Free Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber

before,” Gun interjected. “I mean, about having Cal at the hospital.”
    “So?” Saul said and shrugged. “Well, she arrived about an hour after the day shift left, looking somewhat pale and apprehensive but excited…and almost immediately everything in the ward started to get out of hand and go wacko. Mrs. Willis began to whine and wail about herterrible misfortunes—she wasn’t due to do that for a week, I’d figured, it’s really heartrending to hear—and that set off Miss Craig, who’s good at screaming. Mr. Schmidt, who’d been very well behaved for over a month, managed to get his pants down and unload a pile of shit before we could stop him in front of Mr. Bugatti’s door, who’s his ‘enemy’ from time to time—and we hadn’t had that sort of thing happening on the ward since the previous year. Meanwhile, Mrs. Gutmayer bad overturned her dinner tray and was vomiting, and Mr. Stowacki had somehow managed to break a plate and cut himself—and Mrs. Harper was screaming at the sight of blood (there wasn’t much) and that made two of them (two screamers—not in Fay Wray’s class, but good).
    “Well, naturally I had to abandon Cal to her own devices while we dealt with all this, though of course I was wondering what she must be thinking and kicking myself for having invited her over at all and for being such a megalomaniac about my ability to predict and forestall disasters.
    “By the time I got back to her, Cal had gone or retreated to the recreation room with young Mr. Sloan and a couple of others, and she’d discovered our piano and was quietly trying it out—horribly out of tune, of course, it must have been, at least to her ears.
    “She listened to the hurried rundown I gave her on things—excuses, I suppose—we didn’t usually have shit out in the halls, etcetera—and from time to time she’d nod, but she kept on working steadily at the piano at the same time, as if she were hunting for the keys that were least discordant (afterward she confirmed that that was exactly what she had been doing). She was paying attention to me, all right, but she was doing this piano thing, too.
    “About then I became aware that the excitement was building up behind me in the ward again and that Harry’s (young Sloan’s) petit mal seizures were coming much closer together than they ought to, while he was pacing restlessly in a circle around the recreation room. By my count he wasn’t due to climax until the next night, but now he’d unaccountably speeded up his cycle so he’d throw his grand mal fit tonight for sure—in a very short time, in fact.
    “I started to warn Cal about what was likely to happen, but just then she sat back and screwed up her face a little, like she sometimes does when she’s starting a concert, and then she began to play something very catchy of Mozart’s—Cherubino’s Song from The Marriage of Figaro , it turned out to be—but in what seemed to be the most discordant key of all on that banged-up old upright (afterward she confirmed this, too).
    “Next thing, she was modulating the music into another key that was only a shade less discordant than the first, and so on and so on. Believe it or not, in her fooling around she’d worked out a succession of the keys from the most to the least discordant on that old out-of-tune loonies’ piano, and now she was playing that Mozart air in all of them in the same order, least to most harmonious—Cherubino’s Song, the words to which go something like (in English) ‘We who love’s power surely do feel—why should it ever through my heart steal?’ And then there’s something about ‘in my sorrow lingers delight.’
    “Meanwhile, I could feel the tensions building up around me and I could actually see young Harry’s petit mal attacks coming faster and faster as he shuffled around, and I knew he was going to have his big one the next minute, and I began to wonder if I shouldn’t stop Cal by grabbing her wrists as if