When a mood was on him, Black Screams threatening, he sometimes grew depressed that his collection was limited to sounds dating back to merely a short time ago: the late nineteenth century. Oh, the Banū Mūsā brothers had created automated musical instruments, a water organ and a flute, in the ninth century in Baghdad, and music boxes still played the identical melodies they did when built in medieval days. But they were like music played from scores, re-creations.

Cheating.

Not the real thing.

Oh, we could marvel at a Rembrandt portrait. But it was—right?—fake. It was the artist’s conception of the subject. If Stefan had been moved by the visual, he would have traded a hundred Dutch masters’ works for a single Mathew Brady photograph. Frank Capra. Diane Arbus.

The first actual recordings of the human voice were made in the 1850s by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a French inventor, who came up with the phonautograph, yet it didn’t actually capture sounds but merely made graphic representations of them, like lines of a seismograph. (Stefan was aware of rumors that de Martinville had recorded Abraham Lincoln’s voice; he’d tried desperately to find if this was true and where it might be. But he’d learned that, no, the recording never happened, sending the young man into a bout of depression.) Nearly as troubling to him was the circumstance surrounding the paleophone, invented by another Frenchman, Charles Cros, twenty years later; it had the capability of creating recordings but none had ever been found. The first device to make recordings that survived to the present day was Edison’s phonograph, 1878. Stefan owned every recording made by Edison.

What Stefan would have given for phonographs to have been invented two thousand years ago! Or three or four!

In his gloved hands he tested the noose, pulling it hard—though he was careful not to break the latex gloves.

On his playlist, a series of swishes came on. The sound of a knife blade being swiped against a sharpening steel. One of Stefan’s favorites, and he closed his eyes to listen. Like many, if not most, sounds, this could be heard in several ways. A threat, a workman’s task, a mother, preparing dinner for her children.

When this track ended, he pulled off the headphones and took another look outside.

No lights.

No Artemis.

He turned on his new Casio keyboard and began to play. Stefan knew this waltz quite well and played it from memory once, then again. Once more. In playing the third version, he began to slow the piece halfway through until, at the end, it tapered to a stop and remained a single sustained D note.

He lifted his hand off the keyboard. He played back the recording of the piece and was satisfied.

Now on to the rhythm section.

That would be easy, he thought, looking into the tiny den off the living room, where Ali Maziq, late of Tripoli, Libya, lay limp as a rag doll.

Thursday, September 23