The Wake

Web Editor’s Note: To see the first installment of “The Exhibit” please .

There was one lone guard on the fourth floor. He was old, his limbs were weak. He wasn’t about to go running around like the others. He would be of more use, he told himself, staying at his post. Let the others give chase.

He had spent most of his life tending the museum, and he liked it. It was quiet and peaceful. He knew every inch of it, knew the routines and systems, knew how to handle all the little problems that worked their way in from the outside. Management was always changing, new guards and new bosses coming and going, above and below him. But the museum hadn’t changed, not really, and neither had the people who visited it. He loved them, for some reason. Loved the upturned looks of curiosity on their faces, and loved the things on which they looked. He felt a strange sympathy for these objects, trapped in place, never changing, standing still. It was just a job to all the others. They didn’t love anything. But he did.

What was that breeze? He turned to the window behind him, and there in a shifting waterfall of quiet stood the stranger. He didn’t stand for long though. The window edge stood broken and jagged, but where was the glass? Where was the noise? The old man raised his right hand to gesture stop, moved his left to the radio on his belt and opened his mouth to say something, anything. But he saw the smile and the motion and sound stopped. The stranger ran forward, smile never wavering, stride never breaking, and as he passed, he looked at the old man and winked.

The guard relaxed. Everything, he now understood, was going to be okay.

The fourth floor was where they kept the rotating exhibits, the traveling pieces that moved from museum to museum. It had drawn larger crowds than the other floors, so the rooms were more densely populated with last minute visitors . The exhibit currently on display was a collection of musical instruments, the oldest in the world. Each room had its own family: percussion, wind, string, metal and stone and wood. Each piece was untapped, unopened. Unused. They didn’t move as he passed them. They didn’t catch the light. They didn’t make a sound. As the stranger ran, they were terribly, utterly still.

There was a highlight in the exhibit, a crowning achievement. It was a violin. It sat in a room of its own, poised on a low stone pillar, surrounded by a glass case and a velvet rope and a wide open space. There was a camera in the upper corner of the room that rested its gaze all day on the instrument’s quiet form. As people, in the course of their wandering, moved from room to room, they instinctually saved this one for last. They sensed it was different somehow, so they wove their way through the circuit of rooms and hallways until they were sure they could see no more, until they were sure it was finally right to enter. Then they would step from the crowded galleries of horns and lyres and drums onto the empty wooden floor, into the pale light, that was the home of the violin.

But when they approached, when they walked out into the open and quietly stood before it, they were confused. Every piece in the museum had history. The pieces wouldn’t be there otherwise. And that history was always on display, etched into the narrow gray confines of a small placard sitting before each piece. Names, dates, facts, all faithfully encapsulated in plastic for the edification of the museum’s guests. This exhibit had a little plaque as well, attached to the front of its pillar. It was bigger than the rest. But it was blank. There was no information of any kind, no history or heritage, not even a name. Every other exhibit at least had that, the title of Bowl or Hammer, Robe or Sword, convenient labels and tidy definitions. But there was nothing here.

The violin sat in its case, and each observer had nothing but the deep golden gleam of the wood, the elegant curve of the neck, the subtle tension of the bow to read. The mute instrument yielded no answers. The people who had made or played it were of no importance. Those who bought or sold it were of no importance . Trapped in its glass prison, it seemed to stare, unblinking, back at its observers. There was something about it, something in or around it, something that made it seem vaguely and quietly alive.

Each person stood before it, peered and wondered. Then left. It was no mystery they could solve. So they left.

The stranger was gaining speed now. His exertions hadn’t tired him, and he was nearly there. He didn’t go through the circuit like everyone else, and as he ran, the people he passed all turned. They froze for a moment. They looked at him like an exhibit, with curiosity, quiet and introspective. And inexplicably they needed to know him, where he was going, what he would do, so they turned and followed. The guards, just arriving, joined the newly formed ranks, shouting and pushing. They knew they were too late, knew he was just beyond their grasp. With the crowds closing in from all sides, he burst from their view, into the final room and stood before the violin.

The glass fell. They were just in time to see it, spilling over the threshold of the room, just as it started to drop. It fell like snow. Silent. It caught the light in a thousand shining points as it slowly showered down around the man, around the instrument. But the glittering barbs were quiet, and for an awful moment so was everything else. No breath rasped as it was drawn, no footsteps sounded as they fell. For that instant, the world was captured in falling glass. But the stranger was still moving, faster than the others. His left hand closed around the violin, his right around the bow. His feet left the ground and he was on the pillar where the captive instrument had lain. And as the silent, aching moment passed, as the glass fell soundlessly to earth, he began to play.

They stopped. Everyone. Instantly. How could they not? How could they move, in the face of that terrible, beautiful sound? They swayed to a stop, a single mass, as the first impossible strains of the music echoed outwards from the stranger, striking them still. What was he playing? What could it possibly be? Later, no one remembered, no one could even hum one line of it. It was impossible. The music filled the room like a living thing, like a million living things, every note a terrible blow from the thousand captured vessels that lay dying in the museum’s halls. The walls could not have shook. The lights could not have quavered. The people could not have sunk to their knees, driven downwards. But they did. The awful majesty of the music crashed around them, vibrated in the air, an unplayable chaos of swoops and stutters and screams, of reverberating sound. It was angry, so angry, that the people balled their hands into impotent, shaking fists. It was sad, they knew, as the tears slid silky down their cheeks. It was lonely, and each of them was alone with it, alone with that impossible stranger and his violin. His fingers moved across the strings like the dappled flow of water, his arm worked the bow like fire. He moved so fast, and so slow. He was almost motionless. But no matter the contorted insanity of his fingers, or the chaos of the music swirling mindlessly around him, his eyes shone, and from his face there burned a final, terrible smile.

Free. That was the end of the song. After an uncountable eternity of playing, it was free. The sound impossibly swelled around him in a final surge, a dying struggle, and the people whimpered into the ground, the shaking, shifting ground beneath them, and the building began to change. The first notes of that ending fell below on room upon room of melting paint. The forgotten masterpieces oozed and poured, their substance sluicing downwards from their frames, their smiles consumed in the swirling mess. Like blood, the rivers ran across the floor, mingling the essence of their lost masters, leaving nothing but empty traces on the walls.

The middle notes rose to the galleries above, and hundreds of quaking relics were already splintering from their pedestals. There was rust spreading like a virus over the smooth planes of metal, rot eating into the wood. Angled shapes drooped and split all around , shattered and broke. Soon the pedestals were empty, and the cases bare.

The final notes, the end of the end, rose higher and were met by a thousand other inanimate voices from the dark vibration of the instruments. The strings and skins and other dead substances shook, each making its own noise in its own way, each sound released into the un-caged air. There were shrieks and groans, screams and sighs, as the instruments gave up their quiet, forgotten lives, as they sounded one final time.

And glass fell everywhere. It skittered across the wood and paint, the stone and metal, the petty fabrics of the world that lay dying on the floor. It floated and glittered, a hardened funeral shroud, a window that couldn’t be looked through and a mirror that couldn’t reflect. The lifeless things lay strewn everywhere, broken amidst the glass.

And the stranger played his final note. It didn’t leave the room, didn’t leave the air, but stood and expanded in the space above their heads. It didn’t go after it was played, didn’t fade away. It grew, and the people shrank back as the stranger dropped slowly down. His feet landed silently, his hands empty, his smile unmoving on his mouth. There was, somehow, an open door, a stair leading down, that no one had noticed before. And as he ran towards it, as his body was consumed by the echoing dark, as the museum lay ruined all around, the people turned away from him and looked. They looked, and the violin lay broken on the ground.