Source of Inspiration
by Martin Westlake
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Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
part 3
Kage slept peacefully all through that night, his sleep undisturbed by bathroom visits or poignant dreams, though the distant roar of the river surprised him when he awoke. He got up early and went through his calisthenic exercises.
He was about to take a towel and cross the corridor for a shower when he noticed that the photograph of Syuuto had been placed face down on the desk. The hairs went up on the back of his neck. He propped the photograph back up. Was it his imagination, or had Syuuto’s expression in the photograph changed? His thoughts raced. He shaved and showered. He still looked tired in the mirror.
Kage was impatient to get to his studio. After his usual frugal breakfast, he skipped down the stairs and hurried along the corridor. The roar of the river echoed powerfully in his ears. When he got into the studio, he found that, as in his bedroom, Syuuto’s photograph had been placed face down on the desk. He stood it up again. He looked around. Nothing else in the room had been moved or changed. The good mood in which he had woken up had now completely evaporated. What was going on? Was he imagining things?
He sat down, looked at Syuuto and bowed. ‘Good morning, my beautiful wife,’ he said.
No sooner had he said those words than the familiar thud on the storeroom door sounded. He ignored it and looked intently at Syuuto’s portrait. Had her expression changed? She was still smiling, but the smile seemed somehow more wistful.
‘Aitai, darling Syuuto. I miss you so much.’ He put his head in his hands and wept. Then he heard another thud on the storeroom door. He walked to the door, opened it and bowed. ‘Good morning, Vaida. This morning, I must work. I know you’ll understand. I shall leave the door open in case you want to move around a bit. It can’t be nice being cooped up in here all the time.’
He put his backpack back on the shelf and walked to the piano. He flexed his fingers, did some scales and then played the Prelude. Afterwards, he walked to his desk, smiled at Syuuto, turned on his laptop and his keyboard, and started to search for a first major theme. For Kage, this was always the trickiest part. He had little trouble with exposition and contrast and all the technical developments leading up to modulation and transformation, but he had to find his themes first. He sat at the keyboard for a long time, but nothing came.
At midday he got up, went to the kitchen, took a yoghurt from the refrigerator and once again sat outside, gazing up at the mountains on the far side of the valley. Then he returned to his studio and spent a fruitless afternoon fiddling around on his keyboard. At four, he gave up and went for a walk along the valley. A decent track led all the way down to the village of Airns. Kage walked to the outskirts of the village and then returned to the Foundation.
The next day was the same. And the day after that. He greeted Vaida politely every morning, and left the storeroom open so that, he hoped, he would be left in peace. Syuuto smiled down at him from his desks in the studio and in his bedroom. He slept well. But no inspiration came. At first, Kage didn’t panic. He knew from experience these things could take time. But, by the end of his first week, he was starting to get a little worried. He had had six weeks at the Foundation; now he had five.
There were no disturbances during the night, as there had been on that first night. The dinner conversations in the communal kitchen continued with their familiar pattern. Gradually, he got to know the rest of the Fellows. More often than not, Alruna would join them later in a flash of colour. Kage realised it was her habit to wear a different dress every day, always in a bright hue.
There was no more talk about Vaida and the other phantoms who haunted the building. Giulia’s concern for Kage became increasingly affectionate. But the Inn roared incessantly wherever Kage went, and the Foundation started to feel claustrophobic. He took long walks alone in the afternoons up into the forests on the other side of the valley, where the roar of the rapids was reduced to a distant murmur, at least for a while.
* * *
Towards the middle of that following week, something in Kage snapped. He had, as usual, breakfasted lightly and then come down to his studio, greeted Vaida, played the Prelude, and afterwards sat at his desk. He put on his earphones to block out the roar, but nothing came. He explored the keyboard fruitlessly. Everything he found was either hopelessly derivative or dull and pedestrian. After an hour, he stood up, put down his earphones and walked to the storeroom.
‘Vaida,’ he said. ‘I have a problem. Can you help me?’
He sat on his haunches and gazed into the empty storeroom. His backpack stood forlornly against the wall. With no closed door to bump into, it had stayed in the same place for over a week. It was ridiculous. What could he possibly expect from a spirit? He shook his head sorrowfully and returned to his desk.
As usual, at lunchtime he took a yoghurt from the fridge and ate it outside, staring at the forest on the far side of the valley. But this day the sky was low, grey and threatening. As he returned to the Foundation, he could hear the first menacing rolls of distant thunder. By the time he had walked down the stairs, it was raining heavily, adding a heavy hiss to the usual roar of the rapids. It was so dark in his studio that he had to turn the lights on.
He sat down at his desk and was about to put his earphones back on when he heard a metallic sound, a rhythmic clicking noise. It was coming from the windows. He saw that one of the handles was moving up and down. He got up, and the movement stopped.
‘What is it, Vaida?’ he asked. ‘Do you want me to open the window?’
He crossed the room and opened the window. It opened inwards and was almost pushed out of his hands by a sudden gust of wind. In came the roar of the rapids and the hiss of the rain. He delighted in the freshness of the air and the coolness of the wind. Lightning flashed, and thunder sounded overhead. He felt a sense of exhilaration.
And then, distantly at first, but slowly growing in volume, he heard an ethereal sound, a tune that he could barely make out, as though played on a celeste. Gradually, the sound grew stronger; and he could hear a distinct melody above the roar of the Inn and the hiss of the rain. The melody was strange, haunting, beautiful. The rain lashed his face.
‘That’s it!’ he shouted. ‘Thank you, Vaida! Thank you!’
He dashed to his desk, turned on ‘record’ and started to play the tune. He had it! He had his primary melody. Rain meanwhile started to puddle on the floorboards in front of the window. He went back and closed the window. He had all he needed for the time being.
It rained all afternoon and into the evening. Kage wouldn’t have gone for a walk in any case. Suddenly, happily, he had what he had been so desperately searching for. Now that he had it, he was eager to pursue the inspirational lead all the way to the completion of a first melodic treatment.
So intent was he on his work that he almost missed supper. He was late to the table, but he needn’t have worried. Giulia had kept his place for him. He could not hide his excitement from his neighbours.
‘Are you still playing with those spirits?’ asked Sisay, when he’d finished his account.
Kage bowed his head. ‘I asked for help, and help arrived.’
‘But are you sure?’ asked Barbara. ‘How does your inspiration usually arrive?’
‘I’m sure,’ Kage said. ‘The music was not within me. It came to me.’
‘It sounds like a version of my voices,’ said Jacek.
‘There were all sorts of noises this afternoon,’ said the normally shy Ha-joon. ‘I found it difficult to work.’
Kage watched as Alruna flapped down from the far end of the table. Tonight, her dress was all green, apple green. Kage was ashamed of using such language to describe their housekeeper, but there was something crow-like about her movements all the same.
Barbara gave her a summary of their conversation. ‘What do you think, Al?’ she said at the end. ‘Have other Fellows found inspiration from the Foundation’s spirits?’
‘I don’t know what to think,’ said Alruna. ‘I certainly don’t remember any other Fellows apparently communing with a spirit. I can’t help feeling you’re playing with fire, Kage.’
He bowed his head again but said nothing.
‘I think it’s all in your imagination,’ said Barbara.
‘No, Barbara,’ he said, ‘I think not.’
That evening, when he got to his bedroom, the photograph of Syuuto had fallen on the floor and the protective glass in the frame had broken. Kage spent some time removing shards of glass from the frame. Unfortunately, one of the fragments had nicked the photograph during the impact with the floor, and the nick was just where Syuuto’s beautiful smile had been. Now Kage could not be certain anymore that she had been smiling, or that she was smiling now. He studied her eyes.
‘My beautiful Syuuto,’ he murmured, ‘how I miss you.’ He kissed the frame and stood it on the desk again. ‘Don’t leave me, my love. Don’t leave me.’
He started to scroll through the e-mails on his phone but gave up after a few minutes and prepared for bed.
* * *
He had trouble sleeping that night. He thought he could hear doors banging in the distance. Then Vaida’s theme came back to him and wormed its way through his mind. At two a.m., he got up to go to the bathroom. As usual, a sensor in the hall detected his movement and turned the lights on.
But when he opened the bathroom door, something stopped him from turning the light on. He looked through the window at the Buvetta and saw that a glowing light was playing on the windows again. He found it hard to believe that this was the light from a torch held by some nervous teenager from the village. The light was soft and moved sedately. There was nothing jerky about its movement. Once again, it travelled slowly along the colonnades from the southern to the northern pump station and then disappeared.
Once again, he waited several minutes but there were no more lights. He turned on the bathroom light and peed in the toilet. It was a dark night. Surely any teenager would have retraced his or her path with the torch they had used to explore the interior of the Buvetta. It didn’t add up.
Leaving the bathroom, he had the shock of his life. Alruna was striding towards him along the corridor. This time she was dressed all in red again. He felt slightly embarrassed to be in his pyjamas. He bowed as she got nearer.
‘I hope I didn’t disturb you, Al,’ he said.
Alruna lowered her sunglasses as she walked past, looking down at him over the top of the glasses, and then let out her familiar giggle. In the middle of the night, it sounded more like a cackle. He watched as she flapped away down the corridor and then turned down the staircase. Where had she come from?
He walked back into his bedroom and closed the door. He turned the key in the lock. He felt faintly ridiculous, but the hairs were still standing up on the back of his neck. Where on earth had she been? Why hadn’t she spoken to him? Had she been taking something? Was she sleepwalking?
He looked at Syuuto’s photograph. It had fallen over again. He put it back and got into his bed, his heart still racing, but nevertheless soon felt drowsy. Now, somehow, the roar of the river was strangely soothing.
Kage woke up very early. The storm and the clouds and the rain were gone. Kage knew that it would be a mistake to go back to what he had composed the previous day straightaway. He’d read a novelist somewhere who had spoken about the need to let fresh work ‘objectivise out’. That, he knew, was what he needed to do, and he had an idea about how to spend the day.
* * *
Before going to the kitchen for breakfast, he went to the recreation room and took out a map of the area from the bookshelves. He saw with satisfaction that there was a path on the other side of the river. He would, he decided, take the bus down to Airns and then walk up the other bank to the Buvetta. He went down to his studio and greeted Vaida. He explained his intentions.
‘Today, I am taking a day off. I am going to go for a nice long walk.’
He picked up his backpack and said goodbye. ‘I’ll probably pass by later,’ he said.
He loaded up the backpack in the kitchen with a piece of cheese, two apples and a bottle of water. By the time he set off for the bus stop, it had just turned seven o’clock. He had walked no more than a hundred metres when he heard a cry. He turned and saw Giulia was shouting and waving at him from the main entrance of the Foundation. She was dressed in her yoga gear. He turned back. ‘Good morning, Giulia,’ he said, bowing.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
‘For a long walk,’ he explained.
‘Escape!’ she laughed. ‘May I come? I was about to do my yoga. It will only take me a few minutes to get dressed.’
Kage bowed. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait here. But please hurry; there is a bus at seven-thirty.’
‘I’ll hurry, I promise!’
He watched her dash into the Foundation. She emerged breathlessly some five minutes later, dressed for a walk and wearing a good pair of boots.
‘Do we still have time?’ she asked.
‘If we walk fast,’ he replied.
She put her arm in his. ‘So, where are we going?’
He explained his plans.
‘I love it!’ she said, briefly leaning her head against his shoulder.
Airns was a small town boasting some picturesque houses with carved wooden decorations and a few tempting shops. Kage led them straight to one of two bridges over the River Inn and then turned to the right and walked through the outskirts. They walked on a gravel track that led them up into a forest and onto the mountain track.
The track soon petered out into a path, with still wet fronds of vegetation drooping over it, so that their trouser bottoms got damp. Sometimes the path broadened into clearings where the foresters had been at work. Wherever that happened, Giulia made a point of walking alongside Kage and linking arms again.
After two hours, they caught a glimpse of a lead-covered dome through the pine branches and soon found themselves above the long, thin roof of the Buvetta. The path ended abruptly at a barrier and a ‘Danger’ sign.
They could find no obvious way down to the river. Instead, they had to scramble down through the forest until they reached a relatively unwooded space on the riverbank. They could see a path leading back towards Airns — probably an angler’s path — just as the path above was most probably kept clear by hunters.
Copyright © 2026 by Martin Westlake
