HP Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror - Weird Tales

"Haven't heard piping like that in a long time now," the
man says. Bored, looking for conversation. Aidan regrets having
let him squeeze in. He has nothing against conversation, as
long as other people are having it.
"The old style. A way of playing that can only be learned
from the old masters."
Aidan's heart goes very still.
"Wicklow, is it?" the man guesses, fingering his smooth
bonesreal bone, not wooden substitutes.
"I'm from Mayo," he says, finally. "Castlebar."
"Psssh, you never learned to talk like that in Castlebar."
The bone man turns very old eyes in Aidan's direction.
Seeing those eyes, Aidan contrives a sudden need to use the
jacks. Yet he finds that he cannot induce his legs to lift him up;
he finds that he does not, in fact, have to use the jacks at all.
It has been years, so many years . . . and all that he lost, all
that he fled . . .
It's no place for a child, the company of the likes of us.
He hasn't heard that voice for decades. This old man, this
bone man, has brought it back.
Who are you? he tries to ask, and finds himself naming a
county in the southeast of Ireland, the county his family moved
to from Mayo when he was four, a county that has produced
no pipers of note in a hundred years.
The bone man nods, and falls silent, for a tune has sprung
to life across the table, and he is not a bored old garrulous man
at allhe is a man who respects the music, who has respected the
music for a very long time, and, Aidan is beginning to suspect,
a very long time before that.
4hey told him not to be going in those pubs, bothering
those fellas. They told him not to be playing that filthy
old thing he founda chanter, he'd tell them, it was called
a chanter, it was the thing pipers practiced on, but they said they
didn't care what it was called, he wasn't to go messing with it, it
sounded like a strangled swine, the noise could wake the dead.
Banned from the pubs where the old men playedthe young
weren't interested in the music or the dancing, it was a new world
nowhe would linger at windows, absorbing tunes, growing skillful
at learning them on one listen. He'd keep the tunes in his
heart, all the tunes he could hold, and then skulk away to his
secret place to play them where no one would hear. He had many
secret places, and every one of them was found out, humiliating
him again and again.
Until he found the old cottage. Out past the bogs, at the
intersection of two ancient, overgrown paths, it was little more
than a tumble of mossy fieldstones, with a hearth cold those many
years, two empty rooms occupied only by damp, its thatched roof
replaced with corrugated tin that itself was rusting away. It might
have been a pub once, a wayside stopping placea house of gathering
and welcome, before the paths of the world moved on.
No one ever found him there. He could play as loud as he
liked, as long as he liked. The bogs swallowed the mournful
tones; the porous limestone rocks absorbed them. He practiced
all summer, whenever he could get away. The decrepit ruin welcomed
him each time he arrived.
* * *
AIDAN blinks, looks around the room, desperate to anchor
himself here, now; afraid to be swept back into that place.
All these people...all these real, human people, joining
together to play shared tunesit is continually incomprehensible.
He is used to it, part of it, it is the best part of his life, it is life
itself to him; yet there are still moments when he sits in awe of
its social nature.
The banjo player has struck up "The Flagstone of
Memories." Aidan joins in. Some of the customers have cleared
a space, at the far end by the jacks, to dance a threehand reel.
The bodies weave between and around each other; from his
vantage point, beyond the pub crowd, they dance in and out of
view, as if through a screen of trees.
For a moment, it seems the scuffed floor under his shoes
becomes a firm dirt road, dust settled by a recent, soft rain. He
is the piper at the roadside, where folk from all the little farmssplit
and split again, always too many sons and not enough
landgather on a summer's night to dance under the stars. It is
the crossroads where the cottage grew. Who lived there? Was it
a piper's house? He's never known, and never will.
He is that piper now. The summer stars of centuries past
whirl in the rafters over his head, as the dancers whirl to his
music.
It's not healthy for the lad.
Sure, he's all right; where else can he go?
I tell ye, it goes against nature. He'll take harm from it, you
mark me.
If nature were opposed to it, he'd not see nor hear us now. You mind
your tongue, old fella. Next you'll be scaring him away.
WARM bodies, making music, now, right now, herehe must
brace himself in that reality. But how do you know what is
real? He inhabited two realms for so long, from such a
young age. . . . He would almost rather live in the past, the
spectral, see-through past, unreal except in the mind that
believes in it.
It hurts too much, hurts deep in the part of the brain
where fundamental assumptions are formed.
Who is to say that the bone man isn't a spectre himself?
Aidan has fled such questions for the better part of a lifetime.
The most love he's ever known, and the worst pain he's
ever suffered, were in that tumbledown cottage. He would
never know such love again, not in the realm of men; and so he
pushed it all firmly behind him, that he might at least be spared
the pain.
"It's not lost forever, you know."
"Leave me alone!" he cries to the bone man. It comes out
a whisper.
"You're already alone, lad," the bone man replies. "If I
leave, or you leave, it'll make no difference a-tall so."
Aidan will not believe that. He is not alone, not when he is
surrounded by the music, cupped in its golden hands. Not
when it is music made by living beings, with heartbeats in their
chests and warm pulsing blood under their skin.
The room has taken on the soft lambency of inebriation,
though Aidan hasn't touched a drop.
H . P . L O V E C R A F T ’S M A G A Z IN E O F H O R R O R 63