Dallow removed his hat and shook his head vigorously, then replaced it atop his head with some authority, narrowing his eyes at me, to focus, rather than displaying any anger or displeased discernment.
“My God, Johannes,” he was the only one who called me that, “how did you sneak in here?”
He had to know the answer to that question, though I was past being frustrated about people either asking questions which didn’t require answers, or asking them simply to deflect my own, or both. It was as if he had just realized it was me, after soliciting my opinion just moments before. I snapped a bit, releasing leftover annoyance from my last encounter.
“I walked right through the door, just as you’d left it.”
Dallow descended the remaining stairs, hands at his sides. “Oh did I? I didn’t leave the door open, I never do that. You know what? It doesn’t matter. I’m glad it was open for you. And now you’re here. Jack is here too, you know. Moist too. Furey and Jeffrey…I guess almost everyone is here.”
Well, this was certainly news, but obviously the sound had been coming from somewhere and someone, and though this crew made for an unlikely choir, it was enough people to make a solid racket. Though of course I’d just seen Jack, who was soaking it all in in his own manner, and the volume and intensity of the noise was unchanged when I had witnessed Moist on the roof, so she certainly did not appear to be contributing to it in any material way.
On that note, upon drawing closer to the base of the stairs so that Dallow could hear me more easily without my having to shout, I had the distinct impression, or at least the most distinct so far, of discernible instrumentation. Though highly processed and manipulated, there was the unmistakable tone and timbre of an electric stringed instrument, likely a guitar. The amount of delay and reverb was such that the chords, such as they were, pealed out in waves, but these stacked notes also were, for the first time without requiring a deeply refined and specific sense of the term, pretty. Spiritualized and My Bloody Valentine might have been forming a supergroup ten feet above me, Spaceman wrestling with his instrument, waiting for Shields to answer. Or the other way around. Though it seemed certain that a multi-stringed device was releasing these new sounds, the house reacted much the same, and Dallow closed his eyes as the percussive, wooden taps of something which was not designed as a resonant drum was unlocked for a new purpose. I was self-exiled in the hull of a great reverberating ship, perhaps the old wooden frame of the house was itself mic’ed, a suggestion I made to Dallow, who opened his eyes and replied, in non-answer:
“That’s an idea I wouldn’t put past them, honestly.”
I was again at a loss. The strange, distant behavior of people around whom I had spent so much time, with whom I ought to have developed intimacy sufficient not to keep information from me unduly, was dispiriting. I thought about grasping Dallow’s rumpled collar and shaking his head a bit more, in hopes that the truth, or at least an admission that everything was out of control and we now were elements in the chaos, would spill out. I would then release him, as he looked at me dispassionately, I would place my hands flat on his collar bones, and walk through the door I hoped was still open, leaving the others to their own wits and designs, confident it would continue on without me, gradually caring less if it did not. What I got instead was an offer which there was little reason—whither reason?—to decline:
“Let’s have a look around, eh?”
With this, he theatrically swung around the bottom post of the bannister, as if demonstrating its structural fortitude. He put his arm around me, hand on shoulder, and spun me back towards the kitchen, which was the one area—or perhaps one of two—which I really felt no compulsion to see again. But he was both excited and amiable, and slightly less oblivious to the noise around us, pricking up his ears or even jumping slightly at the more aggressive vibrations and taps.
“Everything is strapped down! Pretty strange, isn’t it? I have no idea what they thought would happen here, but it’s been a long time since we’ve had an earthquake.” He looked sideways at me. “Hasn’t it?” He squeezed my shoulder, pumping twice. “Hasn’t it?”
I agreed that it had indeed been a long time since we’d had an earthquake, and he dropped his arm, to better gesture at some of the finer details of the room.
“So nothing is coming out of these cupboards, they’re totally strapped down. But the table is really the masterpiece, it’s really strange. Sorry if I’ve mentioned this already.”
How he thought he would have mentioned anything a second time in these few minutes we had been together was beyond me. He waved me over to the table, running his finger around the edges, which had been beveled so as to form a lip, thus explaining in part why the glass and mugs upon it did not vibrate off immediately. Upon closer inspection, and at my guide’s behest, I noted the channels carved into the surface of the table, along which the objects atop it seemed to pirouette and skate. Dallow ran his fingers just in front of one of them, appearing to guide the crystal tumbler, just like the one Jack had let smash in the other room, as it tinkled and shook along the path. He seemed mesmerized by its motion, which threatened to become almost regular as he focused upon it so intensely, leading the glass in a nearly flat, oblong figure-8 down the length of the ovular table and back. He leaned in to listen, or so it appeared by the angle of his head to the table, and then beckoned me to crouch with him, revealing a system of contact microphones clipped under the table. They were among the smallest recording devices I had ever seen, affixed to delicate wire and uniformly distributed around the underside. The intricacy of the patterns on both sides of the table, which appeared as old and overused as everything else in the house I had seen so far, suggested a great deal more care in this place than was superficially perceptible. The shabbiness of the whole overwhelmed the design of the parts, which I mused could not have been accidental. The wires radiated out from a hole in the center of the table, up to the tape machine, which Dallow and I rose together to observe rolling and clicking along. The impossibility of recording anything of value from the table with the sheer amount of background noise may have been the least absurd feature of the entire setup. To label any one thing here as pointless would require assuming any other had a deeper purpose, an idea I remained unwilling to concede. Dallow and I watched the tape spool for a few moments, and he eventually broke in:
“That should be interesting playback. I had a band once that did something similar, but it never really worked out. Impossible to perform live, and even though I have a face for recordings, I’m much better off in a live setting! But let’s move on. There’s a big back end on this place, if you know what I mean.” He nodded his eyebrows in his best Groucho Marx, even doffing an invisible cigar as he did. The back room was no less dilapidated than any other part of the place, and held no less specific a function than the other rooms he’d show me, either.
“Three things in here: Theremin, singing saw, mellotron. Who can tell the difference? I can! Besides,” he went on, gesturing to the metal and wooden oddity on the thin-legged stand, “Lydia Kavina played this one once, even though I asked her not to, because I was fixing it at the time. It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my recent life, and there are many—I had to ask Lydia Kavina not to play my instrument because I was worried it would shock the hell out of her, and then I had to listen to her play it more beautifully than I will ever be able to. Incredibly annoying. I was annoyed with myself; I wanted to ask myself to leave. She was gracious, but I also think she was trying to prove some kind of point. Anyway, I’m developing work for my group Potentially the Most Annoying Orchestra, or P-MAO. These will be all the instruments we’ll need, and ideally I’ll be the only member.”
At that, he removed his jacket, rolled his sleeves up nearly to elbows, tightened his tie and smoothed it behind his vest, walked over to the Theremin, the veneer of which was a dazzling blue sparkle, and began rendering a slow, halting version of Bluebells of Scotland, at which the house gradually settled into a rumble which unthinkably fell into time with the mournful wail of the electronic instrument. The rumble was so low and deep that it barely registered as tonal at all, and if I were told in retrospect that I had invented the notes out of desperation, and forced them into being through sheer will, I would not have believed it then, but I do now. Before long, however, I did not need to imagine anything. Someone or something was listening and the tones of the house began to adapt to the sounds Dallow generated from his pinched thumb and forefinger, in rapt concentration as he moved each of his hands slightly ahead of the changing tones issuing from the instrument and below. As I looked to the floor, I noticed for the first time the miniature Stonehenge of small speakers arranged in a semicircle around him, all mismatched and somewhat weathered, but carefully arranged and showing no auditory signs of distress or wear. I could almost hear Jack say something blasé about hidden beauty and how it comes and goes from the other room, but I did not want to turn away from the fantastic rehearsal before me to verify his presence.
As Dallow completed the movement, I though of Cashman and Jack in the underground chapel, and that I, too, had lost all sense of time and was uncertain of the appropriate emotions for the moment. Dallow dropped his hands and I applauded, at which he graciously smiled, but the rumble seemed to continue on in reprise until it gradually worked itself back into the developing round of chords and percussive taps. Dallow could see I had questions, and offered a theory as he pointed to the back corner of the ceiling behind him. I walked over and stared up into a long, open cavern, from which dangled one stalactite of a microphone.
“Echo chamber,” he said, “carved out of an old dumbwaiter. The pulleys along the walls still work, it goes all the way up to the attic. I’ve ridden in it a couple of times, it’s pretty scary, but they used to move some heavy stuff in there, so I think it’s safe.” He looked back at me. “They must be listening up there. But let’s go find out.”
He took me back around to the staircase—finally, the staircase—and we went up. He told me it was mostly bedrooms.
“Who lives here?”
“Who doesn’t? Although it’s barely living, doll! But someone’s got to do it!”
I had, as often, no idea what he was talking about, and assumed it was a bit, not fully refined to his limelit standards. It didn’t matter anyway, as he showed me the insides of each unlocked room, speakers wired through every one of them like dynamite in the walls. It had to be an incredible amount of wattage, perhaps there were amplifiers set behind the sheetrock and plaster as well, and it still seemed impossible that these speakers alone made the house dance and shimmy as it did. Dallow removed a panel from the wall in one of the bedrooms to show me a set of breakers, telling me it wasn’t really “his department,” but someone had shown him, and he found it interesting, which I suppose it was, but my thirst for interesting was pretty well exhausted.
We went up another flight of stairs, and he gestured to the ceiling panel, complete with handle, behind which a ladder to the attic was packed.
“I wouldn’t recommend going up there right now, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, I’m not exactly sure what happened, but it’s definitely not for us to find out. Or me, at least. She uses the fire escape up the back when she wants to rehearse up there, but there are plenty of place to rehearse, so…”
I had to ask, if only for symmetry’s sake: “You don’t think she’d want you to be the one to find her?”
He looked at me quizzically. “Is she lost? I think someone would go up there not to be found,” he hammered this word, “if that’s what you mean.” He walked me back down the same stairs, continuing. “We don’t need to deal with that, anyway. Everyone can think for themselves, here. Everyone was invited, anyway, but that doesn’t mean they have to stay forever. We all leave sometime, Johannes, even you. I don’t leave very often, but I do on occasion as well.” He took on a philosophical, thinking man’s tone as we rounded a corner down a hallway which terminated in double doors. “It’s fine to leave. Important, even. I didn’t build most of the stuff—”
Dallow was interrupted by an unexpected sound, which was akin to a tree being split by rot or by lightning, and may or may not have been mechanically generated. It was this “may not” which I figured alarmed him. I did not know of much in this world of objects and possessions which Dallow would be upset to see—or hear—split in two, but he took a couple of quicker steps down the hall and placed one hand flat on the double doors, the other on an incommensurately new-looking knob and nodded for me to do the same. I didn’t think I was sad anymore, surplus emotion having been replaced with something else. The door felt cold to the touch, almost certainly constructed out of a heavier metal, but the knob seemed almost to steam, and the vibrations from it were so intense and frenetic that I thought I might be experiencing electrocution. Dallow seemed fine though, and as I saw him straining with the door, I realized it was a two-person job to pry it open. And the splitting continued slowly, no longer a tree but a glacier moaning and protesting as it cracked and tore away into an arctic floe.
