“What am I even doing here?” Darcy murmured to himself, shoving some coin across the bar and lifting the dirty tankard to his lips. The pungent taste of the beer mixed with the smoke and sweat emanating from the other patrons, and nausea welled up from a place just beneath his stomach. The alcohol sent a quick rush of numb ambivalence through his system, even as the question still pestered him. He couldn’t sit still, and shuffled back out on the street. What was he supposed to do with an entire evening in a sad little town like this? He had been to cities, big cities, and they had paid him to come, too. He wasn’t getting a cent for his time spent here - worse, he was spending money just to forget where he was. Things were going downhill fast.
Darcy looked out at the town. What a miserable place to live. A carriage horse click-clacked along the road with an elderly couple in tow. He had seen plenty of towns like it on this tour alone - the sort of town that was transitioning towards its inevitable decay. It would be more interesting in a couple years, he thought, when the paint peels and the roof sags - no one’s got the time or the money to fix it. Abandoned houses are perfect for parties where you smash bottles and punch walls. He thought briefly of the sounds of shattering glass as he quickened his pace.
He had been putting distance between himself and the bar where the feeling had begun to take hold of him. He wanted a change of view, that was certain, and moving in a direction, any direction, was helping to achieve that. Pushing on, Darcy felt the desaturated landscape and its relentless similarities begin to exhaust him. Step by step, one foot after the other...gray house, blue house, brick house with a boarded-up window, another gray house...beneath his simple turban, under his greasy black hair, he could almost feel the ridges on his brain begin to smooth out. Waves of quiet tedium washed over him. The sheer dullness, the marked lack of substance made his stomach turn, and he felt a feverish sweat prickle his forehead. He quickened his pace, jogging past the woman with arms too-full of groceries, running, blurring the gray-blue-brick houses together into a sweep of color in the edges of his vision. It looked beautiful, now, trailing like smoke along his peripherals, the rigid structures bleeding into each other. Beautiful, transfixing, even.
Darcy’s eyes refocused as his face collided with solid meat-wall behind folds of bright red fabric, and he felt a pair of legs twist around his own as the world turned to one side. He felt his knee sink into a soft section of the meat wall, heard a gurgled grunt. His shoulder bashed hard against the ground. “Interesting” thought Darcy, examining how the pain lept down his arm and buzzing around his fingertips. Darcy realized he was staring right into the sun.
“Ooh.” he said, “Agh.”. He moved his head to one side to see the meat-wall, draped in red fabric, sat on the stoop next to him. She held a hand-rolled cigarette to her lips and lit the end.
“You ok, then?” She asked him, smoke rising off her words as she leaned in to get a closer look. She was a tall woman, and although the thick red folds of her cloak hid much of her frame, Darcy could see the muscles in her forearm ripple as she shifted her grip on her cigarette.
“You’ve been laying there for a few minutes. I thought I might have to take you to the hospital.” He imagined that for a moment, amusing himself with the picture of himself, hoisted over one of her broad shoulders.
“I’m alright. Are-” he started.
“Fine.” she interrupted him. “Don’t you worry. I’m fine. I’ve been knocked down before.” She sounded a little proud of it, too, thought Darcy. He sat up and ran his hands along his body, checking for bumps or openings where there shouldn’t be, then turned to look at the woman he had collided with at full speed. She seemed to have come out of the experience unscathed, he thought, wincing at the burning lump on his shoulder. Making an attempt at standing up, he managed it, stumbling as he strode over to the stoop and sat down next to her.
“Cheers” said Darcy, his voice cracking as he made a casual quarter-turn to address her. She looked down at him, and the ghost of an amused smile drifted in and out of her expression.
“You were in quite the hurry,” she said, “You must be from out of town.”
“Oh yes,” Darcy said, “Way out of town.”
“So why were you running?” she asked, offering him a cigarette. Darcy turned it down with a polite wave.
“I don’t think I know,” he said, bemused. “I guess I’m used to a little more action, you know? A little more excitement. I’m in a band. We tour the Northeastern shore.” She looked him over, a crease in her forehead growing.
“You don't sound too enthusiastic about the whole thing.” He laughed. “I guess I just don’t get excited about much any more.”
“Your friends might be right to stay” The red-cloaked woman advised him. “The roads along the coast can be very dangerous after nightfall.” She chuckled to herself.
“A musician...imagine that. Not many musicians come around this town.” her face changed expression, as if she had just remembered how to act.
“I’m Alice” she said, extending a warm and weathered hand, which Darcy shook, half-marveling at the amount of callous and scar tissue he could feel.
“Darcy,” he said. There was a pause. “What do you do?” he asked.
“Now? I don't do much of anything.” Alice chuckled. “I used to be a pugilist.” She grinned, and Darcy saw now that she was missing a few teeth. Her days of combat, he thought, hadn’t left a square inch of the woman unscathed.
“You?” he said, “Not a dancer?” She chuckled again, and took a deep breath in, cigarette glowing in the corner of her mouth as she did.
“In a way” she sighed, “I was. Never liked the music, though.”
Before he left her on the stoop, thinking about the past, she had told him to stop into a shop on the edge of town. It was out of his way by a sizable distance, but he felt an obligation to carry out her request. The casual nod he had given as he departed, an automatic response, felt for some reason like a binding contract this time. He thought about her more as he strode along the cobblestones towards the edge of town, imagining the violent stories her scars could tell him. He wasn’t sure if it made him sad or impressed.
The music store looked to be decomposing, tarnished red paint peeling off in the gentle breeze, its front windows almost opaque with grime, displaying hints and shadowy outlines of the instruments behind the filthy glass. Darcy almost strolled right past the weathered sign, which displayed a faded musical note springing out of a pale trombone the color of old teeth. He looked the storefront up and down, half-hoping to find a “closed” sign hanging somewhere, to spare him from disturbing the long-forgotten dust inside, beyond the cream-colored door.
Darcy pulled, and the door opened without a creak, shifting a heap of dust so it swirled about the dim little shop. Rows and rows of neglected instruments stretched out in front of him. To his left, by the soft lantern light he could just make out a hunched figure behind the glass counter, who seemed to be scratching something in a frayed blue book - a ledger, perhaps? Darcy cleared his throat three times before he gave up and began to wander the aisles. His eyes slid past the instruments, pausing here and there in front of an obscured dust-shape to try to determine what sort of instrument it had once been. He inspected bongos, wurlitzers, even a massive two person harp - from what he could make out, the languishing collection was the most extensive he had seen on his frequent travels. He paused at the end of the last aisle just long enough to convey polite interest, and then headed towards the door.
“Looking for something?” a strained voice called out, and Darcy turned to see the hunched figure had straightened up, hood falling back to reveal not an ancient creature but a young woman with dark hair, and darker circles under her eyes. Her long, painted fingernails flicked at the constellation of gold piercings which dotted her face. Darcy struggled to find his wits as the woman stared at him with a distinctive lack of interest.
“No” he said.
“Well, you’ve come to the wrong place then” the woman rasped after a moment, hunching back over the ledger. Darcy tried to think of a biting quip to launch back at the woman behind the counter, but the silence swallowed his words before he could get them out.
He was turning to leave when a ray of sun caught something behind the dirty glass counter. The sunlight hit some crimson shape, bright and unusual enough to stop Darcy dead in his tracks. He turned back around on the ball of his foot, trying to hide his abrupt change in demeanor. He looked down, as if inspecting the buckle on his shoe, and glanced over at the crimson shape again. It was a breathtaking sight - seven silver strings stretched the length of the instrument, a sleek and jagged thing, all fins and curves, like some weird pelagic creature. In the room of faded paint and dust, the bright-red color was entrancing, and Darcy’s mind was filled with images of poisonous berries and blood as he knelt, holding his breath in front of the dirty glass counter. The woman behind the counter looked down at him over the ledger but said nothing. Darcy thought he saw a smile flash through her face for a second, but he wasn’t ready to look away from the guitar, the beautiful, bright-red guitar. Not yet. He looked up. The woman behind the counter had closed her ledger and was gazing down at his crouched form, looking a little less bored than she had before.
“Interested?” she asked, and he was sure he saw the piercings by the corners of her mouth quiver this time. He stood up, looking back and forth between the guitar and the woman behind the counter.
“Yes”, he admitted, unable to think of anything else to say, “How much?” He looked down at the guitar again, scanning for a price. The woman waited for him to look up again, and met his gaze.
“It won’t cost you any money,” she said, not blinking. Darcy looked back and forth between the woman behind the counter and the beautiful guitar. There must be some sort of mistake, he thought to himself, she must not understand.
“It’s worthless, then?” he asked, touching the glass counter with the tip of his nose, looking at the pristine shape of the otherworldly device.
“Nothing is worthless,” the woman behind the counter frowned.
“What’s wrong with it?” Darcy pressed her, eyes still fastened to the red object.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Darcy chuckled to himself.
“How much time do you have?”
“All the time in the world.”
Darcy let his gaze drift back up to the woman behind the counter, who had taken a pouch of tobacco out of the folds in her robe and began rolling a thin white cigarette. He felt as though she were amused, not just by his questions, but by the very fact that he had entered her shop at all. He felt the hot flush of embarrassment burn at the tips of his face, a feeling he had trained specifically to repress. He calmly repeated the mental exercises he used when standing on a stage, crowded with shouts and jeers and curses, but relief didn’t come, and he felt the hot gaze of the shopkeeper still trained on him when his eyes opened a moment later. He met her eyes with his.
“I’ll take it.” he said.
Darcy Daggins left the music store cradling the marvelous instrument in his hands. He walked for some way, unaware if the streets and people that he passed were strange or familiar. He stared, awestruck, at the way the sun gleamed off the guitar's metallic finish, how it felt light, but not flimsy, solid, but not bulky, and how the curves of the guitar fit flush against his hip. He felt something deep within his chest shudder as he held it, something like how he had felt when he played for the first time. Darcy sat down on a stoop, and propped the guitar into position with care. As the fingers of his left hand stretched across the fret, he felt the strings settle into grooves worn into the pads of his fingertips. He felt a part of his brain almost sigh with relief, as it relinquished control to another section, a primordial section that he had awakened long ago. He held his right hand before the strings and closed his eyes, and played.
The bright red guitar seemed to pulse and shudder in his hands as his fingers met the chords. Peals of the cleanest, brightest sound Darcy had ever heard sang from the guitar, sending shivers across his being. Shuddering, he raised his hand to play again. His arm felt like it was moving through warm honey as his fingers met the chords again. The stinging pain in his shoulder was gone. He couldn’t feel anything below his knees, and he didn’t care. The numbness made it feel like he was floating. His fingers met the chords, and the miraculous sound rang out again - the most beautiful thing Darcy had ever experienced, and he - he held it on a leash. He played again.
He played, began to move, walking, still no feeling in his legs, and the numbness creeping up towards his face as the world around him was lost in a bloom of color and lights. He played music he had heard years ago passing by a coffee shop on the way to see his parents' new apartment. Music he had heard while half asleep sailing across the sea just to open for a few talentless flashes-in-the-pan, whose manager would end up paying them a third of the agreed-upon fee. Music he heard from the next apartment over, when he was lost in the middle of a shouting match with his former darling, for reasons which were opaque to him now, and even at the time, far from clear. Music from another time, a forgotten time, far beyond the horizons of existence. Music from a time before sound, from long after the last echoes fade.
Darcy felt nothing but elation as his identity split apart and peeled away, walking towards the sunset, the music filled his mind. From her bedroom window, Alice saw him playing, and sighed. He was much happier now, she could tell by flashes of light amongst his eyes, and his lips, pulled back tight in compounding pangs of elation. She held her warm mug to her chin, and whispered, “good luck.”