Dead March

By the looks of the equipment, the last time it was used was before the 1950s. Ore sat and stared at the blueprints, holding his head in his hands like a Peruvian mummy. Then, in a flash of memory, he recalled Yuri telling him about the Earth’s Schumann resonances. When she first brought it up, he thought she was talking about the German composer Robert Schumann, and after a good dose of ridicule, learned that she in fact meant Otto Winfried Schumann, who had discovered the Earth’s baseline electromagnetic frequency in 1952. Afterwards, Ore had experimented with incorporating it into music, so he could tell off the top of his head that the fundamental Schumann resonance peaked at 7.83 Hz. Since the discovery wasn’t published until 1952, the mysterious inventor of the machine must have lacked the missing piece to get it to work. Still, he had designed the machine brilliantly, and the interface was simple enough that Ore quickly found a way to adjust the lower frequencies.

However, the old machine didn’t exactly have an aux port, so Ore had to use one of the old phonographs to rerecord the song he had written after Yuri’s death onto an Edison cylinder. He then inserted the cylinder into the machine and pulled the large wood-handled lever to turn it on. The machine started to rattle before stabilizing into a soft hum, with the wax cylinder spinning in its container, as the wires attached to the stalactites and stalagmites channeled the audio signal into the cave walls.

Ore thought back to the time Yuri showed him how to make a wine glass sing. She licked her finger and slowly moved it around the rim until it started to emit a humming sound that got louder and louder as she kept going. She told him this only worked with wine glasses, because they were closer to a spherical shape, tapering at the mouth, and didn’t work on cups that were cylindrical or flared out on top. As far as he could tell, the machine worked on a similar principle. But looking at the notes on the table, even after accounting for the Schumann resonance, it would take a year before the vibration would reach its peak and extend to the opposite side of the planet. He would be here a while.

He checked the date on his watch. It was Halloween.

The following year he spent entirely in the cavern, tending to the machine, which mainly meant recopying and replacing the Edison cylinders as they’d get worn down. Over that time, his opinion of dogs changed drastically. He was glad for the company of the three-headed hound, whom he ended up naming Kirby. Perhaps the change of heart was because, with them down there alone, the dog had nothing to bark at. They survived by drinking the spring water and eating the white crabs, which were the only larger form of life down there besides them. At first Ore thought that he would die of radiation poisoning way before a year passed, but it seemed the crabs had evolved a resistance to radiation, which was passed on by eating them.

Spending so long in near darkness, or rather Undarkness, made his hair turn entirely white.

Since there was no sunlight, days and nights lost meaning, and he had to make sure to regularly wind up his watch, a memento of his grandfather, lest he lose track of time altogether. In the first several months he continued to write songs and poetry, but as he ran out of things to say, he spent most of the remainder of the year in meditation. As the year drew to a close, he honestly couldn’t tell whether it had felt long or short.

The night before the anniversary of the start of his broadcast, he performed the necromantic ritual one last time.

Yuri was there again in dream space, but no longer surrounded by stars.

“Now you did it,” she said in her cryptic tone, Ore wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or an accusation.

“Sorry it took so long. Did they all make it out?”

“Yea, as you can see,” she spread her arms to indicate the absence of stars, “though I’m sure they’ll blame me for it later. Be careful what you wish for, right?”

“So we can leave now?” Ore asked in nervous expectation.

“You know I can’t leave,” Yuri repeated, as Ore remembered she said the same thing last time. “I don’t have a body to return to, they cremated it. Besides, I don’t think you would have liked me any more if you’d seen it anyway.”

“I don’t care, you’ll always be the same person I fell in love with,” he tried to justify, even as he realized there was no point in arguing.

“That’s sweet, but it’s too late, entropy and all that. Once something is turned to ash, you can’t reassemble it into what it was before.”

“I thought if I brought everyone back then you…” he was now choking on his words.

“You heard what you wanted to believe, you always did think that you could save everyone,” Yuri interrupted him, “but then that was what made me like you in the first place,” she added by way of consolation.

“I… I…” Ore struggled to form a thought.

“It’s ok, you tried your best, and you did give many of us a second chance, even if it didn’t turn out as you intended.”

Ore just stood there, feebly stretching his arms towards her, desperate to be held.

“I’ll see you soon.”