And now with an inner ear, he searched for the notes of Louisa’s Concerto.

He had been a child of seven the first time he heard the work performed as the overture to Malakhai’s performance of magic and the madness of dead Louisa. Cousin Max had taken him to the show as a treat for his birthday.

He could find many of his own features in his adult cousin, but Max had been a handsome translation: a nose not so great, and eyes with a more normal proportion of white to the colored bits.

He and Cousin Max had found the way to their seats by the glow of flickering candle footlights. The conductor’s baton was rising as they settled down to the red velvet chairs in the concert hall.

There had been no gentle beginning to Louisa’s Concerto. The instruments had welled up and rocked him with an explosion of opening chords, and the music rolled over him, powerful and eerie, then calmer, subsiding into echoes of music within the movement, metaphors of empty corridors. The music rose again to crash down upon him with a passion. And then, at the most unexpected moment, there was a lull, bleeding into an empty silence that caused angst among all the listeners. It was a vacant space which the ear strained to fill with echoes from the refrain – echoes that were not heard, except in the mind. It was a true vacuum, and the imagination of every independent listener had rushed to fill it with phantom notes to end the terrible, unbearable silence.

And then, the real music of solid instruments had resumed with an intake of breath which emanated from every quarter of the hall, relief from the audience that they were not lost. The music was back and flooding over them, making them all new again as though they had been cleansed, not by fire, nor by water, but by passage through the void.

The curtain rose and the music had begun again in accompaniment to the magic act. Malakhai had created Louisa on stage as a real presence. Then he sent her out into the audience, and here and there, a gasp was heard as one person and another imagined that Louisa had touched them. The scent of flowers was everywhere for a time, and then it was gone away into the dark of a child’s imagination.

And this time, in the void, the magic silence where the listeners placed the phantom notes, rather than endure the emptiness, there he had heard a woman screaming.

Long after the hall had emptied of its audience, and only the concerned stage manager remained, Cousin Max had sat in the front row, holding the hand of a badly frightened child.

Max had once told him the best of music kept to the natural rhythms of the heart. Louisa’s Concerto had been such a piece. He had the basic structure of it now, and he strained to find the subtle places where Louisa had placed the most delicate constructions. He sat still for an interval of time which might have been an hour or four, and finally, he had recreated the music, note for note, just as he had heard it that first night so long ago. And in that void Louisa’s genius had created within the music, he recreated the scream, just as he had heard it as a child, but not to the same effect. Now he welcomed the sound of another voice, even a scream, to fill the empty space he had come to recognize as loneliness.

He lit another cigarette to replace the one whose coal had gone dark. The smoke spiraled and wafted around his face without odor or sting to the eyes. He could only smell the roses.

Perhaps the perfume had been a mistake. The scent in the small gold bottle retrieved from the basement had the life span of all things with living ingredients. It filled his senses with the tainted aroma of decayed blooms which had died long before young Amanda was born.

The strains of the concerto were in his mind in vivid detail, interior music, corridors of sadness, and then -Amanda.

She was only the two dimensions of his called-up photographic image, but there was a palpable energy to the woman before him. Expressive eyes could create that illusion in any number of dimensions.

Now, in the manner of adding pinches of pepper and dashes of salt, he put the liquid and gleam in the soft blue eyes, and he gave her a luster of Mallory’s sun-gold hair which could thieve light from shadow.

Ready now.

He leaned forward. ‘Amanda?’

The photographic image bowed its head in response. It was more like a sheet of paper bending to force, an awkward attempt at animating the flat image of a dead woman.

‘Why were you killed, Amanda?’

She responded with Mallory’s voice. He created it for her with only the silk of Mallory and not the sarcasm, only the soft notes for Amanda, and with this voice Amanda said, ‘He lied to me.’

Her soft mouth had opened and closed in a succession of jerking photographic images – a poor approximation of life, a bad joke on God.

There was a wounding to the eyes, as though he had offended her. And he had. His eyes went away from her, and she died off to the side of peripheral vision.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said to no one, for there was no one there, not Amanda certainly, nor even her after-image any more. What a grotesque puppet show this had been. How pathetic was he.

He capped the perfume bottle, but the death of killed roses hung in the air. When he passed into the other rooms, it hung in memory, this smell of death. And when he was in his bed and most vulnerable, hands and feet bound by sleep, floating helpless in the dark – Amanda came back.

All the night long and all about his dreams, fresh young roses were being killed. Even the small, sleeping buds, still closed in tight balls of soft petals – they were also dying.

For a full minute, Charles Butler had been standing by the door, listening to the scuffle of shoes in the outer hallway. By the light-footed pacing to and fro, he knew his visitor was a small person. And just now, somewhere between acute hearing and Zen, he detected the sound of someone standing on one leg and then the other. He politely waited until his visitor had resolved the hesitation and the door buzzer sounded.

Charles opened the door with his smile already in place, a genuine smile, for he liked small children.

‘Hello. So you’ve come early.’ A full hour early.

‘Yes,’ said Justin Riccalo, rocking on the balls of his feet. ‘I’m supposed to meet my parents here. My piano lesson was canceled, and I didn’t know where else to go.’

Not home? Was it possible he wasn’t welcome there?

As though the boy had read his mind, he said, ‘I don’t have my own key. I could go somewhere else. I’m sorry – ’

‘Don’t apologize. I was just on my way to the basement. I’d be happy to have some company. Do you like magic tricks?’

Justin’s response was not what he had anticipated. The rocking ceased as though his store of nervous energy had escaped from a hole which had suddenly deflated the boy. He was a slender child and if he deflated any more, he would be altogether gone.

‘Do I like tricks? Mr Butler, is this your subtle way of asking me if I can make a pencil fly?’

‘Not at all. I think you’ll like the basement.’

With only the lift of one slight shoulder, the boy made it clear that he didn’t care one way or the other.

Charles locked the office door, and they walked down the long hall toward the exit sign which led to the staircase. The boy looked back over his shoulder to the elevator, and Charles explained that stairs were the only way to the lowest level, and he hoped that Justin didn’t mind the walk. Justin trudged along at Charles’s side, walking as though his legs weighed fifty pounds, each one.

Apparently, stairs were a novelty for a child raised in a luxury highrise. When the door opened on to a spiral staircase of black iron, Justin held on to the rail and leaned far over the side. He seemed hypnotized by the winding metal. Bright lights glared at him from bare bulbs at each floor and twisted the shadows of the curling iron.