Soul Music

like zombies are supposed to act.”
    “Yep. I know what you mean.”
    “And we both know why.”
    “Yep. Er. Why?”
    “The guitar.”
    “Oh, dat. Yeah.”
    “When we’re onstage, that thing is in charge—”
    In the silence of the room, the guitar lay in the dark by Buddy’s bed and its strings vibrated gently to the sound of the dwarf’s voice…
    “Okay, so what do we do about it?” said Cliff.
    “It’s made of wood. Ten seconds with an ax, no more problem.”
    “I’m not sure. Dat ain’t no ordinary instrument.”
    “He was a nice kid when we met him. For a human,” said Glod.
    “So what do we do? I don’t think we could get it off him.”
    “Maybe we could get him to—”
    The dwarf paused. He was aware of a fuzzy echo to his voice.
    “That damn thing is listening to us!” he hissed. “Let’s go outside.”
    They ended up out in the road.
    “Can’t see how it can listen,” said Cliff. “An instrument’s for listening to.”
    “The strings listen,” said Glod, flatly. “That is not an ordinary instrument.”
    Cliff shrugged. “Dere’s one way we could find out,” he said.

    Early morning fog filled the streets. Around the University it was sculpted into curious forms by the slight magical background radiation. Strangely shaped things moved across the damp cobbles.
    Two of them were Glod and Cliff.
    “Right,” said the dwarf. “Here we are.”
    He looked up at a blank wall.
    “I knew it!” he said. “Didn’t I say? Magic! How many times have we heard this story? There’s a mysterious shop no one’s ever seen before, and someone goes in and buys some rusty old curio, and it turns out to—”
    “Glod—”
    “—some kind of talisman or a bottle full of genie, and then when there’s trouble they go back and the shop—”
    “Glod—?”
    “—has mysteriously disappeared and gone back to whatever dimension it came from—yes, what is it?”
    “You’re on der wrong side of der road. It’s over here.”
    Glod glared at the blank wall, and then turned and stomped across the road.
    “It was a mistake anyone could have made.”
    “Yep.”
    “It doesn’t invalidate anything I said.”
    Glod rattled the door and, to his surprise, found it was unlocked.
    “It’s gone two in the morning! What kind of music shop is open at two in the morning?” Glod struck a match.
    The dusty graveyard of old instruments loomed around them. It looked as though a number of prehistoric animals had been caught in a flash flood and then fossilized.
    “What’s dat one dat looks like a serpent?” whispered Cliff.
    “It’s called a Serpent.”
    Glod was uneasy. He’d spent most of his life as a musician. He hated the sight of dead instruments, and these were dead. They didn’t belong to anyone. No one played them. They were like bodies without life, people without souls. Something they had contained had gone. Every one of them represented a musician down on his luck.
    There was a pool of light in a grove of bassoons. The old lady was deeply asleep in a rocking chair, with a tangle of knitting on her lap and a shawl around her shoulders.
    “Glod?”
    Glod jumped. “Yes? What?”
    “Why are we here? We know the place exists now—”
    “ Grab some ceiling, hooligans! ”
    Glod blinked at the crossbow bolt pricking the end of his nose, and raised his hands. The old lady had gone from asleep to firing stance apparently without passing through any intermediate stage.
    “This is the best I can do,” he said. “Er…the door wasn’t locked, you see, and…”
    “So you thought you could rob a poor defenseless old lady?”
    “Not at all, not at all, in fact we—”
    “I belongs to the Neighborhood Witch scheme, I do! One word from me and you’ll be hopping around looking for some princess with an amphibian fixation—”
    “I think dis has gone far enough,” said Cliff. He reached down and his huge hand closed over the bow. He squeezed. Bits of wood oozed between his fingers.
    “We’re quite harmless,” he said. “We’ve come about der instrument you sold our friend last week.”
    “Are you the Watch?”
    Glod bowed.
    “No, ma’am. We’re musicians.”
    “That’s supposed to make me feel better, is it? What instrument are you talking about?”
    “A kind of guitar.”
    The old woman put her head on one side. Her eyes narrowed.
    “I won’t take it back, you know,” she said. “It was sold fair’n square. Good working condition, too.”
    “We just want to