At first glance, it was an ordinary bottle. Clear glass, with a matching (rubber tipped) stopper to keep it airtight, apparently empty, labeled with a number. Thirty-six.

She’d found it on the beach while walking her dog. Well, really, the dog had found it. He hadn’t picked it up, because he was a pointer, and didn’t fetch for anything. Even playing ball in the back yard, the dog would locate the toy, point to it, and, if she didn’t come to pick it up fast enough, look back with an expression that clearly said If you wanted it back, you should have adopted a retriever.

So, the dog had pointed, and she had done the fetching.

And the thing is, she isn’t sure why she decided to take the bottle home. She didn’t typically pick up litter (she should probably feel guilty about that, but she didn’t), and she wasn’t the type to collect beach glass.

But something about this bottle was a little off-kilter. Maybe it was the condition: old, sure, but intact. And pretty clean, if slightly scarred by tides and saltwater.

It just… spoke to her.

So, she took it home, and left it on her desk, next to the mug full of pens to the right of her monitor. Eventually, she’d wash it out, maybe discard the stopper, or leave it in the junk drawer and turn the bottle into a bud vase. She’d always liked using glasses and jars and old candle holders instead of actual vases.

Days went by. She forgot about the bottle, but on the night of the full moon, she noticed a shadow inside, almost like a person. She held it to the light, but that didn’t make anything solidify, it was still just a vague, shadowy outline.

Opening the bottle was likely an unwise idea, but she couldn’t help it. Just as when she’d chosen to cart it home, the thing was speaking to her.

Only this time, the speaking was literal.

Let me out… please! Let me out!

She pulled the stopper, expecting the worst. A demon maybe, or a trapped djinn. She expected her dog to start barking his fool head off, but he couldn’t be bothered to leave his place on the sofa, and as far as she could tell, all that was released was some air that smelled of saltwater.

The full moon crept across the sky.

She took the open bottle to the coffee table and stared at it.

Nothing happened.

The sun made its first appearance, while the moon was still faintly evident in the sky, and she gave up and went to bed. Her dreams were bizarre that night – morning – whatever. They were filled with sailing ships, storm-tossed seas, rum-running and cheating boyfriends. And then she had the feeling of being trapped and immobile. She tried to breathe, but the air was stale and swampy. And when she tried to sit up, she hit her head on the window.

Wait… window?

She opened her eyes to a sunlit room, but it wasn’t her bedroom. It was her living room, but everything was oversized, and she couldn’t seem to move from her spot.

Realization came in the form of a demonic red eye on the other side of what she now recognized as a curve of salt-etched glass. The eye blinked, and suddenly it was blue – the same blue as her own.

A hand curved around the bottle, and lifted her up, and she saw the demon properly. But the horned head morphed into a facsimile of her own face, and when she looked down at herself, all of her color was gone. She felt small. She felt transparent. She was… trapped.

She tried yelling for her dog, but the fickle creature was standing next to her newly-made double with his leash in his mouth, and his tail wagging.

He gave a single bark and the demon with her face and body laughed in her voice. “Sure, let’s go to the beach, boy. We should get rid of this thing.”

The demon clipped the leash onto her dog’s collar and tossed the bottle – her prison – into her tote.

When they got to the beach, the demon walked out to the end of the jetty and hefted the bottle once more. With a strong arm (apparently the demon had inherited her softball pitching arm) she threw it into the sea.

A magical creature could have lasted centuries in a glass bottle, even in the depths of the ocean. But she wasn’t magical. She was just a young woman who’d found a bottle on the beach. She was unconscious before the bottle sank into darkness, and dead by moonrise.

And the demon?

She lived a happy stolen life in her stolen body, with her stolen dog.

As demons do.

“And behold, a pale horse and its rider’s name was Death,” Margo quoted. She asked her horse to pause at the top of what had once been the main street of the city they were entering and waited as her companions caught up to her.

“Are you casting me as Hades then?” Helen asked, drawing up her own mount beside her wife’s. “Not sure that’s flattering.”

“But don’t you feel like that’s who we are?” Margo challenged. “Look at this city. The buildings are burned out husks. Nature is weaving itself back over the framework, and what are we doing? Picking over the carcasses of what’s left behind.”

“Child, you fret too much.” The warm words came from Mother Ruth, the leader of their community, and this… hunting party. “We did not cause this atrocity, we survived the actions of those who did.”

“But we’re still gaining from it, Mother,” Margo complained. “How does that make us any better?”

“Because we have accepted the challenge of rebuilding the world,” the older woman answered in a tone that brooked no argument.

Beyond her, the fourth member of their party released her left hand from the reins and pointed. She didn’t speak – hadn’t spoken since the Day of Destruction many decades before – but her meaning was clear. They were meant to move forward.

“I’ll lead this time,” Helen said.

“Just because you don’t want to be Hades,” Margo teased.

“Well, that… but also it’s my turn.” And she urged her horse forward, assuming correctly that the others would fall in line behind her.

At the center of the city, they found their destination. It was not, as Margo had expected, Mother Ruth’s home church, or even the great cathedral in the center of the broken metropolis. Rather, it was the public library.

“Books?” Margo asked. “We’re here for books.”

“Books, yes,” Mother Ruth confirmed. “But also, to see if the computer network here might still be working, to find out if there are other survivors somewhere.”

Technology had all but died after the last war, and the surviving engineers and computer and telecom experts were just beginning to bring it back. Electricity had only been reasonably reliable for about a year, and with it, refrigeration.

“And if there are? Do we reach out?” The question was Helen’s this time.

“We give them directions to neutral ground and invite a meeting. We don’t know what other survivors might be like. Some might be quite violent.”

But while the network was still up – shielded as it was in the basement of the old building – there was no sign of anyone using it. They left one machine logged in to a message board they’d set up. Then they’d filled their saddle bags with books – how-to manuals, cookboks, gardening guides, and a few novels – and made their way back outside.

The horses were waiting patiently.

Mother Ruth helped their silent companion to climb aboard her mount, then settled herself on her own saddle with surprising grace. Margo and Helen were not quite as graceful, simply because they hadn’t had the same years of practice, but they were competent, and the party soon began their journey back out of town.

The light was fading as they left the city, and somewhere behind them a wolf howled, causing Margo to shiver. Closing her eyes against the fear, she imagined the four of them as they must look to anyone still hiding within the crumbling stone and rusted steel, and the bible verse came back into her head.

Helen and Ruth and their voiceless friend might not like the comparison, but it was people like them who had destroyed the world, and it was they themselves who were picking over the bones.

“And I saw, and behold, a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him; and they were given power over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.” ~Revelations, 6:8, RSV translation.

She runs into him  – quite literally – outside the coffee shop across the street from old campus, the one where they make the mochas with proper bitter chocolate and understand that whipped cream shouldn’t be sweetened.

“Excuse me,” she says, “I’m so sorry, I was looking at my phone and…” Said phone has fallen to the ground and she crouches to retrieve it rather than bend. When she looks up it’s his mouth that catches her attention. His mouth. His lips. Pressed together. Plush in a way that men’s lips typically aren’t.  Kissable.

In that moment, the stranger in his vintage clothes and the hat that obscures his eyes has become the object of her desire.

He doesn’t speak, but extends a hand to assist her as she releases her squat and stands straight. “Thank you,” she says. “Again, I’m sorry.”

He touches his hand to the brim of his hat and disappears into the shadowed twilight of the university district.

A week passes by, then two.

Halloween is over. Thanksgiving is coming fast.

There’s an annual party at the university, and as a professor, she is required to attend. It’s hosted by the English department this year, and the folklorists have chosen the theme: firelight. They’ve got fires in the giant fireplaces at either end of the hall and set the tables with lanterns of living flame.

The portraits of past presidents, past tenured professors, high up on the walls, look down in judgement and envy. Possibly more of the latter.

She half-expects to see him there, immortalized in oil paint.

Instead she spies him over by the hot hors d’oeuvres. He’s serving himself some of the stuffed mushroom caps.

Across the room, she finds herself once again entranced by his lips.

She goes to him, observes that the chafing dish that once held mushrooms is now empty. He must be watching her, too, because a cool hand touches her shoulder and he is offering a second fork, gesturing for her to share his plate.

“You’re very kind,” she says.

He gives the slightest of shrugs and leads her to a quiet alcove.

They spend the evening watching the rest of the party. They leave together; he escorts her to her apartment.

“Do you want to come in?” she asks.

He touches his hat again, and the muscles in his cheeks contract slightly, drawing his lips – god! Those lips! – into a subtle smile.

They share a pot of tea, and then a bottle of wine.

She does all the talking, but somehow, he conveys his opinions on her observations. Yes, Ayn Rand is overrated. No, modern students don’t read enough romantic poetry.

As dawn light turns the window shades pink, they each move to the center of her sofa. He takes her hands in his. She leans close, under his hat-brim with him, and touches her lips to his.

In the space of a kiss, she understands… the hat hides his demon eyes from human gawking, and also protects them from bright light. And his lips hide teeth meant for cutting and chewing human flesh.

His voice… when she hears it… is mesmerizing. Julian Sands married to Alan Rickman mesmerizing. He tells his story in a few succinct sentences. His father was a demon, his mother his human mate. When she learned what he was, his mother made his father promise that he could live a human life. He chose to dwell among books.

* * *

“Why don’t you speak?” She asks, much later in the morning, when she’s resting against his smooth chest.

“My voice is where my power lies,” he explains. “If I’d wooed you with words, you would be in thrall, and I didn’t want that, don’t want that.”

“Is that what happened to your mother?”

“Yes. But becoming pregnant broke the thrall, and now she remains with my father out of choice.”

“It wasn’t coincidence, was it? Me running into you?”

“No.” His answers are brief, but she hears the more in them.

“How long can this last?” She means the connection they’ve forged.

He answers by kissing her.

“You’re wrong you know,” she tells him, several days later, as they’re walking to the coffee shop as the season’s first snow falls around them. “It’s not your voice that draws people in. At least, it wasn’t with me.”

“What was it then? The hat? The clothes?”

“No,” she says. “Guess?”

In the privacy of a darkened doorway, he smiles at her with a closed mouth covering his deadly teeth, and she stretches a gloved finger up to caress his lips.

Instruments are meant to be played. They’re not to be left alone, untuned, unused , unloved.

They have souls, you know. Not fully-formed ones such as ours, mind you. Rudimentary souls. Proto-souls, you might call them.

Or maybe they’re not souls at all. Doesn’t matter. The name you give them isn’t important. That you recognize that there’s a spark of something – a spark of some THING – suspended in the wire and the wood, or curled up inside the brass of the bell, or hiding tucked up against the reed – that’s what matters.

And those things. Those THINGS… when they’re ignored long enough they go crazy trying to make music without a human hand, a human heart, to guide them.

You know how when you walk by a cello on a stand, sometimes you hear a hint of resonance? Or you think you hear a piano note late at night?

Those are them. The sparks trying to become flame.

We talk about great musicians being connected to their instruments, playing as if the violin or saxophone an extension of their body? That’s because the spark has found ignition.

A raw, new, unplayed instrument will fade into dust.

But one that’s felt the loving touch of elegant hands on its keys, the special balanced weight of sticks being held to drum, the soft slide of a virtuoso playing a glissando – those instruments quite literally go mad.

They cry out loneliness in crazy concertos that fold in upon one another like cobwebs. They fill empty rooms with the dissonant sounds of their grief.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, what were you saying about the music room?” Sarah had been lost in thought, seeing the poor old piano.

“Piano comes with the house” the woman in the gold blazer repeated. “Previous owner was a classical star until arthritis killed his career.”

Sarah made some polite response as she and Gold Blazer Woman moved to the next room in the walkthrough. But she cast a final glance at the deteriorated instrument and the collection of empty chairs.

“Don’t worry.” She willed the ancient Steinway to hear her thoughts. “I’ll save you.”