The Price of Love and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.
    – Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”
    Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
      Are sweeter.
    – John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
    O ne night, many years ago, I found myself wandering in an unfamiliar part of the city. The river looked like an oil slick twisting languidly in the cold moonlight, and on the opposite bank the towering metal skeletons of factories and cranes gleamed silver. Steam hissed from tubes, formed abstract shapes in the air and faded into the night. Every now and then, a gush of orange flame leapt into the sky from a funnel-shaped chimney.
    I was lost, I knew now. The bar where I had played my last gig was miles behind me, and the path I had taken was crooked and dark. The river lay to my right, and to the left, across the narrow cobbled street, tall, empty warehouses loomed over me, all crumbling, soot-coveredbricks and caved-in roofs. Through the broken windows, small fires burned, and I fancied I could see ragged figures bent over the flames for warmth. Ahead of me, just beyond the crossroads, the path continued into a monstrous junkyard, where the rusted hulks of cars and piles of scrap metal towered over me.
    Out of nowhere, it seemed, I began to hear snatches of melody: a light, romantic, jazzy air underpinned by wondrous, heart-rending chords, some of which I could swear I had never heard before. I stopped in my tracks and tried to discern where the music was coming from. It was a piano, no doubt about that, and though it was slightly out of tune, that didn’t diminish the power of the melody or the skill of the player. I wanted desperately to find him, to get closer to the music.
    I walked between the mountains of scrap metal, sure I was getting closer. Then, down a narrow side path, I saw the glow of a brazier and heard the music more clearly than I had before. If anything, it had even more magic than when I heard it from a distance. More than that, it had the potential to make my fortune. Heart pounding, I headed towards the light.
    What I found there was a wizened old black man sitting at a beat-up honky-tonk piano. When he saw me, he stopped playing and looked over at me. The glow of the brazier reflected in his eyes, which seemed to flicker and dance with flames.
    “That’s a beautiful piece of music,” I said. “Did you write it yourself?”
    “I don’t write nothing,” he said. “The music just comes out of me.”
    “And this just came out of you?”
    “Yessir. Just this very moment.”
    I might lack the creativity, the essential spark of genius, but when it comes to technical matters, I’m hard to beat. I’m a classically trained musician who happened to choose to play jazz, and already this miraculous piece of music was fixed in my memory. If I closed my eyes, I could even see it written and printed on a sheet. And if Ilet my imagination run free, I could see the sheets flying off the shelves of the music shop and records whizzing out of the racks. This was the stuff that standards were made on.
    “So you’re the only one who’s heard it, apart from me?”
    “I guess so,” he said, the reflected flames dancing in his eyes.
    I looked around. The piles of scrap rose on all sides, obscuring the rest of the world, and once he had stopped playing, I could hear nothing but the hissing of the steam from the factories across the river. We were quite alone, me and this poor, shrunken black man.
    I complimented him again on his genius and went on my way. When I got behind him, he started playing again. I listened to the tune one more time, burning it into my memory so there could be no mistake. Then I picked up an iron bar from the pile of scrap and hit him hard on the back of his head.
    I heard the skull crack like a nut and saw the blood splash on the ivory keys of the old piano. I made sure he was dead, then I dragged his body off the path, piled rusty metal