Chapter Three
Song
It couldn't be said that the fearsome head of the great manor of the Baskerville clan and his two closest servants lacked in taste or in appreciation of the arts. On the contrary, their education was as fine as was required from ones of their rank and influence. They were authors of exquisite music and charming prose that was undoubtedly bound to cross ages and reach the hearts of people centuries later. And in the middle of this refined company, a single man stood out like the outsider he was. It wasn't that he lacked grace himself, far from it. But there was like something in the air around him that indicated that no matter how close he was to them, he ultimately didn't belong in the same dimension. He was an otherworldly piece of art and they were fine connoisseurs.
If anything, Jack was a lot like a song. Loving him was painful, hating him was harder than initially supposed. Letting him close to your heart was a dangerous mistake, keeping him at a distance was hard and lonely. The man was lovable and equally despicable, sickening and comforting, and you needed the eye of an artist and the heart of a poet to love him. To see all the corruption within his soul and still somehow find him pure, to witness the ugliness of his warped nature and still see a thing of beauty.
To Oswald, Jack was the melody played with skill and delicacy. He was a maddeningly bold piece; the cheerful, happy sound of a major key that was composed with as much skills and as little feelings as was humanly possible. It sounded empty and calculated, and yet at the same time lovely and comforting, deceptive joy interspersed with subtle borrowed chords of foreboding. An ephemeral sad and ominous sonority you could easily miss if you don't listen carefully, and one you could blissfully ignore until the piece nears its end and switches definitely to an unsettling minor key of pure anguish.
To Lacie, he was the poem sung ever so carefully over her brother's piano. It was a song of simple words; a sweet, feather-like rhythm that made it sound like a nursery rhyme. And yet, if you listened to its actual meaning, it was but a disconcerting sequence of dark words that spoke of beautifully pure yet destructive love, one that bordered on madness and despair. A twisted, elegant refrain that expressed joy and pleasure and implied sadness and loneliness. It was a sweet-sounding song that paradoxically conveyed the fragile state of the human mind, the transient character of love and friendship, and a fate carved in blood, loneliness and devastation.
To Levi, Jack was the story both the melody and the lyrics conveyed. His whole being was the unexpected development of a monotonous plot. He was that character that could suck in the audience, enrapture it, be exactly what they asked for and exactly what they didn't wish for. He would make the gallery cry for him in compassion, or scream for his head in anger. Just with that sweet smile of his, he could seduce and infuriate, equally induce love and hate, pity and rage. He was that character who could be both the beginning and the end of the story, that one who could keep the audience entertained with all the contradictions he brought along until that very last note, when he would vanish suddenly to a silence so deafening that it'd make you doubt you were even hearing something before.