Winner of the Gold Key for Flash Fiction  

His nails raked against the stone, sparking a shrieking sound that echoed through his head like an ugly song. He stopped abruptly, letting his hand fall to his side. Everything was silent. Silent and dead. It made him wish for the return of the horrid scraping. 

He took a step down the cool, narrow hall. A black mist covered the stone archway that spiraled back into the abyss. He took another step, then another, waiting to hear the resounding clank as his feet collided with the floor. Nothing. He moved with a silent grace, more of a glide than a step—a haunting motion that served as a constant reminder. 

Gazing down at his pale hands, so thin he could make out the skeleton underneath, he willed himself to shudder at his ever-fading grip on humanity. As he watched, his hand became transparent and disappeared, no more than the ghost of an appendage once used by a man. 

What had the long fingers been used for? He could no longer remember. A century of silence had erased the calluses that used to belong to the flesh. Now, he rubbed the soft skin against his worn, wood walking stick, lost in a maze of memory as he traveled down the long hall.

The thick, soundless air collected around his head, pressing down like an impenetrable weight. His ears began to ring with the hollow, phantom sound. One single note extended into eternity. He tried to imagine a change in pitch, a fluctuation in tone, a clashing cord to shape the sound into one of the lyrical stories of his youth—

That’s it! He thought, with relieved exclamation. That’s what his hands had been used for. The wooden walking stick morphed into a small, curving instrument with strings creating a bridge over a depthless pit. Pulled taut, the wires curved inward at the tip to meet a swirling handle. A violin, his violin. But how? How could it be here? He had not carried it with him to this life that wasn’t a life at all. He’d left it behind, back with the human boy holding the bowstring.

His feet met the lip of a staircase, and he began to spiral down into the cold depths below. Something hard and warm grabbed his chest, pulling him deeper, deeper. He closed his eyes, feeling the strings of his heart bend and vibrate with the cry of the violin. 

He heard it. The bow played the strings with incredible gentleness at first. Back and forth. A gentle lullaby growing, feeding on the leaps and bounds of laughter, the laughter of a child, a feminine sound that sent his heart sighing. The image of a girl, with shining gray eyes, swirled behind his lids. His hands move in front of him, guided by the bow as it danced across the strings. 

Faster, faster. His heart began to race with the song as light poured from the vessel, rushing out like a waterfall flooding the world with its majesty. Faster, sharper. The sound grew violent, shrill as if running to meet the edge of a cliff, knowing full well the danger of the plunge beyond. Don’t stop. The girl’s tears dripping down her porcelain cheeks, little crystalline droplets of rain from storm cloud eyes. Never stop.

He gasped, or he would have, if his lips had been able to part. Instead, he choked on the wretched burning breath, wrenching his eyes open. The dream vanished, the girl gone. 

Clenching the thin, wooden stick in a hand, he continued his descent. 

At some point he reached the bottom, another chamber of endless black. Heavy silence penetrated his head. He felt empty. More empty than usual. There was something he couldn’t remember.

Remember, remember, remember . . . The words drew together like a chant, a plea, begging him to search his mind. He recalled something like music but could not remember why. 

How could he make it again? Could he play the dead air with his dead fingers? No, such songs did not belong to the body, and his heart—his heart . . .

Nothing. He was nothing. 

Maybe once, these halls had been strewn with portraits and filled with a lively, joyous refrain. Maybe once, he had lived, had loved. He could not remember. 

So he continued down the vast hall, continued into the darkness that stole away his song, year by precious year. Yet somewhere, high up in a tower, sealed off from the maze below, a young man screamed, throwing himself against the doorless stone walls, willing just one to crack. He missed his violin. He missed his love and the friends of his youth. But most of all, he missed his soul.