Relics, Wrecks and Ruins

by Aiki Flinthart

  “Stop calling me that! And what do you mean, a three-set show? What happens now?”

  He started back up the stairs to the house. “We got his attention. Now we kick the shit out of him until he decides to leave for greener pastures.” He stopped at the top of the steps. “You coming?”

  “What happens if I don’t?”

  The back of his shoulders rose and fell. “Who knows? Maybe he’ll live. Maybe he’ll die. Maybe everyone inside that house gets consigned to some living hell.”

  “What? You can’t put that shit on me! I’m just a guitar player!”

  Jacks just stood there facing the front door. “Not even a particularly good one from what I’ve seen.” His hand wrapped around the doorknob and turned. “If you stay, you’d better get real fucking good, real fucking soon, Axe Girl.”

  #

  She followed Jacks inside the house without being sure why.

  Fuck, maybe I’m possessed now.

  Through the hallway and up the interior stairs to the second floor, where she had to step over Kyle’s parents who were huddled on the floor holding each other and crying. They looked shell-shocked. Part of her sympathized with their plight. The rest of her wanted to kick them in the ribs until they got off their asses and did something.

  “Don’t judge what you don’t understand,” Jacks said, as if he could read her thoughts.

  Inside the bedroom, Kyle still lay flat on his back, seemingly unconscious, but when she walked by him, he said, “Gonna take you, baby. Gonna take you all the way down with me tonight.”

  “Don’t know that song.” She plugged the Strat back into her tuner and plucked the bottom E string. She couldn’t believe how out of tune the guitar was. She’d never smashed the strings that hard before. It was a miracle they hadn’t all broken.

  “What now?” she asked Jacks.

  “First set was to get its attention,” he replied. “Now we soften him up, see if he can stand the heat.”

  “And if he can?” She watched Kyle roll onto his stomach, then push against the mattress with his hands, his torso rising up like a cobra.

  Jacks raised an eyebrow. “Just keep playing.”

  “And what if we can’t?” They hadn’t even started up again yet and already she was more tired than she’d ever been at a gig. “What happens when we run out of steam?”

  Jacks walked over to the bed and leaned down going eye to eye with Kyle. “Then this little fucker eats our souls.”

  #

  They were halfway through the second set when things got weirder—and worse. For the first few songs, Kyle stomped all over his bed acting for all the world like a petulant child determined to get their attention. He said things Jen shouldn’t have been able to hear over the music.

  “You really believe all this garbage they’ve been feeding you, Baby Jen?” he asked as she was finished off an improvised solo during some blues song Jacks had called out. “I mean, which is more likely?” Kyle went on. “That, after millennia of exorcisms being proven to be bunkum, you happen to find yourself in the middle of a real one? Or that two desperate, gullible parents fooled themselves into believing the source of their son’s cancer is possession by the devil?”

  Jen did her best to ignore him, which he didn’t seem to mind because he had no end of ways to get her attention back.

  “Just look around,” he commanded.

  Her solo done and Jacks back to crooning his lead vocal, she found she couldn’t stop herself from doing as the kid suggested. Signs of religious fervor were everywhere. The cross over the bed, family photos arranged into a cross on the wall, the sword-wielding angel bookends on the shelf. Books with titles like, Healing with God’s Power and No Such Thing as Coincidence: Seven Signs Your Child is Possessed.

  “See what I mean?” Kyle asked. “These people are crazy.”

  He stood on the edge of his mattress again, ignoring Jacks’s raucous performance and undoing the buttons of his pajama top. On his chest were several burns, all the shape of a crucifix inside a circle.

  Shit, Jen thought. They branded the poor kid.

  An elbow jostled her in the ribs.

  “Focus,” Lucy said.

  Jen stumbled over the next chords trying to get back on track, but her fingers felt awkward, swollen. She looked at her hands to find the skin a sickly white, the veins exposed like those of a corpse pulled from the water. Her mouth filled with bile that she tried to spit out, but it clogged her throat, choking her. Only after forcing a violent cough did she manage to spew it out onto the floor and all over her clothes.

  “Keep playing,” Lucy warned. “The music’s the only thing keeping him out of you.”

  With horrifying, stilted slowness, she forced her fingers to take the shape of the next chord and strummed. The nausea subsided a little, and her fingers found their positions on the fretboard again.

  For the next six songs, Jen tried to ignore everything she heard from the bed, focusing only on the tactile sensations of her right hand, holding the pick and slamming it against the strings, the dull thud of Levon’s kick drum coming up through her feet, and the way Lucy’s bass sent vibrations through her whole body. All the while, Johnny Jacks sang his heart out in a pitched battle against something Jen couldn’t see but was utterly and terrifyingly aware of.

  Kyle gesticulated at her, using his body to get the attention his words could no longer draw from her—not that he shut up at all. He shouted, pleaded, moaned, cackled, and made every other use of the apparatus of a boy’s throat he could.

  Somewhere in that second set, Jen Farmer started believing in the Devil.

  #

  Johnny called a halt to the second set after just half an hour, and that, even more than the haunted look in his eyes, told her something was wrong. As her guitar’s last ringing chord died, the singer stumbled out of the room, leaving the three of them behind.

  “Come on,” Levon said, leading her out. He, too, looked shell-shocked.

  Lucy Bottom was crying, which seemed incongruous with the sureness of her bass playing.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Jacks spoke in hushed tones to the parents. Despite the quiet, Jen heard the raggedness in the singer’s voice. Kyle’s parents shook their heads, pleading with Jacks.

  “I’m sorry,” he just kept saying.

  “What’s going on?” Jen asked Levon.

  “Johnny can’t cut the thing loose.”

  “So, what now?”

  The drummer shuffled past her without answering and stepped into the little bathroom in the hallway. He slammed the door shut, and a moment later she heard him puking.

  “Lucy?” she asked.

  The bass player walked out the front door. Jen followed.

  “Sorry you got pulled into this shit,” Lucy said.

  Jen sat on the front steps next to her. “Would’ve been nice to get a heads-up beforehand.”

  Lucy stared off at the empty street ahead of them. “Wanted: guitar player for exorcism, must be able to improvise in all styles and fight demons.”

  “What’s really going on in there?”

  “What do you think is going on?”

  Jen balked at the question, finding herself unexpectedly on the defensive. She’d been prepared for Lucy to rattle off some nonsense about demons and possession—which would have let Jen scoff or deny it or maybe even allow it might be possible.

  “The kid’s fucked up,” was the only answer she could come up with that neither denied the evidence of her eyes nor admitted that the thing poking at her guts seemed only to lack her belief before it would crawl right into her throat and choke her from the inside.

  Lucy shrugged. “Let’s say that’s all it is. Let’s throw out all the…weird shit for a second, and say this is some unusual mental disorder.”

  “I can live with that.”

  “Fine. So how do you fix a kid with that kind of problem?”

  “Drugs. Therapy. Um…electric shocks?”

  Lucy spit onto t
he grass. “They tried all that. None of it worked.”

  Jen searched for another answer. When nothing suggested itself, she asked, “So rock music is the last resort? I mean, what’s the…” Crap. She really knew nothing about psychology, neurology, or pretty much anything with an ‘ology’ appended to it. “How’s it supposed to work?”

  Lucy held up a hand, palm parallel to the porch, and shook it up and down. “Music vibrates the air, right? Our brains turn waves into sound. But when those sounds take the shape of music, they vibrate other things, too.” She placed her hand low down on Jen’s stomach. “Here. And it turns out, this is also where those…whatever they are that can take possession of a human being…get inside us.”

  “You’re back to talking voodoo shit.”

  Lucy gave her a wry smile. “I tried to let you hold onto your hang-ups as long as I could. From here on out, it gets freaky.”

  Freaky. Jesus Christ. Understatement of the year. “Fine. Let’s say I come along for the ride here, you’re saying the music—”

  “Not any music. The right songs, the right intensity, hitting all the right resonances. That’s the only way to shake loose whatever’s inside that kid.”

  “So how do you figure out all those ‘right’ elements?”

  “I don’t.” The bass player looked back up the steps where light from the hallway seeped onto the porch. “Johnny’s the only one who can do it.”

  That, as much as every other weird thing that had been said tonight, was almost the hardest thing to believe.

  “A rock ’n’ roll exorcist.”

  “Only one in the lower forty-eight,” Lucy confirmed. “There’s a guy up in Alaska, but he never leaves the state.”

  “So, you’ve seen this work?” Jen asked. “You’ve seen people cured?”

  “One time, yeah. Not a kid, though. An old woman in a nursing home.”

  “You cured her?”

  “Yep. She died peacefully in her sleep a week later.”

  “A week? One week?”

  “Hey, it’s better than nothing. Besides, where she was headed was worse.”

  Jen chewed on that for a minute. “So, here you are, in some suburban house, crying your eyes out between sets while Levon hurls up his guts, and your one success story is an old woman who ended up dying a week later. Why would you even bother?”

  Lucy looked away. “Because I’ve seen what happens the other times.” Still not meeting Jen’s eyes, she rose and trudged back up the stairs into the house. “You should probably go home, Jen. The third set’s always the worst.”

  #

  Jen was halfway to the kid’s bedroom when a visibly strung-out Johnny Jacks stopped her in the hall.

  “Just wait here,” he said. “Me and Levon’ll pack up your gear for you.”

  She’d been heading to the bedroom to do precisely that. She’d been prepared for an argument with Johnny to get her stuff. Figured he’d go all Jesus on her and give a hundred reasons why she should stay and help him fight the good fight over the kid’s soul. But Jacks just looked at her as if she was some dumb bystander he was pushing out of the way of oncoming traffic.

  “Who says I’m leaving?” she asked.

  The aging rocker’s sneer made its way to his face, but for a second, she saw the other thing in his eyes—the thing she’d never expected to see there: hope.

  “Not your war, kid.”

  Jen had played guitar since she was fifteen years old. Even then, her parents, her teachers, and most of all, every band she’d been in, had said she’d started too late; she didn’t have that ‘spark’; her playing was workmanlike at best and ‘girly’ at worst. She’d practiced every day but it was never enough; played until her fingers had turned numb and then gone through harrowing visits to a neurologist who’d told her she needed to lighten up on the practicing or risk permanent nerve damage.

  “Besides,” the doctor had said, “I thought you rock musicians weren’t about perfection. Isn’t it all about soul?”

  Soul. Yeah, Jen could’ve used some soul in her playing.

  “So, you figure this ‘war’ belongs to you?” she asked Jacks.

  He licked his lips, not like a perv but like somebody’s uncle trying to figure out a nice way to say a kid wasn’t ready for football tryouts. “You didn’t sign up for this. It’s the worst case I’ve ever seen. Three hundred dollars is a lousy payday for what comes next.”

  “Then why are you going back in there?”

  He ran a hand through greasy graying hair. “I’m old, kid. If I go down fighting, well, I wasn’t going to live that long anyway. I don’t try? Then what’s the point of living?”

  Lucy and Levon squeezed past her in the hallway and headed into the kid’s bedroom.

  “What about them?” Jen asked. “Why are they going back?”

  “No idea,” he replied. There was a subtle break in his voice, and his eyes were wet. “Until five seconds ago, I figured they were going to leave.” He patted her on the shoulder and headed towards the bedroom. “It was good playing with you, kid. Couple of times in that second set I heard a lion clawing at the doors of her cage getting ready to bust out. Don’t ever listen to anyone who says you’re second rate, Jen Farmer.”

  He left her standing there. A lion clawing at the doors of her cage. Twenty years of playing guitar and that was the only time anyone had described her playing in a way that made sense. Of course, given what a manipulative prick Jacks was, there was a decent chance he’d said it just to see if he could make her stick around.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  “Hey, old man,” she called.

  Jacks poked his head out of the bedroom. “Yeah?”

  She pushed him out of the way and entered the bedroom.

  The air was thick with a kind of green-black haze that stank of every kind of death and decay. Lucy and Levon were barely on their feet, coughing from the stench and trying not to look at the eight-year-old boy who floated, cross-legged, two feet above his mattress. Particles of puke, shit, and urine floated around him like Saturn’s rings.

  When she walked in, Kyle said, “You’re the one I’m going to rip apart first, Jennifer.”

  She plugged the amp cable into her guitar, not even bothering to tune the Strat, but instead turning the gain all the way up.

  “The name’s Axe Girl, you little shit.”

  #

  “No more covers,” Jacks said. “No more playing it safe.”

  Levon started up a heavy, nasty beat on the drums. Lucy plucked a steady rhythm of straight eighths on the second fret of the bottom string of her bass, but Jen knew the key wasn’t going to stay in F-sharp; this was going to be E all the way—open strings wherever possible, the strongest vibrations with a standard tuning.

  Jen turned the Strat towards her amp, not touching anything but the whammy bar, letting the feedback build up. It was such a cheesy, guy-liner-and-black-leather-pants thing to do. But fuck it: fighting a demon called for a little showing off.

  “Well, all right, motherfuckers,” Jacks declared, the last syllable swooping up from a low baritone note all the way to a high tenor range that shook the bedroom windows. “Show me what you got!”

  Jen blasted into an E-9 chord with an almost funk rhythm that ran counter to what the others were playing but would’ve made Prince proud. The effect was both dissonant and yet somehow sweet; the wrong move that sounded right.

  In other words, rock ’n’ roll.

  The room shook, though whether from their performance or from Kyle she couldn’t tell. The boy’s parents stood together in the doorway watching with impotent desperation.

  “Help me, Daddy,” Kyle whimpered.

  His plea would have been more convincing if his various secretions weren’t twisting and turning in the air, buzzing around the room like a swarm of wasps—and if he wasn’t giggling quite so much.

  Jacks sang with a passion and furor that would have captivated an entire football stadium. So much so that it took a mi
nute before Jen realized he wasn’t singing in English. She wasn’t entirely sure it was any kind of language.

  But Levon’s drumbeats faltered. His upper body lilted back and forth as he struggled to keep up the beat. When he looked up, she could only see the whites of his eyes.

  “What’s happening to him?” Jen asked Lucy.

  “He’s losing it.” She slapped the drummer across the face. It didn’t do any good. “Come on, Levon, stay with me, brother.”

  The rhythm from the drums started to drift then faded completely. The last trace of Levon disappeared.

  “Hey, ladies,” he grinned at them, tongue lolling from one side of his mouth like a dog’s as foamy drool slid down his chin.

  “Fuck!” Lucy cried stumbling away. She tripped over her own patch cable and fell, the bass giving a cacophonous crash that crushed the music, breaking it apart like stale bread.

  “Ain’t givin’ it up,” Johnny Jacks continued to sing. “Ain’t givin’ it up to you.” What had been a gravelly, bluesy voice before had become ragged.

  Jen slammed a power chord on the guitar then reached to help Lucy up. The bass player took her hand but started to drag her down to the floor. Like Levon, her eyes showed only the whites, and her grin was anything but human.

  “Come play with me, Jenny,” she cooed.

  Jen yanked away, lost her pick but managed to hit the strings with her fingernails to give Johnny something to sing over. He fell to his knees, the way a crooner would during the big emotional moment of the song, but his performance was lifeless, barely audible above Jen’s guitar and the hiss that had risen to take the place of the rest of the music.

  That hiss…

  She’d thought it was the usual noise that came through guitar and bass amps when you weren’t playing, but this was different. Feral. Gleeful. Like an ocean wave, it crested higher and higher before crashing down on them, drowning everything in its path.

  “Come on, Jenny, give it up, girl,” Lucy said with someone else’s voice.

  “On your best day you couldn’t play worth a damn, baby,” Levon crooned.

  A creak from the bed made her turn. Kyle was crawling forward on his mattress, eyes milky white except for pulsing strands of red like blood vessels bursting one after another. A rabid rat preparing to pounce on a dying cat.