“What about the soul of a Templar Knight?” I asked, half a second before the thought was even fully formed.
The demon’s head snapped up, and the grin vanished from his face. “What?”
“You want quantity or quality, pal? I’m an official Monster Hunter of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. I’m as close to a Templar Knight as it gets nowadays. That oughta be worth something, right?” I wasn’t being exactly truthful. I was the official Hunter for the region, but Joe was the actual Templar. I wasn’t much for supervision, so I kinda told Church leadership to kiss my ass too many times to be a full-on Knight myself. But I was the closest thing to a Templar they were gonna find in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, that morning, least as far as they knew. That’s the good thing about only being kinda Knight-adjacent—I can still lie like a son of a bitch when I need to.
“You’ve got a deal, human. You give me your soul, and you can buy the studio.” The demon stuck out his hand to shake on it, but I held both of mine in the air.
“Slow down there, Speed Racer,” I said. “You want my soul, you gotta do it old school. You’re gonna have to win it.”
The demon’s eyes narrowed. “Win it?”
“You ever heard the song ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’?” I asked.
“You want to play me for it? And whoever plays the best song wins?”
“The whole shooting match,” I confirmed. “My soul, the studio, the whole mess. You in?”
He looked thoughtful for a long moment, then started to shake his head. I could feel the moment slipping away, almost see the deliveries of new computerized Auto-Tune equipment pulling up to the studio doors. I did the only thing I could think of, I reached deep into my negotiating toolbox, and I started to cluck.
“What are you doing?” the demon asked.
“I’m - cluck - not doing - cluck - anything,” I said. “Do you - cluck - hear a chicken - cluck - in here anywhere?”
“What?” the demon looked baffled.
“Well - cluck - I can’t imagine that a real - cluck - demon would be - cluck - afraid of a human. So you - cluck - must really be - cluck - a chicken.”
His face went about eight shades of red, and he glared at me, yellow eyes shining through his human mask. “You’re on, redneck. And you shall know torment the likes of which you’ve never seen once I get you into the pits.”
“I doubt that,” I said. “One, I don’t plan to lose. And two, Skeeter once made me watch three seasons of Gilmore Girls over one unholy weekend a few years back. Let me tell you, there literally wasn’t enough alcohol in Georgia to make that pain go away.”
“Well, then, Bubba, it is, as you humans say, on.”
“As we humans say,” I said, “come get some.”
The demon stepped into the middle of the studio and waved his hands in the air. Four more copies of himself appeared out of thin air and took up positions all around the studio. One strapped on a big Fender fretless bass, one grabbed a telecaster from a rack, another sat behind the drums, and the last one stood behind a keyboard. The demon himself magicked a Gibson Jet Black Les Paul out of thin air, and they lit into a song like nothing I’d ever heard. It started off with a simple blues riff, then shifted into a little poppy thing, then transitioned into old-school rock n’ roll shifting slowly into a metal guitar solo that almost made me cry, it was so technically perfect.
They played a good eight-minute song, bounding and dancing notes around the room like they were skipping rocks across a creek. Not a one of them ever missed a note. Everything they played was so technically perfect, it was like watching a master class in how to play musical instruments. They played until I was sitting there breathless, then the lead demon spun that black Les Paul up into the air over his head and brought it crashing down to splinters on the floor in front of him.
He waved his hands in the air again, and the other demons vanished, their essences flowing back into him like smoke. He took a little bow, then grinned at me. “I believe that is what you call a mic drop.”
“That was pretty good, pal. But now let me show you what music really feels like.”
I walked to the middle of the room and picked up my old guitar case. I flipped open the latches and pulled out that blue guitar. I ran my fingers over the strings and nestled the guitar against my body. I ran my hand up and down the neck and let myself drift back in time, back to when we all lived together—me, Pop, Jase, and Mama. I put the pick to the strings and plucked out a few notes, turning the pegs to make sure she was as in tune as I could get her.
I looked up at the demon, and I started to sing.
“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
Tha-at saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now, I’m found.
Was blind, but now I see.”
My fingers slipped, and my voice cracked, and the demon just sat there grinning.
“You know, son, just because it worked out okay in a song, doesn’t mean you should actually put your soul on the line in a musical battle against a creature born of magic who carries around his own backup band. But don’t worry, after the first thousand years or so, you hardly even feel the whips.”
I just smiled back at him and said, “Thanks, I knew I was forgetting something.” I looked up at the booth window. “Y’all ready?”
A light flipped on in the previously pitch dark control room, and I watched Skeeter, Joe, Amy, and the one person I never thought I’d see again in my life walk out the door, then they all trooped into the studio and picked up instruments. Amy sat down behind the drum kit, twirling the sticks to calm her nerves. I knew she hadn’t sat behind a kit since she was a teenager and her daddy taught her how to play. Her dad left her his drum kit when he passed, and it sits in her garage now. It’s all set up, and she’ll polish it once in a while, but I’ve never seen her even touch a stick.
Joe picked up a Fender Stratocaster, knocked it into tune in seconds, and let fly with a little blues riff that would have made Jimi Hendrix smile. Skeeter picked up a battered old P-bass and plucked a couple chords. I remembered him playing bass in the jazz band in school. Like there weren’t enough reasons for people to beat him up. He was black, gay, and skinny as hell, then he went and joined the jazz band on top of it. Even with me to back him up, I wonder how he survived.
Then a dark-haired woman I hadn’t seen in over a year and thought I never would again walked in, looked at me for a quick second, and walked over to an old Hammond B-3 sitting in the corner. She blew the dust off the keys, fired up the Leslie amp sitting next to it, and sat down.
I smiled back up at the demon and said, “I forgot my band. How silly of me.” Then I nodded to Amy, and she counted us in. This time, when we ripped into the first verse of “Amazing Grace,” it wasn’t a dirge, it was a praise song, shouting to the heavens about the love we found in God, no matter what we had done in our lives.
We moved into the second verse, and Mama leaned forward and started to harmonize with me. We sang together for the first time in better than twenty years, and it started to feel like all the old wounds we’d caused each other were finally getting cleaned out and healed.
“‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear.
And grace my fears relieved.
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.”
The demon looked a lot less sure of himself as we moved into the third verse. I dropped out of the rhythm guitar and concentrated on just singing, just pouring out every bit of emotion I’d ever felt in a church, or at a concert, which are about the same damn thing to me most of the time, and I felt my heart swell with emotion as I sang.
“When we've been there ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun
We've no less days to sing God's praise
Then when we first begun.”
I stood up for the last verse, and everybody stopped playing and stepped up to surround me. Even Billy pushed his chair off the wall and
stood with us in a semicircle, singing a cappella gospel and flinging it right in the face of the demon and his lawyer, telling them without ever using the words that they could go back to Hell because we had God and music on our side. Mama stepped forward and took my hand in hers. I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t. But I could sing with her, and with the rest of my family, one last verse.
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I'm found.
Was blind, but now I see.”
Those final notes hung in the air, and the demon hung his head. He just nodded once and started for the door.
I picked up the microphone in front of me, stand and all, and tossed it to land at his feet. “That’s a mic drop, bitch.”
Epilogue
We stood in the middle of the room, laughing and drinking beers that Billy pulled from a little fridge in the control room. There was a lot of hugs, and a fair amount of back-slapping, and finally after a few minutes, I walked over to where my mother sat on the piano bench. I held out a beer to her, but she shook her head.
“I never was much for beer, Robbie.”
“I know,” I said. “I just didn’t know how else to come talk to you.”
“You could have just walked up and said, ‘Hey Mama’.”
“That’s way too easy,” I replied, and we both smiled.
We sat there in silence for a moment, then she said, “I see you found the guitar I left you.”
“Yeah, I found it today. I ain’t opened that case since the day you left, but it was in the back of my truck this morning when I went out looking for a gun.”
“Did you pack it?” Mama asked.
“No, but that kinda thing happens to me a lot. I reckon Hank Williams put it there last night.”
“It says a lot about the time I spent with your father that I’m just not going to ask about that,” she said.
“Yeah, I reckon it does.”
Silence fell between us again, then Mama asked, “Now what?”
“What do you mean, now what?”
“Now what happens here? From what I heard, you now have the right to buy a recording studio in Alabama.”
“Well, technically I do, but I think I’m gonna let the Catholic Church buy it instead and turn it into a museum of southern music. I talked to Joe, and he said they can use it to raise money for old pickers that don’t have good insurance to cover their end-of-life expenses. ‘Cause some of those old boys didn’t get good record contracts, or haven’t sold much in a long time, and they’re pretty broke now.”
“That sounds like a good idea, son.”
“I’m glad you came, Mama. I wasn’t sure when Skeeter told me about it…”
“I was in the car with Skeeter, Robbie. ‘Not sure’ is an understatement.”
“Well, I mighta said some things that were less than kind.”
“I could understand that,” she replied.
“But what I don’t understand is how were you there in the first place,” I said.
“How was I at Skeeter’s?” Mama replied.
“Yeah.”
“I was looking for you. We didn’t part on good terms last year, and…”
You know that feeling when you’re talking to somebody and they trail off, and you know that there’s another shoe, and it’s about to drop right on your damn head? Yeah, I had that feeling right then.
Mama looked at me and said, “Son, I know I walked out on you and your daddy a long time ago without any explanation, but there was a whole lot more going on than I could tell you then, and I’m probably going to cause all kinds of trouble telling you now, but here goes—”
That thud off in the distance? That was a shoe. And it sounded like it was going to be a big one.
My mother looked at me, then the air around her shimmered with lavender light and white sparkles, and when the light faded, she looked almost exactly the same. Except her features were a little more angular, her hair had more luster, and her ears were very, very pointy. Like Lord of the Rings pointy.
Like, “my mother is an elf’ pointy.
“Robbie, I need your help.” My elf-mom looked at me with tears welling in the corners of her eyes. “I know I don’t deserve it, but it’s a matter of life and death. And not just for me, but for your sister, too.”
A sister? Well, shit.
Afterword
This is more of a suggested listening list than an afterword, but if you catch me in a bar sometime and want to know, I’ll tell you the true-life stories about the sights Bubba saw in his travels. At least half of them are true stories, and way too many people in this story are built loosely around my family members.
But this much I do believe to be true - there are still people out there making amazing music, and here are a few of them you might have heard of, and some you might not have. Either way, if you give them a listen, or a few nickels, then awesome.
Check these folks out -
David Childers
Jonesalee
Doubting Thomas Band
Sturgill Simpson
The Waybacks (Merlefest Album Hour recordings)
Chris Thile
Nickel Creek
Doc & Merle Watson
The Avett Brothers
The Overmountain Men
Jason Isbell
Reckless Kelly (live “Break My Heart Tonight”)
Laura Love (“Amazing Grace” on Octoroon)
And take every chance you get to support local musicians and the places that produce live music.
Acknowledgments
Thanks as always to Melissa Gilbert for all her help, and to Adrijus at RockingBookCovers.com for his fantastic cover work.
The following people help me bring this work to you by their Patreon-age. You can join them at Patreon.com/johnhartness.
Sean Fitzpatrick
Sharon Moore
Sarah Ashburn
Wendy Taylor
Sheelagh Semper
Charlotte Babb
Carol Baker
Noah Sturdevant
Leonard Rosenthol
Lisa Kochurina
Patrick Dugan
Melinda Hammy
Jeremy Snyder
Emilia Agrafojo
Brian Tate
Michelle E. Botwinick
Candice Carpenter
Theresa Glover
Salem Macknee
Trey Alexander
Jim Ryan
Word of the Nerd
Tracy Syrstad
Russell Ventimeglia
Elizabeth Donald
Samantha Dunaway Bryant
Shael Hawman
Bill Schlichting
Steven R. Yanacsek
Scott Furman
Rebecca Ledford
Ray Spitz
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About the Author
John G. Hartness is a teller of tales, a righter of wrong, defender of ladies’ virtues, and some people call him Maurice, for he speaks of the pompatus of love. He is also the best-selling author of EPIC-Award-winning series The Black Knight Chronicles from Bell Bridge Books, a comedic urban fantasy series that answers the eternal question “Why aren’t there more fat vampires?” In July of 2016. John was honored with the Manly Wade Wellman Award by the NC Speculative Fiction Foundation for Best Novel by a North Carolina writer in 2015 for the first Quincy Harker novella, Raising Hell.
John is the au
thor of the Bubba the Monster Hunter series of short stories and novellas, the Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter novella series, and the creator and co-editor of the Big Bad anthology series, among other projects.
In 2016, John teamed up with a pair of other publishing industry ne’er-do-wells and founded Falstaff Media, a publishing conglomerate dedicated to pushing the boundaries of literature and entertainment.
In his copious free time John enjoys long walks on the beach, rescuing kittens from trees and recording new episodes of his podcast Writing Rants, where he provides writing advice laced with a lot of profanity every two weeks. He’s also a member of the Authors & Dragons podcast, with a bunch of other writers who are way better and funnier than he is. John is also a contributor to the Magical Words group blog. An avid Magic: the Gathering player, John is strong in his nerd-fu and has sometimes been referred to as “the Kevin Smith of Charlotte, NC.” And not just for his girth. He can be found online at www.johnhartness.com and spends too much time on Twitter, especially after a few drinks.
Find out more about John online
@johnhartness
johnghartness
www.johnhartness.com
Also by John G. Hartness
The Black Knight Chronicles - Omnibus Edition
Paint it Black
In the Still of the Knight
Man in Black
Scattered, Smothered, & Chunked - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season One
Grits, Guns, & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season Two
Moon Over Bourbon Street - a Bubba the Monster Hunter Novellas
Night at the Museum - a Bubba the Monster Hunter novellas
Midsummer - a Bubba the Monster Hunter novella
Year One: A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Collection
Oh Bubba, Where Art Thou? (Bubba the Monster Hunter Book 26) Page 9
