There Is Music After This

This week, Martin Cahill takes us to the Underworld, where Eurydice sits in the aftermath. ~ Julian and Fran, September 15, 2024

This month, we are delighted to share with you another spectacular group of stories by Alaya Dawn Johnson, F. Brett Cox, Martin Cahill, and Alexander London. We are also grateful to discover ourselves World Fantasy finalists for The Sunday Morning Transport, which is both stunning, and utterly impossible without our immensely talented authors, dedicated editorial team, and you, our brilliant readers. Thank you all so much.

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There Is Music After This

by Martin Cahill

He lets me weep for a time. It’s the absolute least he can do.

I feel the weight of my keeper’s world on all sides; the heavy embrace of the afterlife shrouds me, weighing me down in shadow as thick as linked chains. A part of my brain, feral with loss upon loss, rails and snarls, mouth frothing, desperate to pull free, be free.

But—

But that wasn’t the bargain, was it?

At least not the one he made with a tender and desperate musician, the porcelain faith in his heart already trembling in fear at failing. Nor was it the deal the dead girl agreed to, eager to be with her musician once more in the light of the world of the living.

Her freedom was supposed to have been found in faith unshattered.

Yet, it was lost, upon his turning.

My keeper’s voice eventually finds me in the darkness that is him, rich and silken. Mournful, even.

I, too, know what it is to want to leave this place. To watch the one you love ascend, up and away, leaving you bound to your hell.

Does she ever look back? I ask through tears, growling with grief. Still raw, the hurt. The betraying turn.

The darkness sighs. He will only ever be able to relate so much.

No, he finally confesses. She does not need to; she knows she’ll be back when her season ends.

It does not have to be said that my love will not be returning. That he even made it out of here alive is miracle enough. And even if he wanted to, even if he now beats his knuckles bloody against the floor of the earth, begging his hands to shatter if it would let him come back to me . . . that hadn’t been the bargain struck.

And while my keeper is kind, that kindness cannot unbend the shape of his fastidious heart.

The gods need rules, he murmurs to me in my rage and weeping, else all would be possible, good and bad. What chaos wrought from formless expectation? What maelstroms made from even the best of intentions unbound?

He intends it to be comforting. I tell him it is not.

After a time, his wife sits with me in the now familiar dark. My eyes are adjusting to the deep night of death, and in the shadows of the afterlife, she emerges like the first tender shoot of spring. Her beauty is devastating, and I think it is no wonder he is crushed when she leaves; when she is here, her very presence reminds you that life, sweet life, exists, and that very essence is as rich and nourishing as blood from the vein.

Her hand finds mine; she holds it with the strength of farmers and midwives. She has dirt under her nails and her inky waterfall of hair smells like the shade of the willow tree, the heady caress of iris blooms. Her eyes, greener than spring, express sorrow to me in the starless caverns of her half-year home.

There will be life after this, she said. Her voice throbs like a heart’s pulse; she reminds me of sunlight, and it hurts to see her, hear her, even smell her richness. Later, after I wail and gnash at her like a bear, bloodied and trapped, when I am alone, I realize why her words hurt so much.

It was that she made me remember the taste of hope. Hope, plunged into me like a knife, bright steel pushed straight to the bone.

I don’t want to hope again. I don’t want to continue on.

When I recover enough of me to form those shapeless agonies of my heart into words, I ask for oblivion from that river I know sits at the deepest part of hell.

My keeper in darkness refuses.

His words, like hers, lance through me.

You will find a place here, daughter of kings, wife to song. I know it. There is some role more for you to play, even here, when sorrow is thickest and smothering. If you truly desire no more, of anything, I give you leave to wade into those waters below.

But I think you would regret it.

Regret what? I scream, with all the fury of the brokenhearted, the betrayed, the bitter.

My keeper in darkness is patient with me.

Whatever comes next, he replies.

I’m alone for a very long while after that. On purpose, I think. And I’m gifted what few have in hell: time.

It doesn’t exist here, beneath the earth. And for all the souls that lurk in the endless dark, they don’t know how long they’ve been here. Kept from gods, kept from kin, maybe it is that dangerous kindness of my keeper, that he takes time from the dead.

A mortal construct, time.

But how else to track heartbreak?

And by the same measure, how else to know healing?

It isn’t time that stitches my heart together, though. It isn’t being alone, bereft of my husband and the song of his voice and the sudden weakness of his conviction, that brings a mending. Nor my cold keeper and his green bride, each attempting to offer the thread to knit me whole once more.

It is none of these things, for time does not heal wounds no matter the scholar’s belief. And compassion offered only soothes when accepted and applied.

No, these things do not save me. Nor do I save myself. If I had been left to the darkness, to darkness I would have stayed. I would have kept hell’s hearth like we were wed, and, in that hell, I’d tend an empty house, waiting for the husband who looked back to come home again and see me clear once more.

No, how can one so broken as I save myself when grief and rage yoke me equally, their grasps sure and strong?

It is her voice that breaks me from mourning’s reverie. And not just her voice, but the tenor of it that shakes me from my stupor.

It has strength, her voice. A strength reserved for the living. It has courage, it must, being a creature of life journeying through a place of death. It has fear, knowing they do not belong and so must not cease in their journey.

Worse of it all, it has hope.

And that hope? It’s starting to crack.

Across the vast expanse of starless night, I see her making for the door my husband had sought. It strikes me now that I only ever saw his face in defeat. If I had seen it from this angle, facing tenuous victory, so very close to the end, would I have understood why he turned? For her face is artful in its pain, ecstatic in her desperation, so, so beautiful in its love.

I see the weight carried, now. The impending sorrow. For when he turned, I didn’t just lose my life with him; he, too, lost his life with me.

And this young soldier, with her trembling gait and tense jaw, holds fast but not for much longer. Her eyes flick from side to side, and I see her neck twitch, determined to hold fast.

Behind her walks a beautiful young man. With every step behind her, he becomes more real. The gold comes back to his hair, the amber to his eyes. He carries a book in his hands; he carries love in his heart.

Hope paints his face, urges her forward; he cannot see the faith on her face beginning to break.

I know time because my keeper gifted it to me. I know that I haven’t moved in centuries. My body protests as I stand, shaking dust from my skin. In the moment, I cannot even think of why I move; I only feel the ache of deepest pain in my heart and want no creature to know it as I have.

I go to her, moving through the night like it is my friend. And I get close enough to hear her panting breath, her thumping heart. If she prays, I cannot hear. But she need not say anything, for her face conveys it plain.

He is not behind me. I have been fooled. I will turn and he will be gone. I am a fool. Why walk on? Surely, I must see. If I don’t know, it’ll be for nothing . . .

And I am speaking to her before I can even worry if she hears me.

Because your love is true. Because you came to the bottom of the world for him. Because death is no bar to your heart’s call. It is only fear that makes you wish to turn, and I promise you, he is there. There is nowhere he’d be but here. For he loves you as you love him and there are worlds where it is you who walks behind and he ahead. It is fear that makes you doubt. And it is faith, in him, in yourself, in your love, that will bring you both home. There is music after this. Bring him to it, so you may both dance and love fully.

Does she hear me? I couldn’t tell you. But her face stills, relaxes. She pauses at the spot where my Orpheus gave in, oh, my sweet man. She breathes.

The young man behind her pauses, mere inches from her, a second, golden shadow.

Then she smiles. And she keeps walking.

I don’t know if she heard me, or if that young man saw me.

Or the father after her, and his daughter who trailed behind.

Or the two young men, then the two older women. And the dozens and dozens more, on and on and on.

As long as there is love and death, there will be those who challenge my keeper to give one back from the grip of the other.

And my keeper will make a bargain he crafted long ago, first given to a poor musician and his wife. Having no choice but faith, they will take it.

And they will walk.

On and on and on, through utter night, unyielding, unsleeping, aching and weary, all for a chance at life in the sun with that bright soul connected to them by love, ever a step behind.

And in those dark places now, I walk with them too.

My keeper, when he visits with his beloved, has never mentioned what I do. Never asked me why nor asked me to stop. He has some kindness after all.

And no, not everyone stays the course.

But enough make it home that my own heartbreak begins to mend. Little by little, like my husband restringing his harp, carefully mending that which has snapped. Doing so with caution, care, and love.

I noticed one day that I have forgotten time. I only needed it for a little while anyway; grief requires time, else it will never alchemize into what comes next.

What I carry now in my heart is hotter, brighter. Hope does not burn me as it did before. For now, it has become a torch in my hand. And I use it to keep the dark and fear at bay, just a little.

Long enough at least for a breath, a memory, a kind word, a moment’s rest.

Often, that is all it takes to assure a heart that love is but a step behind.

And then, as one, we keep walking.

Together.

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Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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Martin Cahill is an Ignyte Award–nominated writer living just north of NYC and the author of the forthcoming novella Audition for the Fox, arriving Fall 2025. He works for Erewhon Books and is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop of 2014. His fiction can be found in numerous literary magazines, including Reactor, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed. His short story “Godmeat” appeared in the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 anthology, and he was also one of the writers on Batman: The Blind Cut from Realm Media. His nonfiction and game design can be found at such places as Catapult, Ghostfire Gaming, Reactor, and others. You can find him online @mcflycahill90.

“There is Music After This,” © Martin Cahill, 2024.

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