A Year of Stories (Collection Four)

From Such Rough Material

Dear Wilhelm,

If you're reading this, I'm dead, which we both must admit is not such a bad thing.

Not for me, and certainly not for you.

If you're reading this, it also means that you've received the package from my lawyer, and considering that you have never been a man of patience, you've probably already opened it.

If my bad impression of you is less accurate than I know it to be, allow me to spoil the surprise.

It's the violin.

Yes, that violin.

My violin.

Before you get all weepy, Wilhelm Van Stradt – my friend, my rival – the one living soul perhaps more talented than I...

Before you pound your breast wondering why I'd leave you – the man who stole my place on the stage of the Bella Grande – the instrument that made my name, please allow me to disabuse you of your misconception...

This is not a gift.

It's a test.

You once asked me how a low born pretender like myself, from a family whose name is not much older than one of your lessor country cottages – could produce music so rich, so alive.

How I could craft such great beauty, from such rough material. I truly believe you meant it as a compliment, I certainly took it as one.

I honestly don't remember what I told you then, but what I do know is that it was a lie – a lie I spoke both because I didn't think that you would believe the truth, and because I couldn't risk that you might.

Fortunately for us both, dead men aren't bound by such concerns.

The real answer, the one I hid from you, is that I was able to create my music because of the violin that now sits at your feet, and that the violin that now sits at your feet, is magic.

I don't mean that as some trite artistic abstraction – I mean what I say – the violin has power, the power to reach out and grasp some ineffable piece of the listener's soul, and reflect that fragment back at him or her or them as pure beauty.

It's a power given to any who play it.

A power that is now yours.

"But why," you might ask, would I give such power to you?

Why would I make a man I always hated for his greatness, greater still?

Because, as I said, the violin is not a gift – it's a test.

When I write that the instrument grasps a piece of the listener's soul, I mean this in the most literal sense.

If you don't believe me, pick it up, pluck its strings, and watch it feed Wilhelm. Listen to the song it makes as it burns through raw essence, the rough material that forms us all. Listen and know that this same song could transform you into a legend.

Then open your eyes and watch your audience die, a fragment at a time, in the purest ecstasy. Ask yourself how many days or weeks or years you've stolen from them, and whether or not they would thank you for it.

Finally, turn your gaze inwards, and feel that dread instrument's cold fingers dancing across your throat, as it takes a piece of you as well, small for now, but even great meals must begin with a first course.

Do all this and know that the death you see on the face of those you play for, is reflected on yours as well.

Now do you understand why I left this instrument of beauty, of horror, to you my impatient friend?

If you're reading this, you've seen what its done to me, you know the cost, you have your warning – still, I wonder just how long it will be before you pick it up and play.

Yours,

Carter Vigo