scratchy veil of fatigue irritated my eyes. My mind aper thin. I had been w all day and half the night, and now I was afraid to go to sleep.
Was my mind playing trie? It seemed that I could hear a tune. Well, hardly a tune. Just five lost notes. I opehe window to be sure. Yes. There was definitely sound ing from the garden.
Words I uand. Give me a torn or damaged fragment of text and I divine what must have e before and what must e after. Or if not, I at least reduce the number of possibilities to the most likely option. But music is not my language. Were these five notes e opening of a lullaby? Or the dying fall of a lament? It was impossible to say. With no beginning and no ending to frame them, no melody hold them in place, whatever it was that bound them together seemed precariously insecure. Every time the first ruck up its call, there was a moment of ay while it waited to find out whether its panion was still there, or had drifted off, lost food, blown away by the wind. And so with the third and the fourth. And with the fifth, no solution, only the feeling that sooner or later the fragile bonds that lihis random set of notes would give way as the links with the rest the tune had given way, and even this last, empty fragment would be gone food, scattered to the wind like the last leaves from a wiree.
Stubbornly mute whenever my sind called upoo perform, the notes came to me out of nowhere when I was not thinking of them. Lost in my work in the evening, I would bee aware that they had beeing themselves in my mind for some time. Or else in bed, driftiween sleep and wakefulness, I would hear them in the distance, singing their indistinct, meaningless song to me.
But now I really heard it. A sie first, its panions drowned in the rain that rapped at the window. It was nothing, I told myself, and prepared to go back to sleep. But then, in a lull in the rainstorm, three notes raised themselves above the water.
The night was very thick. So black was the sky that only the sound of the rain allowed me to picture the garden. That percussion was the rain on the windows. The soft, random squalls were fresh rain on the lawn. The trig sound was water ing down gutters and into drains. Drip… drip… drip. Water falling from leaves to the ground. Behind all this, beh it, between it, if I was not mad or dreaming, came the five notes. La la la la la.
I pulled on boots and a coat a outside into the blaess.
I could not see my hand in front of my faothing to hear but the squely boots on the lawn. And then I caught a trace of it. A harsh, unmusical sound; not an instrument, but an atonal, discordant human voice.
Slowly and with frequent stops I tracked the notes. I went down the long borders and turned into the garden with the pond—at least I think that is where I went. Then I mistook my way, blundered across soft soil where I thought a path should be, and ended up not beside the yew as I expected, but in a patch of knee-high shrubs with thorns that caught at my clothes. From then on I gave up trying to work out where I was, took my bearings from my ears alone, followed the notes like Ariahread through a labyrinth I had ceased t sou irregular intervals, and each time I would head toward it, until the sileopped me and I paused, waiting for a new clue. How long did I stumble after it in the dark? Was it a quarter of an hour? Half an hour? All I know is that at the end of that time I found myself back at t