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THE MERRYVILLE CODAIsabel leaned heavily into Eric’s shoulder as he guided her back to the dressing room. The dark, narrow hallway in the back of the Merryville Concert Hall seemed a hundred miles long. She was trembling with tears that could not be held much longer quivering against her lashes.
Eric’s arm was wrapped around her, protectively, possessively. His fingers, the fingers of a trained pianist, subtle and strong as steel, were dug a little too tightly into her shoulder. The pain gave her something to concentrate on, something solid to cling to while horrible memories swirled around inside her mind.
“Oh, Eric! It’s all so horrible. Poor Ted.”
The pianist pulled her a little closer, wrapped her a little tighter in his arm.
“Don’t think about it.” He whispered hoarsely. “It is too horrible. Too horrible to even contemplate. We mustn’t think about it.”
But Isabel couldn’t stop thinking about it, about the terrible way Ted Allison had died, right in front of her. She couldn’t get the sight of his face, sweet gentle Ted’s face—turned chalk white, drawn and sunken. The skin was cracked and flaking, withered like the skin of a mummy. His eyes had been glassy and lifeless but had shone with a kind of mad fervor, never blinking. The shriveled lips that she had kissed a hundred times, twitching as he mumbled endlessly.
“First Eric, then myself.”
Ted’s voice had been hollow, sepulchral, dry as a whisper from a forgotten tomb.
Those terrible words, repeated over and over, finally stopped when bullets from police revolvers riddled Ted’s body. It took several shots to bring his numb, shambling body down.
Her tears finally overwhelmed her and spilled in hot streams across her cheeks.
Eric squeezed her tight and pressed his lips to her forehead.
“It’s alright. We’re here.”
There was a click and the creak of a door opening.
The overwhelming scent of hundreds of flowers hit her face like a tropical breeze. Perfume and baby powder mixed with the smell of years of cigarettes nervously puffed to ash. She stumbled into the dressing room, grateful to be out of that awful, endless hallway.
“I had them brought up while we were on stage.” Eric whispered, gesturing to the mounds of floral arrangements. “I wanted to surprise you.”
Isabel opened her eyes and looked blearily around.
The dressing room lights were turned up, a blaze of luminous white, and there were bouquets of flowers everywhere. They were crammed and crowded onto every flat surface that could hold them.
“Oh, Eric!” She exclaimed, sniffling.
He kissed her forehead again.
“I can’t take all the credit.” He admitted with a sheepish smile. “Everyone wanted to contribute. Even old Munson from the Vocal Performance Department. Rita and Janet, of course, they picked out the tasteful orchid displays over there, by the mirror. Warren, that rogue, bought you all those red roses in the white vase over there. I think he still has designs on you. I’m going to have to talk to him”
Eric’s voice was deep and rich and smooth like chocolate melted in coffee.
“Bennett and the ensemble boys chipped in for that gigantic garish wreath on the chair.”
“Oh, it’s awful!” Isabel blurted out, smothering half a laugh with her hand.
“I know! Each of the boys picked out all the flowers they could afford and they had them all worked together into one huge arrangement.”
“It’s monstrous!”
They both chuckled and pressed their foreheads together conspiratorially.
Eric’s brow felt cold and tight against her feverish skin.
Isabel blinked. A cold chill ran through her.
Something was wrong. She couldn’t quite place it, but something was subtly off.
A second later she was wracked by another paroxysm of grief.
“I feel so guilty!” She blurted out. “I waited so long to tell Ted about us, to break off the engagement. I knew it would break his heart, and he’d been so sick. I had no idea that something so horrible was going to happen to him. Maybe, if only I’d…”
“No! Don’t think that way. Don’t you feel a moment of guilt. None of this was our fault. I know how you feel. Ted was my best friend. But what happened to him was Dr. Morris’ fault. We did nothing wrong. Ted would have forgiven us, he saved us both and would have wanted us to be happy. He said as much in his note.”
She looked up, eye to eye with Eric, who smiled at her.
“Did you take your shoes off?” She blurted.
“No…” He answered, looking quizzically at her. “Should I?”
His smile was white and roguish, but a bit too tight.
“Because I usually have to reach up to kiss you, but we’re eye to eye right now, as if we were the same height? Isn’t that odd?”
His smile didn’t falter. If anything, it grew wider and fiercer.
“Very odd.”
“Is there something in your eye?”
She squinted at him.
His eyes were dark and mellow, but not the deep pools of warmth and humor that she was used to. They seemed a little too dry. Too shiny.
Eric chuckled and raised a finger to his eye, pushing the tip right against the eyeball and wiggling it around. A second later he pulled it away. A small glass lens stuck to his fingertip.
The eye behind it was a colorless gray, cold as iron with a twist of bitter amusement.
Isabel gasped.
“It is such a pity that you are so bright, such an observant, brilliant woman. This would have been so much easier for you if you’d never noticed any difference.”
The man’s voice was deep and rich, a raspy velvet baritone, very very different from the voice of Eric Iverson.
“You’re not Eric!” Isabel whispered, trying to cringe away from the man before her.
He gripped both her shoulders now, with hands like iron claws.
He smiled.
“Actually, I am Erique. I am Erique Claudin and I am very pleased to finally be able to introduce myself to you properly. I’ve been a fan for a very long time, my dear. You have such an exquisite voice!”
Isabel’s eyes went wide with horror.
“What have you done to Eric?” She shouted.
“Oh, I had to dispose of him earlier. On the train. A pity, really, he was a very fine musician and I value musical talent more than any man alive.”
“Disposed of…him?”
Isabel was in the grip of a slow motion convulsion. Her guts felt ready to spill themselves upon the floor, rolling inside her like anguished worms.
“Yes. I threw him off the train just after I cut his hands off. I had to borrow them, you see. I had need of his talents. I regret to confess that the piano is one of the few instruments that I haven’t mastered myself. And I needed to be with you, to pose as Eric. I needed to accompany you when you went on stage tonight. I couldn’t risk anything happening to you, not with Dr. Morris’ ghastly ghoul about to go on his last rampage.”
“His hands?” Isabel’s voice was a disbelieving whisper.
She stared at the hands that gripped her shoulders. They were quite definitely the hands of Eric Iverson. She knew them well, intimately.
“Why yes. It was the only way I could absorb what he was, what he could do. I don’t enjoy doing such things, you know.”
She stared at the face that looked so much like Eric Iverson’s, her Eric’s, but now the life seemed to melt out of it. The skin looked waxen, too smooth. There were black stitches circling the wrists beneath the cuffs of the tuxedo he wore.
“I had to sew them on myself. One at a time. Which is quite difficult, if you must know.”
Isabel let out an incoherent scream of rage.
She beat her fists on the face in front of her. The face crumbled beneath her hands, cracking like dry wax and tumbling away in shards.
Underneath was a completely different face, a monster’s face.
Most of the skin was gray, like a corpse that had been held underwater until all the color leeched out of it. A horrible livid wedge of scar started above the right eye and ran down the cheek. Red, exposed meat and purplish-red curdled scar tissue ran together.
“Not very pretty, I know.” Claudin said with a sad, wry little smile.
“You have to keep in mind that I am over a hundred years old, almost a hundred and twenty, I think. I don’t keep count anymore.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Music is my life, my dear. It nourishes me. It sustains me. Music is eternal and with it, so am I!”
The madman turned his face upwards, enraptured by some phantom symphony that only he could hear.
Isabel tried to pull free from him, kicking and punching with all her might, but she might as well have been fighting a sandbag. He didn’t seem to feel any of the blows she landed. Even a toe to the crotch elicited nothing more than an “oh” of surprise on his lips and a slight chuckle.
When Claudin looked back at her, his eyes were filled with sorrow, and with a wild hunger that terrified her.
“But such an existence comes with a price.” He said sadly. “I must feed. I must eat to survive. And you, my sweet Isabel, you have such a lovely voice!”
The hideous creature puckered its lips and leaned in to kiss her.
Isabel tried to turn away, but cold dead lips pressed against her own. Her mouth was forced open. Claudin shuddered with ecstasy and began to suck the music out of her. He pulled a scream from her, dragging it out against her will. The scream grew higher and shriller as her vocal cords clinched tighter and tighter. Her breath grew faint. She felt herself expiring into him, everything musical, every note she’d ever sung rushed up and out of her in a tinkling, warm stream.
To Erique Claudin it was like swallowing the sweetest cotton candy ever spun. It filled him to his core, thrumming and vibrating. The music breathed life into his cold lungs, poured vitality into his numb corpse’s limbs.
Isabel melted in his arms, her eyes rolling up under her lids. There was a screech as her taut vocal cords finally tore under the force of that terrible, sucking kiss. Her lungs emptied of air and she fainted limply to the floor.
In moments there was nothing but empty air in Claudin’s arms.
Shuddering out of the ecstasy that had enveloped him, he prodded her body with his toe. She took a slight wheezing breath but did not stir. Everything that was left of Isabel now lie in a pathetically small heap on the carpeted floor.
Sadly Claudin picked a red rose from Warren’s vase and placed it upon her breast.
“I’ll never forget you.” He promised somberly.
Then, with a sigh, he pulled a slick porcelain mask from the bag concealed behind Isabel’s dressing screen. The mask covered most of his face living only his mouth and chin exposed. With his ugliness covered, he swung a black cape across his shoulders and then left the Concert Hall through a cramped drainage tunnel beneath its basement.
He whistled and hummed as he splashed through filthy water in the dark.
Perhaps he would write a new concerto, and dedicate it to Isabel.
Erique Claudin was a romantic man, in his own way.