Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [65]
Albert glanced at Bethany. She smiled and nodded.
'All right. Sure. In fact, I'm sort of curious about how it sounds after . He glanced at Craig Toomy. 'You know.'
He opened the case, grimacing as his fingers touched the latch which had opened the wound in Craig Toomy's forehead, and drew out his violin. He caressed it briefly, then took the bow in his right hand and tucked the violin under his chin. He stood like that for a moment, thinking. What was the proper sort of music for this strange new world where no phones rang and no dogs barked? Ralph Vaughan Williams? Stravinsky? Mozart? Dvorak, perhaps? No. None of them were right. Then inspiration struck, and he began to play 'Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah.'
Halfway through the tune the bow faltered to a stop.
'I guess you must have hurt your fiddle after all when you bopped that guy with it,' Don Gaffney said. 'It sounds like it's stuffed full of cotton batting.'
'No,' Albert said slowly. 'My violin is perfectly okay. I can tell just by the way it feels, and the action of the strings under my fingers ... but there's something else as well. Come on over here, Mr Gaffney.' Gaffney came over and stood beside Albert. 'Now get as close to my violin as you can. No . . not that close; I'd put out your eye with the bow. There. Just right. Listen again.'
Albert began to play, singing along in his mind, as he almost always did when he played this corny but endlessly cheerful shitkicking music:
Singing fee-fi-fiddly-I-oh, Fee-fi-fiddly-I-oh-oh-oh-oh, Fee-fi-fiddly-I-oh, Strummin' on the old banjo.
'Did you hear the difference?' he asked when he had finished.
'It sounds a lot better close up, if that's what you mean,' Gaffney said. He was looking at Albert with real respect. 'You play good, kid.'
Albert smiled at Gaffney, but it was really Bethany Simms he was talking to. 'Sometimes, when I'm sure my music teacher isn't around, I play old Led Zeppelin songs,' he said. 'That stuff really cooks on the violin. You'd be surprised.' He looked at Bob. 'Anyway, it fits right in with what you were saying. The closer you get, the better the violin sounds. It's the air that's wrong, not the instrument. It's not conducting the sounds the way it should, and so what comes out sounds the way the beer tasted.'
'Flat,' Brian said.
Albert nodded.
'Thank you, Albert,' Bob said.
'Sure. Can I put it away now?'
'Of course.' Bob continued as Albert replaced his violin in its case, and then used a napkin to clean off the fouled latches and his own fingers. 'Taste and sound are not the only off-key elements of the situation in which we find ourselves. Take the clouds, for instance.'
'What about them?' Rudy Warwick asked.
'They haven't moved since we arrived, and I don't think they're going to move. I think the weather patterns we're all used to living with have either stopped or are running down like an old pocket-watch.'
Bob paused for a moment. He suddenly looked old and helpless and frightened.
'As Mr Hopewell would say, let's not draw it fine. Everything here feels wrong. Dinah, whose senses - including that odd, vague one we call the sixth sense - are more developed than ours, has perhaps felt it the most strongly, but I think we've all felt it to some degree. Things here are just wrong.
'And now we come to the very hub of the matter.'
He turned to face them.
'I said not fifteen minutes ago that it felt like lunchtime. It now feels much later than that to me. Three in the afternoon, perhaps four. It isn't breakfast my stomach is grumbling for right now; it wants high tea. I have a terrible feeling that it may start to get dark outside before our watches tell us it's quarter to ten in the morning.'
'Get to it, mate,' Nick said.
'I think it's about time,' Bob said quietly. 'Not about dimension, as Albert suggested, but time. Suppose that, every now and then, a hole appears in the time stream? Not a time-warp, but a time-rip. A rip in the temporal fabric.'
'That's the craziest shit I ever heard!'