The Burial Hour (Lincoln Rhyme 13)

And soon they were.

Shaky-hand, sweaty-skin--these were nothing compared with a Black Scream.

Pacing the farmhouse, then outside in the wet dawn. Stop, stop, stop!

But they hadn't stopped. So he'd popped extra meds (that didn't work, never did) and, in the 4MATIC, sped to where he stood now: to chaotic downtown Naples where he prayed the ricocheting cacophony would drown out the screams. (That sometimes worked. Ironically, noise was his salvation against Black Screams--as much and as loud and as chaotic as possible.) He plunged into the jostling crowds filling the sidewalks. He passed food vendors, bars, restaurants, laundries, souvenir stores. He paused outside a cafe. Imagined he could hear the forks on china, the teeth biting, the jaws grinding, the lips sipping...

The knives cutting.

Like knives slashing throats...

He was sucking up the noise, inhaling the noise, to cover the screams.

Make them stop, make them stop....

Thinking of his teenage years, the girls looking away, the boys never looking away but staring and, sometimes, laughing as Stefan walked into the classrooms. He was thin then, passable in sports, could tell a joke or two, talk about TV shows, talk about music.

But the normal didn't outshine the strange.

How often he would lose himself in the sound of a teacher's voice, the melody of her words, not the content, which he didn't even hear.

"Stefan, the sum is?"

Ah, such a beautiful modulation! A triplet in the last of the sentence. Syncopated. G, G, then B flat as her voice rose in tone because of the question. Beautiful.

"Stefan, you've ignored me for the last time. You're going to the principal. Now."

And "principal," an even better triplet!

Only then did he realize: Oh, messed up again.

And the other students either looking away or staring (equally cruel).

Strange. Stefan is strange.

Well, he was. He knew that as well as anybody. His reaction: Make me unstrange or shut the hell up.

Now, on this busy corner in a busy city, Stefan pressed his head against an old stone wall and let a thousand sounds pass over him, through him, bathing him in warm water, circling and soothing his rampaging heart.

Hearing, in his head, his fiery imagination, the tolling of the red bell on the dirt, spreading outward from the man's neck last night.

Hearing the sound of blood roaring in his ears, loud as a blood bell ringing, ringing, ringing.

Hearing the refugee's screams.

Hearing the Black Screams.

From the time of adolescence, when the Black Screams started, it had been a battle to keep them at bay. Sound was the lifeblood for Stefan, comforting, explaining, enlightening. The creak of boards, the stutter of branches, the clicking of tiny animal feet in the Pennsylvania garden and yard, the slither of a snake in the woods. But the same way that healthy germs can become sepsis, sounds could turn on him.

Voices became sounds and sounds voices.

Roadside construction equipment, driving piles was really a voice: "Cellar, cellar, cellar, cellar."

A bird's call was not a bird's call. "Look swinging, look swinging, look swinging."

The wind was not the wind. "Ahhhhhh gone, ahhhhhh gone, ahhhhhh gone."

The creak of a branch: "Drip, drip, drip, drip..."