The Fire by Katherine Neville

weight set upon it. I went over to look, and I felt the blood flooding into my brain.
    The paperweight was overt enough: Propped on a metalkey ring, to keep it from rolling, was the eight ball from our billard table. The note itself was definitely from my mother; the code was so simplistic that no one else could have invented it. I saw how hard she’d worked to communicate cryptically, clearly with no help.
    The note, in large print, read:
     
WASHINGTON
    LUXURY CAR
    VIRGIN ISLES
    ELVIS LIVES
    AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
     
    The Elvis part was simple: my mother’s last name – Velis – was spelled two different ways to show it was from her. As if I needed that helpful clue. The rest was a lot more upsetting. And not because of the code.
    Washington was, of course, ‘DC’; Luxury Car was ‘LX’; Virgin Isles was ‘VI.’ Together, in Roman numerals (as they clearly were), their numeric value was:
     
D    =    500
    C    =    100
    L    =    50
    X    =    10
    V    =    5
    I    =    1
     
    Tally them up, and it’s ‘666’ – the Number of the Beast from the apocalypse.
    I wasn’t worried about that Beast – we had plenty of those protecting us, scattered about the lodge as our animal totems. But for the first time, I was truly worried about my mother.
    Why had she used this hackneyed pseudomillennial ruse to grab my attention? What about the paperweight on top – another standard bunkum, ‘Behind the eight ball’ – what on earth did that mean?
    And what should one make of that old alchemical drivel, ‘As above, so below’ ?
    Then, of course, I got it. I removed the eight ball and the bit of paper, setting them on the keyboard music stand, and I opened the piano. Before I could set the strut in place, I nearly dropped the lid.
    There, inside the hollow body of the instrument, I saw something I thought I would never, ever see again inside my mother’s house as long as she lived.
    A chess set.
    Not just a chess set – but a chess set with a game set up, a game that had been partially in play. There were pieces here that had been removed from the field of play and were set out upon the keyboard strings at either side – black or white.
    The first thing I noticed was that the Black Queen was missing. I glanced over at the billiard table – good heavens, Mother, really! – and saw that the missing queen had been placed in the rack where the eight ball was supposed to be.
    It was something like being drawn into a vortex. I began to feel the game in play. Good Lord, how I had missed this. How had I been able to leave it behind me? It was nothing like a drug at all, as people sometimes said. It was an infusion of life.
    I forgot the pieces that were off the board or behind the eight ball; I could reconstruct everything from the patterns that were still there. For several long moments, I forgot my missing mother, my aunt Lily lost in Purgatory with her chauffeur, her dog, and her car. I forgot what I’d sacrificed – what my life had become against my will. I forgot everything exceptthe game before me – the game cached away like a dark secret, in the belly of that piano.
    But as I reconstructed the moves, the dawn arose through the high glass windows – just as a sobering realization dawned within my mind. I could not stop the horror of this game. How could I stop it, when I had replayed it over and over again in my mind these past ten years?
    For I knew this game quite well.
    It was the game that had killed my father.

The Pit
     
Mozart: Confutatus Maledictum – how would you translate that?
    Salieri: ‘Consigned to the flames of woe.’
    Mozart: Do you believe in it?
    Salieri: What?
    Mozart: The fire that never dies, burning you forever.
    Salieri: Oh, yes…
    – Peter Shaffer, Amadeus
     
    Deep in the pit of the hearth, the fire spilled over the sides of the giant log like liquid heat. I sat on the moss rock fireplace ledge, and I gazed down mindlessly. I was lost