“I’m happy for you, Billy.”
“Thanks, Jake. I talked to the ghost, too. Olivia? She says the thing in the woods isn't the Devil. I think it’s Pan—you know the old Greek god?”
“Yeah, I know,” Jake said, thinking that Billy was wading farther into the deep end with each step, talking not only to the Devil now, but to a ghost and a god as well. If only his own experience hadn’t touched on these possibilities, it would have been a lot easier to dismiss the man as a burnout.
“Maybe Pan was her muse, and now he’s mine.”
“If it’s helping you to look at it that way, and not making you paranoid, then it’s probably an okay interpretation of what you’re going through.”
“Do you think?”
“I do.”
“That makes me feel better about it. You’re really the only person I can talk to about this. Rachel helped me get in contact with Olivia, but she doesn’t remember anything. She was in a trance at the time, and I don’t think I trust her enough to tell her what I’m doing out there in the forest.”
“Keeping your cards close. That might be wise. You’re in a vulnerable place.” He slapped his car keys against his thigh to indicate that he was going.
Billy looked up at him and said, “So, Jake. Do you think you could record my new songs?”
Jake laughed and looked at the pine boughs above.
“When Trevor’s not around. Just me and my guitar.”
“In the woods?”
“No, in the studio.”
“When?”
“How about you come back tonight after he leaves? It’s still early.”
“So much for a night off.”
Billy looked down.
“No, it’s cool. I don’t have anything else going on. I’ll come back in an hour or so.”
“Thanks.”
Jake thought Billy looked pretty stoned. Maybe he was. So what? As long as Billy didn’t expect him to go back into those woods in the dark….
At home Jake opened a beer and sat down on a couch that felt far less familiar than the one in the control room. He tried to watch TV. Most of an hour had passed when he looked down at the bottle in his hand. It was still full. He drank some. He remembered breaking up with Lori Vandercross in High School. Every song on the radio at the time had magnified and articulated his suffering.
Now, sitting in the dark apartment in the aftermath of losing the girl he had believed he would marry, letting the photons from their cheap TV wash over him for no other purpose than to keep the silence out, he found he was grateful for the lack of emotional triggers in the flat, dry hip-hop beats and ego trip rhymes ricocheting around the room.
A hot blonde VJ in a Santa hat appeared amid swirling graphics. Jake didn’t know what she was talking about. He flipped the channel, landing on a car commercial. Early morning golden sun, winding California coastal road, chiming anthem-rock guitar lines designed to evoke a yearning for wide-open spaces, or more likely a yearning for the sleek black car that was cruising through them. Jake felt a drop of moisture hanging from his nose and was surprised to find that he was crying.
* * *
Snow swirled in the headlights of the Pontiac on the secret dirt road to the studios. The accumulation silenced the already quiet winter woods. For a fleeting second, Jake saw a spotted deer standing at the side of the road when his high beams turned the animal’s eyes into violet-tinted mirrors. He startled, pumped the breaks, and fishtailed the unwieldy vehicle.
He sat there with his heart hammering until the deer bounded across the road and into the woods. Having lost traction and momentum in the dead stop, he backed the car up to flatter ground and got a running start on the steep hill up to the church. As he cleared the top, he saw Trevor Rail’s BMW still parked under the tallest evergreen, right where it had been when he left.
Jake considered turning around, but decided that would be just chickenshit. Rail might have seen his headlights by now or heard his engine working hard up the hill. He would want to know why Jake was here. Best to walk right in and give an excuse for coming back. He could say he wanted to grab a rough mix cassette of the edits he’d been obsessing over.
Maybe Rail would leave while he was dubbing a copy. But the church looked dark. The stained glass cast a weak, dirty glow onto the snow. It reminded him of the yellow light of dying batteries in a flashlight, struggling and failing to erase the shadows of the guardian pines. Jake was thinking, That light can’t hold a candle to the moonlight, when it struck him that it was candle light.
He turned off the headlights thirty yards or so from the church and parked behind the shed where Buff kept a snowplow, a chainsaw, and some shovels. Hiding the car only increased his anxiety. If Rail found it tucked out of sight like that, no excuse about rough mixes would do. But hiding suddenly felt right.
He thought again about whether or not his headlights had hit the church windows. Probably not. And the snow under his tires would have masked the sound of his approach far better than the usual gravel. Maybe Rail didn’t know he was here. He opened the car door and immediately realized that he didn't have to worry about being heard. Bass pulsed out of the church loud enough to remind him of the dance clubs in Miami. If he could hear it from here, it had to be deafening in there.
He cut a wide approach to the building keeping his footprints in the shadows of the trees. When he had halved the distance between the shed and the church, he recognized the song. It was “I Know It’s There.”
Twenty-one
Billy thought he saw a flash of lightning behind the stained glass. Maybe it was in his head. He was not enjoying the game, but he thought it might get better. He felt buzzed and luxurious in his skin. Trevor Rail’s voice was small and far away, as if it came to him through the talk back mic in headphones, but he wasn’t wearing headphones. In fact, Rail must have been shouting to be heard at all over the blasting pulse of the music. Billy knew he had heard this song before, but he couldn’t place the title. It made him horny. Who was this anyway? It sounded so familiar. He tried to focus.
A heavy rope swung before his eyes like a hypnotist’s chain. But where was the watch? I Like to Watch, he thought. That was one of his songs. Oh, right! This was one of his songs, too. One of the new ones that he didn’t care about anymore. Not since he started writing with Pan in the forest.
The rope was tied in an elaborate knot around a pair of wrists. A pair of hands poked out of the coarse bouquet. One of the fingers was wearing his platinum ring, but it looked too big for the finger. Shaggy black hair brushed the collar of a leather jacket. That’s mine, too. Between the hem of the jacket and a bunched up pair of faded black jeans, a pale ass was exposed in the candlelight. He had the vertiginous sensation of having been pulled out of his body, viewing himself from behind and above. But that wasn’t quite right. There was something familiar about the body beyond his hair and clothes.
“Rachel?” he murmured.
“She’s not here, Billy!” Rail shouted in his little headphone voice.
Rail stepped between Billy and his doppelgänger, holding another length of rope, which also hung down from the ceiling. He pulled on it with both hands and Billy watched the bound figure before him rise. Rail handed Billy the rope and said, “Hold this tight!”
Billy did as he was told, watching fascinated as Rail picked up a tube of lubricant in his right hand and squirted a glob of it into his latex gloved left hand. Then he reached down and caressed the cleft of buttocks framed between jacket and jeans. Billy noticed his own charcoal-gray boxers stretched between his doppelgänger’s thighs. He was surprised to feel the jeans he was wearing tightening around an erection at the sight. He grasped the rope tighter. The rough threads dug into his palms.
Rail smiled at him—the man’s teeth looked like a stone wall polished by a sandstorm. “Come on, Billy,” he said, “Come on and fuck yourself. Merry Christmas! It’s what you’ve always wanted. Fuck yourself, Billy. Do it.”
Billy tug
ged his jeans free of the button with one hand, the other still holding the rope.
* * *
Jake had found a view of the big room through the kitchenette window—one of the few that weren’t stained. It was enough of a view to see that Rail was spending his night off from the job of record producer exploring a sideline as a porno director. Jake couldn’t see a camera in the room, but neither did he see Rail’s gun, so apparently this evening’s festivities were the sport of consenting adults. Billy had probably forgotten all about the acoustic session. He had seemed high when he’d asked about it.
Jake felt uncomfortably like a voyeur for watching whatever this weird shit was they had gotten up to after more wine and probably some of Rachel’s pot. He was about to go back to his car and head home before the still falling snow made that difficult when he saw Rail tie the other end of the rope into a noose and slip it over Billy’s head.
Billy didn’t resist. Perhaps he had experimented with this technique before. Even Jake had heard of it, but it was notorious for tragic mishaps. In Billy’s present condition, it could not be okay to let him do this. What the hell was Rail thinking? Was he there to spot Billy, or was he trying to kill him?
Jake started for the front door. But as soon as the thought of intervening formed in his mind, so did the image of Rail holding him at gunpoint and tying him up as well. Why couldn’t all those candles just set off the fire alarm? That would at least get Eddie up here.
Jake circled the building and considered climbing the tall pine tree nearest the second-story bathroom window. But that was crazy. The branches up top were probably too thin, and he knew his athletic limits. He would only end up badly scratched and covered in sap before having to give up. And time would be wasted. Fortunately, when he tried the side door off the control room—the one Billy most often used to embark on his afternoon walks—he found it unlocked.
There were no candles burning in the control room, but the recessed lights had been dialed down to a yellow-brown haze. The red and green LEDs on the console and outboard gear sparkled like a Christmas tree. The glass doors to the big room were closed, but he could see Billy and Rachel through them when he peered between the speakers, hunched low over the console. He craned his neck until Rail came into view.
Rail was standing in front of Rachel with his latex gloved fists held together before him in imitation of her own bound hands. He was sweeping his hands toward the floor, presumably to demonstrate that she should do the same. But it wasn’t working the way Rail intended. Rachel was too out of it to get the instructions, her eyes flickering between a squint of pain or pleasure and an upward rolling motion, her irises disappearing under mascara-smudged eyelids. She didn’t look like she could focus on Rail at all.
In frustration, he grabbed her forearms and pulled them downward. High above them on the catwalk, the thick rope slid over the arm of a heavy boom stand weighted with sand bags. The stand acted as a pulley, and Billy was lifted up on his tiptoes by the noose around his neck. The expressions on their faces told Jake that this act of leverage brought Billy deeper into Rachel while simultaneously cutting off blood and oxygen to his brain.
Rail let go of Rachel’s arms. They rapidly swung back up above her head as Billy came down again onto his heels. Rail held something too small to make out under Rachel’s nose. He cracked it with his thumb and she jolted into a momentary state of alertness—eyes widening, nostrils flaring—and shook her head. Ammonium nitrate. Having restored her to consciousness, Rail demonstrated the mechanism to her again. This time, she took up the rhythm of her own volition.
Rail turned away from the S&M seesaw he had set in motion and walked toward the control room doors. Jake ducked under the console, scurrying as far back into its shadow as he could get. He pulled his knees to his chest just as the doors opened, flooding the space around him with the music from the speakers in the big room. Black slacks and snake skin boots moved into view less than a foot away from him. The music cut out abruptly.
Jake slowed his breathing in the now silent room. The boots stayed firmly planted for what felt like an aeon, during which Jake could vividly imagine Rail sniffing the air. Then he heard the unmistakable click-scratch of the Zippo flipping open and igniting. The pungent, bitter aroma of a cigarillo wafted down to him. He could picture Rail sucking smoke through his cupped fist in that odd, deviant way of his, while admiring the spectacle he had initiated.
A dirty yellow wave of smoke drifted under the console and lingered in the claustrophobic space. Jake’s heart beat harder, driven by the certainty that Rail had come in here and muted the music because he had seen him. Was the hunter toying with his quarry, smoking him out of his hole? The involuntary urge to cough seized him. He covered his mouth and held his breath until his eyes watered. Then Rail’s snakeskin boots pivoted and strode away.
When he heard the control room doors close, Jake allowed himself to breathe again, daring to believe that Rail was on the other side of them, returning to his game.
After a couple of minutes had passed, he crawled out from under the mixing desk and looked around. The control room was empty. He almost laughed when he thought of telling Rail with a straight face that he’d just been checking a few connections under the hood. Staying low, he scanned the field of buttons, pressed one, slid a fader up, and listened to the sounds of live air, creaking rope, and raspy respiration, picked up by one of the mics in the big room. Then he crouched back down and sat Indian-style under the console, listening.
Rail’s voice came through the monitors. “Have you heard the story of Olivia Heron, Billy?”
“Mmm. The ghost.”
“Do you know how she became a ghost?”
No reply. Only creaking rope.
“She was the church organist. One night a priest caught her playing lascivious music in the nude. Perhaps he requested a duet and she refused. Word got around town that she had engaged in congress with Satan in return for the gift of infernal song. Are you listening, Billy? Billy.”
Jake winced at the sound of a loud slap. It was followed seconds later by the crack of a paper-wrapped glass capsule and labored breathing in fits and starts.
“You’re okay, Billy. All of the blood is in your dick. Not much in your head. Feels good, doesn’t it? Are you getting that full body buzz?
“As I was saying, Olivia Heron was accused of practicing witchcraft, and a very rare event occurred right here in this church as a consequence. The priest performed an exorcism. A failed exorcism. The rite lasted seven hours. When the sun cleared the horizon in the morning and it was determined the Devil had not loosed his grip on the girl, they ended it by hanging her. Right here in this room. And I know this because I was there. D’you take, my meaning, mate? I was right here when it happened.”
Billy mumbled something. It might have been “liar.”
Silence for a while, then the seesaw sound of rope creaking in rhythm. Jake wondered if Rail was assisting Rachel again.
“History repeats itself, Billy,” Rail said. “But sometimes the echoes of history cancel each other out. Tonight, we complete a circle. Only, on this darkest night of the year, our ritual transforms the noose, the instrument of fear and hatred, into the stimulus for ecstatic union.
“This is it, Billy, the ultimate act of unabashed self-expression: fucking yourself in defiance of the very grip of death at your throat. Isn’t it what you’ve always wanted? Isn’t this what the stadiums full of adoring fans are a substitute for? The need to love yourself? Such hunger for others to love you, to fill that hole. And now, it’s my gift to you. Embrace your darkest drive, Billy. Rock-and-roll always has. That’s the glory of it.
Do you know what instrument Nero played while Rome burned? The chittara, a forerunner of the guitar. And they said he was the Antichrist. The same sound seduced you as a boy, the sound of six strings. Those timeless vibrations of shameless lust and aggression. Are you getting off on what I’m saying? That’s it. Put your hips into it. The sound of power.
The sound of fire. Harder! The sound of Holy Fucking Thunder. Now rock harder!”
The control room doors swung open. Jake froze. He watched Rail’s boots come into view again, moving swiftly this time, motivated by his own rant. Jake felt sick at the thought of Rail noticing that the mic was on, noticing the controls he’d changed. Then the music came blasting on again at distortion-laced maximum volume. Rail left again, this time leaving the doors open in his wake.
Jake ventured a glance around the side of the console just in time to see the front doors of the building swinging shut on a flurry of swirling snow beyond the pumping, swinging spectacle that was Billy and Rachel.
Was Rail going to get something from his car?
He took a step into the big room, feeling terribly exposed. Now he could see that Rachel was standing on one of the milk crates they sometimes used to raise guitar amps off the floor. He thought of the gloves Rail had been wearing. Had the ringmaster left this high stakes freak show to run its course and look like an accident?
He scanned the room. On the table in the kitchenette, the Japanese dagger lay tangled in the silk scarf Rachel had once used to blindfold Billy. God only knew what other games had preceded this one. Jake seized the knife and ran to the interlocked couple with it. They took no notice of him. Rachel’s eyes were closed and Billy’s were turned upward and inward. The rhythm of their sex was now labored and drowsy. Billy weighed more than Rachel, but if she collapsed, if she fell off of that crate, he would hang.
Jake slid his left hand between Rachel’s bound wrists, catching the rope with the web between thumb and forefinger. He pushed it up, raising her arms above her head, taking her weight off Billy’s end. Holding her up like that with one hand, he sawed at the rope with the knife.
Highbeams flared in the windows—Rail pulling out onto the road. Thank God.
Three times the blade slipped. Sweat trickled from Jake's hair into his eyes. Coarse threads sprung from the rope in clusters, but sawing was taking too long. He drew the blade back beside his ear and placed his trust in its flawless geometry. He slashed, the rope severed, and the lovers fell.
The Devil of Echo Lake Page 23
