Chapter 5: Pt. 1, Ch. 5: A Harp of Breastbone

Part 1

Chapter 5: A Harp of Breastbone 

Honora opened the door of the third stone house to find a room filled with musical instruments. Shelves lined every wall from the floor to the ceiling, each one cluttered with brass, strings, and woodwinds, flutes both of silver and crudely carved wood, snare drums and cymbals, stray piano keys and lute pegs, sheet music, phonographs, gramophones, and even more she could not put a name to. In one corner stood a bass taller than she was, in another a baby grand piano, in another a full drum set. 

It seemed every house was the same. Shelves upon shelves stacked with whatever oddments the resident found worth collecting, a bed curtained off in a corner apparently as an afterthought. The owner of the last house they searched had a thing for pottery and fine china. The owner of the first house appeared to be stockpiling weapons, but none of them were loaded, and some were not even operational by Terrell’s guess. The collection was not just limited to rifles, pistols, and grenades, but swords and daggers with intricately carved handles, bows and arrows of polished wood, axes, all dull and useless. On top of that there were shields, helmets, and full displays of armor. Honora imagined it was what a museum must look like. 

Some of the weapons were unknown even to Terrell, and he was fresh off the battlefield. Big, bulky guns made of heavy black metal that looked like someone had combined several rifles and pistols together.

“Most of Europe started the war on horseback and ended it dropping bombs out of the sky,” Terrell reasoned. “Technology moves fast nowadays. The Germans could’ve had all this in the works before the armistice,” he added, though he looked doubtful.

Here in the music hall, some of the instruments were foreign to them as well. Strange looking guitars, and radios that looked nothing like the ones she had seen before. 

“They don’t seem to have any notion of what music is worth collecting,” said Davcina, flipping through the sheet music. “Some of these are just scales or finger exercises.” 

“Maybe they wanted to learn,” said Honora, picking up a silver flute. “Why would anyone have so many instruments if they didn’t want to play music? Besides, the fairies are known to play music. All the sweetest songs in Ireland were learned from them.” 

“So tell your stories,” said Davcina.

“We could ask Rosa,” said Terrell. “Or the pregnant girl.” He peered out one of the small round windows. “They been out there a long time. Ought we go and check on her?”

“I told you,” said Davcina, “being surrounded by gawking strangers, however well-meaning, is no comfort to her. Rosa and Rocco speak her language, and they’re of an age. They’re our best chance of getting information out of her.”

“She must’ve been here for almost a year, aye?” asked Honora. “To have a belly that big?”

“She’s not pregnant by one of them,” said Davcina, running her fingers along the keys of an odd-looking piano. They made no sound. “They’re not real men. She must have already been with child when she was taken.”

“What would they want with a pregnant girl? Her baby?”

“The idea of a baby might have amused them.” Davcina shrugged. “We don’t know how long she’s been here. They might not have known she was with child when they took her. By her age, I would guess she didn’t know either.”

Rocco yelled for Davcina and she went out to meet him. Terrell was busy with a trumpet, fingering the keys, cleaning the mouthpiece with a handkerchief. Honora hastily did the same with her flute, though she had already been attempting to make a sound into the mouthpiece since she picked it up without any regard for hygiene. 

She had no idea how to play the flute. Caoimhe used to play the harp back home, but she gave it up when they had to pawn her instrument not long after arriving in the city. Honora looked at the row of string instruments, wondering how to tell which were in good condition. She took up a harp small enough to take on the road and brushed her fingers lightly across its strings. A soft thrum answered her. That was the extent of her musical talents, but her sister could get some use out of it. The price they fetched for her harp had fed them long enough for her to find steady work. Honora scanned the rows of instruments again, wondering how much the whole lot was worth, and what’s more, how she could carry it all home. The dead men surely would not miss it. Perhaps the other stone houses held something of more value. She and Caoimhe could sell the lot and travel anywhere they wanted. Her reverie was cut short by Rocco’s screams. 

Honora and Terrell ran outside, instruments still in hand. They found Rocco attempting to pull Davcina away from one of the dead bodies. She had a knife. 

“What the hell are you doing?” Terrell grabbed her shoulder, but she jerked away. 

Without a word, she knelt down and sliced one of the bodies open from navel to neck. Entrails oozed from the open wound. She dug as if sifting through a toy chest, pulling out intestines, stomach, heart, and scrutinizing each of them in turn. 

Terrell watched on, stunned silent. Rocco muttered a prayer under his breath. Honora opened her mouth to speak several times but could not find any words. From beyond the willow branches, the sounds of a panicked, crying girl could be heard, interwoven with Rosa’s soothing words. 

Terrell was the first to speak. “You’ve already burned these men alive,” he said with forced calm. “Now you’ll mutilate their corpses before the bodies are even cold?”

Davcina did not so much as pay him a glance. “I’m doing no more harm than would be done during an autopsy or an embalming.” She put her knife to the next body. “And as I’ve told you before, these are not men.” She reached into the gut of the corpse and held a handful of its contents out for Terrell to inspect. “See?” 

Honora flinched away at first, but forced herself to have a look. It was clay. She looked at the body. There were no organs spilling out this time. No blood. “The body… it was burned.”

“Bones and all?” asked Davcina, ripping the body apart limb from limb until it was crumbled beyond recognition. 

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“Burned bodies don’t look like that,” said Terrell quietly. 

Davcina sat back on her heels, looking between the two bodies. “Humans… we weren’t sculpted from clay and brought to life by the breath of a god, nor were we carved from the wood of an oak tree and animated by a song, despite the stories you’ve been brought up on. Our creation began billions of years before the first man walked the earth. From the birth of the universe, we were in the making. “Fairies,” she looked at Honora, “demons, monsters, shapeshifters,” she indicated the pile of clay, “are not so sophisticated, powerful as they may be. They were made by lesser beings than our creator. They can learn to move and speak like humans, but growing, creating, reproducing… that’s all beyond them.” She looked at the first dissected corpse, its intestines and heart on the ground where she had left them. “That body could not have evolved from this hunk of clay.” 

Honora winced as Davcina strode through the rest of the corpses, slicing each of them open one by one. Some crumbled like clay, some spilled their organs. Bones were found in the ashes left by the worst of the fires. Honora looked down at the harp clutched to her chest. Caoimhe had used to play “The Two Sisters” to taunt her, musing that Honora’s fair blonde hair would make her a find harp one day, but Honora had always been more shaken by the girl who drowned her sister in the first place than by the wandering harper who found her corpse. The harper made the song a fairy tale, where a harp of bone and hair could sing the truth of a murder for all to hear. She had never paid any thought to the type of man who could tear a girl’s body apart to make that harp. 

Davcina could have made that harp. She would not even have had to make do with using hair for strings. She had already collected enough gut to make a proper sound. 

“This doesn’t make any sense.” Davcina stood, surrounded by her handiwork. “They all had the same abilities. We all heard it. Honora and I saw it. Rosa didn’t mention any differences between them, nor did the pregnant girl. Yet there are undoubtedly two different species here.”

“And one of them is human,” said Terrell.

They all stood in silence, surveying the dead. Only a handful of the bodies had been clay. Most of them were human. The pregnant girl had stopped screaming and crying, but Rosa’s consoling whispers still carried through the rustling red leaves. 

Rocco posed a question to Davcina. 

“The baby could very well be one of theirs,” she replied. She turned away from the mangled corpses and washed her hands in the nearby stream. 

“So it could grow up to be like them?” asked Honora, shuddering at the thought of some fairy child growing up in New York City. 

“Or it could be a completely normal human,” Davcina replied, drying her hands with a handkerchief. “These shapeshifters could have found a way to teach their skills.” She circled the bodies. “They could have captured women who were already with child and brought them here to raise as their own.”

“So, what do we do?” asked Honora. “We can’t very well send the girl back home, can we?”

“No, I’ll have to keep her with me until the child is born.”

“And then what?” asked Terrell. 

“And then send her home to her parents.” Davcina shrugged. “If the child is unremarkably human, I’ll send it to her, if she even wants it.” 

“And if it’s not?”

Davcina made no reply. She stood and put her knife back in her pocket. Murmurs coming through the willow branches filled the silence. It seemed Rosa had calmed the crying girl down.

“You mean to harm that child?” asked Terrell more forcefully. 

“I don’t intend to let a potentially dangerous creature loose in the city,” said Davcina. 

“Even if it has the same abilities,” Terrell argued, “we don’t know it’ll go on stealing girls and bringing them back here, do we? That’s learned behavior, not instinct.” 

“Even if that were true,” said Davcina, “that leaves us with a being with normal human instincts in a body with extraordinary abilities. What harm could possibly come of that?”

Terrell stared back at her, but said nothing. 

No one said anything. The willow stood still, its branches no longer swaying. Not even a whisper carried through the silence.   

“Rosa?” Rocco peered through the low-hanging branches curiously. “Rosa?” He repeated more loudly, disappearing through the curtain of leaves completely. “Dove sei? Rispondimi, Rosa.” 

 

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