written by a friend who opined that Toby's solo album causes d10/d100 SAN loss.
THE MUSIC OF TOBY DRIVER
by H.P. Worcraft
I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have
never again found Jamaica Plain. These maps have not been modern
maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the contrary,
delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place, and have
personally explored every region, of whatever name, which could
possibly answer to the place I knew as Jamaica Plain. But despite
all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find
the house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last
months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the
university, I heard the music of Toby Driver.
That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical
and mental, was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my
residence in Jamaica Plain, and I recall that I took none of my few
acquaintances there. But that I cannot find the place again is both
singular and perplexing; for it was within a half-hour's walk of the
university and was distinguished by peculiarities which could hardly
be forgotten by any one who had been there. I have never met a
person who has seen Jamaica Plain.
The inhabitants of Jamaica Plain impressed me peculiarly; At first I
thought it was because they were all silent and reticent; but later
decided it was because they were all very high. I do not know how I
came to live in such a place, but I was not myself when I moved
there. I had been living in many poor places, always evicted for
want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house. It
was the third house from the top of the street, and by far the
tallest of them all.
My room was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since
the house was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strang
music from the peaked garret overhead, and the next day asked old
Blandot about it. He told me it was a bass player from Connecticut,
a strange, young man who signed his name as Toby Driver, and who
played evenings on Lansdowne Street; adding that Driver's desire to
play in the night after his return from the club was the reason he
had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable
window was the only point on the street from which one could look
over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond.
Thereafter I heard Toby every night, and although he kept me awake,
I was haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the
art myself, I was yet certain that none of his harmonies had any
relation to music I had heard before; and concluded that he was a
composer of highly original genius. The longer I listened, the more
I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to make the young
man's acquaintance.
One night as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Toby in
the hallway and told him that I would like to know him and be with
him when he played. He was a small, lean person, with shabby
clothes, blue eyes, grotesque, satyrlike face, and oddly coloured
hair; and at my first words seemed both bored and bemused. My
obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him; and he grudgingly
motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking and rickety attic
stairs. His room, one of only two in the steeply pitched garret,
was on the west side, toward the high wall that formed the upper end
of the street. Its size was very great, and seemed the greater
because of its extraordinary barrenness and neglect. Of furniture
there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy wash-stand, a small
table, a Yaffa block, an iron music-rack, a stack of Decibel
magazines, and three old-fashioned chairs. Sheets of music were
piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were of bare boards,
and had probably never known plaster; whilst the abundance of dust
and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than inhabited.
Evidently Toby Driver's world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of
the imagination.
Motioning me to sit down, Toby closed the door, turned the large
wooden bolt, and lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought
with him. He now removed his bass guitar from its motheaten
covering, and taking it, seated himself in the least uncomfortable
of the chairs. He did not employ the music-rack, but, offering no
choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with
strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of
his own devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for
one unversed in music. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent
passages of the most captivating quality, but to me were notable for
the absence of any of the weird notes I had overheard from my room
below on other occasions.
Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and
whistled inaccurately to myself, so when the player at length laid
down his pick I asked him if he would render some of them. As I
began my request the satyrlike face lost the bored placidity it had
possessed during the playing, and seemed to show the same curious
mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when first I
accosted the young man. For a moment I was inclined to use
persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims of intoxication; and
even tried to awaken my host's weirder mood by whistling a few of
the strains to which I had listened the night before. But I did not
pursue this course for more than a moment; for when the musician
recognized the whistled air his face grew suddenly distorted with an
expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long, cold, tattooed
right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude
imitation. As he did this he further demonstrated his eccentricity
by casting a startled glance toward the lone curtained window, as if
fearful of some intruder'a glance doubly absurd, since the garret
stood high and inaccessible above all the adjacent roofs, this
window being the only point on the steep street, as the concierge
had told me, from which one could see over the wall at the summit.
The young man's glance brought Blandot's remark to my mind, and with
a certain capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and
dizzying panorama of moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the
hilltop, which of all the dwellers of Jamaica Plain only this
crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window and would
have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened
rage even greater than before, the lodger was upon me again; this
time motioning with his head toward the door as he nervously strove
to drag me thither with both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with
my host, I ordered him to release me, and told him I would go at
once. His clutch relaxed, and as he saw my disgust and offense, his
own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his relaxing grip, but
this time in a friendly manner, forcing me onto the Yaffa block;
then with an appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered
table, where he wrote many words with a pencil, in the labored
English of a Hampshire alumni.
The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and
forgiveness. Driver said that he was drunk, high and afflicted with
strange fears and nervous disorders connected with his music and
with other things. He had enjoyed my listening to his music, and
wished I would come again and not mind his eccentricities. But he
could not play to another his weird harmonies without the rest of
Kayo Dot, and could not bear hearing them from another; nor could he
bear having anything in his room touched by an-other. He had not
known until our hallway conversation that I could overhear his
playing in my room, and now asked me if I would arrange with Blandot
to take a lower room where I could not hear him in the night. He
would, he wrote, defray the difference in rent.
As I sat deciphering the execrable words, I felt more lenient toward
the young man. He was a victim of physical and nervous suffering,
as was I; and my metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In
the silence there came a slight sound from the window - the shutter
must have rattled in the night wind, and for some reason I started
almost as violently as did Toby Driver. So when I had finished
reading, I shook my host by the hand, and departed as a friend.
The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third
floor, between the apartments of an aged money-lender and the room
of a respectable upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth floor.
It was not long before I found that Driver's eagerness for my
company was not as great as it had seemed while he was persuading me
to move down from the fifth story. He did not ask me to call on
him, and when I did call he appeared as though he had just woken up
and took three hours to get ready. This was always at night - in the
day he slept and would admit no one. My liking for him did not
grow, though the attic room and the weird music seemed to hold an
odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out of that
window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering
roofs and spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to
the garret during theater hours, when Toby was away, but the door
was locked.
What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of
the strange young man. At first I would tip-toe up to my old fifth
floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase
to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted
door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me
with an indefinable dread - the dread of vague wonder and brooding
mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were
not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe
of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic
quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player.
Certainly, Toby Driver was a genius of wild power. As the weeks
passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician acquired an
increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now
refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on
the stairs.
Then one night as I listened at the door, I heard the shrieking
Telecaster swell into a chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which
would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity had there not come
from behind that barred portal a piteous proof that the horror was
real - the awful, inarticulate cry which only a Driver can utter,
and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or
anguish. I knocked repeatedly at the door, but received no
response. Afterward I waited in the black hallway, shivering with
cold and fear, till I heard the poor musician's feeble effort to
rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing him just
conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the same
time calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Toby stumble to the
window and close both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door,
which he falteringly unfastened to admit me. This time his delight
at having me present was real; for his distorted face gleamed with
relief while he clutched at my coat as a child clutches at its
mother's skirts.
Shaking pathetically, the young man forced me into a chair whilst he
sank onto a pile of laundry, beside which his guitar and pick lay
carelessly on the floor. He sat for some time inactive, nodding
oddly, but having a paradoxical suggestion of intense and frightened
listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and crossing to
a chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and
returned to the table, where he began to write rapidly and
incessantly. The note implored me in the name of mercy, and for the
sake of my own curiosity, to wait where I was while he prepared a
full account of all the marvels and terrors which beset him. I
waited, and Toby's pencil flew.
It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the
young musician's feverishly written sheets still continued to pile
up, apparently mostly with drawings, that I saw Toby start as from
the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the
curtained window and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied I
heard a sound myself; though it was not a horrible sound, but rather
an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note, suggesting a
player in one of the neighboring houses, or in some abode beyond the
lofty wall over which I had never been able to look. Upon Driver
the effect was terrible, for, dropping his pencil, suddenly he rose,
seized his Fender, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest
playing I had ever heard from his amplifier save when listening at
the barred door.
It would be useless to describe the playing of Toby Driver on that
dreadful night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever
overheard, because I could now see the expression of his face, and
could realize that this time the motive was stark fear. He was
trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something
out - what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be.
The playing grew fantastic, dehnous, and hysterical, yet kept to the
last the qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange young
man possessed. I recognized the air - it was a wild Bauhaus piece,
popular with the goth kids, and I reflected for a moment that this
was the first time I had ever heard Toby play the work of another
composer.
Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and
whining of that desperate electric guitar. The player was dripping
with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, always
looking frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied
strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing and
whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and
lightning. And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note
that was not from the amplifier; a calm, deliberate, purposeful,
mocking note from far away in the West.
At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night wind
which had sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing
within. Toby's screaming guitar now outdid itself emitting sounds I
had never thought a Marshall stack could emit. The shutter rattled
more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the window.
Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and
the chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling
the sheets of paper on the table where Toby had begun to write out
his horrible secret. I looked at Toby, and saw that he was past
conscious observation. His blue eyes were bulging, glassy and
sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind, mechanical,
unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest.
A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript
and bore it toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in
desperation, but they were gone before I reached the demolished
panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the
only window in Jamaica Plain from which one might see the slope
beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark,
but the city's lights always burned, and I expected to see them
there amidst the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest
of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the
insane Telecaster howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread
below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets, but
only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with
motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth. And
as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the
candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and
impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the
demon madness of that night-baying guit-box behind me.
I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light,
crashing against the table, overturning a water-pipe, and finally
groping my way to the place where the blackness screamed with
shocking music. To save myself and Toby Driver I could at least
try, whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought some chill
thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard
above that hideous guitar. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly
thrashing pick struck me, and I knew I was close to the player. I
felt ahead, touched the back of Toby's chair, and then found and
shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his senses.
He did not respond, and still the Telecaster shrieked on without
slackening. I moved my hand to his head, whose mechanical nodding I
was able to stop, and shouted in his ear that we must both flee from
the unknown things of the night. But he neither answered me nor
abated the frenzy of his unutterable music, while all through the
garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and
babel. When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not
why - knew not why till I felt the still face; the ice-cold,
stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into
the void. And then, by some miracle, finding the door and the large
wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed thing in
the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed electric
guitar whose fury increased even as I plunged.
Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark
house; racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient
street of steps and tottering houses; clattering down steps and over
cobbles to the lower streets and the putrid canyon-walled river;
panting across the great dark bridge to the broader, healthier
streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible impressions
that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that
the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled.
Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never
since been able to find Jamaica Plain. But I am not wholly sorry;
either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the
closely-written sheets which alone could have explained the music of
Toby Driver.
THE MUSIC OF TOBY DRIVER
by H.P. Worcraft
I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have
never again found Jamaica Plain. These maps have not been modern
maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the contrary,
delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place, and have
personally explored every region, of whatever name, which could
possibly answer to the place I knew as Jamaica Plain. But despite
all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find
the house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last
months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the
university, I heard the music of Toby Driver.
That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical
and mental, was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my
residence in Jamaica Plain, and I recall that I took none of my few
acquaintances there. But that I cannot find the place again is both
singular and perplexing; for it was within a half-hour's walk of the
university and was distinguished by peculiarities which could hardly
be forgotten by any one who had been there. I have never met a
person who has seen Jamaica Plain.
The inhabitants of Jamaica Plain impressed me peculiarly; At first I
thought it was because they were all silent and reticent; but later
decided it was because they were all very high. I do not know how I
came to live in such a place, but I was not myself when I moved
there. I had been living in many poor places, always evicted for
want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house. It
was the third house from the top of the street, and by far the
tallest of them all.
My room was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since
the house was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strang
music from the peaked garret overhead, and the next day asked old
Blandot about it. He told me it was a bass player from Connecticut,
a strange, young man who signed his name as Toby Driver, and who
played evenings on Lansdowne Street; adding that Driver's desire to
play in the night after his return from the club was the reason he
had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable
window was the only point on the street from which one could look
over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond.
Thereafter I heard Toby every night, and although he kept me awake,
I was haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the
art myself, I was yet certain that none of his harmonies had any
relation to music I had heard before; and concluded that he was a
composer of highly original genius. The longer I listened, the more
I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to make the young
man's acquaintance.
One night as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Toby in
the hallway and told him that I would like to know him and be with
him when he played. He was a small, lean person, with shabby
clothes, blue eyes, grotesque, satyrlike face, and oddly coloured
hair; and at my first words seemed both bored and bemused. My
obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him; and he grudgingly
motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking and rickety attic
stairs. His room, one of only two in the steeply pitched garret,
was on the west side, toward the high wall that formed the upper end
of the street. Its size was very great, and seemed the greater
because of its extraordinary barrenness and neglect. Of furniture
there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy wash-stand, a small
table, a Yaffa block, an iron music-rack, a stack of Decibel
magazines, and three old-fashioned chairs. Sheets of music were
piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were of bare boards,
and had probably never known plaster; whilst the abundance of dust
and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than inhabited.
Evidently Toby Driver's world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of
the imagination.
Motioning me to sit down, Toby closed the door, turned the large
wooden bolt, and lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought
with him. He now removed his bass guitar from its motheaten
covering, and taking it, seated himself in the least uncomfortable
of the chairs. He did not employ the music-rack, but, offering no
choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with
strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of
his own devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for
one unversed in music. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent
passages of the most captivating quality, but to me were notable for
the absence of any of the weird notes I had overheard from my room
below on other occasions.
Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and
whistled inaccurately to myself, so when the player at length laid
down his pick I asked him if he would render some of them. As I
began my request the satyrlike face lost the bored placidity it had
possessed during the playing, and seemed to show the same curious
mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when first I
accosted the young man. For a moment I was inclined to use
persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims of intoxication; and
even tried to awaken my host's weirder mood by whistling a few of
the strains to which I had listened the night before. But I did not
pursue this course for more than a moment; for when the musician
recognized the whistled air his face grew suddenly distorted with an
expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long, cold, tattooed
right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude
imitation. As he did this he further demonstrated his eccentricity
by casting a startled glance toward the lone curtained window, as if
fearful of some intruder'a glance doubly absurd, since the garret
stood high and inaccessible above all the adjacent roofs, this
window being the only point on the steep street, as the concierge
had told me, from which one could see over the wall at the summit.
The young man's glance brought Blandot's remark to my mind, and with
a certain capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and
dizzying panorama of moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the
hilltop, which of all the dwellers of Jamaica Plain only this
crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window and would
have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened
rage even greater than before, the lodger was upon me again; this
time motioning with his head toward the door as he nervously strove
to drag me thither with both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with
my host, I ordered him to release me, and told him I would go at
once. His clutch relaxed, and as he saw my disgust and offense, his
own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his relaxing grip, but
this time in a friendly manner, forcing me onto the Yaffa block;
then with an appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered
table, where he wrote many words with a pencil, in the labored
English of a Hampshire alumni.
The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and
forgiveness. Driver said that he was drunk, high and afflicted with
strange fears and nervous disorders connected with his music and
with other things. He had enjoyed my listening to his music, and
wished I would come again and not mind his eccentricities. But he
could not play to another his weird harmonies without the rest of
Kayo Dot, and could not bear hearing them from another; nor could he
bear having anything in his room touched by an-other. He had not
known until our hallway conversation that I could overhear his
playing in my room, and now asked me if I would arrange with Blandot
to take a lower room where I could not hear him in the night. He
would, he wrote, defray the difference in rent.
As I sat deciphering the execrable words, I felt more lenient toward
the young man. He was a victim of physical and nervous suffering,
as was I; and my metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In
the silence there came a slight sound from the window - the shutter
must have rattled in the night wind, and for some reason I started
almost as violently as did Toby Driver. So when I had finished
reading, I shook my host by the hand, and departed as a friend.
The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third
floor, between the apartments of an aged money-lender and the room
of a respectable upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth floor.
It was not long before I found that Driver's eagerness for my
company was not as great as it had seemed while he was persuading me
to move down from the fifth story. He did not ask me to call on
him, and when I did call he appeared as though he had just woken up
and took three hours to get ready. This was always at night - in the
day he slept and would admit no one. My liking for him did not
grow, though the attic room and the weird music seemed to hold an
odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out of that
window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering
roofs and spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to
the garret during theater hours, when Toby was away, but the door
was locked.
What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of
the strange young man. At first I would tip-toe up to my old fifth
floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase
to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted
door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me
with an indefinable dread - the dread of vague wonder and brooding
mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were
not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe
of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic
quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player.
Certainly, Toby Driver was a genius of wild power. As the weeks
passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician acquired an
increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now
refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on
the stairs.
Then one night as I listened at the door, I heard the shrieking
Telecaster swell into a chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which
would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity had there not come
from behind that barred portal a piteous proof that the horror was
real - the awful, inarticulate cry which only a Driver can utter,
and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or
anguish. I knocked repeatedly at the door, but received no
response. Afterward I waited in the black hallway, shivering with
cold and fear, till I heard the poor musician's feeble effort to
rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing him just
conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the same
time calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Toby stumble to the
window and close both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door,
which he falteringly unfastened to admit me. This time his delight
at having me present was real; for his distorted face gleamed with
relief while he clutched at my coat as a child clutches at its
mother's skirts.
Shaking pathetically, the young man forced me into a chair whilst he
sank onto a pile of laundry, beside which his guitar and pick lay
carelessly on the floor. He sat for some time inactive, nodding
oddly, but having a paradoxical suggestion of intense and frightened
listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and crossing to
a chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and
returned to the table, where he began to write rapidly and
incessantly. The note implored me in the name of mercy, and for the
sake of my own curiosity, to wait where I was while he prepared a
full account of all the marvels and terrors which beset him. I
waited, and Toby's pencil flew.
It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the
young musician's feverishly written sheets still continued to pile
up, apparently mostly with drawings, that I saw Toby start as from
the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the
curtained window and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied I
heard a sound myself; though it was not a horrible sound, but rather
an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note, suggesting a
player in one of the neighboring houses, or in some abode beyond the
lofty wall over which I had never been able to look. Upon Driver
the effect was terrible, for, dropping his pencil, suddenly he rose,
seized his Fender, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest
playing I had ever heard from his amplifier save when listening at
the barred door.
It would be useless to describe the playing of Toby Driver on that
dreadful night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever
overheard, because I could now see the expression of his face, and
could realize that this time the motive was stark fear. He was
trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something
out - what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be.
The playing grew fantastic, dehnous, and hysterical, yet kept to the
last the qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange young
man possessed. I recognized the air - it was a wild Bauhaus piece,
popular with the goth kids, and I reflected for a moment that this
was the first time I had ever heard Toby play the work of another
composer.
Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and
whining of that desperate electric guitar. The player was dripping
with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, always
looking frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied
strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing and
whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and
lightning. And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note
that was not from the amplifier; a calm, deliberate, purposeful,
mocking note from far away in the West.
At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night wind
which had sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing
within. Toby's screaming guitar now outdid itself emitting sounds I
had never thought a Marshall stack could emit. The shutter rattled
more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the window.
Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and
the chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling
the sheets of paper on the table where Toby had begun to write out
his horrible secret. I looked at Toby, and saw that he was past
conscious observation. His blue eyes were bulging, glassy and
sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind, mechanical,
unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest.
A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript
and bore it toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in
desperation, but they were gone before I reached the demolished
panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the
only window in Jamaica Plain from which one might see the slope
beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark,
but the city's lights always burned, and I expected to see them
there amidst the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest
of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the
insane Telecaster howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread
below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets, but
only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with
motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth. And
as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the
candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and
impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the
demon madness of that night-baying guit-box behind me.
I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light,
crashing against the table, overturning a water-pipe, and finally
groping my way to the place where the blackness screamed with
shocking music. To save myself and Toby Driver I could at least
try, whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought some chill
thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard
above that hideous guitar. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly
thrashing pick struck me, and I knew I was close to the player. I
felt ahead, touched the back of Toby's chair, and then found and
shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his senses.
He did not respond, and still the Telecaster shrieked on without
slackening. I moved my hand to his head, whose mechanical nodding I
was able to stop, and shouted in his ear that we must both flee from
the unknown things of the night. But he neither answered me nor
abated the frenzy of his unutterable music, while all through the
garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and
babel. When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not
why - knew not why till I felt the still face; the ice-cold,
stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into
the void. And then, by some miracle, finding the door and the large
wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed thing in
the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed electric
guitar whose fury increased even as I plunged.
Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark
house; racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient
street of steps and tottering houses; clattering down steps and over
cobbles to the lower streets and the putrid canyon-walled river;
panting across the great dark bridge to the broader, healthier
streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible impressions
that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that
the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled.
Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never
since been able to find Jamaica Plain. But I am not wholly sorry;
either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the
closely-written sheets which alone could have explained the music of
Toby Driver.
