“Hey, Jake. Did I get you in trouble?”
“No. Are you dressed? I want to show you something.”
“Show me what? I thought we could talk before you go back to work.”
“We can. I don't have to go back.”
“You have the night off?”
“Yeah, crazy, huh?”
“Because of me?”
“No. Come on, put your coat on.”
“Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise. Your Christmas present. We can talk at dinner. We’ll have dinner in Kingston, okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Please, Ally. Just come with me. You’ll feel better. We have all night to talk.”
She nodded and said, “Let me get my shoes.”
They drove in silence. Jake unfolded a crumpled piece of notepaper to consult his own scribbled directions. He soon made a series of turns down empty side streets. There were no shops in this part of town. Even the houses soon petered out.
“Are we lost?” she asked.
“No. We’re almost there.”
“Almost where?”
“The Christmas Surprise Place, silly.”
She looked out the window as the car rolled down a dark, tree-lined lane, ending in a parking lot with a long, low cinderblock building flanked by chain link fences. As soon as the car cleared the trees, they could hear it—even with the windows rolled up—a cacophony of barking dogs echoing inside the building, spilling out into the quiet night.
Jake parked the car and cracked his door open to see her face by the dome light. She looked surprised, but more scared than happy.
“It’s an animal shelter?” she asked.
He nodded. “We’re going to rescue a puppy. I would have just brought one home to you, but I wanted you to be able to pick it yourself.” He waited for her reaction.
“You’re giving me a dog for Christmas?”
“I know how much you’ve wanted one. Ever since we met.”
“You always said the apartment was too small.”
“Well, puppies start out small, too. And things are going well for me. Maybe we’ll have a bigger place before long. I know it’s hard for you, being alone. You should have a companion.”
She started to cry and turned her head away from him to look at the kennel building. He touched her hand where it lay in her lap. She squeezed his fingers tight and a deep sob wracked her body.
“Ally? Honey, I thought you wanted a dog. What’s wrong?”
The silence spun out between them, punctuated only by the sound of desperate, lonely animals, crying out from their cages. When she looked at him and tucked her hair behind her ear, he realized it was the first time in weeks he had really seen her face close enough and long enough to read it. It required no interpretation. She wore a sadness so complete it seemed to fit her like a pair of jeans she had already broken in.
She reached out and brushed his sandy hair away from his glasses with a slight wrinkle of her forehead as if she was only now noticing that it was getting shaggy.
“You smell like cigarettes,” she said.
He didn’t say anything, just looked into her eyes.
She said it softly, but it hit him hard, “A dog isn’t going to fix this, Jake.”
He started the car and shut his door. The darkness enveloped them again.
Seventeen
Jake felt something pushing his shoulder. He hoped it would stop. It came again, hard enough to wake him. Ally was shoving him. “Summuns at the door,” she said through the pillow. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes and interpreted the thin promise of light on the ceiling. It could hardly be dawn. His second coherent thought of the day startled him into action: if that banging woke the landlord… He got on his feet and looked at the alarm clock. 4:48. Wearing only boxers, he plodded down the balding carpeted stairs to the foyer door. Before he reached the bottom, he recognized Billy’s haunted face, framed by cupped hands, peering through the dingy, bubbled glass.
Jake unbolted the door, swung it open to the tune of a loud creak, opened his mouth to ask Billy if he knew what time it was, and instead found himself saying, “What happened?” Billy looked more intense than Jake had ever seen him. Was the church burning?
Billy looked at him wild-eyed and asked, “Do you have a portable recorder?”
Jake chuckled humorlessly. It became a cough in his dry throat. He said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Billy shook his head.
Jake turned and climbed the stairs, scratching the back of his head. Billy closed the door and followed without invitation. Jake looked back at the sound of Billy’s boots on the stairs and pushed his palm down beside his knee, keep it down. Billy gingerly crept up the rest of the steep stairs with a gait like Elmer Fudd’s in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons.
In the kitchen, Jake turned on the coffee machine, which wouldn’t have automatically started to gurgle and hiss for another three hours. As he took the half-and-half from the fridge, he tried to ignore Billy, who was shifting his weight anxiously from one foot to the other as if he had to pee. At last, Billy said, “Listen, Jake, I’m sorry about the hour, but this really can’t wait. Can you please just get dressed and come with me?”
Jake said, “With a recorder.”
“Yeah, do you have one? I left my mini-disc recorder back home in San Fran.”
“Billy, you sleep in a studio in case inspiration strikes. You know how to plug a mic into your computer. You don’t need me to make a demo at five in the morning.”
“It’s not in the studio, it’s in the woods.”
“What is?”
“What I need you to record. It’s in the woods. Do you have a handheld DAT or something?”
“Yes, but what are you trying to get, bird calls at dawn? We could set that kind of thing up in advance with a little notice. Hell, we have an FX library full of stuff like that.”
“It’s not birds, it’s… You’ll see. You have to see for yourself. I can’t tell you. Just get dressed. I’ll show you,” Billy said, fumbling in his pocket for a cigarette. His hand was trembling.
“Don’t smoke in here,” said Jake. “Wait for me outside.”
“Okay. Cool. You’re coming, right?”
“Sure. You’re killing me with curiosity,” Jake said.
“I’ll be out front.”
“Hey, how did you find my apartment?”
“Just looked for the shitbox car on the main drag.” The little grin that curled one side of Billy’s mouth at the end of the remark won Jake over, and he almost forgot how aggrieved he was. The guy had charisma, you had to give him that.
“I’ll be right out,” Jake said.
He hastily poured the coffee into his travel mug and spilled some when he heard Allison’s voice behind him say, “Oh. My. God.” She was standing in the hall, pulling her bathrobe tight around her chest. “Billy Moon.”
“Yeah,” Billy said, lowering his head boyishly, clearly expecting to be scolded for waking her.
She looked past him at Jake. “Jake, darling?” she said, “Why is there a rock star in our kitchen at five AM?”
“He needed to borrow a cup of sugar. Why don’t you go on back to sleep?”
She started laughing nervously and Billy joined in. It became a warm, genuine sound before it trickled away.
“I’m sorry,” Billy said. “I’m very sorry to have woken you.”
“S’okay,” she whispered.
Still looking like she’d seen a ghost, Ally pivoted on her heels. As she shuffled back to the bedroom, Jake called after her, “Uh, I’m going to work early.”
“Whatever.”
* * *
The story came out as they drove in the gathering dawn up the winding dirt road to the church.
Billy had dreamed that night of taking his acoustic guitar to a little pool he had found in the woods. Once there, he sat on a tree stump and sang a new song—one he had not yet written. It was a beautiful haunting
melody. When he awoke from the dream, his head was clear for the first time in weeks, but he couldn’t remember how the song went.
He felt sure that if he took his guitar to that glade in the heart of the forest, like in the dream, the song would come to him. So he slipped out of bed without waking Rachel. Deep in the woods, he came to the place he had been visiting on his walks, and with fingers numbed by the cold, he was able to hear the song in his head and find it on the fret board.
And here was the part he didn’t think Jake would believe, the reason he had gone into town to wake him. While he was working out the chords, and scribbling little notes on a legal pad, he heard fragments of flute on the air playing a counterpoint melody against his guitar. At first, he wondered if it was just the wind sounding in the hollows of dead trees. But the more he played, the more convinced he became that it was there, a clear melody.
“Your musical imagination is just really vivid,” Jake interjected.
“Like the piano in the church? C’mon, Jake. I can tell the difference between what’s in my head and what’s in my ears.”
“But you were half asleep.”
“Look, that’s why you’re here—to record it and prove it’s not in my head, okay? I know what I heard. Maybe I’m crazy. You’re gonna let me know.”
Jake waited outside the church while Billy ran in to get his guitar. When he reemerged, they crossed the creek using the stepping-stones and started up the trail into the woods. A thin cover of snow reflected and amplified the scarce light. Jake checked the recorder slung over his shoulder on its strap. The batteries had enough juice in them for a good hour.
The not-yet frozen ground made for a mucky surface to walk on, and Jake had to stop twice to pull his foot free, one time losing his work boot when his foot slipped out of it, leaving him to balance on the other foot while pulling the boot from the mud with the sound of greedy suction. Billy watched with an impatient glare until Jake was moving again. After that, Jake tried to follow Billy’s course more carefully, placing his boots on the same thick tree roots and grasping the same overhanging branches for balance. Billy seemed to know the path well.
Jake wondered what Eddie would say if he knew a client had dragged him out of bed at dawn to do a little field recording in the middle of the woods. Probably something like, “Better not end up on your time sheet, you make enough OT as it is. And if you drop one of our mics in the creek, I’ll have your head.” Eddie might also wonder what Moon was on at the time. Probably mushrooms purchased on the village green.
Jake’s problem, however, was that he didn’t think Billy was high. His pupils were a little big out here in the semi-dark, but they had looked normal in the kitchen. Besides, Billy just seemed like himself. Excited, yes, very excited, but not zoned out. No, he was pretty sure Billy wasn’t on drugs, just batshit crazy.
Jake was so accustomed to the stress he imbibed daily now—like a low dose of a poison he was developing an immunity to—he wasn't especially miffed about this latest violation of his personal life. Even the notion of a personal life seemed like a joke. He knew he could have refused Billy’s request, so why exactly was he cooperating with this madness? Was it because he saw more of Billy than Ally these days and had come to regard him as a friend? Would proof of delusion in the form of a recording with no flute break Billy’s psychosis?
Jake was also aware of a less virtuous motive underlying his cooperation. He felt a boon from the simple fact that Billy was trusting him and confiding in him. It placed the two of them on a different side of the fence from Trevor Rail, and that seemed important. That they were about to record something, however bizarre, without Rail’s knowledge gave Jake a thrill. This was, after all, a new Billy Moon song, written with just a guitar in the woods, and he was going to be the first person to hear it and record it on the spot. Just the two of them.
What if he captured something special? Something even usable. Maybe a demo version that had some magic that just couldn’t be recaptured or surpassed in the studio. It was unlikely, but such things had been known to happen. Sure, Billy’s voice and hands were probably too cold to deliver a clean performance of something so new and fragile, but it was possible. Magic was always possible, every time you pressed the record button. That was why he had taken the job in the first place, and that was why he was tromping through the mud at dawn.
Lost in his own thoughts, Jake bumped into Billy’s guitar case before noticing the singer had stopped. They were in a little clearing with a black pool in the center ringed with mossy stones under a lonely, gnarled rowan tree. The sight of that tree gave Jake a chill, though he could not say why.
Billy laid the case down on a relatively dry patch and popped the latches. Taking the acoustic from its plush shell, he sat down on a fungus-riddled tree stump and did a cursory tune up.
Jake said, “Strum a few chords while I get a level.”
While Billy strummed idly, Jake walked around him in a semi-circle, microphone in hand, listening through headphones. Jake stopped when he found the sweet spot and said, “Okay, I think I’m all set. Thought I’d be picking up wind and bird sounds, but it’s dead quiet here. Birds should be going nuts at this hour.”
Billy nodded gravely.
Jake pressed the record button and a tiny red LED came on. The slightest breeze stirred the trees like a curtain parting on a stage. Tiny ripples moved across the pool. Jake felt a tingle of fear, like a splinter edging under his skin, as Billy started to strum a syncopated minor key progression. He’s going to turn on me in five minutes. He won’t forgive me for not hearing it too.
But then he did hear it, and that little shard of social fear seemed to grow and radiate throughout his body, mutating into a different thing entirely, a multifaceted blazing star of spiritual dread.
They were not alone in the woods. The flute wove in and out of the chord changes. Billy sang a wordless melody in his husky tenor, the notes spinning and dancing with the lilting flute line.
Jake focused on keeping the mic from shaking too badly.
Toward the end of the song, Billy’s voice shifted direction slightly, and Jake glanced up to see him looking at a little stand of birch trees in the bracken while he sang. Following the direction of Billy’s gaze, Jake saw a flash of ridged animal horn that reminded him of the color and texture of a conch shell. Then a glimpse of brown fur and ruddy flesh—human flesh—in another narrow gap between two papery white birch trunks.
But before he could focus on it, it was gone with the flute melody, punctuated by the percussion of hooves on stone. Jake knew in that moment that if he had caught those hoof beats on tape, it would freak him out even more than the flute because he wouldn’t be able to convince himself they belonged to a deer.
Billy let the final chord ring out and then stowed the guitar back in its case. He didn’t comment, just stared into Jake’s eyes, daring him to contradict what they had just witnessed. Jake, who still trusted machines more than his senses, looked down at the digital Walkman in his hand. It was trembling. He pressed rewind, listened to the whir and click, then pressed play, holding his breath, feeling his heart in his throat.
In the headphones he heard the guitar intro, followed by Billy’s voice, but no flute. “It’s not there,” he said. He took the phones off and held them out to Billy, who didn’t accept them.
“But you heard it, right?” Billy said, “You heard it.”
Jake nodded.
* * *
Ally was throwing clothes into a duffel bag, missing the mark half the time, the volume of her voice rising as she ranted at Jake, who stood dumbstruck behind her in their bedroom. “It’s wrecking you, Jake. This job is wrecking you. You’re going gray.” She punctuated the word with a thrown garment. “You don’t get any sleep, or sunlight. You live on takeout. That producer is going to give you PTSD, or at the very least a good case of tinnitus. And now you think you’re seeing devils or something.”
“It was more like a satyr,” he muttered.
“What you saw was probably a deer,” she said, turning to face him with something new on her face—pity. “You know that, don’t you, Jake? It was a deer. You can hardly drive down Main Street without hitting one.”
“But what about the flute?”
“There’s nothing on the tape but Billy, right?”
“Billy and the hooves at the end. I’m telling you, I saw human skin, human muscles, not just animal fur.”
She held up her hand for him to stop.
He had come home to shower before the day’s session and found Ally waiting for him at the kitchen table. Over eggs and toast, he told her about the encounter in the forest and what Billy thought it was, and now she was leaving him.
She gently placed the hand she was holding up in a stop-don’t-say-any-more gesture on his cheek. “Jake, this isn’t like you,” she said, “You’re sleep deprived, and you’re spending a lot of time with a charming but delusional man. It’s affecting your judgment, and you’re scaring me. Tell Eddie you can’t do it anymore.”
Jake took her hand from his face and dropped it. He felt his cheeks flush with heat. “I can’t just quit my job in the middle of a project. That’d be the end of me. The deadline is just two weeks away now. There are a lot of guys who would give anything to be in my position.”
“Give anything? Give what? A life? A wife? You’re giving everything, and it wouldn’t amount to peanuts if it wasn’t for the overtime.”
“Yeah, well, it’s been enough to support you.”
She cast her eyes down. “I guess you won’t have that expense anymore.”
“You’re breaking up with me for Christmas?”
She laughed. “You won’t even know it’s Christmas. It’ll be just another day in the studio.”
She was right, of course. Rail and Moon probably would work on Christmas to make the deadline. Maybe Rachel would make hot chocolate and string the control room with popcorn.
“There’s nothing here for me, Jake. We’re in the middle of the woods. I came here for you and you’re not even here. You won’t even know I’m gone.”
The Devil of Echo Lake Page 19
