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The Slow Music Of Drums

by A.C. Wise

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It was easier than I imagined, tracking down the last original member of Exquisite Corpse. My uncle left surprisingly detailed notes for a man with a disordered mind—left them, and then disappeared.

Died. Disappeared. I don’t know.

Julian was the name on my uncle’s birth certificate, but everyone called him Rabbit. We weren’t close when I was growing up, only after my own father died and I discovered that I had a lot more in common with my father’s brother than I’d ever had with him. We’re both prone to obsession, insatiable curiosity. It’s gotten me fired from more than one job, following my own line of interest rather than writing the story as assigned. Rabbit wasn’t a journalist, but I bet he was difficult to work with too.

I’ve been telling myself that Rabbit died, for the sake of closure, but I’m pretty sure that’s a lie. He mailed me a key, wanted me to follow him. Left a mystery for me to unravel, knowing I’d be the one to help my not-quite-aunt Jessi sort through his stuff once he was gone.

Before he vanished, Rabbit and I had been talking a lot on the phone. Late night calls—or early morning ones, depending on your perspective. The calls were mostly him rambling, me listening. I didn’t follow everything he said, but a few things stood out.

He said our family is cursed.

He said maybe it was on account of some people I’d never heard of up in St. Sauveur, and that Exquisite Corpse was part of it too. He told me they’re a band that doesn’t really exist, a band that has only ever played one song. They’re still playing it, technically. Somewhere out there, someone is rolling their fingers over the skin of a drum, and carrying on a thing that was started almost fifty years ago.

No part of the song has ever been recorded. No one person has ever heard the whole. By design.

The band got its name from the surrealist art movement, which was in turn inspired by an old parlour game called Consequences. One person draws a head, folds the paper, and passes it on. The next person draws the body and so on. The players do eventually get to see what they’ve created together, their beautiful monster. Not so with the band.

The contributing musicians are scattered across the world, and even if the logistics for gathering them all together weren’t impossible, most of them are dead now. Suicide, mostly, from what I’ve heard.

Consequences, like the original name of the parlour game. Not everyone could live with what they’d done. But the song was never meant for them anyway, Rabbit told me, never meant for us at all, and by us, he meant humankind.

The key Rabbit mailed me turned out to unlock a file cabinet in his office. Jessi, my-not-quite-aunt, and I had to excavate a tunnel through piles of textbooks and journals and newspapers and architectural drawings to even get to it. Rabbit and Jessi were never married, never lived together long enough to be considered common-law, but she cared for him, and she knew he needed someone to look out for him, so she never went far.

She didn’t want anything from Rabbit’s apartment, but she said I was welcome to it. The only things I took were the spiral-bound notebooks I found in the locked drawer, and a carving buried under a pile of receipts and old bills.

The carving was of a rabbit, curled tight into a little ball like it was sleeping, or afraid of something bigger than itself and trying not to be seen. Warm red-brown wood, knife-marks deliberately left in place, varnished, and just the right size to fit in the palm of my hand.

The notebooks, among other things, contained a list of names. The only one not crossed off on the list was Jerry Kirkpatrick’s, along with an address in St. Sauveur.

During one of our late-night calls, Rabbit told me how St. Sauveur used to be a charming little town until the local butcher and grocery were replaced by high-end farm-to-table restaurants, and multi-million-dollar rental properties replaced all the family homes. It’s all skiing in the winter, water parks and hiking and various festivals in the summer now. No one really “lives” there anymore.

The Laurentians are beautiful in the fall, and I’m between jobs, so why not just go? See if Jerry Kirkpatrick is still there, the lone hold-out who didn’t vacate his land to make way for a new vacation home.

The tires make a satisfying thu-thump as I cross over a small wooden bridge. A right turn onto a winding road, and I almost shoot past the handmade wooden sign pounded into the dirt at the end of a long, crooked drive, but luckily there are no other cars behind me.

Kirkpatrick.

Silence falls on me as I climb out of the car. It takes a moment for sound to kick back in—grosbeaks and chickadees off among the trees. The river rushing behind the house at the far end of the drive.

Trees cluster in on all sides. Jerry Kirkpatrick’s whole property strikes me as a place that doesn’t want to be seen. I sling the bag with Rabbit’s notebooks and his carving over my shoulder and walk down the drive. There are carvings tucked among the trees—animals and faces that aren’t exactly human, but not exactly inhuman either.

I assume Kirkpatrick built the house too—a wood-shingled roof, blending into the trees, part gingerbread and part storybook castle, with an honest to goodness tower protruding on one side. I wonder if he had a kid, or kids, who grew up living in that tower room. The house looks organic, both in the crunchy granola sense, and like it was grown, pushing its way up out of the ground like a mushroom. I knock against the screen door’s frame, painted deep forest green and maroon.

Jerry Kirkpatrick opens the inner door and peers out at me through the mesh.

Huh,” he says, like he was expecting me, but also surprised that I made it this far.

He looks like what I would have expected from one of the founders of an experimental band—which is to say, a stereotypical aging hippy. Grey hair surrounding a shining bald spot, worn loose down to his shoulders. A beard to match, escaping the confines of his chin, and resting neatly against his chest. He’s even wearing tie-dye, cargo shorts, and sandals—a bleach-stained hoodie his only concession to it being fall.

You’re Rabbit’s kin.” Not a question, and he steps back, holding open the door.

I don’t know if my family is cursed, like Rabbit said, but I do know certain things run strong in our blood. The family resemblance being one of them. My father and his siblings all look alike, and all my cousins and I do too. Rabbit never had kids, but if he had, I could have been one of them.

Jerry leads me down a dark, narrow hallway, to a surprisingly bright and sunny kitchen.

I just made a pot of tea. We can take it out onto the back porch, and I can tell you some of what you came here wanting to know.” Jerry lifts a tray, already holding two mugs alongside the teapot.

Thank you.” I hold open the screen door since his hands are full.

The rocking chairs look like Jerry’s work, as does a low table made from a tree stump. The river sparkles, gushing and whirling through a series of eddies and miniature rapids just past the ragged edges of Jerry’s land. He points to a spit, jutting out into the water.

Used to set off fireworks out there every year on Canada Day. Kids loved it. All those families are gone now. I’m the only one who stayed.”

The money wasn’t tempting?” I ask.

I can only imagine what the property developers offered to try to buy him out.

Not so much. I prefer a simple life, and besides, I’m planted here.” I don’t miss his odd choice of words. “If you stay past sunset, you’ll see why.”

Jerry raises his mug. Steam curls over the edge. I add honey from the tray to my own mug and match his salute.

What happens after sunset?” I ask.

The stars come out,” Jerry says, unperturbed. “I’ll take you over to the hollow, then, if you want to see.”

He gestures back toward the house, but I take it he’s referring to something on the other side.

The old Campbell property,” he says, answering my unvoiced question.

He goes on to explain that it’s technically higher ground than his property, but he calls it the hollow because it’s far more cleared of trees than his own land. His property sits at the lowest point in the valley—the base of the bowl. The Campbell land is one side of that same bowl, the only side that’s not currently occupied by a multi-million-dollar home.

Because it’s cursed,” Jerry tells me.

The same word my uncle used when he said maybe it was to do with some family around here, land that stained everything and everyone in the valley.

It’s all connected,” Jerry says, once again answering something I haven’t asked yet.

To Exquisite Corpse?” Once again allowing me to hold back the question I’m avoiding, the questions about Rabbit whose answers I don’t want to know and suspect I already do know.

Everything. Everything is connected in the valley, and Exquisite Corpse is part of it. It was born here even if it didn’t start here. It’s planted in this ground too.”

In Rabbit’s journals, he said the song—the one, singular, drawn-out, multi-part song—that Exquisite Corpse’s various members have been playing for the last fifty-odd years is a message. A very specific message meant for something that communicates much slower than we do, that lives at a different rate. The kind of something that could hold all the parts of the song together, because fifty-odd years would mean nothing to it. The message, from what I gather: we’re here, we’re ready, there’s nothing on Earth worth preserving, come and end the fucking world.

Oh, Rabbit, what did you do?

Why?” I say, and Jerry gives me a half smile in the light that’s just starting to turn the same colour as the honey sweetening my tea.

Is that really what you want to know?” he asks in turn.

Yes and no. Rabbit’s journals described the smoky bars and cafes where Exquisite Corpse first played. Not even proper clubs really. University cafes. Small, nowhere, hole-in-the-wall venues. Places that weren’t even cafes or clubs—empty warehouses and falling down homes. Sometimes only one or two people would attend. Sometimes no one at all. Exquisite Corpse didn’t care. The song wasn’t for us, after all.

That wasn’t the only thing in Rabbit’s journals, though. They’re full of bits and pieces, all jumbled together. Something about how someone maybe related to our family went looking for their former military commander in the arctic and never came home. About how there were bees who planted children—planted, that same word Jerry keeps using—or maybe the other way around, and the terrible things that grew from those seeds. About keepers, like shepherds, walking slowly and endlessly across the sky. About how signals could be amplified by particular designs to make, or open, or strengthen a gate between the stars.

So, the real question I want to ask, with the answer I’m not ready to hear is: Rabbit, what did you do?

Whole pages of his notebooks are darkened with ink, only the tiniest smudged spaces left blank—white stars with the faint blue page lines showing through. Rabbit sketched a building like a hive—a building, or an art installation, I’m not sure.

Rabbit told me about a city design competition, during one of our late-night conversations. He didn’t specify which city, whether he’d entered a design or not. He didn’t mention the hive. He changed the topic, colony collapse disorder, or how the weather was bad for apple orchards this year. The calls were like that—disjointed, fragments, not all of them leading anywhere. It was hard to know what to hold onto, and what to discard.

Jerry sets his mug down and stands, hands braced on his back, joints popping. The light through the trees is deep gold now, lowering toward the river. The sun sets early at this time of year.

You staying for dinner?” Jerry asks.

If you don’t mind.”

I should go. I shouldn’t let curiosity get the better of me, because that might be the curse Rabbit was actually talking about. Nothing to do with bad land, or anything deep and weird and sinister. Just our inability to let go.

It’s nothing fancy, just leftovers,” Jerry says. “I always make enough to freeze, and then add fresh vegetables alongside. You can help me chop.”

Jerry sets vegetarian chili that smells delicious to re-warming on the stove. I dutifully help him chop vegetables to roast with herbs and olive oil.

Used to be a man and his wife that took care of a lot of the properties around here,” Jerry says. “Her name was Jeanette; his name was Marcel. They had a vegetable garden, and they always shared whatever they had with the other families in the valley. I remember the beans, specifically. I miss those. They’re never as good when you buy them in the store.”

He pours us each a glass while we cook. It’s not even yet five, but I don’t think I’ll be going far tonight.

The Campbell property is right across the road,” Jerry says, as if once again reading my mind. “We could get smashed and walk there in the dark and be fine.”

Once the vegetables are in the oven, I gather up the courage to ask another question.

Does it bother you that so many members of Exquisite Corpse are dead?”

Jerry leans against the counter with a melancholy expression, but he doesn’t seem offended.

Part of the idea was that spreading the song out across multiple hands meant that it wouldn’t weigh quite as much, no one person would be responsible for the apocalypse. I guess that didn’t work out as well as we thought it would.”

Or the people who killed themselves didn’t want to stick around to see the recipient of the message,” I say.

Sure,” Jerry says.

He picks up the knife, runs it under water, and dries it before slipping it back into the block beside the others.

But I decided to take the bet.” He answers the part of the question only just implied by what I said. “I’m sticking around as long as I can on the chance that it will be the most beautiful thing in this or any world.”

Jerry pours more as we sit down to eat, and lights candles. Full dark gathers outside. The chili is perfectly spiced, the vegetables roasted to perfection. We talk about nothing—sports, the weather, how much the valley has changed. We don’t talk about Exquisite Corpse or the end of the world. I don’t ask if Rabbit ever put hand to drum and made himself part of the call. After our plates are clear, we finish the wine. Jerry tells me about his son, who did indeed live in the tower room Jerry built for him, and how he died of brain cancer while he was in medical school. Far too young. He talks about his art—the custom woodwork he does for clients, and the pieces he never sells.

Like this one.” I take my uncle’s carving out of my bag.

Jerry’s eyes light up briefly, but the sad smile returns, the same melancholy as when he talked about his son and the dead members of the band. All that death weighing on him, all the time he’s been alone. I could see that being the kind of thing that might make a man want to end the world, but for Jerry, it happened the other way around. Consequences—the name of the parlour game. Did Jerry know? Were they always necessary sacrifices he was willing to bear?

Rabbit asked me to carve him,” Jerry says. “This is what I made.”

Candlelight plays across the wood, makes the rabbit’s fur ripple as if it will wake in my hand and run. Jerry reaches out a finger, but stops short of touching it. He made the rabbit, but it isn’t his anymore.

You about ready to head over to the hollow?” Jerry asks.

I nod, because we’ve already drunk all the wine. I tuck the carving back into my bag and help Jerry clear the table. He retrieves a heavy-duty flashlight from the pantry cleverly hidden behind a set of built-in shelves, along with another bottle—not wine this time—and a box of matches.

There’s a pair of boots by the door,” Jerry says. “You might want to swap out your shoes for those and borrow one of my jackets against the cold.”

I do as he suggests, and follow Jerry into a night that’s surprisingly still, the same silence as when I first pulled into his drive. Jerry turns the flashlight on, which I suspect is for my benefit rather than his. The beam catches on his carvings; like a strange game of freeze tag, I imagine them moving a split-second before being hit by the light. At the road, Jerry sweeps the beam in either direction, but there are no cars.

All this used to be gravel,” Jerry says. “They paved it when the big houses went in.”

He swings the light back in the direction we came, off to the side of the road, where all I can see is overgrown weeds.

Old boathouse used to be down there.” Like it’s a landmark I should know.

I try to picture Rabbit here as a young man, hiking up the hills, throwing himself off a dock into the river back when nobody cared that it was too dirty and dangerous to swim.

Across the road is another drive, wider than Jerry’s, not set as far back among the trees. Metal posts with a single chain strung between them guard it. Jerry skirts around the pole on the left, continuing to swing the light around, narrating our journey.

Garage is over there,” he says, before turning to illuminate a flat stone; it takes my brain a moment to process it as a grave. “Campbells had a dog that went missing during a storm. Her body washed up three days later. They buried her here.”

That’s the least of what’s buried here—my mind makes the unwelcome leap, and I push the thought away.

The drive slopes upward, gravel crunching under our boots. There aren’t any overt no trespassing signs, but it feels like we shouldn’t be here. Nobody should.

When Jerry first mentioned the hollow, I couldn’t believe that land this valuable would sit unoccupied, but I get it now. It feels wrong. The moment we stepped past the chain, it got under my skin, made itself a home.

Used to be a gate down there,” Jerry says, letting the light sit on the wall of trees. “Or a door—a wooden frame at least, covered in weird carvings. It was here when the Campbells bought the land. They never did find out who built it, but something stepped through before they tore it down.”

Jerry moves the light away, keeps walking, like what he’s saying is the most natural thing in the world. I see it. The gate, the door he described, a spindly thing that makes no sense—two pieces of wood planted in the ground, one across the top to make a frame. The thing stepping through is spindly too, tall, scraping against the wood even as it ducks down. It’s not there, but I can’t help breaking into a trotting run to catch up to Jerry.

The old house,” Jerry points the flashlight to the right at the top of the hill.

White paint, black roof, glass boxes on either end. A glassed-in porch on one end, a dining room with barely any walls, just windows, on the other. Like the land, the house feels wrong. A building that makes no sense, a place where bad things happened. I want to lean away, and I’m grateful when Jerry steers us left along a pine-needle littered path.

Pool there.” He points to the far end of the path. “Pool house.”

The light jumps between the two features, giving me a glimpse of each. The beam jerks to the right, almost as if something yanked at Jerry’s arm, coming to rest on a rock, spattered with layer upon layer of paint.

When the Campbells built this place, any time they had left over paint, they just tossed it here. Not very environmentally sound. The kids used to love climbing on Paint Rock though. Until one of them slipped and hit their head. Died on the way to the hospital.”

Jerry moves the light away, takes a few steps further along the path.

There was a rumour that the Campbells buried the kid here, like they buried the dog. They both belonged to the land. I can’t imagine it’s true though.” Jerry’s voice suggests he can imagine it, and now I can imagine it too—one kid, dozens, bones forgotten among the trees. Still birth. Accidental drowning. Suicide.

Anyway, this is us.” Jerry uses the light to indicate two stumps, cut and polished like the one on his back porch.

In between, a carefully built bonfire, just waiting for a match. Jerry gets the fire lit and settles down. I could run, but instead, I take the other stump. He pulls the unmarked bottle from his bag, holding it up to catch the light.

Make this myself,” he says, tilting it so the liquid rolls inside.

It’s got a thickness to it, amber, like whisky. Jerry produces tin camp mugs, pours us each a measure. Sweet, like mead, but with a sharper bite. It burns going down.

Sparks rise. The air smells of pine sap. I’m glad Jerry lent me his jacket. Curses weren’t a thing I ever believed in, until Rabbit disappeared. Now, I can’t stop being aware of the land stretched around us. I don’t doubt Jerry’s stories, and that there’s even more he hasn’t told me. This place resonates. Did the land birth Exquisite Corpse, or was it the other way around? Is the mere suggestion of a curse enough for such a thing to take hold? Is there a place where it begins, or does it all just go round and round until the end?

You want to know about Rabbit,” Jerry says. “How involved he was.”

I guess so,” I say.

I could keep telling myself he’s dead, but I’m more and more certain it’s not that simple.

You want to know if he ever picked up a drum. If he ever contributed to the song.” Neither phrased as questions.

I look at Jerry across the fire. He’s holding a small drum, only about as wide across as his hand. I never saw him pack it or take it out of his bag. It’s braced between his knees, his fingers resting on it contemplatively, but not playing, not yet.

The music is there—thunder behind a skin of clouds. The fire makes Jerry’s eyes hollow, like he’s wearing a mask, his own face stretched and dried like the head of the drum, something else looking out at me from within.

Will it make you feel better, knowing?” Jerry asks.

Probably not,” I say.

The only person I told I was coming up here was Jessi. She looked at me sadly, kissed me on the forehead, and told me to be careful. I heard all the things she didn’t say—that I was too much like Rabbit, that she’d spent all those years looking after him, and she couldn’t look after me too, and that she was sorry.

The same way I feel the land around us, I feel the sky overhead—a weight leaned up against it, pressing down from the other side of the stars.

Rabbit used to run around these parts,” Jerry says. “Not with the Campbells specifically, but on their periphery. Close enough to be part of it.”

I don’t have to ask what he means. I’m part of it now, too. His fingers rest on the drum, not tapping, but about to.

He was the kind,” Jerry says, “even back then, who got fascinated with things. He might take an animal apart to see how it worked. I’m not saying he did, I’m saying he could. He wanted to know everything.”

A pause, a sip that I find myself mirroring.

He wasn’t there at the start of it, but in a way, we all were, just by virtue of being in the valley. Once the idea of Exquisite Corpse started up, Rabbit got caught in our orbit. After that, he was always on the edges, walking his own path.”

Jerry drains his mug, grimacing, but still pours himself another, and I hold out my cup for the same.

Understand,” Jerry says, “I felt a calling, a compulsion. The song wasn’t a choice for me. Rabbit, he got so wound up in whether a thing could happen, he didn’t stop to think whether it should.”

Nothing Jerry says surprises me; I wish it did. I pull out one of Rabbit’s notebooks, flip to the page with the hive. It looks different than I remember. A thing of negative space, the rest of the page ink-scribbled in, inter-locking levels winding around each other without beginning or end.

Have you ever seen anything like this?” I ask.

Jerry takes the notebook, squints in the firelight. When he hands it back, it occurs to me that I could drop it into the flames, but it probably wouldn’t change anything.

Yes and no,” Jerry says. “It’s part of it, but I don’t know how.”

Instead of burning the notebook, I look at the page again. Jerry doesn’t have to explain—I see it, whether I want to or not. Rabbit’s design, spiralling upward from some public plaza, an art display, an architectural curiosity. People climbing it and falling down again. Jumping, because they can’t conceive of doing otherwise. A compulsion, like Jerry said, an overwhelming desire to fall.

The sky and the other buildings and the trees all blurring past in the gaps between those winding stairs. A new architecture superimposed on the city they know, making it strange. And when they hit, some of them won’t die right away. They’ll lie there, looking up at the stars framed by the hive as they breathe their last in incredible, shattering pain, and find them changed and made strange too.

It’s part of it, the music, the song. The slow communication with something living differently through time. Those bodies hitting the pavement—they’re the sound of drumming too. Caught by the hive, resonating and amplifying a call out among the stars.

Rabbit didn’t have to pick up a drum,” Jerry says.

An answer I already know.

Where did he go?” My throat is dry, scratching around the words.

Far away, but not so far that you can’t follow.” I don’t grasp Jerry’s words, until I do.

Tap.

One finger dropped onto the skin of the drum, like a fat drop of rain preceding a downpour. The sound travels all the way up and down my spine. An offer. Take up the drum. Add to the song. Become a part of the same thing Rabbit was—the family curse, the insatiable curiosity. Be a part of something so much bigger.

Look up,” Jerry says.

Or maybe he doesn’t say anything at all. Maybe my head is yanked back by nothing, lifting of its own accord. Maybe whatever’s in Jerry’s bottle—honey from bees who planted children in the ground and grew terrible things, tended by the vast keepers slowly moving across the sky—is making my head swim.

The stars waver, rearranging. Picking up the vibrations of the drum, answering the song that’s been playing for half a century, maybe more.

Tap, tap, tap.

Jerry’s fingers rattle across the surface of that pulled-taut skin, but the sound is so much louder. It fills the valley, echoes back from the hills. Can they hear it in all those million-dollar houses? The sky shivers, suggesting a new architecture amongst the stars, faint lines of silver traced upon on the dark, and hidden among the trees. Bones among the roots where the children were planted to make frames of their own. Doors. Doors upon doors, just waiting for something to step through.

I’m up, stumbling, nearly tripping and pitching into the fire. Running back down the hill, down the side of the bowl in the dark. I won’t make it to my car. I’ll fall, break my face against the gravel, or I’ll turn around—compelled.

Yipping follows me. Laughter at first, maybe Jerry’s, or maybe a sob. But soon enough, it’s not laughter or tears, nothing human at all—that too-tall thing scraping the frame of the door that no longer exists on the corner of this land.

I pelt past the dog grave, running frantically, and not daring to look at what might be coming down the hill behind me. Laughter. Footsteps. The sound of drums. I’m going to make it. I’m going to make it. I’m not going to make it at all.

Oh, Rabbit, what have you done?

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod Episode 950

November 22nd 2024

The Slow Music of Drums by A.C. Wise

Narrated by Wilson Fowlie

Hosted by Alasdair Stuart with audio by Chelsea Davis

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Hello, I’m Alasdair, your host and this story continues our annual anthology and collection showcase and comes to us from A.C. Wise. The Slow Music of Drums was originally published in the 2024 Anthology Northern Nights edited by Michael Kelly. Also our editorial staff recommend Northern Nights VERY highly. It’s a great anthology!

Author: A.C. Wise’s latest publications are the novellas Grackle, and Out of the Drowning Deep. She is also the author of the novels Wendy, Darling, and Hooked, and the short story collection, The Ghost Sequences, among other works. She’s won the Sunburst Award, and been a finalist for the Nebula, Stoker, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Locus, Aurora, Shirley Jackson, Ignyte, and Lambda Literary Awards. Along with her fiction, she contributes regular review columns to Locus and Apex Magazine.

Your narrator this week is the magnificent Wilson Fowlie/ Wilson Fowlie lives in a suburb of Vancouver, Canada, and has been reading stories out loud since the age of four. He credits any talent he has in this area to his parents, who are both excellent at reading aloud. He started narrating stories for more than just his own family in late 2008, when he answered a call for readers on the PodCastle forum. Since then, he has gone on to read dozens of stories for PodCastle, as well as all of the other Escape Artists ’casts, and many other fiction podcasts all over the web. He does all this narrating when not reading copy for corporate videos, and acting in local theatre productions.

 

A.C. Wise tells us: ‘Astute readers and listeners may be aware, or interested to learn, that the C in A.C. Wise’s name stands for Campbell. The property described in “The Slow Music of Drums” is, or was, a real place. The rest is made up. Mostly.’

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My first thought when I finished this story was Lego Hill. Lego Hill is a small rocky outcropping by Port St Mary on the Isle of Man. It was named that, by my family, because when we used to go for walks down there I unearthed a lot of Lego that had been buried on the hill. Buried long enough to have actually had plant life grow over it which was almost as impressive as the full on truck toys I pulled out of the garden of the lighthouse where my sister’s boyfriend worked a few years later. Always something buried. Always something to find. Sometimes it waits to be found. Sometimes it chooses to as we see here.

 

Those walks were full of uncomfortable family history. I was scared out of my senses by a dog there once. I remember a rainy picnic there instead of the airshow on the other side of the island because either the car had broken down or one of the family disputes I was young enough to not understand but old enough to notice had hit. Those walks were full of them. I’d ply on the beach or with the dog. My parents would have whispered arguments or work out the constantly evolving algebra of dealing with undiagnosed depression in a place neither liked, in industries as vital as they were loathed by the government of the time, always keeping a brave face for me. Family suffocates even when it doesn’t. Family are the people we can’t hide from when we need to hide the most, just like they’re the people we run to when we need them the most. Landscapes encoded with history, trauma, memory. Paint and lego slapped onto uncaring geology for the next kid to find, or not.

 

It also put me in mind of Longplayer. Longplayer is a one thousand year long musical composition which began at midnight 31st December 1999. It’s located in the lighthouse at Trinity Wharf in London and we’ll drop links to it in the show notes. It’s the ultimate ultra low frequency communication. Music as a bridge across time, Music as the defiance of time, hijacking it’s linearity to play its scales. I love that.

 

I lvoe that this story sits within those two extremes, because everything does. I had so much fun, and found so much Lego on those walks. The airshow that wasn’t? I remember being crammed onto a bench in the pouring rain, eating a damp sandwich next to a damp dog and my parents and I laughing at the absurdity of it. It doesn’t matter if that happened, oddly enough. It matters I remember it as I make my own way out across the landscape of familial memory. Memories stretched past lifetimes, family and personal history as music played out across time.

 

The horror in this story is in the way it takes that idea of art as a measure of time and subverts it into something terrible. I love how Wise plays very carefully and well with the idea of wrong not meaning alien and vice versa. This isn’t an evil foreigners story by any means, rather a crystallisation of one of the things I love the most about this genre. The sense of something vast approaching and the Earth shaking as it does. Music played in a curdled harmony. A building that plays you by killing you. Peter Gabriel’s The Tower That Ate People. Ballard’s High-Rise. Elements of Westworld. Everyone hears something different in the song and that’s beautiful. Everyone lives differently and that’s vital. And that’s why I love the ending here. Alive, for now. Even if it’s in the moment before you fall. Even if it’s the second before the music stops. Even if it’s all you have, you have that. Hold onto it.

 

Brilliant work, thanks to all.

 

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PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

 

Join us next week for Last Supper by Richard Dansky, read for us by the amazing Trendane Sparks. We’ll see you then but before we go PseudoPod wants you to remember Oh, it was a marvel of design! Deceptively-spacious apartments, yet no room quite big enough for a double bed or decent-sized sofa. Cooking facilities that seemed adequate until you tried to do more than microwave. An office space in every flat, but without a door, so you could never truly escape your work. None of them had more than a single bedroom – though each had a main bathroom and an ensuite, which is a small touch I was very proud of.