Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban Read Free Book Online

many pains of death as underworld opened to me, underworld and the moment under the moment. I suffered the many pains, the many colours of death and I knew everything. The colours were swallowed up in blackness, there came a stillness and I found myself weeping by the river with the lyre in one hand and the plectrum in the other. The strings were still sounding as a song died on the air and I could feel in my throat that the singing had come from me but I could remember nothing of it. I tasted blood in my mouth and there was blood coming out of my nose. On both sides of the river the trees came down to the water’s edge and swayed their tops against the sky.’
    ‘There opened to you underworld,’ I said, ‘and you knew everything. I remember how it was, I remember her weeping.’
    ‘Yes,’ said the head, ‘in the weeping of Eurydice there opened to me underworld.’
    Here the voice of the head of Orpheus paused; the mottled sunlight and the leafy shade, the dragonflies and the river vanished into greyness. A desolation and a silence filled mymind. The sky was very pale. I wanted to keep the mottled sunlight and the leafy shade, the dragonflies, the honeyed air. I closed my eyes and waited for the voice to continue.
    I heard the distant traffic on Putney Bridge, the rush of cars on the Lower Richmond Road. I opened my eyes. The water was lapping at my feet and the head was well out into the middle of the Thames moving downriver against the tide. I was surprised, I had expected the story to be finished in one telling. As I watched the head out of sight I felt abandoned and forlorn but there was no heart pain so I supposed in some way it was still with me.

6 We’re not Talking about a Bloke with Winged Sandals
    I came home feeling altogether used up and worn out but I typed up the whole episode while it was still fresh in my mind, put it on disk, and printed it out. On the far side of the common the plane trees swayed their tops against the morning sky. The telephone rang.
    ‘Hello,’ I said.
    ‘Are you all right?’ said Istvan Fallok. ‘I tried to get you last night but your line was always engaged.’
    ‘Why shouldn’t I be all right?’
    ‘You seemed to be in some kind of a state when you left here; you knocked me down and tore out of here with electrodes all over your head and you left your anorak behind. How are you feeling now?’
    ‘I’ve just been chatting to a rotting head.’
    ‘That isn’t just any rotting head, it’s the head of Orpheus.’
    ‘So it tells me. Have you known each other long, you and it?’
    ‘A year or so, I suppose, but I doubt that we’ll be seeing each other again, it and I.’
    ‘Why is that?’
    ‘Did you have a little angina during your chat?’
    ‘Yes, I did.’
    ‘Did the head sing to you?’
    ‘Yes, it did.’
    ‘Did you hear anything?’
    ‘No. Did you?’
    ‘Yes. It sang in a barely audible sort of wheezing whisper and it did some supernaturally complex variations on a spooky theme for about twenty minutes. I kept thinking, Oh yes, I’ve got it, then the next moment I’d forgotten it. We were outdoors at the time, I’d no recording gear. When it finished it said to me, “There, you see?”
    ‘“Could you sing it again?” I said. “I seem to have missed a lot of it.”
    ‘“Sing what?” it said.
    ‘“What you just sang,” I said.
    ‘“Did I sing something?” it said.
    ‘“Yes,” I said, “just now.”
    ‘“I don’t remember singing anything,” it said. “Maybe if you give me the parts you remember we can put it together.” So that’s what we began to do. Every now and then the head would turn up and if we were at the studio I’d play what I’d done and we’d do a little more or if I was out somewhere I’d have a little keyboard with me. Month after month I worked on that music and I never could get it to come right, it just wouldn’t hold still - I’d have a couple of minutes of it pretty well laid down and I’d think, well,