Haydn’s Head
By Finnur Windle
One
The Captain moves upon the stairwell, withering in the tunnel’s coarse half-light. The door is open at the step-crest and its portion of the glow cannot be put off for long. He is called out of his indecision by the sputter of muskets beyond his nervous sentry. The Captain enters the room above, the window is open, the air in the room is fresh. Despite the clutter inside, the furnishings themselves suggest a bareness, glared clean by a hard rarefied brightness that seems not to emanate from the open day. The Composer is still here, still keenly aware of the geometries of wind and light, the discontinuous eternities that tenant his mind, as it moves its quick hands over any surface that may suffer itself to be all-altered by it. The Captain moves to the bed to share his words, which now feel somehow spare in the way the spread between them.
The City is established under our rule, The Prince is installed at its heart. I am called to a new front; this day’s passing will see me bound westward.
The Composer does not answer, he doesn’t not appear to stir from his vigil at the window.
The Captain departs with the sunrise.
Five days later when The Captain walks on foreign soil The Composer is dead.
Two
The toil of city-folk unfurls: Carts, children, markets stalls and church bells, among these filtered sounds there is a lacuna in the general day-fuss. A door its hinges worn smooth by custom no longer foils its slight murmurs against the larger habits of The City. Servants, workman and other commoners of all stripes on all days other than this one, would move through the opening in a punctuative flow. On this day, the sound is stoppered, a coffin rests its length against the door. A flaw that marvels through glass.
The War’s afterglow suffuses the streets and houses. The Composer is buried in a pauper’s grave, marked only by its solitude. A small leafy dell that survives the smoke and strain of growing industry by nestling, immaculate but subdued, in its shadow.
Three
A farmhouse, a particle of The City’s strange diffusion, yet still entrained by its faltering gravity. It now stands on the edge of this influence, a few spars and beams that lie up into the sky, a low and mean dwelling, fallen to disuse and misuse. Four figures gather in its hollowness.
One: Why, are we a coven now? Are we not known to be friends; would our homes not suffice?
Four: Our mission demands a setting; we have all been sensitised in a fugitive way.
Two: That must be accounted for.
Three: But this is no conspiracy, we are merely restoring an element recently subtracted from our one belong.
Four: That may be, but subterfuge is necessary when one is subject to the erratic attentions of The Prince.
One: Why not go to it then, while a chance of success is still at hand, why slip from our beds and steal through the night to this grim hovel, we should go to the task immediately.
Three: Seconded
Four: This is no forum. Our purpose is strange but necessary, it requires a resolve which until this moment was peculiar to us all.
They move off into the night moving with what they imagine is stealth.
Four
The cross heave of spades, by feet that tread upon the recently dead.
Two: The whole of it?
Four: We need only the wellspring of his strange faculty, the rest is of no consequence now.
Two: Ah
Four: Here’s the blade, to it, and quick, there will be little blood now.
Five
The Prince: What is to be done, solstice approaches and we have no music, did The City die with its soldiery?
Where is The Composer?
The Servant: In the earth many months now sire
The Prince: Where was he buried.
Servant: A grave by The Factory
Prince: Dig it up
Servant: Sire?
The Prince: Exhume the body and have it interred in the palace grounds. We will consecrate this festival with a proper honouring of his stubborn remains.
Summon also, my immediate court, there should be some ceremony to such an undertaking.
The Court skips about, rabble like and bold, their dress holds about their person in peculiar attitudes, sending out trilling flares of fancy, expelling their obsequious care out to oscillate in the dusk filtered lanes. It is a dissolute sort of merriment, the flourishes of their dance are torpid, elegant attenuate reeds mired in some viscous element, warbling out over a river to a sun which could be broaching a new day or ushering in night.
The Prince, at the heart of this strange strutting shoal of sinners, is by turns garrulous and taciturn. his attention acts beyond his eye, and draws him on through his own mummery, a tenuous guide rope that vexes any sigh of self that could breach the court’s thick fog of blandishments.
The footling grave is castled in a bleary hallow of fume choke and mellow lantern light. The sallow quagmire is cleared of its smear by the fuss of harlequins and the beery half-fear of the labourers set upon this task. The earth is disturbed, less settled than it should appear, weeds have not taken root, it is soft and dark, wet, and near.
Bring it up! Bring it up! The Prince suddenly alights upon the spot.
The men work the earth, a song is lifting among their stock, a slacken roping hum binding up around their footing and the dustline thrift of each man.
The coffin is brought up.
The Prince demands a viewing, wood dust and corpse musk taint the air.
The head is not there.
Six
We move up above and away, so far that the prince’s capering rage is too far away to be near.
Lives away there is a house, proud, somehow dear. Inside Four is performing his grisly ministrations upon The Composer’s head, flensing off the flesh in several accurate shears. He then unburdens it of its precious freight, now lumpen, purpling and museless. Only the skull is retained.
*
Finnur Windle is a PhD candidate at the University of York, he is currently working towards producing a monograph on the poetry of Amy Clampitt. He writes mainly poetry and short prose but has a developing interest in writing scripts and screenplays. He is launching his own literary journal with a colleague under the name Daymark Press, where he hopes to attract and develop the talent of those working outside of current literary trends.