Sweet Romance12 min read
The Suona That Woke a Gentle Monster
ButterPicks12 views
I lost my job in the city and came back to the mountain village with one coin in my pocket and a wild plan in my head.
"I'll be a folk instrument influencer," I told my reflection and my old suona case on the table. "Just wait."
I am Claudia Berry. My grandpa taught me music. Grandpa's name is Gustav Mathieu and he was the village drum and wind player for as long as anyone could remember.
"Grandpa, watch me," I said, with more pride than skill.
"You always had the spirit," Gustav said. "But the breath must be steady."
I blew. The sound cracked like someone stepping on dry leaves.
"Try again," Gustav grunted, smiling like he forgave me. He had small, kind eyes that could make me feel brave.
I wasn't only trying to make music. I had a plan: short funny clips, modern twists on old tunes, a pretty face and a messy, confident tune. Online, the loudest often get the most likes. I wanted the bright city life again. I wanted to be loud and loved.
I borrowed Lane Sherman's old pickup to carry my tripod and camera. Lane is the village chief. He leaned in the road and pointed up the hill.
"Go up the mountain," Lane said. "High and open. No one will bother you up there."
"Good," I said. "Perfect for filming."
Up the mountain I climbed. There is a wide flat rock where the wind eats the sound and throws it back larger. I set my phone, hit record, and tried to make the suona sound like triumph.
I played a silly version of the old funeral tune—mismatched notes and all—because I thought people would laugh. Maybe laugh and then like. Maybe laugh and then follow.
The wind changed. A sharp sound rolled across the ridge. The last note hung and then everything trembled.
Something heavy hit the ground beside me. I thought at first it was a branch. Then a hand grabbed my collar.
"Who plays like that?" a voice snarled. It was too loud, rough like metal against metal.
I had a hand at my throat and my knees forgot their job.
"Let go!" I squealed, because that is what someone does when hands are at their throat.
The grip loosened. A man stood there: dusty, long coat in tatters, hair tangled, eyes bright and angry. He smelled like old rain and river stone. He looked like a portrait turned to flesh, a man from an old photograph who had walked out of the frame.
"I'm not dead yet," he snarled. "If I'm going to be something, I'm not lying down because of that noise."
"Who are you?" I managed.
"Vaughn Freeman," he said, with the calm of a name taken long ago. "And you—why would you play that badly?"
He was a creature, that much was true. He called himself a jiangshi by thick jokes in the village later, but in the pale morning he looked more like a tired gentleman who had lost the map to his century.
"You woke me up," Vaughn said. His hands were still white and strong. "You ruined my path. You have to fix it."
"Fix it how?" I whispered.
"Either become a bride in the old way, or play the music that lets me go."
"What?" I said. "You want to... marry me?"
He blinked, and the blink was oddly human. "I am old in ways you cannot count. My path must be closed. A living tie or a perfect song. The song is better, but the song must come from you. Three months."
I stared. Three months? I had not practiced in a month, much less taken a full three months on something.
"Three months," he repeated. "Play it and I can go. Fail, and you become my bride by blood and bone."
"No," I said with a laugh that cracked into fear. "No way am I marrying a—what are you?—a dead man."
"You are not running this mountain," Vaughn said, oddly calm. "Not yet. Stay. Learn. Or leave and hide. I will find you either way."
Then he turned and walked up the ridge like a person who had lived through whole wars and had a right to be taken seriously by mountains.
I left my suona where it was. I ran home.
Back in the yard, my hands still shook. Grandpa was waiting by the pile of wood.
"Did you find practice space?" Gustav asked.
I told the short version. He listened with the face of someone who had seen strange things in the long years he'd held a drum.
"A grave spirit is a heavy thing," Gustav said. "But music is older. If he truly was trapped by a wrong song, you might be able to help."
"Or I'm trapped," I said. I couldn't laugh. I had to keep living.
"Three months then," Grandpa said. "We will practice."
I tried at first to cheat. I played a recorded version on my phone on the second day and carried it up the mountain. I thought the trick would work. The big, echoing tune poured out of my speaker.
Vaughn listened. He lay on the rock and closed his eyes.
"Nice," he said. "But not you. A machine is not the same as breath."
I had to try harder. The idea of being forced into a strange marriage with a man who smelled like wet stone and wore a suit from another era was more terrifying than the lesson of getting better at music. I fixed my jaw and returned to the suona with stubbornness like a train.
I started filming too. I filmed Vaughn when he let me. He was terrible at it. He tried the suona, and the bad noises he made became gold on my little social platform. The first clip, titled "My mountain brother the tragic suona man," hit five hundred thousand views in a day.
"You're laughing in the wrong places," Vaughn muttered when he noticed his own face plastered on the screen.
"I'm getting fans," I said. "And you are getting followers. Everybody wins."
He didn't look like a monster when he smiled. He had a rare, soft smile that made his old suit seem younger. He would sigh and lie on the rock and watch clouds. He'd talk about the days when cities had a different light and steam trains pulled away from platforms packed with men and women in different hats.
"Where are you from?" I asked him once, when the sun was going down and the mountain air had the quiet of a ship waiting at night.
"Far away. A city by water," Vaughn said. "I had a life. Once."
"Tell me a story," I said.
He told me little things: his sister's silly hat, a street where lanterns hung between buildings, a woman who hummed a melody he could never forget. It was the humming that pressed like a key. He told it like a person showing me an old wound without asking for a bandage.
"Why do we have to be so kind to ghosts?" I asked.
"Because ghosts are homesick," Vaughn said. "And home never comes back unless someone remembers it."
That night I dreamed of a woman with my face in a painting on a wall. She smiled like a day with sunlight in it. I woke up with a strange empty ache like a song missing a final note.
Weeks passed. I practiced. I failed. I cried sometimes. But I posted every day. The more we filmed, the more people watched. My follower count grew like a vine up a wall.
"Eight thousand," I told Grandpa one afternoon. "Thirty thousand. It is a thing."
"You used to play for funerals," Gustav said. "Not for what the world calls fame. But if fame feeds you, then feed."
We sketched a plan: I would go to the mountain every day, practice with Vaughn, learn breath and tone and the touch of the suona. He would teach me technique and history. I would film. I would be careful.
"Every time you hit three notes right, I will give you an old hairpin," Vaughn joked one evening, producing a thin metal piece that glittered even under the low light. "It is mine. Keep one as a promise."
"You are bribing me with jewelry?" I said, laughing despite myself. He stuck the hairpin into my hair in a way that made the world tilt.
That hairpin stayed with me. I would play the tune and feel it press against my scalp like a small, stubborn promise.
Vaughn's teaching was strange but patient. He would place his hands over mine on the instrument and move them just so. I would feel the heat of him like a living person. His hands were cool, but not the cold of the grave. He guided breath and posture. He corrected tiny faults.
"You have a stubborn mouth," he said once. "Loosen it when you blow."
"You're the one who complained about my playing!" I shot back.
"One must complain to teach," Vaughn said.
As the weeks unwound, little things happened that I could not explain. When I put my hands into his to make a difficult roll, my heart would skip like a stone into a pond. When he laughed at something I did poorly, it felt like a bell in the chest.
"Do you like me?" I dared to ask once, stupidly.
Vaughn didn't answer right away. He looked at the valley as if he could see a shape down there. "I like when you are stubborn," he said. "You make the mountain less lonely."
Heart-throb moment one.
I did better. I learned a tune well enough to stop the mountainside dogs from howling. We filmed longer, more tender videos. I edited them with a funny cut here and a filter there. People loved it: the contrast between a pretty, laughing girl and a stiff, old gentleman with the best forehead.
"You're going to be famous," Vaughn said once, clapping slowly.
"I'm already getting messages," I said. "They want to meet the mountain suona girl. They send hearts like little storms."
His eyes softened. "Don't let city lights burn you," he warned.
"Then come to the city," I said.
"I belong here," Vaughn answered. "I have to follow a road I broke."
We both changed. I learned to listen to the space between notes. He learned to laugh at a forward edit. We both learned patience and jokes and a kind of closeness that made me forget fear.
Heart-throb moment two: one evening we filmed a simple clip of him pretending to be serious and then cracking a tiny grin. Hundreds of people commented that he was "impossibly handsome," and the way he looked at me when he laughed made my stomach feel like someone had struck a clever bell.
By the end of the second month, I could play a full tune without falling apart. My fingers finally obeyed me and my breath found a place to rest. Vaughn declared that I had the rhythm of the old river.
"You will save me," he said.
"Don't say that," I said. "This song should be for your freedom, not mine."
"It will be for both," he insisted.
The day before the third month ended, he said one line that landed like a stone in water.
"Tonight," Vaughn said. "At midnight. Come. Bring the suona and play 'The River's Farewell.'"
"The River's Farewell" was not a song I had known. It was a tune he hummed—a low, aching line that felt like an empty cup. He said it was the song that could loosen chains of longing.
I prepared. I tightened the hairpin in my hair, like fastening a compass. I carried the suona and my phone and a small lantern. I climbed to the stone and found Vaughn waiting, palms behind his head, as if he had always known it would come.
"Are you ready?" he asked.
"Ready as I'll ever be," I said.
We began. I played the opening line and something inside me opened. The melody flowed like water across stone. Vaughn closed his eyes. He smiled, and the smile looked like someone remembering better weather.
Halfway through the tune, the air trembled. There was a sound like a low bell and a wind rose that smelled of rain and the salt of a faraway sea.
"Keep going," Vaughn murmured.
I did. I wrapped breath with breath, the suona singing clear. This time the notes did not wobble. The mountain listened.
When the final note hung and died, Vaughn sighed as if a great weight had dropped from his chest.
"Good," he said. "Very good."
He lay back on the rock and looked at the sky.
"Will you leave?" I asked.
He said nothing at first, then turned his head. "I will go where I am supposed," he said. "But not before I tell you something you must know."
"Tell me."
"You were my promise once," he said. "Once, I promised a girl I would return. The girl in a painted wall waited for me. I could not let her go. I could not stand that promise broken. That is how I stayed."
I listened. Something tightened in my chest like a string. "What was her name?"
"She looked like you," he said, and that was all he said.
Heart-throb moment three: He touched my hand, and the touch was not a ghostly thing but a presence that made my breath small and bright.
"Promise me one thing," he whispered.
I waited.
"Find me again," he said. "If I am to come back right, find me again."
"I will," I answered too easily.
"Good," he said. "Now play the rest."
I finished the last few notes, and the night felt like it exhaled. The dust around Vaughn seemed to pull together. He lay very still. His eyes, which had always been deep, finally softened.
"Thank you," he said.
His hands slackened. Dust took the place of fingers. The suit that had seemed full of old stories wilted like a photograph left in the rain.
I screamed into the dark.
I gathered up the hairpin that had come from his coat pocket and stuck it into my sleeve like a talisman. I ran down the mountain and clung to the phone as if it could catch him.
When I returned the next day, the rock was just rock and there was only a small, tidy pile of things where he had been. The hairpin was mine in a real way now, but it didn't feel like victory.
I went into his burial cave, the one under the big stone, with my lantern shaking in my hand. I pushed aside the dirt and found a coffin, open and empty, lined with coins and wrapped in scarves. On the wall above, a painting: a woman in a dress that looked half like my face and half like a memory.
I fell to my knees. The painting looked like me, only older and softer, smiling as if at a man who would come home.
"Who are you?" I whispered to the painted woman, but it felt silly to question oil on plaster.
Then a voice like a chain being rubbed came from the dark.
"You remember," it croaked.
I looked up. A shadow wavered, and then a figure stepped forward. It was neither perfectly human nor only a rumor. The figure was a dark-trimmed official with heavy, tired shoes.
"I am a ferryman of a sort," he said. "I come to collect debts and tally names. Your story is thick with ties."
"Tell me everything," I begged.
He sat on the coffin's edge and began, and he did not spare the small, bitter details. It was a story of promises and a city by water and a wedding that did not happen. He said my painted face was not a trick but a memory carved into the tomb because once upon a time a man named Vaughn had loved a girl named like me and could not let her go. When the world tore them apart, he came to the mountain and built a guard of his will to wait, to bargain, to try and keep a thing tied to his chest.
"You were parted," the ferryman said. "She died before the bridegroom came back. He made a terrible choice. He would not let her go, and he turned himself into something that would linger. He called the road of ghosts back to himself, and he broke rules to bind her down."
"He loved her," I said, almost pleading. "How could that be wrong?"
"He loved a memory more than the world," the ferryman said. "Love is not wrong, but binding someone, making the world freeze, is a heavy thing. He paid for it. He waited and waited. He forged a name now told as a ghost story."
"Did he find peace?" I asked.
"Tonight, maybe," the ferryman said. "Because you were the song. You handed him a release. But there are other rules. When a memory wakes, a memory can remember. You were part of a circle. You must walk your side of it."
I left the tomb with more questions than answers. The painting had followed me like a shadow. That night I remembered pieces I had not known were mine: a courtyard with a well, the feel of a braid in my hair, the taste of tea that tasted like summer and rain.
A dangerous thing in memory is that once you remember, you cannot forget.
The next day, I could not sit. I had to follow the ferryman's words that said Vaughn might have to cross a path called the Northeast Way, a narrow road through the trees where ghosts pass on their journey. If I wanted to stop him from being taken, I had to go to that road.
I ran there. The trees were close and the fog moved like breath. The laughs of old spirits sounded like children. I called his name until my throat burned.
"Vaughn!" I shouted. "Vaughn, wait!"
A figure caught me and held me like a man grabs a babe. It was him. He smelled of rain and the ocean and a suit that was not quite new. He looked at me as if I were both stranger and promise.
"You remembered," he said, amazed.
"I remembered," I said. "I remember everything."
Welcome back to a memory that is heavy with sun and steam, I thought. But when I looked at him, I saw his face—young and old in the same glance—and I felt the old ache and a new resolve.
"I came to take you with me," he said. "I cannot bear to be home alone."
"If you go," I said, "you must promise me you won't only hold a memory of me. You must live, again."
"I will be alive," Vaughn said. "I will find a way."
He put his forehead to mine and made a small vow that felt real, not ghostly. I pressed my hand against his cheek and tasted the salt of old promises.
"You will find me again," I whispered.
"I will," he said, and the words were a light like a match struck.
Then he did what he had to do. He walked into the mist. He gave me a last look. The fog swallowed him like a song swallowed by the wind. I fell to my knees and screamed, because that is all a torn heart is good for at that moment.
Time moved. It is a crude healer but it moves. I kept playing. I kept filming. My followers became many. My life was more than the mountain. I bought better lights and a small microphone that caught every breath.
Ten years later I climbed the same slope and played the same tune just because I could. My hair had lines that laughed at the wind and my suona had marks of use.
A small boy sat on a rock and watched me. He had eyes that were bright as new pennies and a laugh that fell like early rain. His name—he said proudly—was Vaughn Freeman.
"You are the suona woman," he said, and his voice was a child and a line from a song.
"Yes," I said, and my throat filled until the old knot loosened.
"Are you waiting for me?" he asked with the raw, honest belief of a child.
"I have waited a long time," I said. "Can you wait a little longer while you grow?"
He nodded like a plant turning to the sun. "I will come back quicker than ten years," he promised with the easy faith of someone who believes the sky listens.
I laughed and let tears go, and they felt like rain washing salt. I put my hairpin into my pocket. The painting on the tomb in the cave still looked like me when I closed my eyes. The suona still sang like an arrow.
"Grow," I said to the boy. "Grow fast and come find me."
He grinned, earnest and sure, a small mirror of the man who had taught me and loved me and let me learn him away.
"Okay," he said. "I'll be right back."
That line was something no one else would say in any other story: a promise between a woman who learned to play and a boy who carried an old name like a secret.
I lifted the suona and played for the mountain, for the hairpin under my pillow, for the painted face in a coffin cave, for the ferryman and the fog, for Vaughn who had once been a man and for Vaughn who would grow into one.
The wind took the notes up the slope and the valley held them like a secret. I put my hand in my pocket and felt the cold of the metal hairpin, safe as a promise.
The End
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