Armageddon Rag

by George R. R. Martin

  The sleepless nights came more frequently as time ran down on him. One week before the scheduled comeback concert, they finally closed up the Philadelphia theater. The instruments and all the massive new sound equipment and the roadies and friends and groupies and sound crew and light crew piled into a bus and a semi for the trip to Chicago. Maggio, Slozewski, and Larry Richmond flew out. Faxon was supposed to fly with them, for a final week of rehearsal in Chicago, but instead he announced that he was taking a plane to New Mexico to see his family. “If we don’t have it now, we’re never going to have it,” he said, leaving unspoken the thing that everyone knew: they didn’t have it. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back in time for the gig. Just don’t ask me why.”

  Sandy and Ananda drove in Daydream. He cut loose from the bus and the semi as soon as he could by the simple expedient of flooring his gas pedal and leaving them far behind. He had had too much time with all of it, and he wanted to be alone. Ananda, who had been attending the rehearsals regularly, had been unusually quiet during the last week in Philadelphia, but on the road her spirit came back to her. She was playful, lively, erotic. They made a silly game of making love in every state along the way, and whenever he expressed doubts or forebodings, she was there to talk or joke him out of it. She was good to have along.

  He did think of visiting Maggie when they passed by Cleveland, but somehow, with Ananda along, it didn’t seem like a good idea, though he had never known Maggie to be jealous.

  When they reached Chicago, Sandy was careful to stay away from the Conrad Hilton. He checked into the big new Hyatt Regency, a tall modern goliath of a hotel that had not even been dreamed of in 1968. Even at the last minute…or especially at the last minute… there were a million things to do. Sandy did them. Doing them took so much energy that he had none left for worry.

  But on the last night, the dream came once again.

  The hall, the vast dark hall. But it was not a hall, Sandy saw; they were outdoors, under the stars, spreading stars like yellow eyes. There were the Nazgûl, bathed in flickering dancing light, red light, dull violet light, white light that made them burn and shimmer, black light that made them brighter still. Each was as Sandy had seen him before. Gopher John was burned, Faxon was still-faced and bleeding, Maggio’s whole body seemed ripe with pustulence and decay. And in front was Hobbins moving. Hobbins, not Larry Richmond, the real, the original, the dead Patrick Henry Hobbins himself, singing as only he could sing. He was vast, taller than the others, the three mere humans, the living; he was tall enough to brush the terrible black sky, and he was translucent, burning with a furious inner light. He was singing “The Armageddon Rag.” Behind the stage was the big rough X-shaped cross, and the naked woman nailed to it, bleeding. They had pulled off her nipples with pincers and the blood ran down her chest. Another thin red trickle crossed the whiteness of her thighs, flowing from her vagina, from somewhere deep inside her. Her eyes had been put out; she twisted her head and screamed and looked out at the dance from empty, bleeding sockets. She was familiar, he sensed. He knew her, knew her somehow, this wasted child-woman. He knew the sound of her screams, knew the look in those blind bloody eyes, knew the sad, pathetic motions of the thin body. But how? Where? It would not come clear. Behind her were the demons, all around them were the demons, dark shapes writhing in greater darkness, slitted yellow eyes, red red mouths, breath like fire. But on the dance floor the people boogied on, lost in the magic of Hobbins’ voice, lost in the spell of the Nazgûl. Sandy ran from one to another, shaking them, hitting them, trying to make them listen. Froggy grinned at him and made a joke. Lark told him his politics were incorrect. Bambi said he had to believe, to believe in the promises. The promises were beautiful. Ananda was there too, dancing wildly, laughing. She was naked and her dance was maddeningly erotic. But she stopped when Sandy came near. “It’s all right,” she said, and she did that thing with her tongue, slipping it across her lower lip, so quickly, so enticingly. “Don’t fight it. Come.” And she took his hand and tried to draw him into the dance. But as she pulled him he saw Edan Morse, off to the side, standing alone and looking at his hands. His hands were bleeding. He held them up and they dripped black, viscous blood. “This isn’t right,” Morse said. “This isn’t right.”

  “NO!” Sandy screamed, and he sat up in bed, shaking. For an instant it had seemed so real. Then it faded, and it was just a dream again, and he thought he would have another black, sleepless night. But his shout had woken Ananda, and she put a gentle hand on his shoulder, drew him back and down. “I had the dream,” he said.

  “Don’t think of it,” she said. She took his hand and put it on her breast. It was warm and alive, and Sandy felt her nipple grow erect under his palm. “This is no night for bad dreams,” Ananda whispered. She kissed him and ran her hand down along his spine. “It’s all right,” she said. “Don’t fight it. Come.” He was already hard, and she opened her legs for him, and she was very wet and very warm, and he entered her and found his comfort there, found his warmth and solace, found shelter from the storm. “Come,” she whispered to him as they moved together, “come, come, come, come.” And finally he did.

  TWENTY

  And we’ll go dancing baby and then you’ll see/

  How the magic’s in the music and the music’s in me

  Between the Hyatt and the Civic Auditorium lay the streets the ghosts had walked on his last visit to Chicago, the streets where the battles had swirled on a hot, humid night like this in 1968, but tonight they flowed with a different kind of excitement, the normal Loop traffic swelled by a steady stream of couples moving south from the parking garages to the theater, to hear the Nazgûl play. Sandy made the walk alone, since Ananda had been down there all afternoon. He felt very much a part of the crowds streaming toward the concert. They were all strangers, but he knew them, the men and the women in jeans and tee shirts and the ones in denim suits, the ones who came in cabs and the ones who piled out of ancient VW minibuses, the ones whose hair was styled and the few who still wore it long. It would be an older crowd than those at most rock concerts, he knew, full of people like himself, full of Bambis and Froggys and Slums, come together in celebration after too many years apart, come together once more to hear some memories…or maybe, just maybe, because they were lost, and looking for something.

  The street outside the theater was a zoo. Taxis pulled up one after another, discharging fares. Cars cruised past slowly, with women hanging out the windows shouting to see if anyone had extra tickets, stopping dead when one of the scalpers came sidling up. The concert was a sell-out, had been a sell-out within hours of the moment tickets went on sale. Already the double line of concert-goers stretched around the block. Sandy saw a lot of beards still, a few headbands, here and there a fringed vest. There was one woman with waist-long red hair whose chest was covered with buttons; buttons for candidates and causes and bands that had been forgotten for years, with slogans that no one ever chanted anymore. Sandy smelled grass as he pushed through the crowd. He counted a lot of Nazgûl tee shirts; the famous blue Dead Hobbit tee shirt from the 1969 tour, the dead-black shirt (washed-out now), with nothing on it but four pairs of red eyes, that had been given away to promote the Black Album, the common blood-red printed shirt with its white lettering and line drawing, and of course the new shirt Sandy had helped design, a deep purple, the color of an old bruise, with silver lettering that said THE NAZGÛL FLY AGAIN over a transfer showing a black rider etched in silhouette against a swollen red sun.

  He flashed his pass at the door and was admitted. Backstage was the normal preperformance chaos multiplied by about a factor of ten. Everyone seemed to be running somewhere and shouting. He found Ananda back with the band. They were sitting amid the confusion and trying to look calm. Rick Maggio was smoking a joint, his feet up on a chair. He was still porcine, though he’d dropped about forty pounds and the strain was showing in his eyes. A cute blond was sitting in a lotus position at his feet, like a faithful dog, and every once i
n a while Maggio would give her a little pat on the head, and she would look back and repay him with a crooked redlipped smile. Gopher John was sucking a beer and scowling at himself in a mirror. He was wearing an old tie-dyed smock that he must have dug out of the bottom of the closet he’d thrown it in fifteen years ago, and his beard had come in full and fierce, making his face look rounder than it was. Larry Richmond wore a red denim suit and a black shirt. His long white hair was freshly washed and brushed, and it looked pale as ice, like a frozen waterfall. He was putting in the contact lenses that would change his pinkish eyes to a vivid, piercing, demonic red. Balrog was asleep at his feet.

  “Where’s Faxon?” Sandy asked.

  Ananda shrugged. “He’s been running around all day, checking the lights and giving Reynard a hard time, bitching at Gort, supervising the sound check. Wants to do everything himself. I don’t know—”

  Faxon came in the door, frowning. “They’re letting ’em in now,” he said. “Packed house. This is it.” He looked at the other three Nazgûl. “The rehearsals may not have been the best, but that was for practice and this is for real. If we don’t pull it together tonight, it’s over. You got that? All of you? Rick?”

  “Don’t sweat it, man,” Maggio said. “We’re cool. It’s goin’ down smooth as baby shit, I guaran-fucking-tee it. Biggest fucking comeback in the history of rock and roll. Don’t get all uptight.”

  Sandy could tell that Faxon was controlling his temper with an effort. Real tension showed in every line of those handsome surfer-boy features. “If you fuck up, Rick,” Faxon said carefully, “I’m going to come across the stage and shove my bass up your fucking ass. Is that clear enough for you?” He smiled. “So who’s uptight? Not me. John, Pat, how you doing?”

  “I’m a little nervous,” Richmond admitted. You could see the anxiety all over his face, Sandy thought. He’d never looked less like Pat Hobbins than he did right now, scared as he was.

  “You’d be a freak if you weren’t nervous,” Faxon said. “Don’t fret it, kid. You’ll be okay.” His voice didn’t really believe it. “All right, we all know how it’s going to go. We’ll open with ‘Napalm Love’ for old times’ sake, and then get into the new stuff. The sound’s real good out there. This place has terrific acoustics.”

  “We know, Peter,” Gopher John said with a small smile. “We played here in ’71, remember? Take it easy.”

  Faxon grinned self-consciously. “Well, then,” he said. He looked at his watch. “We got about an hour before we go on. Let’s get our asses next door. Morse has set up a hell of a spread. Booze, wine, beer, enough food to feed the entire Polish army. It’s already full of celebrity types. Lots of designer jeans and gold chains, and all the media too, of course. Sandy says we’re supposed to mingle and make nice.”

  “Fuck that shit,” Maggio said. “I’m staying right here and gettin’ me some head.” He patted the girl at his feet and she smiled for him again.

  “Suit yourself,” Sandy put in. “It’s Larry they’re going to be interested in, anyway.”

  “Ah, fuck,” said Maggio. He got to his feet, as Sandy had figured he would. “Whattahell, I might as well get me a few brews and talk to them jerks. C’mon, baby.” She followed him from the room in much the same way that Balrog followed Richmond.

  Sandy left the preshow party early. It was too crowded and smoky and hot for him, and he was getting more and more nervous as the moment of truth neared. Out in the auditorium, most of the seats were filled, and the crowd was buzzing noisily and starting to get restless. The darkened stage, with instruments and sound equipment all set up, looked pregnant with possibilities. He was standing looking out at it when Ananda appeared silently at his side and took him by the arm.

  “Look at them,” Sandy said, nodding at the tiers of seats, at the balconies, at the blur of faces.

  “What am I supposed to see?”

  “Me,” said Sandy. “Me, writ large. Us, our generation, the class of 1970. This isn’t a rock concert, it’s a convention for aging hippies and co-opted radicals. Why the hell are they all here?”

  “Because they took the wrong road a long time ago,” Ananda said with unexpected vehemence. Her voice was dead earnest, her eyes dark and lambent. “They lost something, just like you did. They betrayed everything they stood for, abandoned it, changed into their goddamned mommies and daddies only half-knowing it. And now the world is shitting on them like it shit on their parents, and they don’t like it. They know in their guts now as well as their heads what a stinking world this is, and they know they could have changed it, but they blew it. So now they want to get back. They want to get back to the time when they counted, when they still believed in something, when there was still a little hope that their lives would actually mean something. And music is the only road, Sandy, the only road back. Right?”

  Sandy smiled. “I wish I knew,” he said. The lines of a song occurred to him. “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  “What if there never was a garden, ’Nanda? What if there never was a garden at all?”

  She never got to answer. Suddenly they were surrounded by people, noise, commotion as the party backstage broke up and spilled itself into the wings. And a moment later, out in the auditorium, all the house lights died on cue.

  You could feel the stillness, the sense of expectation. You could hear the conversations perish. You could touch the pulse of the crowd, the fluttery excited beat of the mass heart in that darkness. You could catch the scent of hope and fear.

  Dark silence for a long moment.

  Then the announcer’s voice filled the breathless quiet. “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 1971 …THE NAZGÛL!”

  Three flaming red spots lanced down and touched the pitch-black stage, and there they stood as they had stood so often in concerts long past, long past but not forgotten. Rick Maggio grinned and drew his long, hard nails across his Telecaster, leaning on his Wah-Wah pedal to send a wild scream of distortion out to challenge the night. Gopher John, scowling behind the red-and-black drums, eased into a tremulous roll on his floor tom. Peter Faxon stood with his bass against him like a shield against the world, his face still and expressionless. He tuned the Rickenbacker as coolly as if he were alone in his room.

  The crowd came to its feet, cheering, clapping, whistling, stamping, screaming its approval. The shouts all melted together into one loud, incoherent noise, a thunder of welcome that went on and on and on, the din of it drowning the faint sound of Gopher John’s drum roll, the deep vibrations of Faxon’s bass, the stabbing whine of Maggio’s guitar. The sound built and built until it seemed as though it might never end, as if the band might never get to play at all… and then, like the voice of God himself booming out of heaven, came the voice of Larry Richmond with the words of Patrick Henry Hobbins, the words that ought to have been inscribed on Hobbins’ tombstone. “All right kids,” the voice said, cutting through the din like a knife, “let’s rock till our ears bleed!”

  The white spot flashed on, incredibly brilliant, nova hot, a shining shaft angling through the dimness, alive with dust. It came alive and it came down and it caught him, and there he was walking around the drums, there he was, his white hair shining in that light, his clothes as black and shiny as sin and as red as doom, his eyes burning, there he was, there he was, strapping on the guitar, moving to the microphone, there he was, there he was, it was impossible, he was gone and buried, it couldn’t be, but there he was, Patrick Henry Hobbins, there he was, the Hobbit himself, in person, on stage, back from the goddamned dead.

  The applause dwindled and stopped. For an endless moment, the hall was filled with the silence of disbelief. The faithful stood there and gaped, unable to believe their eyes. Someone off in the back screamed hysterically. And then the cheering began again, twice as loud as before, so wild and fevered and hoarse that it threatened to rip the roof off the auditorium. The
Nazgûl basked in it. One by one, Sandy saw them smile. It had been a long time, a long, long time.

  It was Peter Faxon who came to his senses first and broke the spell. He lifted his head, grinning, and said, “Hey, you wanna hear some rock and roll?” The audience screamed back at him as one, and slowly the cheering staggered to a halt. The Nazgûl looked at one another. Maggio laid into the sizzling opening riff of “Napalm Love,” the crowd recognized it and screamed, Richmond’s rhythm guitar picked up the song and filled in behind Maggio, ringing the contrasts, and then came the bass and the drums, the quickening tempo, and the crowd screamed louder still, and Larry Richmond tossed back his long white hair with a jerk of his head and gave ’em the opening lyric:

  Hey baby, what’s that in the skyyyyy?!

  Maggio’s cement-mixer and whiskey voice provided the answer:

  It’s loooooove!

  And then they were into it full-force, the guitars screaming together, Slozewski scowling away, Richmond moving from one Hobbins pose to another, boogying, posturing, pounding his Gibson as he gave his best to Faxon’s acid lyrics.