A More Perfect Man: Climax?

Harry felt the swell of the organ’s notes. Rising, rising, building and building and never falling, only climbing and always and forever rising. He wanted to run, to flee, escape the horror of the music and the horrors of the City and the horror waiting through the door at the end of the hall. He stopped, holding his breath, unable to take the oxygen into his lungs for fear that the air itself was foul with the evil of the organ player’s song, as if it would rush into his lungs and fill them with corruption and rot and death and agony beyond all the torture and pain that ever was suffered in the darkest ages of man. In vain he stood waiting for the moment of release when the tension would at last break and the tortured organist would abandon his horrendous crescendo and at last reach the end of his hellish composition, but to no avail. He could feel the blood as it pumped through his throbbing veins, adrenaline at last tearing it free from the frosty fingers of fear that had held him since the song began. With what courage he could find he walked on, on and on, he knew not how long, he only knew he must go on, must reach that room at the end of the hall. The fingers of the organ player danced faster and faster, the notes climbing higher and higher the peak of tension and terror. And then, with nothing to warn of the coming change, the playing stopped.
Not a sound could be heard but the frantic beat of Harry’s heart. It could not be the end; the song was not over. The monster organist was merely teasing him. He had built to the climax, the apex of his ecstasy and his prey’s terror. And he was savouring the moment, his moment of complete mastery, holding on as long as he could before plunging once again into his black chorus. Harry’s every muscle tensed; his dread was never greater. Any moment the song would resume its manic dance. The beat of his heart grew louder, slowly louder, threatening to flood his ears with its pounding beat, with the rush of the blood racing through his fear-pulsing veins. And then, keeping perfect time with his racing heart, he heard it. It was not his tormentor, the twisted organist; no, another had entered the hellish orchestra. It was a violin, a single, lonely note, infinitely sweet and endlessly sorrowful, the crying voice of a spirit gone, the dying breath of a love forsworn. In his mind’s eye danced images of a woman in white, a maiden’s ghost in forest of night. The dark and shadows all around, her silent footsteps on the ground. Her flaxen hair and silken gown; cold blue eyes, skin white as down. In human form a winter’s day, with grace like death in her dancer’s sway. She turned away from him at last, her silent footfalls on the grass. And into the silent woods she stepped.
The violin had stopped playing. Harry gasped. He fell. With the fading of the violin’s song, the image of the girl had faded also; she had been naught but an illusion, a figment of Harry’s trembling imagination, the product of a mind worn thin by exhaustion and hunger. Rising up from the ground, Harry saw to his horror that he had come at last to the door at the end of the hall. All trace of the haunting music had fled the air, and silence reigned supreme once more in the City.
And then a voice.
“Well are you going to come in or are you just going to sit there?”
Harry picked himself up, and opened the door at the end of the hall.
“I thought you’d never come visit me, what a shame that would have been.”

The voice came from high above Harry, floating down through the air of an enormous room, a room the size of a mountain, a room filled with a light as bright as the sun. Through the sky (for sky it was, a vast indoor sky, bound by walls ten thousand yards apart) whirled fantastic machines, glittering chrome birds and mad spirals made of steel, spinning wheels of silver and frantic shapes of every sort, dancing like iron clouds, the great artificial sky their ballroom. Like a school of metal fish they circled and danced and swam through the air. Now they would come together, meld as one great mass of phantom shapes. Now they would split apart, a thousand glittering metallic points in the electric light. In all his life Harry had never seen such a thing, never even read of anyone else seeing a sight similar to this. There was something almost frightening about the objects, a terrible randomness in the way they moved.
Again the voice echoed across the vast expanse of the room.
“Did you like my song? I wrote it myself.”
It came from one of the nearest of the metal objects, one that looked like a great inverted pyramid. As Harry watched, the pyramid descended slowly towards him and came to rest on the ground twenty yards from where he stood.
‘Come up here, won’t you? It’s been so long since I’ve seen something I didn’t create myself.” A series of steps came down with these words, unfurling like the petal of a flower in bloom, a flower of cold steel and dead iron. Hesitantly at first, but with courage and curiosity quickly growing, Harry walked towards the steps, looking in wonder up at the top of the strange device. His foot had not touched the second step when the entire machine let out a hiss, and with a slight jerk lifted itself from the ground, slowly climbing towards the room’s centre. The steps, too, began to move, and carried Harry upward to the object’s top.
“You’re just in time you know.” He heard the voice growing closer. “I’ve got a great show planned for today.”
The pyramid came to a sudden stop. Looking down, Harry could see for the first time the enormity of the room. It stretched outward in all directions, several miles wide and as many wide. From the floor, the walls curved slowly up, bending ever so subtly until they all came together at the top, a mile and a half above where they had started. Below him like clouds of silver danced the metal birds and spirals and pyramids. And below them, impossible to see from the ground level where Harry had come in, was a great circular pit filling the dead centre of the room. At one edge of the circle was a city, a city made of stone, its white towers reaching high into the trapped air. At the opposite was the imitation of a sea, waves crashing against a manufactured shore. Covering the shore were the dark hulls of ships, wooden ships, ancient even in the time before the City. Between the city of stone and the ship covered beach lay rolling hills and fields of green grass waving in the wind of hidden fans.
“You really did make it at a great time, wonderful time. Best possible time to come. I’ve really outdone myself. The best show I’ve ever done. And you’ll get to see it! Oh isn’t this just so exciting.”
Harry snapped his head up from looking at the ground far below, and, for the first time in many years, his eyes met with those of another person. He had forgotten that he was not alone, that the voice that had beckoned him unto the strange craft must naturally to have belonged to another human like himself. And the man who met his eyes was unlike anything he could have possibly expected.
His hair was a wild, tangled bush of tight red curls that poked stubbornly out from beneath a faded purple stovepipe hat. He wore a suit, several sizes too small, of the same faded purple as his hat, his feet covered in yellow socks and no shoes. His eyes -eyes wider than any Harry had seen in any of his picture books or movies- were filled with an intense, frenzied curiosity. He stared at Harry in an almost animalistic way, as a dog looks at a stranger who has enter the room, or a child too young to understand the world inspects an unknown room. The wide pupils were set in irises of deep bluish green, ocean-like both in colour and in the way that they at once moved with waves that revealed every changing emotion and hid beneath the waters depths unseen. His mouth was set in a childish Christmas-morning grin. His skin was a pearly white, white as the skin of the women Harry had seen in his haunting vision. Something about him terrified Harry more than anything he had ever seen.
“Wha, what did you say? A show?”
“Yes of course, a show! A grand show. It’s all a show, life, isn’t it? But it’s usually so boring and droll, so sometimes I like to step in and mix things up, rewrite life, make things more exciting. The only shows worth watching are the ones someone’s rewritten” Suddenly the man leaped into the air, grabbing his hat with one hand and pulling an enormous silver watch from his pocket with the other as he did so. “Oh my! Oh my oh my oh my! We must hurry, hurry, it’s just about time to start! We wouldn’t want to keep my players waiting.”
With these words hardly out of his man the man ran towards a the opposite side of the craft, and it was in following him with his eyes that Harry noticed for the first time that the surface on which they were standing was not completely devoid of furnishings, but that there was in fact a rather large pipe organ situated to one side, and next to it stood a low table, on which sat a violin. Parallel to this table on the other side of the craft was a small structure of about four feet tall, shaped somewhat like an ancient pastor’s podium, and this, Harry presumed, was where the controls to the craft were located, as it was to this structure that the strange man now rushed.
All of a sudden and without warning Harry was thrown to the ground- the craft had begun to drop with an alarming speed, spinning and spiralling as it rushed towards the floor a mile below, weaving between the schools of flying machines and fantastic devices that filled the air in manic fashion, passing them so close that Harry could have reached out and touched their shiny smooth surfaces with his hand, had he not been so preoccupied with fearing for his life. And then, even more suddenly than they had began their fall, they stopped, hovering not ten yards above the grassy plain Harry had spied from on high.
Harry pushed himself up on one elbow, gasping for breath and looking desperately for something solid to cling to, should the maniac driver decided to surprise him with another sudden flight. But the man in teh purple suit had evidently reached his destination, as he was walking from the control panel back towards were Harry lay.
A very serious air had overcome the man’s features, erasing all traces of the childlike manner of before. His gate was marshalled and deliberate, his face set in the stony visage of a commander stepping forth to examine his troops before a desperate battle. In his hand he held a sceptre of tempered steel, with golden star shaped studs inlaid in a spiral wrapping about the whole length like a coiled serpent. He stepped to the very edge of the platform, and lifting the sceptre above his head, called out in a mighty voice that rang throughout the mountainous room:
“Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurl’d to Pluto’s gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such is my will, the word of Jove!
“I declare, O Muse! that in this ill-fated hour
Will the fierce strife spring. And by my power,
From Latona’s son will dire contagion spread,
And heap the camp with mountains of the dead;
For I am god of men, and all the world beside,
And for a god’s joy will his children die.”
Upon finishing his speech, the man held his sceptre in the air for a moment longer, then let it drop, and turned to Harry.
“Did you like it? It’s not all mine of course, just the second part. The first was written by some old dead blind fellow.”
Harry opened his mouth in shock, unsure of what to say. But it was of no matter, for at that very moment, the sound a hundred mighty horns, horns built for war and fired in blood, resounded across the valley from the direction of the beach. Immediately, the blast of a hundred mighty trumpets, trumpets of gold and bronze and silver, answered the horn’s challenge from the city walls. And then came the shouts of ten hundred thousand men, terrible cries of war and bloodlust and vengeance. Following the gaze of the man in the purple suit, Harry looked out across the grassy field, and there his eyes met sight that would have filled the hardest heart with awe.
Like the waves upon an angry ocean they came, a mighty rush of men and steel, weapons glistening in the artificial sun, their armour blending together like the scales of a great snake, shining black and purple and blue in the sun, a moving forest of pikes and helmets and shields, the ground shaking in fear beneath their sandaled heels. They rolled across the low hills and waving grass, pouring inland from the hollow ships on the beach like a storm upon the plains, a black cloud rolling forth and covering the land in darkness, the very air trembling in dread at the coming storm. The storm of men came ever on, silent but for the rhythm of their savage step, holding back the fury in their breasts until the enemy was at hand, waiting until they could see the fear in the eyes of their foes to release as one their thunderous war cry.
From the white stone city across the field came a sound like the crack of thunder, and the heavy stone gates were thrown open to unleash the fury of those within. Out they rushed, a river of ants bursting forth to defend their hive. Gloriously they marched, their helmets silver in the electric yellow light; their breastplates crowned with rich stones of every colour and shape and size; their shields of shining gold bearing inlays of blue, telling tales of noble heroes and valorous deeds. They marched in time to a high and noble song, every voice blending together as one to carry the notes far across the plain to the helmeted ears of their foes. As an avalanche they rushed, brilliant in colour and reckless in bravery and full of joyful noise, roaring forth to meet their enemies from across the artificial sea.