THE VALLEY OF THE FOUR GIANTS: MUSIC

The disc spins and crackles as the needle falls gently into place. It wobbles over the vinyl.

She listens. She smiles. She knows what to do.

--

I can't move. I cannot move. I can not move. The arrow has pinned me to the tree through the shivering muscles in my right arm. In front of me, gigantic and hideous, is Loneliness. Some distance behind her, Lustfulness watches, pensively. Her enormous frame blocks the sun.

"Trapped!" laughs the former, "Tiny tiny spider, trapped by his own web of thoughts."

She bends and leans in closer.

"You won't escape this time," she whispers. I feel her hot breath.

"What shall we do with him?" asks Lustfulness. "Hopelessness will want to finish him."

"He isn't going anywhere. Look at him."

"Aw he's... bleeding. Poor little thing..."

Their laughter crackles through the air.

"Oh let's crush him!" cries Lustfulness. "It will be so much fun! After all, he's led us a merry dance around this horrid forest. Look, I'm soaking! It's his fault, the little rat. Let's ram him and pulverise his bones into the mud he came from, "

"Oho yes! And for what he did to Uselessness too!"

"Uselessness! Dead! Yes, by this miserable skeleton. Well there's nothing he can do about us... is there?"

"Not while he's like this... anyway!"

The pain is coursing through my arm. The world is spinning.

"Pinned, pegged, nailed to a tree! What can anyone do while nailed to a tree?"

"As good as dead."

"As good as... Shall we?"

"No."

"No?"

"We must let Hopelessness end this."

"Why?"

"You know why."

"Ach, he'll be way dead before then. Look at him. It's only a matter of time!"

"Hopelessness has to end it."

"He needs to get here quickly then."

The giantesses talk. They discuss which of them should go to find their leader and which should stay.

"Perhaps you should send me," I interject. Lustfulness jabs a finger into my forehead and pushes my skull into the tree. Concussion rings inside my head.

Before long, they draw straws and decide. Loneliness will stay; Lustfulness will go.

The sun arcs through the sky, the evening falls and Loneliness, in the light of a small fire, sits waiting and whispering on a broken tree trunk. I close my eyes. I don't have long left.

--

She turns the handle. It glimmers in the twilight as the mechanism ratchets and clicks. Carefully, she slips the disc from its old-fashioned sheath and places it on the turntable. With one fluid motion, she lifts the needle and lets it drop on to the spinning record.

--

"All alone, with only me," says Loneliness through the dark. I can't see her now. Only shapes, hidden by the failing light and dying embers. I can hear her though. Her voice is somehow singing outside and inside my head all at once. It's hard to describe it - like stale cream, sickly and sweet as it pours through my head. She won't stop.

"No friends, no family, no joy, no sun, no laughter, no hope, no life, no future. Ha. Dead you are, with nothing and no-one but me..."

I close my eyes. There must be something I can do. But the pain is real, surging through my arm, the arrow still projecting hideously out in front of me. I am failing.

"I don't believe you," I say, desperately, gasping for air. It's all I can think of. "I don't believe... any of it."
"Oh but you must, little spider. Look around you. Who in the world do you have but me? Everyone... everyone has left you here to die... alone... with me..."

But something vague is stirring in my memory.

"It is not good..." I can barely breathe, but the words are forming in my mind.

"What is not good?" she laughs.

"It is not good for man..." I puff. Everything is spinning. "To be... alone."

I breathe in as the pain throbs. I'm about to die. Tears run down my cheeks and I hang my head.

Loneliness laughs.

--

Suddenly, and from nowhere real, I can hear music. It sounds at first as though it's coming from inside me, a gentle sort of... piano, high and twinkling. I lift my head.

"What is that?" says Loneliness, raising her voice. She can hear it too then. So, I'm not imagining it.

It grows louder. I can hear more now, a kind of skiffling drum pattern and the gentle padding of.. a double bass, I think. It's crackling through the woods - piano and bass, playing out an old-fashioned sort of rhythm, like a train.

"What is that sound?" Loneliness seems worried. I recognise it.

"It's um... It's jazz," I say.

"Shut up. Shut up," she panics. "It... it can't be..."

"It is," I'm smiling now. My face feels tight. The rhythm is building into a swing time pattern. "It very much is."

The melody crinkles through the trees. Soon there are crackling old voices singing along - a kind of harmony trio. I can't quite make out the words but... some how...I know...who...

Loneliness is standing now. I can see her silhouette block out the stars and her eyes flash yellow. The music gets louder and louder still.

Then, all of a sudden, I remember!

I know these voices. I know who they are. I remember them!

Loneliness looks down at me.

"Stop it!" she screams. "How are you playing that? Stop it. Stop that music!"

She clutches her head with both grubby hands. Her bow clatters to the ground.

My friends, long ago and far away keep singing. They can't be stopped.

A trumpet solo suddenly echoes through the trees. Then a clarinet and a sliding trombone. I laugh at how ridiculous it sounds, given the circumstances. Loneliness falls to her knees.

The music soars to a crescendo, tight vocal harmonies and jazz guitar and piano filling the forest as those voices sing cheerily through the darkness. These are my friends! And suddenly, we're singing together, even me with my final breath, and for them, for me, for all of us, nothing else matters. Especially not Loneliness.

She shouts but her awful voice is drowned by the music, as loud as it is. She is no match for us. She clutches her ears in agony as she cries in terror. I laugh.

"Stop! Stop! Stop it!"

I'm not listening.

Then, with one terrifed, painful cry, she charges towards me, her lips curled with rage and dread.

I sing. We sing, undeterred and unafraid. My friends and I, together.

She thunders toward me, scooping up another arrow, ready to plunge into my heart. Thumping footsteps, her terrible face flickering in the firelight. The song swoops into the final few bars as she comes. But with every step closer, something strange is happening and happening quickly: Loneliness is shrinking. Smaller and smaller she gets, and angrier and angrier she looks. The size of a tree, then a tall bush, then a furious child, brandishing an arrow like a pencil. Then, as those musicians play their wonderful ending and the track slams to a stop, Loneliness, in a simple cloud of fury, looks once at me with a glowering hatred in those tiny yellow eyes, and pops out of existence.

She is vanished, gone, as though she was never there. A giantess who never was. Loneliness is defeated.

--

Gentle applause crackles through the empty forest. The Photographer lifts the needle and smiles to herself as she carefully slips the disc back into its pocket.