The Glass House Read Online Free Page B

he’d respond to perfect.
    After the initial crescendo he began the almost seventy bars of rest. He looked down. He wished he didn’t have such tiny feet—size five shoes and over six feet tall? Ridiculous! Sometimes he wore bigger shoes with paper stuffed in the toes, but when he did he often tripped over his feet. Like a dumb clown.
    The music modulated and the violas took the melody.
    WJ knew that music at its heart had a “feel” and that, to hisprofound frustration, he could never feel the “feel,” so he copied the others—with arithmetic precision.
    He readied himself and made a perfectly timed entrance with the other cellist. They took the melody for six bars then the rest of the ensemble joined in.
    It was for moments like this that he bothered with the cello—to be in the midst of the sound.
    With the music all around him he could almost feel its magic. No—he could almost feel something.
    As a younger man, WJ had tried to understand what was happening to him. Everyone else seemed to be finding partners and solace—and more than that, joy!—in the company of others.
    He’d listen closely to the lyrics of love songs, but couldn’t understand what it was they were singing about.
    English literature had been his Waterloo in high school. He’d read what everyone else read, but he got nothing from the words on the page.
    Movies left him cold whenever the plot degenerated to the love between the two leads. Even the hatreds in the films escaped him. He literally didn’t get what the problem was. Sure, he saw the logical outcomes of being cheated or betrayed or abandoned, but he saw no joy in retribution, or hate, or love, or sex—or anything.
    He was left especially cold when musicals, for no discernible reason, broke into song. Glee was the bane of his existence, and he’d smashed two expensive HD LED monitors when he turned them on only to find Smash mid yech. Yep, he’d smashed Smash —twice. He knew he should find that humorous. He didn’t. He knew it was funny—had even read and annotated the Bergson book, Laughter, in an attempt to understand “funny”—but he never felt the joy of the joke.
    Most confusing was that women found him attractive. At first he thought it was just because he had money and the things money can buy. But, much to his surprise, they found him a good bedcompanion. This stunned him, since he seemed more and more divorced from the act of sex as time went by. He seemed to float above it, marvelling at the look on his partners’ faces—what he could only assume was a kind of ecstasy, but from what he couldn’t begin to guess, let alone partake in. Yet the further he abstracted himself from the reality the more they seemed to adore him—so sexy, so alive, such a great lover!
    The other cello player turned the page a moment late, which brought WJ crashing back to the present. He ventured a look at the man. The guy liked to interpret the music. WJ didn’t approve of that, so Mr. Interpreter wouldn’t be a member of the ensemble much longer.
    WJ held his bow above the strings and allowed the bass, violins, and the violas to lift him—like the young monk he’d seen on the synaesthetes’ website who sang single notes up to the dome of the chapel and then seemed to rise—no, did rise, encased in the music he sang.
    And such a look of glory on his face!
    WJ knew from the moment he saw him that that boy was the key to opening the door that all his life had been closed to him. Even as he put his bow back on the strings and joined the andante finale of the piece he knew that it was worth every penny he’d paid, every law he’d broken, every risk he’d taken to entice and then kidnap the monk from the video.
    The monk: Seth Roberts.
    He remembered nights before he’d captured Seth. After a concert, back in his three-storey loft, he’d turn out the deco