HP Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror - Weird Tales

(e continues to sit, in his forgotten corner, long after
the last of the other musicians have left. The night
barman lingers late, hosting a few old gangers after
hours; then later stillguardian of his domain, perhaps reluctant
to leave it to the memories and the shadows. But in the end he
too is gone, the lock tumbling into place behind him. His last
check of the premises did not reveal Aidan's presence.
In the slender hours before dawn, Aidan listens to the reels
and hornpipes echoing in the shadows. At last, as he senses the
first hint of morningin the grey hours, when the air outside
pales to the hue of frosthe lifts the chanter, fills the bag with
the pub's breath, and begins to play the tunes of his youth.
He is safe. No one hears him. The shadows dance alone.
HE stood completely still, looking at the foundation hole
where the cottage had been. He stood so still, so long, that it
seemed a rime of frost formed on him, made of him a frozen
thing, a relic of his disastrous absence.
If I'd been here! he wanted to cry. If I'd known!
But no one had told him. No one had known about the
time he spent at the crumbled ruin. The start of yet another
industrial park, on the outskirts of a small town three counties
away, had not been news in Dublin. While he'd been receiving
the degree that dangled from his numb fingers, they'd been
tearing the cottage down, scooping out the first loads of earth.
Tá brón orm, he whispered. There is grief on me.
He fled that day, never to return. He could not live in a
land that demolished its own ghosts.
IN the morning, he is paler than the paling shadows.
He knows, now.
He has become a Grey Man.
The day barman cannot see him. He subsides into a kind
of sleep, a sleep of memory, deep below the stones, the earth,
the schist, deep in the past of another land.
He will spend the days in the nooks and crannies of his
childhood, and the nights as a lonely wraith, and if a child
should come, to learn, a child of any age, he will be herea
teacher, a good teacher, taught by the best teachers himself.
When the sessions form like crystals, he will sit in, on the
periphery. He will suggest tunes, gently, into the minds of those
coming up blank.
Then, on a breath of remembrance, he will play along. n
Terry McGarry is a freelance speculative-fiction copyeditor and Irish musician.
In her past lives, she has been a bartender on Wall Street, an English
major at Princeton, a street trader in Ireland, a Page O.K.’er at The New
Yorker, and a SFWA officer. Her short fiction has appeared in more
than forty magazines and anthologies, and her poetry is collected in the
award-winning chapbook Imprinting. Terry’s most recent novel is Triad
(Tor Books, 2005).
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 65