HP Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror - Weird Tales

64 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
"You've come back to the crossroads, Aidan Rourke," the
bone man's voice says from beside him. But the bone man is
gone.
And don't all the youngsters learn from the old players? It's how you
learned yourself, don't be denying it. Plastered to the piper's knee at every
hoolie, at his feet at every crossroads dance, every parlor ceili. "Round the
house and mind the piper!"
We're older than the oldest of that lot, now.
Aye, and better pipers too. No hay to bring in. No turf to cut. We've
plenty of time for it now.
AIDAN plays. Fear contracts his elbow against the bag, produces
a sound of strangled desperation. People look over at
him, brows raised, and he cringes against the hard wooden back
of the chair. To be heard is to be noticed. To be noticed is to
be silenced. With, he must play with, he must be ever part of
the music. His arms sag; his fingers seize. He falls silent. It is
worse than terror.
He turns toward the sound of movement, a scrape of chair
legs: some of the earlybirds behind him are vacating their comfortable
spot by the wall. Leaving his jacket, his instrument
case, he moves quickly into the emptied space. The woodpaneled
walls meet here in angular safety. He braces himself against
their joining, and takes up his pipes again.
We've got to do something for the poor little fella. It's a terrible thing, to
lose your mam.
It's enough your being here, he told them. Just don't leave me.
And sure where would we go, then? they said, laughing. No, lad,
it's you who'll be leaving, one fine day. We'll be here as we've always been.
We'll play as we've always done.
I believe you, Aidan said, and hefted his pipeshis first full set
of Irish pipes. Newer than theirs, made of better materials, but
weaker for that somehow. Over the years, he would break them
in. They would age with him. No need of the coveted historical
pipes, the expensive ones made in the seventeenth century,
now collector's items. He could hear those pipes played here
and now. By the men who had played them when they were
new.
For me mam, he said, beginning a slow air he'd gotten off
them.
For your mam, they replied, and listened while he keened.
THEIR voices speak in the music, in the breaths the whistlers
take between phrases, in the crackle of peat in the hearth.
Wherever peat is burned, there are ghosts of the old Ireland.
Aidan knows; it is what brought them, that winter's night when
he had to steal some turf to burn in the crumbled hearth, risk
discovery by the smoke, or freeze. They could not warm him,
the Grey Men; they could not warm his hands to help his fingers
move in the frosty air. They were as frost themselves, a
condensation of breath, fine mists of smoke and ice in the
shape of men.
But they warmed his soul with their playing. Sometimes he
slept there, comforted by the rise and fall of their ancient
accents, their chatter about the pasthis lullaby the forgotten
h
tunes, the tunes that no O'Neill or Mulvihill had ever catalogued.
They listened to him. It was all he'd really asked of anyone,
and all that had really been denied him, as the industrial estates
went up and the jobs materialized and the money began to
come in. In his music, they heard his triumphs and heartaches;
through his words they accepted the small irritations of his
days, the eager excitements. They saw him off with jaunty grins
and sly humor; they welcomed him back with serene complacency.
He belonged there. He would always return.
GROUNDED by the building's structure, he finds the music
in him again. A set of breakneck reels begins, and he plays, his
fingers flying, cutting and striking, rolling each note into ornament.
There is no tonguing the elbow pipes; they speak in a language
of limbs.
He has never been so fluent. His hands and arms articulate
all that his words never could. No more fear of his own sound
now, nor ever again. He switches the drone on, opens the regulators
with the heel of his hand to produce thirds, fourths,
fifths. In his embrace, the pipes sing longing, sing heartbreak.
As long as he has the music, he will exist. In these tunes he
will go on forever, a being out of time.
Never lose the music, lad, they said when he set off for university.
It's a big place, Dublin. You'll find your chances to play. Just don't let
them stuff your head with so much education it squeezes the tunes out.
I won't, he promised. I won't. . . . And he made good on that
promise, as he made good on his promise to return.
It was not their fault they couldn't make good on their
promise to be there.
* * *