Song for the Dead

In Austin, where the air hums with the ghosts of old songs and the river runs green as a liar’s promise, the nights sometimes stretch too long. Nights when the bats under the Congress Avenue Bridge aren’t the only things stirring. I’ve lived here all my life—thirty-two years of sweat-slicked summers and winters that never bite deep—and I thought I knew this city.

I was wrong.

My name is Elias Marrow, and I make guitars. Not factory-stamped clones but real ones—built by hand in a shop so cramped I sometimes dream the walls are closing in. The smell of cedar and lacquer seeps into my clothes, my skin, my bones. I like it that way. There’s a kind of quiet in the work, a rhythm as true as a heartbeat. A man shapes wood, and if he listens right, the wood shapes him back.

That quiet ended the night she walked in.

It was late February, the 21st of 2025, if the calendar on my workbench wasn’t lying. Outside, the sky burned purple and gold, the kind of sunset that makes you forgive Texas for everything else. My hands were deep in sawdust, shaping a fretboard, when the door chime rang—a single brass note, light and trembling.

I looked up.

She stood just inside the doorway, letting the night curl around her before stepping forward. Tall, lean, and dark as midnight, with a coat that hung like a second skin—leather, old but worn with intent. She moved like someone who knew exactly how much space she took up and exactly who would try to take it from her.

No guitar case. No broken strings. Just herself. And still, somehow, the room felt smaller.

“You’re Elias,” she said. Not a question. Her voice was low, like the hum of a cello string in a dark room.

“That’s what the sign says.” I wiped my hands on my jeans. “You need something fixed?”

“No.” She stepped closer, and the air shifted. Cooler. Sharper. Like the first breath before a storm. “I need something made.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I don’t do commissions for just anyone.”

She tilted her head, and for a moment, it was like watching a cat weigh the distance between one rooftop and the next. Then she smiled—just a little. “This isn’t for just anyone. It’s for a performance. Tomorrow night. Under the bridge.”

I didn’t have to ask which bridge. Every Austinite knows about the Congress bat bridge. At dusk, the sky swarms black with wings, tourists snapping pictures while locals sip beer and pretend they’re used to it. But no one plays music there.

Not unless they want to play for something else.

“What kind of performance?” I asked, even though my gut already knew I wouldn’t like the answer.

She held my gaze. “The kind that sings to the dead.”

The words should have been ridiculous. I should have laughed, or rolled my eyes, or pointed her toward the Cathedral of Junk, where the real weirdos hang out. But there was something in her eyes. Something that didn’t blink.

I’ve seen strange things in this city. A man rollerblading naked down Sixth Street. Murals that seem to shift when you aren’t looking. Stories passed between bartenders about places you don’t go after midnight. But this wasn’t that kind of strange.

This was the kind that doesn’t bend.

“Lady,” I said slowly, “I make instruments, not miracles.”

“Then make me an instrument,” she replied. “I’ll handle the miracle.”

She set five thousand dollars on my workbench. Cash. Crisp hundreds, pulled from the folds of that leather coat. More than I’d make in a month.

I should have said no.

Instead, I ran my fingers over the cedar blank I’d been saving for something special. It felt warm, almost humming under my touch.

And I took the job. Because I’m a fool.

And because the wood was whispering to me that night.

The work took all night.

I didn’t sleep. Couldn’t. My hands moved like they belonged to someone else, guided by something just beyond the edge of thought. I carved the neck from a single piece of mahogany, shaping it by feel more than sight, the wood warm and pliant beneath my fingers. The fretboard—ebony, dark as a moonless night—took inlays of silver wire I didn’t remember buying.

The body was cedar, pale and fragrant, and when I brushed away the shavings, the grain swirled beneath my fingertips like smoke frozen in glass. I strung it with steel—bright, cold steel that sang when I tuned it. And it did sing. Even before I finished tightening the last peg, I could hear it. A voice, waiting.

By dawn, it was done.

It sat on my workbench, humming with something more than the sum of its parts. It was the best guitar I had ever made. Maybe the best I ever would make. And for the first time in my life, I felt like I hadn’t built an instrument at all.

I had let something be born.

I met Veyra under the bridge at dusk.

The air was thick with the musk of bat guano and river silt, the cicadas thrumming like they were keeping time for something older than us both. Above, tourists lined the railings, cameras poised, waiting for the bats to spill into the twilight. None of them looked down. None of them saw her step from the shadows, moving like a blade slipping free of its sheath.

She took the guitar without a word. Her fingers brushed mine, and a shiver ran through me—not the pleasant kind. They were cold. Not cool, not chilled—cold, like river stones pulled from the depths. Like something that had forgotten the warmth of the sun.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” I said. The realization felt like a splinter working its way free from my skin. “A vampire.”

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. “Does it matter?”

“It might.”

“Then yes,” she said, and her smile showed teeth—sharp, too sharp, gleaming like the silver in the fretboard. “But not the way you think.”

I should have stepped back. Should have run. But I didn’t. Because I’d heard the stories. Everyone in Austin has.

Whispers about the ones who never age, never die. The ones who haunt the fringes of the city, sipping from the veins of South Congress drifters and Rainey Street revelers. The old legends, dressed up in new clothes, half-truths folded into bar stories and sold on Uncommon Objects T-shirts.

I’d never believed them. Not really.

But standing there, with the bats rustling overhead and Veyra’s gaze holding mine like a hook through flesh, I believed.

“Why me?” I asked.

She tilted her head, listening to something I couldn’t hear. “Because you listen,” she said. “Because you hear it. The song beneath the noise. I’ve watched you, Elias. Your hands don’t just shape wood—they listen.”

I opened my mouth, but there was no answer to that.

No time for one, either.

Veyra turned, cradling the guitar against her hip, and struck the first chord.

The sound moved.

It wasn’t just music. It was something older, something deeper. The first note rolled out like a distant storm, low and resonant, vibrating in my ribs like another heartbeat. Above us, the bats stilled. The cicadas stopped their song. Even the river seemed to hush, the lapping of water against stone going silent.

Then she layered chords over it, complex and mournful, a melody that ached like old sorrow, like rain on a dry and waiting earth. It wasn’t a song—it was a summons.

The guitar sang, and the world listened.

And then the shadows moved.

They unfurled from the cracks in the concrete, from the silt along the riverbank, from the dark places where the city had forgotten itself. Wisps of night, pooling into shapes: a woman in a flapper dress, her pearl necklace gleaming against her spectral throat. A soldier, his shoulders slumped with the weight of things he could no longer carry. A child clutching a rag doll, her fingers curled so tight the fabric strained.

The dead.

Summoned by the song.

I took a step back, my boot scuffing against gravel. “What the hell—”

“Stay,” Veyra said, and her voice cut through the air like the edge of a blade. “They won’t harm you. They’re mine.”

The figures swayed, drawn forward by the music. Their hollow eyes glowed faintly, fixed on her. On the guitar.

On me.

I felt their weight, their longing, like a cold hand pressed to the back of my neck.

I swallowed. “Why?”

Veyra’s fingers never faltered. “Because they’re lost,” she murmured. “And I owe them a song.”

The music wove through the night, unspooling something old, something aching. It bent time, stretching it thin as a worn-out string. For minutes. For hours. I don’t know. I only know that when she finally let the last note fade, the shadows faded with it.

Dissolving.

Returning to dust, to silence.

Above us, the bats erupted—a black storm against the sky, shrieking as they took flight. The tourists above cheered, thinking it was all part of the show.

Veyra turned to me and pressed the guitar into my hands.

“Keep it,” she said.

I curled my fingers around the neck, the wood still warm from her touch. “I don’t want it,” I lied.

Her smile was small, knowing. “You will.”

And then she was gone, swallowed by the night like she had never been.

I didn’t sleep that night either.

I sat in my shop, the guitar on my workbench, its strings gleaming in the lamplight. It looked the same as before—cedar body, silver-fretted neck, steel strings humming with the memory of touch. But it wasn’t the same.

I plucked a note—just one.

The air shivered.

A flicker in the corner of my eye. A shape, just beyond sight. I turned, but there was nothing.

I didn’t play again.

Days passed. I locked the guitar in a case, slid it under my bed like a relic too sacred—or too dangerous—to leave in the open. I told myself it was over. That it had been a strange night, a trick of the mind, an elaborate performance for an audience that hadn’t realized they were watching.

But I couldn’t stop hearing it. Even in silence, it thrummed beneath my skin, humming through the grain of my bones. I heard it in my dreams, layered with Veyra’s voice, her fingers moving over the strings like a whisper against the dark.

Austin went on around me—tacos at Torchy’s, traffic grinding along I-35, the endless strum of guitars spilling from Sixth Street bars. But the city had a pulse now, a rhythm I couldn’t unhear. The neon signs flickered in time with it. The wind in the pecan trees carried harmonics I hadn’t noticed before.

Something had shifted.

On the fifth night, I gave in.

I took it out. Sat at the edge of my bed and cradled it like something fragile. The steel was cool against my fingers, but beneath that, the wood was warm. Like a living thing. Like a body still holding the last of its heat.

I strummed a chord—soft, tentative.

The shadows gathered.

Faint at first. Wisps in the corners of the room. The shape of a hand that was gone when I turned to see it. A breath where no one stood. They didn’t move, didn’t speak.

They listened.

I don’t know how long I played. I only know that when I stopped, I felt emptied—like the music had poured something out of me, like I had paid a price I didn’t know I owed.

I thought about that night beneath the bridge, the way the bats had erupted into flight just as the dead had faded.

Had they carried them?

It was absurd. But I couldn’t shake the image—the ghosts unraveling like mist, drawn up into the wings of a thousand black shapes, ferried into the sky.

Where had they gone?

Did it matter?

Maybe they had simply been waiting for someone to play them home.

The guitar is different now. I can feel it, like a knot beneath my fingertips. A weight. It isn’t just an instrument anymore, and I am not just a man who builds them.

Veyra knew that. Knew exactly what she was doing when she left it with me.

I don’t know what she is. A vampire, sure, but not the kind we tell stories about. She doesn’t haunt clubs looking for easy prey, doesn’t curl into a coffin before dawn. She is something older. A keeper of the forgotten, of the things Austin has paved over and rewritten in neon and cheap beer.

And me?

I don’t know why she chose me. But I know this: I am part of it now.

The song.

The dead.

The ember beneath the live oaks.

And every night, I play a little more, wondering how long it’ll be before she comes back.

Or before I go looking for her.