Page 30 of The Dead of Summer

Running through the second-floor stacks, I check and—yes!

The tower lights are still visibly on through the papered windows.

I remember Willy telling me the organ is on the same circuit, so be careful, because even just a flurry of accidental notes could bring about the downfall of the library.

Now I’m hoping the same notes will save us.

I slide into the organ bench, checking over my shoulder. Another wave of weepers is rushing up to the second floor, sealing off my exit as they twist and twirl toward the organ’s balcony. This has to work. I throw back the organ’s wooden key cover and hit the first few notes.

Nothing happens.

Was I wrong? Is it broken? My scrambling hands make only a series of dead thunks.

Then I remember: Organs are machines, they require starting up.

Willy showed me once, his hands guiding me in the process, but can I do it by myself?

I find the switches on the far right. One says START .

I slap it on and beneath me the instrument begins to whir.

“Come on, come on,” I coax it. I hit the second switch, marked RUN , and music bursts from where my fingers already have a chord pressed.

Before I can play more, a weeper—a pillar of ultramarine frills trailing from a bulbous jellyfish crown—sways toward the new noise.

Right as it focuses on me, I grab the bench and swing it.

Hard. Right into the creature’s middle. It screams with two human voices and topples into the windows overlooking the lawn.

The paper rips away. The glass cracks and half the panes shatter, but the weeper catches itself with its human hands.

It would take just one powerful hit to send it through the window, but I stop.

Splayed against the glass, I see what makes the creature so immense: It’s a father with a child piggybacked on his back, now forever fused together.

The child looks at me, their face badly warped through the jellyfish crown, and even though I know these two are long gone, I can’t do it. I can’t kill them. I drop the bench and rush to the keys.

Listen , I tell myself. Listen.

The piggyback weeper slowly stands, its nest of frills twitching toward me.

Listen. Just listen to them.

All around me is screaming and chaos. I try to block it out, listening back in time to the moment on the dance floor with Sam, where we waltzed among these monsters.

They hadn’t felt like monsters then. They hadn’t felt like people, either, or even individuals.

It had felt like swimming in the valley between two waves, both thrown and pulled in the same instant, as though being held by a force of unimaginable strength choosing, for just a moment, to be gentle.

Pfaff said that the weepers have no ears to hear with, yet with my very own ears, I listened to them soothe one another in a language of lullabies.

What had it sounded like? Where do I even begin?

The screaming night punctures my focus. The weepers are at my back.

I squeeze my eyes shut. I tell my hands to play—play anything—but what if I do it wrong?

What if this song is my last? These thoughts spring from the dark memory of my failed audition, when I really did think the music had left my life forever.

It feels unfair that now, when it really matters, when I can already feel the sting of encroaching tentacles reaching for me, the music of my mind has abandoned me.

A tendril hisses against my neck and pain crackles across my exposed skin. A jellyfish kiss I can’t escape. I’m done. I’m lost.

In my final moment, I think of Gracie.

I think of my mom.

Is she watching from Singing House’s attic? Will she see me die? Is she listening, and will she hear me scream? When I’m a weeper, will she let me come home? Kiss me? Hug me? Sit me down in the parlor? Will she bundle a blanket around my shivering, ruined body and give me one final word of advice?

In the face of inevitable death, I already know what Gracie would say. She has already told it to me so many times.

We do not end, we echo.

What will my echo be? A cry stifled? A smile screamed?

Out of furious rejection, I jam my fingers into the organ keys.

What I play is unknown to even me—it’s not fragments of past compositions, or songs I’ve memorized.

It’s something I’ve only heard once, when I stood in the glittering fog of the dance floor and begged Sam to crash into me.

I remember thinking it sounded like a hymn, so I let it be a hymn.

The organ sings like something from another world. When, ten measures later, I am not dead, I turn over my shoulder.

The piggyback weeper stands, tentacles limp, looking down at me.

It’s not alone. I play at the center of abundant horror.

Dozens of weepers shiver and sway on the organ’s balcony, and more peer up from the stacks below.

Many are unrecognizably transformed, like their bones have exploded within them, revealing pulsing scallop flesh.

Others are remarkably human, and some are brand-new.

I even recognize Tiff, lips still pushed to shush, as massive tears squeeze from her eyes.

I have to keep playing. As I do, I remember more of the hymn I had begun to transcribe in isolation.

I build off it, paying close attention to the way the weepers twitch with agitation.

The music isn’t dependable—there’s no set key, no real time signature, hardly any structure at all—but when I hear the weepers nearest me begin to hum along, I know this will work.

I know they will listen to me, if I listen to them.

And I keep an eye out the window, searching the distance for any sign that the others got away.

A flash of light catches my eye. Headlights!

The bus rolls over the corner of the lawn, then halts. The back door opens, and Bash appears waving his pizza paddle as straggling survivors run through the transfixed clots of weepers to get aboard.

Go , I urge them. I have no idea how much longer this rapport will last, but I know my own chance to escape has come and gone.

I can’t stop playing. I’m part of the reef now, and strangely, I am calm.

Would it be so bad, to stop hiding? To be grown into something monstrous, beautiful, and utterly un-alone?

I think of the dad and his kid, fused into eternal joy, and I feel myself begin to cry.

“Care for a duet?”

My hands falter as someone steps to the keys beside me. I look up, into the bloodied smile of Wendy Pretendy.

“Told you I was right behind you, kiddo. May I?”

Wendy—no, Willy—is barely standing. He leans on the edge of the organ like one of his legs might not be working. His other hand comes away from the harpoon wound slick with red. Still, despite everything, he is gentle with me as he eases me off the organ so that he can play.

“Now, I can’t do all that,” he says as his own fingers attempt a clumsy version of the hymn I was composing. “But how about you give your old teacher a little hint?”

I understand the question before I understand the reason he’s asking it.

“I think they like the key of D, but they like to be heard, too.”

“Like a call-and-response? Well, now that I can do.”

Notes fly from Willy’s hands, enthralling and precise, and I recognize the opening of Elton John’s “Sacrifice.” A classic. But why this song?

And then I get it.

“No,” I cry, but Willy’s got his showman smile at full brightness.

“I’m afraid so, kiddo.”

The change in music has made the weepers rustle with intrigue. I can feel the calm I created in the library slipping away. And the air, saturated with briny stink, is cut through with smoke now, too.

“Come with me,” I demand.

“You know I can’t do that. The show must go on, right?”

I swipe at the tears blurring my vision.

I have minutes—no, seconds—left with Willy.

All the things I’ve wanted to say well up in my throat.

Even through his smile, it’s clear Willy is on the verge of collapsing.

He plays through the pain, lifting his voice to catch the fraying attention of the living reef around us.

“Good morning, children! My name is Wendy Pretendy, and I’m so glad to see your smiling faces. I hope those limbs are ready to get loose because guess what time it is!”

Willy puts a hand to his ear on reflex. I can’t leave the call-and-response unanswered, so I meet Willy’s voice with my own.

“Wendy Pretendy’s Bendy Hour!”

My voice cracks. Willy’s does not. With a flourish he transitions into a new song.

I know this is my final cue. I back away, carving a slow path through the crowd of weepers that have begun to draw tighter toward the organ.

Each step is a blistering betrayal of my body against my mind.

When I’m halfway down the stairs, Willy calls after me.

“Oh, Ollie, there’s something I wish I told you forever ago.”

I have to keep my eyes ahead—even the smallest touch could break the captivation. But I lift up a hand, letting Willy know I’m listening.

“Okay, kids, let’s use our ears!” Willy’s singsong voice fills the entire library.

“Let’s reallllly listen!” He fingers into his next song, also in the key of D.

The way he plays it, it’s like he knows it will be his last. Exquisite intention rings through every note from the organ, and Willy’s voice fills the night.

“She’s got a smile that it seems to me

Reminds me of childhood memories.”

I get to the bottom floor, where the air is hazy with burning books.

The weepers are sparse here, and the barnacles of the door have sealed themselves against the smoke.

The lawn is packed, but the weepers are all looking up, at the window, listening, and none notice as I slip through.

Suddenly, I’m at the bus and hands are pulling me inside.

The engine gives a throaty rev, and we’re rocketing away from the library.

I race down the aisle and fling open the back door, but the guttural roar of the motor drowns the music out. In seconds, it’s already a memory.

But I know that song. Gracie used to play it all the time, saying This is a Guns N’ Roses classic , she’d say. You know, your dad loved this one. And to me she’d sing the familiar refrain.

Whoa-oh-oh! Sweet child o’ mine.