“I’m not scared.”
“Listen, Jake, this is not the first strange thing I’ve experienced in this church. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
Jake’s gaze drifted through the glass doors toward the loft where the grand piano slept under its black canvas cover.
Billy leaned forward, hands clasped, stubbled chin perched atop steepled fingers. He said, “You told me to transpose that melody to D. It spells ‘dead.’ Why did you tell me to do that?”
Jake kept looking through the glass, but he said, “I’ve heard it too. When I was alone in here.”
“The piano playing itself?”
“Yeah.”
“So then why are you busting my balls about this voice? It’s another manifestation of the same thing.”
“It could be. I’ll admit that, because I don’t even have a theory about what that piano did. But there could be other ways to explain the voice. It doesn’t have to be connected.”
Billy sighed. “Give me a theory that doesn’t involve me speaking in tongues.”
“A burst of radio interference.”
Billy folded his arms and gave Jake a stare that said, That all you got?
Jake turned his chair to face Billy. “Have you ever seen a UFO?”
“No.” Billy could feel anger welling up now. “I’m not some fucking psychedelic casualty who believes every weird story he’s ever heard like it’s his civic duty as an artist. Believe me, I know guys like that, who won’t even do a guitar track until someone balances their chakras with crystals and does a banishing ritual.”
Jake held his palm up to ward off the tirade. “I’m not suggesting you’re like that. Just hear me out. I have seen a UFO, technically. Many times. I’ve seen something fly by that I couldn’t identify for certain. Could be a plane, could be a helicopter. Maybe a satellite at night. Maybe even a bona-fide alien spacecraft. The point is, sometimes you have to file things under ‘unknown.’”
“Yeah, but there isn’t any normal explanation for a piano playing itself. Or a voice besides mine getting into that mic. It doesn’t sound like radio. I’ve used cheap pedals and cables that pick up all kinds of crap. I know what that sounds like.”
“And I know that damned piano makes no sense. I admit it—it’s fucking scary. Maybe that is a real poltergeist. But if we have to get on the crazy train about one thing, that doesn’t mean every other weird thing has to be connected to it, or we’re just running full tilt off the tracks. There may be different explanations for these two things. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Let me get this straight, because now you sound crazy to me. You think it could be a ghost playing the piano, but it could still be me leaving myself backward messages in a hypnotic trance in the vocal booth.”
“Maybe.”
“You’d rather believe in two weird things happening instead of just one cause for both effects.”
“Billy, I’m trying to help you keep one foot on the ground. I just think you should keep your options open for as long as possible when you’re tempted to start believing some really weird shit.”
“Okay, I get it. But I’m still more concerned with what it means. It says, follow the tracks. How can you not hear that? Do you think it means the railroad tracks?”
“What railroad tracks?”
“When I was walking in the woods the other day, after he pissed me off, I saw an old railroad track. Maybe I’m supposed to follow it.”
“I guess a walk in the woods just to see where it goes for a mile or so wouldn’t hurt. It’s not like the voice is telling you to jump off a cliff. Or kill someone. At least not yet,” Jake said with a strained grin.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Sorry. If it means something to you, you should follow your instincts and try to figure it out.” A few beats of silence passed. Jake said, “Do you think it might be a reference to Rail’s name?”
“Could be. But that still wouldn’t necessarily mean it’s my subconscious playing tricks on me. Not where he’s concerned. If it refers to him, it’s even more likely to have an otherworldly origin.” Billy looked out through the side door at the stepping-stones that led to the creek. The wood beyond was a tangle of black shadows, the sky above only a shade or two lighter than the tree shapes. When Jake spoke again, it snapped him out of a reverie in which his mind tumbled down a railroad track through the cold night. “Why would a message about Rail be more likely to come from the other side?”
Billy got to his feet slowly, arched his back and said, “You should go home, Jake. It’s late.”
“All of a sudden you’ve given up trying to convince me?”
“I appreciate you staying late to let me hear it, but I just don’t think you'd understand what I’m going through.”
“Did I say something?”
“No. Just, you’re skeptical about a spirit playing the piano and you’ve even heard that for yourself. You’re not ready to go where this conversation leads next.”
“Try me.”
“You’ll think I'm completely burnt out. And maybe I am.”
“Well now I’m awake and totally curious. Tell you what: if you tell me what you mean about Rail, I’ll tell you what I heard about the ghost and the piano.”
“I could probably get that story from Gribbens for a beer.”
“I won’t judge you.”
“People always say that. It’s impossible not to judge, even if you keep it to yourself.”
Jake waited.
Billy sighed and said, “I think he’s the Devil incarnate. Okay?”
Jake smiled and said, “I won’t argue with that wild theory.”
“I’m serious.”
“Okay… So you sold your soul?”
“I believe I did. It’s an idea that has kind of gathered around me lately when I look back at my experiences with him. I know it’s crazy, but once I thought of it, a lot of things just seemed to fit. For a while I couldn’t put my finger on how it happened exactly, but now I think I know.” Billy gave a rueful little laugh and tapped his right hand nervously on the corner of the console, the platinum ring on his finger rapping out a nervous rhythm. “There you have it. Devil. Now what about this ghost?”
“A deal’s a deal, but I'm afraid this is going to feed your fire. Her name is Olivia. What I heard is she was a witch back before the Civil War. They hanged her for consorting with you-know-who.”
“Go on,” Billy said, feeling his gooseflesh rising, having that sensation of wanting to look at what might be over his shoulder, and not wanting to.
“She played the organ back when this was a real church.”
“Before they hanged her as a witch, she was the church organist?”
“According to the legend. Everybody around here has a different version of the story. The studio grounds keeper told me they got the idea she was a witch because she played so well. Apparently, her interpretations of certain hymns were a little too hot to handle. They say she played them with rhythm and odd chord voicings, like in a black gospel service, sweating and writhing on the bench.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, but who would really know, after all this time, about the details. There’s probably a sparse record of what happened at the Town Library. Far less titillating, I would bet.”
“That might be worth looking into. Records of the trial.”
“I’m not so sure it would have been a real trial. Hanging witches went out of vogue after Salem in the late 1600’s. If there’s a grain of truth behind the story, it would've been the act of a small-town vigilante mob. But there might be a Historical Society of Echo Lake you could check with. I never leave the studio, so I couldn’t tell you what we have in this town.”
“Okay, go home already. Get out of here. Thanks again for the help.”
Jake stepped around the console and was almost through the glass doors to the big room when Billy said, “Hey, Jake?”
“Yeah?”
“Can
I borrow your flashlight tonight? I’ll buy you new batteries.”
“Sure. Just don’t lose it. My mom gave it to me.”
Jake took the little red anodized Maglite from the nylon holster that hung from his belt beside a folding knife for stripping cables. He handed it to Billy. The barrel was etched with his initials, JC.
Thirteen
Billy stepped outside and looked around. There was a half-moon beginning its descent toward the southwestern horizon and enough clouds around it to confirm that he would need the Maglite. He twisted it on to check the batteries, and a puddle of milky white light splashed out between his fingers onto the snow-frosted grass at his feet.
It was just about three hours before dawn, and the night was cold. He pulled his leather jacket close around his chest and walked into the field toward the road. Looking back at the church from this vantage point in the middle of the field, the little white building was backlit by the half-moon, the stained-glass windows dark. The place looked peaceful standing alone in the virgin snow against the black spires of the forest. The wind picked up, raising the pine boughs with a gentle murmur. He thought of going back inside and burying himself in thick fleece blankets. From here, the church looked like a safe place in contrast to the dark forest. He felt a coldness that seemed to emanate from underneath his coat, from under his skin; he knew that tonight, whatever spirit haunted this place, it awaited him not in the church but in the woods.
He squeezed the flashlight, rubbing the texture of the scored grid that served as a grip into his palm, finding in its tactile reality the resolve to go there. Maybe it was all in his mind. Maybe his poet’s imagination was extracting too much meaning from the random chaos of his life. There was a way to put that theory to the test now. Follow the tracks. Follow the thread of meaning to its end and see what he found: an overstressed mind thrashing and drowning in its own secretions or the tangible teeth of a soul eater.
Billy forced his feet forward, toward the tree line, where he could hear the icy brook gurgling. As he pulled his combat boot from the suction of the muddy ground and took the first step, the moon seemed to sink like a stone dropped in water through the underside of the cloud cover, suddenly illuminating the thin crust of snowfall covering the field in patches.
There was an unbroken skirt of snow around the church where the shadows of the pines had sheltered it from the slanting rays of the afternoon sun. Now, as the cold moon reflected that same light down from high above, it revealed a pattern of small shadows, little craters running in a circle around the building. Backtracking, Billy saw what they were—wolf tracks, preserved like fossils by the night freeze. They encircled the church and then ran beside the creek before vanishing into it at a shallow place, then continued on the other bank, climbing up the snowy slope between mossy stones.
He walked across the running water, splashing his black jeans. The combat boots were waterproof, but they were old and worn and some icy water sluiced through around the tongues under the laces, making him catch his breath. He shone the flashlight on the ground ahead. The tracks vanished for a couple of yards where the overhanging boughs had caught the snow. As he stepped over the stones and under the conifer canopy, his beam fell onto a sparkling crust of snow up ahead, and the paw prints resumed—the trail of the pack of gray wolves that had paid him a visit while the ghost of a witch whispered over his shoulder into his microphone.
So it wasn’t railroad tracks he was supposed to follow. He thought of how that Robert Johnson song had been inverted in a way. Now it’s me on the trail of the hellhounds.
He focused on the beam of light shuddering ahead of him. What if he found their den and they attacked him? The thought made him stop to consider just what he was doing. There would be daylight in a few hours. He could borrow a shotgun, just to be safe, come back, and see where this led without the prospect of a pack of hungry wolves lunging out of the dark at him. But he didn’t know how long the trail was, and daylight might melt it before he reached the end. If he waited, the opportunity to find out what it meant could literally evaporate. With that possibility in mind, as urgent as it seemed to make haste, his growing fear that the flashlight beam would catch the golden fire of lupine eyes at any moment almost corroded his will.
His intuition told him to trust whatever had summoned the wolves, summoned the snow to take the impression of their tracks. Whatever purpose he was serving, it had to be greater than feeding the pack this night. And he needed to know. If a dead witch was leading him on, he needed to confront her and get some answers about the nature of his situation. If she had once walked the same path, made the same deal, she could tell him what lay ahead.
Follow the tracks.
He pressed on.
The soft laughter of the creek faded in the trees behind him. An owl hooted somewhere off to his left. Pinecones hit the ground at odd intervals, triggering his taut nerves. Every animal sound sparked his synapses and spiced the air around him with fear pheromones like tendrils of blood in shark-infested waters.
At one point, he heard what sounded like footsteps behind him—twigs crackling and leaves crunching with the slow impact of stealth. He spun around and swept the beam of light across the woods in an arc.
“Who’s there?” he called and held his breath.
Silence.
He could have called again, could have demanded that his pursuer step out, but talking to the shadows would only grant uncomfortable credence to the notion that he was not alone, so he moved on, straining to listen through the sounds of his own stride for evidence of another.
Dense pine and oak branches now blocked what little remaining light was cast by the setting moon. The trail faltered in places. Twice he had to stop and scan the ground with the flashlight to find the next spot where the gaps between the trees widened enough to allow the snow crust he depended on for continuity. Each time when he found the tracks again, he felt a strange sweet-and-sour reaction in his stomach.
At length he came to a moonlit glade in the heart of the forest. Here the pristine snow formed an unbroken disc of crystal cover around a large pool of still, black water in the center. Over the past hour, he had often seen the tracks of other animals bisecting the wolf trail. There had been deer tracks and those of some small animals. But he had scarcely noticed these while he was focused on the distinctive shape and direction of the wolf prints.
He realized now how ubiquitous those other tracks had been when he registered their total absence here. In this clearing, only the wolf tracks cut the snow. They spiraled inward, the overlapping pattern of the pack thinning out as the spiral closed until only the sparse tracks of a solitary wolf completed the final circumambulation around the brackish pool, then vanished at its edge.
There was only one way to read it. The tale these tracks told, even to an urban eye, was singular and impossible: a pack of wolves trotted into this glade, encircled the pool and vanished one by one into thin air, or condensed their numbers one into another until a lone wolf remained—the pack leader—and this wolf then dove into the pool and was gone. Gone as if the pool were a window to another world.
Billy no longer wanted to know what was going on here. He had found the end of the trail. Now all he wanted was to turn tail and run through the woods as fast as he could with no concern for the branches that would cut and bruise him along the way. This had been a bad idea. It would be an even worse idea to stay. Time to haul ass. Time to find out if his pack-and-a-half-a-day lungs could pump his boots back to yonder haunted church before the Devil could catch him.
But then what? Didn’t he have a session scheduled with the Devil at noon this very day? Wouldn’t he also be running to the monster, if he ran? At least if he confronted the undisguised threat here in this primeval place, he might see things as they really were, without the pretense that the relationship had anything to do with the everyday concerns of people like Jake and Danielle, profit and loss. Here the game would be stripped of the civilized trappings that kept him wonderi
ng if he was going insane. Burning out. Wouldn’t it be better to stare it in the face?
Maybe not.
Something stirred the air around him. He picked up a fluttering of blue-violet light in his peripheral vision, like a wavering propane flame or the afterimage of a camera flash on closed eyelids. Only, when he turned toward it, the image didn’t flee in the direction of his gaze as if riding his vision – it clarified itself: an ephemeral body standing beside him, a naked woman drawn in migraine-hued light.
Her figure was voluptuous, her face darkly beautiful, with strong, northern-European features. Her long hair was braided and wrapped around the crown of her head, exposing sensuous shoulders and the milky hollows of her collarbone. He could see the trees through her skin. It was like looking through wet rice paper he had seen in Japan. She turned toward him and he saw that her nipples were hard, as if she could feel the winter chill in the nocturnal air.
Maybe she’s always cold now, since she’s been dead.
The ghost raised her hand toward him and he recoiled. But she didn’t reach to touch him, she merely cupped her hand over the lens of the flashlight. It went out like a snuffed candle.
Now he could see her more clearly, her own light seeming to glow more brightly in the absence of the profane electric stuff. She almost looked solid as she walked into the center of the clearing and touched the surface of the water with her toe, like a timid little girl deciding whether it was warm enough for a swim. The water didn’t exactly ripple from the specific point she had touched, but rather quivered as if a gentle breeze or an electrical current was stirring every atom. Then she raised her hand again and gestured toward a solitary tree at the water’s edge.
The moon dropped through the clouds again, and she was gone.
Billy swallowed. His mouth tasted like he had been sucking on an old penny. He approached the pool in the pale light, noticing as he did that a tangle of thick roots were woven into the earth around the hole, reaching down into the dark water. He saw some silver thing flash and dart away in the depths. A fish? Was the water clearer than he had at first judged by its blackness? Any mud would have settled to the bottom in its utter calm. The smell of it was not as swampy and stagnant as he expected it to be. He detected a note of rot, but there were also overtones of rosewater and cut grass. These seemed impossible in late November with snow on the ground.
The Devil of Echo Lake Page 15
