Where They Wait

by Scott Carson

I was about to tell him that if he wanted to see such horror so badly, he could try it himself, but then I stopped myself. Why couldn’t he try? He knew the words; as he’d said, he had the song. Why had he needed me at all? And then, finally, I understood. If the simple act of listening could do damage to the living, then the act of singing it to the dead? That was damnation. It was written plainly in the journal of John Trenchard, quoted from the dying Dennison. There was a price to listening to the death song, and a higher cost still for those who shared it. Once it had been a gift, a peaceful passage, but out there on the winter sea where Lermond’s whip had gone slick and red with blood and flesh, flaying innocence in pursuit of power, it had become something else. “Yes,” Ashley Holland’s ghost whispered into my ear, that soft icy gust that had once repelled me and now felt like a comfort. “You know what to do. Sing the right song, in the right way. Please.”