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kay-chronister · 3 years

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“The Women Who Sing for Sklep” nominated for a World Fantasy Award: read free here.

A hugely unexpected honor: “The Women Who Sing for Sklep,” a story original to Thin Places and beloved to my heart, is a finalist for a World Fantasy Award. “Sklep” is my playful troubling of Wicker Man-style folk horror, inspired by the folk music gathering project of the composer Béla Bartók and the ambivalent fascination with the “primitive” that fueled early-twentieth-century anthropology more broadly. Also, Slavic mermaids. In light of the story’s nomination, I’ve decided to make it available -- free online for the first time -- to read here. Hope you enjoy!

The Women Who Sing for Sklep

The composer stopped when he came to the hillside overlooking the village of Sklep. He asked his assistant to photograph the squat little houses of wattle-and-daub, sipped from his canteen, and looked upon the landscape with approval.

He rode into the village posting to his horse’s trot, stiff in the saddle after many hours of riding. His assistant was fortunate; his assistant got to walk. His assistant’s name was Triglav, after the old Slavic god, which the composer appreciated.

Sklep had no Sunday market, so the main road into town was empty, besides a woman who sold goat’s milk in glass bottles on one side of the road. The composer did not ask her where to find the town magistrate. He already knew. The house at the end of the road was taller and narrower than any of its neighbors. Already he had seen a dozen villages arranged just the same way.

In front of the tall, narrow house, the composer dismounted, put his horse’s reins in Triglav’s hands, then walked to the door and knocked. The horse nibbled hopefully at the dust in front of the house. Triglav arranged and rearranged their luggage. The composer waited, his arms crossed like two intersecting bars in front of his ribcage.

Inside the tall and narrow house, the town magistrate served coffee from an Arabic carafe. The composer’s eyebrows lifted at this display of worldliness. They were on the Hungarian plain. Last year the composer had lived with a tribe who spoke their own language and played instruments made from freshly sanded pine.

“I want to study the music of your people,” the composer said to the magistrate. “I want to live beside you and understand what inspires you.”

The magistrate did not say why, not aloud, but his brow furrowed deeply.

“Go see Magdalena,” he said.

“Magdalena,” repeated the composer.

“Come to the Cemuk festival tomorrow. I will introduce you.” The magistrate was still frowning. “What is that thing?”

He was gesturing to the camera, a cloth-covered lump in Triglav’s lap. The composer nodded to Triglav, who obediently removed the cover and peered down the telescopic lens at the squat, wind-whipped man sitting across from him.

“Please, not me,” said the magistrate, and rose to his feet. “I don’t have any.”

The composer was an expert in his field, so he could not ask for clarification.

***

The composer and his assistant showed up to the festival before anyone else did. They spent two hours photographing and recording and transcribing the gathering of wood by the young men of Sklep, who timidly darted back and forth from a thicket of birches to the field where they laid their kindling. At dusk, the boys lit a cluster of bonfires.

As the sky darkened, the people began to emerge from their houses. The girls wore white robes and had fern fronds braided into their hair; the children were barefoot. Everyone was shivering.

The composer made a note of the festival’s taxonomy: Christian alteration of a pagan summer fertility ritual. He stood at the front of the crowd, beside a birch tree covered in ribbons and beads, and watched the girls shuffle into formation. In a few minutes they would sing, opening the sky, and rain would come to the village of Sklep. The last tribe had told the composer about this miracle so many times that he believed their stories must have some basis in truth.

No one asked the composer who he was or why he had come. No one spoke. After a while the composer saw the girls open their mouths in unison like they were singing, but no sound came out. He shut off his wire recorder. He watched their lips form words he couldn’t recognize, their throats rippling with effort, their chests rising and falling.

Meanwhile Triglav winked into the camera and shot photo after photo. Triglav must either be hearing sound or had expected not to hear sound. No one acted surprised by the silence. The composer felt deeply and profoundly uncomfortable.

The girls shut their mouths in unison. The one on the end exhaled heavily as though all of the not-singing had tired her. Without speaking, they formed a line and walked into the birches. The young men followed at a respectful distance, heads lowered. A boy of eleven or twelve tried to go with them, but his father restrained him. The boy made a little choking sound of frustration. When he saw the look on his father’s face, he fell silent.

As the last of the boys disappeared into the trees, the composer tucked his trousers into his socks and set out after them. The procession had split the woods like a part, pressing down the undergrowth. The path left behind was easy to follow, and no one stopped the composer or his assistant from following. Beside the composer, Triglav shouldered the camera and photographed the backs of the girls’ heads and the boys’ shoulders from between the birches.

They walked for close to an hour. A few of the boys played scuffed brass instruments. Chromatic scales in irregular minor keys. Melancholy, dirge-like music. The music had no discernible tempo, but the boys all walked as stiff and regular as soldiers. The composer made a note to ask whether they practiced the ritual beforehand.

The boys glanced nervously into the trees sometimes; the girls too, though with less fear on their faces. Things with rope-like arms and legs shifted in the branches but never came down. Slick sounds came from the canopy. Presently the procession came to the side of a thin black river. The boys put their instruments down, and the girls laid candle-topped wreaths of pine and yew branches on the surface of the water.

The composer put his notes away and watched the wreaths drift downstream. He could feel that something was going to happen. Beside him, Triglav made a small shuddering sound and laid the camera into the composer’s arms. The composer was surprised, but shifted to shoulder the burden. He watched his assistant join the village youth. For reasons that he would not be able to remember later, he did not call Triglav back to him.

The girls and boys paired off, Triglav beside a girl with a narrow, pointed face that reminded the composer of a fox. The composer watched as they opened their mouths in another soundless song. Triglav sang too.

When they finished singing, Triglav waded waist-deep into the river with the other boys. Ripples formed circles around them. They shivered with the cold. The composer wondered what he would name the concerto he wrote in honor of this ritual. He knew the villagers would drown the little decorated birch tree at the end of the festival. He wondered if they would drown anything else.

Snake-like things came from the middle of the river, the same wet spitting predators that had been in the trees. Legs twined around necks, obscuring faces. The composer already knew his assistant was gone before Triglav sank into the water.

***

The woman Magdalena was old and built like a boulder. She crossed herself when the composer came to the door, saying, “You can never be too careful during green week.”

In her little cottage, she served the composer a fist-sized hunk of black bread with soft curdish cheese. While he ate, she covered the windows and locked the doors. Twice she said a charm. He didn’t know the words but he felt their rhythm and knew they were holy.

When he finished eating, the composer took out a leather-bound notebook and a pencil. He had not asked Magdalena if she would share the village music with him; he had not yet spoken to her. He thought something wordless must have passed between them. Already she had made overtures to protect him from whatever spirits the rustics believed in. He was comforted, a little flattered. He was hoping he would not end up like Triglav, dead on the floor of the river.

“Do your people use modern notation?” he said first.

She blinked at him.

“The treble and bass clefs?”

“No,” she said. “We don’t learn our music, not the music you mean.”

“And which music is that?” He made a note: ritual music distinguished from other genres. Possible religious component to this.

“The music that killed your friend.”

“The music made no sounds. I thought it must be some kind of pageant, or spell, not—not music. And it was vocals only, no instrumentation. Is there a reason for that?”

“You couldn’t hear it?” She looked suspicious.

“No,” the composer said. “Should I have been able to hear it?”

“Hmmm,” said Magdalena.

“Do you make music like that?”

“I can,” she said. “But I don’t think I shall.”

“I’ll pay,” the composer said. For months his artistic failures had been haunting him; he had drifted in a sort of waking nightmare between concert halls and conservatories. He had been longing to make music as the rustics did in his homeland. Now he was wandering the earth like Cain, a mark of wonder on his forehead, trying to find what secrets were contained within the little villages long forgotten by the Poles and the Russians whose operettas were so popular. Civilization had no beauty any longer, he had told someone in a Viennese coffeehouse. He wanted to compose the wilderness.

Magdalena blinked sleepily. “But we are, as you say, soundless.”

“How can I train myself to hear you?”

“You cannot. Outsiders cannot.”

“And if I am not an outsider?”

The woman laughed from deep inside her throat. She took the notebook from the composer’s hands and laid it on the floor. The wire recorder, she regarded with suspicion but allowed to stay. “You do not want to become one of us.”

“Why not?”

She licked her dry lips. Her eyes kept darting from his face to the covered windows. Shadows were playing on the blankets she had used as makeshift curtains. “When you hear the music, you will not be able to live anywhere else. You will have to stay here.”

The other tribe used to say the same things when they taught him how to play their fiddles and pipes. The composer admired how romantic the people of the plains were. He took up his notebook and made a note: music of central ritualistic and cultural significance.

“While you live among us,” said the old woman, “always remember to listen for rain.”

The composer said he would. Satisfied with his first day of work, he returned to the stranger house in the middle of Sklep. The snake-like things moved in the trees above his head but he did not hear them, or pretended he didn’t. That night, he composed a mazurka on his fiddle. He lay in his bed with the burlap-scented pillow and listened for rain.

The bodies on the floor of the river shifted, and rain fell.

***

The villagers of Sklep rarely left their homes. Even the food-sellers were reluctant to set up shop. While they sold goose eggs and rye flour to the composer, their eyes roved the landscape nervously. Green week, he kept hearing. It was green week so everyone was afraid.

They were not an expressive people. They did not mourn the boys and girls whom they had lost in the ritual. The composer made a note: ritualistic sacrifices occur with regularity? No one spoke of the lost youth, or of the snake-like arms that had reached for them. Magdalena would not acknowledge that anything had been lost, when the composer asked her.

“They will come home. They have to sow their oats,” she said.

The composer sent for a pianoforte. He taught modern notation and scales to anyone who would listen. He composed nocturnes and sketches on his fiddle. He filled numerous notebooks with his observations on the popular music of Sklep, which was mostly ballads full of cruel women and their hapless lovers. Only boys sang the songs. The girls never sang. They sat knitting with their long white fingers. Their feet drummed rhythms on the floor. The composer sat with them and felt impotent.

Many nights the people retreated to the banyas, little wood bathhouses where strangers were not welcome. Boys hauled piles of hot stones from the hearth to the banya door, where their mothers and sisters stood waiting in goatskin robes. At last, the doors shut and flumes of steam rose from the banya roofs. The composer played lonely chromatic melodies on his fiddle and caught rain in a barrel. Twenty-two inches fell in the first week alone.

***

After green week ended, Magdalena washed the blankets that had covered her windows. She was hanging them to dry when the composer reached her house. While she fixed the blankets to her line with clothespins, the composer sat on a tree stump with his fiddle tucked underneath his arm. By now he had grown comfortable watching idly while she worked in the kitchen or the yard. He knew she would not want his help. He wasn’t made for that sort of work.

“You survived,” she said, and beckoned for him to follow her inside.

“Yes,” said the composer. He had been trained not to belittle the superstitions of the rustics. Their mouths and doors would shut as soon as he did. “I thought today we might work on some more transposition of the ballads.”

“No,” said Magdalena. “Today I will sing for you.”

The composer reached for his wire recorder, trying not to look as eager as he felt. He had seen how Sklep opened up when the threat of green week ended. Sellers called out to passersby without taking care to keep their voices low. Children went to and from school in noisy, gleeful throngs. Men walked tree-shaded roads without looking nervously above them. But Magdalena, the composer had feared, would stay closed.

The woman took a long sip of water and grunted to clear her throat. Her arms hung at her sides and her chin pointed to the ceiling. When she sang, she made no sound. The composer sat and listened, his wire recorder humming uselessly in his lap. Triglav would have photographed the woman’s open mouth, her squinted-shut eyes, her flared nostrils. Triglav was dead on the floor of the river. The composer remembered hearing the story of some German hack who wrote a piece made entirely of rests: four pages of silence.

Then, after a few minutes, sound began to come from the woman’s throat. She sang in an undertone as thin as eggshell. The pitch of her voice wavered like an instrument being tuned. The composer could not have imitated the sound on his fiddle or pipe or piano. He could not have described it with modern notation. He could only listen, holding the wire recorder to Magdalena’s open mouth and wondering if the device would even catch the sounds she made.

“Did you hear me this time?” she said, when she was finished.

“A little,” he said. “Are you trained to produce such sounds?”

“I am too tired for questions,” said the woman. “Please, go before the rain comes.”

The composer packed up his belongings. As he reached the door, the sky opened and rain poured down.

***

After green week, Triglav returned. He came out of the river with a wife and a lush, dark beard on his face. When he shaved, his skin was smooth as a child’s underneath. He would say nothing of what happened on the floor of the river. He moved like a sleepwalker.

Ewers of water rested on every flat surface in the small house that Triglav shared with his new bride. The table, the bookcase, the stove top, the porch steps were all covered. Triglav’s wife did not offer the composer anything to drink when he came. The composer was accustomed by now to the inhospitality of the people of Sklep, and took the liberty of filling his canteen from one of the kitchen table pitchers. He found the contents murky and sour, as if taken from still water.

“It’s not to drink,” said the wife.

The composer sat down and waited for Triglav to come home. His assistant’s wife sat down across from him. Occasionally she dipped a dishrag in one of the pitchers and patted herself down with the swamp water, wetting her face and neck and hair. The composer lifted the camera from his lap and took photographs; the way the girl craned her neck, he could see that she wanted to be admired. After a while he asked if she liked to sing. She told him she’d always thought songs were better left to people who didn’t have any in them.

“Any songs?”

“Any blood,” she said.

Triglav came in the door humming. He asked the composer if they could go fishing soon. He said, “Alida tells me we won’t have rain tomorrow.”

From beneath the wet rag draped across her face, Alida said, “There will be no rain until the stranger house is empty.”

Triglav said, “Does she think she can do that? Put us men under siege that way?”

“She’s unmarried,” said Alida. “Of course she can.”

***

At the side of the river, Triglav spoke in a low tone of what happened during green week. He said he remembered those days as a dream. He watched while his existence swam above him. He had no power to stop things from happening on the floor of the river.

The girls could breathe, could swim. The girls’ limbs got longer, their incisors jutted out from their mouths; when they kissed the boys who partnered them on the shore, it stung like salt rubbed in a wound.

He said the girls sang sometimes at night, the same ritual songs they’d sung at Cemuk.

“You can only hear those sorts of songs properly underwater,” Triglav said to the composer. “They make so little sound above the surface.”

The composer took out his notebook and made a note: damage to the inner ear necessary for ritual music to resonate as intended?

“I only wonder,” the composer said. “Why did you marry her?”

“What do you mean?”

“She almost killed you. She might still kill you.”

“Oh, that’s how things are in this town,” said Triglav. “Every woman sees her husband drowned before she marries him. All the girls are made like that. They have to be, or they couldn’t make the rain come.”

His assistant believed in the power of the ritual now; the composer made a note.

“This power she has over you, you don’t mind it?” he said.

“Of course,” said Triglav. “They have us underneath for one week, just one week, and then we have them for the rest of their lives.”

“Or they have you,” the composer said.

The air was hot, for the sixth month had come and the summer solstice was close, yet still Triglav shivered. He said, “You shouldn’t stay here any longer.”

“Why not?”

Triglav wouldn’t say. “We ought to get away from the river,” he said. “A bachelor is worth the same as a grave here.”

“What’s that?” The composer had never heard the proverb before.

“Nothing,” Triglav said. “Nothing. That’s just what we said underneath the surface.”

***

Magdalena was not inside her house when the composer next came to her door. Steam rose from the roof of her banya, so he determined that he would return in an hour; an hour passed and still she sat inside the bathhouse. Long into the night she remained. Every half hour, boys brought hot stones and fresh water to her banya door.

The composer did not question them, though he wanted to. No one in Sklep would speak to him since he listened to Magdalena sing. His music students stopped attending their lessons and his interview subjects made implausible excuses that the composer recognized for what they were: rejections, closed doors. At night he played Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude on the pianoforte. He remembered a story about how Chopin had written the piece after he saw a vision of himself drowned on the floor of a river, raindrops falling over him in a steady patter. The composer thought perhaps he could call the rain to Sklep if he played that prelude enough times. The sun could not shine while someone played Chopin well.

The villagers of Sklep were too reserved to openly blame him for their drought, but the magistrate did come once to the stranger house. The composer admitted him and then returned to the piano bench, continuing where he’d left off in the Raindrop Prelude. “You can leave this town,” the magistrate said, when the composer came to a rest, “whenever you want—perhaps you did not know?”

“Do you fear to be seen with me?” the composer said, dropping to the bottom of the piano as he came to the slow, solemn portion of the piece marked sotto voce. He could hear the rainfall especially well in this bit, the drops coming steadily down. “Will they cast you out too?”

“I fear starving more than I fear the wrath of any woman. The only thing she can do is what she’s already doing: not singing.”

The composer stopped playing and made a note: music a mechanism of social control.

“You believe there will be no rain if the girls won’t sing?” he said, returning to the piano.

“The girls? No. They are—needed. For what they are. For the blood their children inherit. But for now, Magdalena is the only woman who makes the rain come.”

“And when she dies?”

“Another woman will sing for Sklep.”

The composer had reached the prelude’s closing motif, a bright tentative passage like the morning after a storm. He played the last chords. He held them down for longer than the score prescribed. Without turning his head, he said, “That might be for the best, don’t you think?”

***

Magdalena was still inside her banya when the composer came to her house. Steam rose from the bathhouse in white shuddering waves, but still the air felt dry. For weeks there had been no rain. The composer knocked on the door twice, then waited. When she told him to come inside, he did.

Magdalena was wrapped in wet willow leaves, a rustling gray garment that covered her from chin to ankles. Her bare feet, pale and shriveled with water, sat propped on one of the wooden benches affixed to the walls. Her wet hair was bound with fern fronds and hung down her back in heavy bundles.

“I want you to bring the rain,” said the composer.

“No,” said Magdalena, and rose from the bench. The willow leaves crackled softly when she moved. Outside, the wind picked up.

“You won’t?”

“No,” she said. “Not while an outsider stays in the stranger house, banging on foreign instruments and writing songs that sound like bad copies of the ones we sing at Cemuk-time.”

“You refuse?”

“Leave Sklep.”

The composer understood. The crops were wilting in the fields. The river had gone down so far that the Sklep river-girls swimming along the floor were visible from the bank. The trees were as bare as they were in wintertime. Even bathhouse wood couldn’t retain its moisture. Even the wettest things had become perilously dry.

***

Everyone knew who burnt down the banya with Magdalena inside. They also knew when the banya burnt, because the first rain in weeks fell in time to put out the last of the flames.

Sometime later, when he had left the stranger house and taken a wife of his own among the village people, the composer asked Triglav’s wife, the new rain-bringer, to sing for him. She did, in a cool, sonorous undertone that made each note sound like a secret dropping from her lips. The composer could hear her perfectly.

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