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Category: Fantasy/Horror
Description: Douglas Quaide is serving thirty years at the Kerwin Correctional Facility, where despair constantly presses on his soul. When his new bunkmate---notorious serial killer Heinrich Shultz---unleashes a deadly talent, Quaide discovers a path to his own humanity...and possibly to his salvation.
eBook Publisher: Uncial Press, 2010
eBookwise Release Date: August 2010

Available eBook Formats: OEBFF Format (IMP) [36 KB]
Words: 6955
Reading time: 19-27 min.

"In Chamber Music, the story of a convicted murderer who finds compassion within the music of insanity, Peter A. Balaskas touches the reader's soul with the ultimate truth that evil exacts a cost, that the universe does not forsake good. Haunting and as horribly beautiful as it is disturbing, Chamber Music will resonate in memory long after the tune ends."--C.L. Fuqua, author of The Swing

I heard a whistle.

No, not just a whistle. A tune, a sad one, like a lonely Irish ballad, low in the beginning, then gradually rising with each passing second, reaching out to anyone who could listen. At first I thought it was my imagination. Maybe after reading more about life on Dungarven, this little melody was being conjured by my mental escape mechanism. After all, it was just plain impossible that something as beautiful as that song could exist in the real world, especially in a jail cell. I looked up and saw Shultz standing on that chair again, staring at the sunset. His scaly lips were puckered and I had to swallow a little bit of my gorge at the sight of him. He looked like some lusty creature fixated on an invisible desire. The whistling, that lovely melody that somehow transported me away from my despair here at Kerwin, came from the grotesque lips of that obscene butcher. Beyond the whistle I began to hear...something...accompany it. I couldn't concentrate. Shultz's fish-like face was distracting me too much. So I turned away and closed my eyes. And there, inside my head, the song came into bloom.

The whistle transformed into a woman's voice, a lovely one at that. I floated in the satin darkness, feeling the freedom of the space around me. But I wasn't alone. The source of the song was drawing near. A pillar composed entirely of flame was illuminating the void.