His block wasn't exactly a slum. But it sure wasn't the best part of town. Once the sun was down on Slime Street, there wasn't anyone around except Relly and his mom and a few stray cats.
There weren't any real neighbors. Just abandoned warehouses and old boarded-up stores. Hardly any cars, nobody walking. All the buildings kind of leaned together like sick creaky old men. Most of the windows were dead black. That first night I went, a tongue of cold air came licking down from the north and got caught on Slime Street. It turned and turned, and made a little whirlwind, sucking up paper cups and dead leaves and bits of plastic.
His house was three stories tall. And real narrow. So, between two empty lots, it looked like a tower.
I stood at the front door for a while, thinking I should just turn around and go home. They wouldn't want me. We'd go through a couple of tunes and they'd give me that fake little smile that means "Thanks, but no thanks."
It was actually a double door, with an arched top, like the entrance to an old church. The paint looked about a hundred years old, peeling off in long curls. No doorbell. He'd told me that already. "There's some rocks on the front step. Just use one of those to bang on the door. My mom will hear it."
And she did. The door came open. "You're the girl," she said. No "hello," or "come on in." She just stood there looking me over. "You're the girl," she said again.
That wasn't obvious? "Yeah. Relly said I should—"
She opened the door wider and I figured that meant I should go in.
My bass case kind of banged against the door. I was trying to pass through without getting too close to Relly's mom. "Sorry, sorry," I said. But she wasn't the type to care about a few digs in the woodwork.
She was no suburban mom. Not by a long shot.
Like Relly, she was tall and thin. And she had the same long black hair. From the way he'd talked about her, I thought she'd be an old stoner metalhead. She actually remembered going to see Orion Hedd. "Totally changed my life." He repeated this to me. And it sounded like he'd heard her say it about a hundred times. "I'll tell you that. Nothing was ever better. It was like a shimmering magic wind came blowing through. Right down from the stars, a cold wind from the seventh heaven."
But with me, she didn't get into the '70s trippy weirdness. At least not that first night.
She pointed to the stairs. "You'd better leave your coat on. It gets cold up there." And that was that.
Ten
SO I CLIMBED THE three flights of steps to the attic. The stairs didn't creak. They whispered. Or that's what it seemed like as I went up. Faint voices from far away.
At the first-floor landing, I heard the steady thump of Butt's kick drum. At the second, a low growling riff reached my ears. By the third floor, the whisper of the stairs was drowned out by drums and guitar and someone's maniac yells.
I got to the attic and pushed open the door. A wave of sound broke and poured around me. They were good. Already I could tell.
"Hey, all right!" Relly said. "You came."
"I said I would."
He pointed to Butt, behind his drum set. "There he is. Don't smell so good and can't hardly talk. But he can drub those drums better than the best." Relly had a different way of speaking now. A little louder. Kind of brash and bragging. This was his turf, unlike school. These were his friends, his allies, his band mates. He could be more himself here than in a school filled with two thousand strangers. "And this is Mr. Jerod Powers, the Golden Boy."
Jerod was so good-looking I almost had to turn away. I mean it was too much, all that wild blond hair and piercing blue eyes and pouty lips. I guess every band needs a pretty boy. Didn't matter if he could sing. But as it turned out, he was pretty good.
"So what do you think?"
I didn't answer at first. What did he want me to say? "Yeah, Butt's a shaved gorilla and Jerod should be in the movies?"
Then I understood. He meant the attic, and what they'd done to make it a practice space. "It's great, it's great," I said. And I wasn't just talking. It truly was an amazing place.
The ceiling went way up, with dozens of weird angles like a cathedral. It was all raw boards. And the ooze of hundred-year-old sap hung down in hard amber drops.
They'd pushed mountains of abandoned junk to the edges of the attic to make room for the band. There was a wardrobe full of old clothes, wooden crates and cardboard boxes, stacks of books, toys, rusty tools. I saw a floor lamp in the wreckage. The shaft looked like bone and the shade like dried animal skin. An old army helmet hung on the wall, along with a velvet painting of a snarling black panther, and a wedding dress in a tattered plastic bag.
The other band I'd played in, and that was only for a few weeks, had practiced in a cellar. Relly's attic was full of junk, too. But it felt just the opposite of some wet, smelly basement. With no close neighbors, they didn't have to insulate for the noise at Relly's. No mattresses on the Walls. No foam on the windows or layers of Curbside Special carpet nailed to soak up the sound.
What I liked best was the space over our heads. It seemed to go up and up forever.
Eleven
"YOU CAN PLUG IN OVER HERE," Relly said, pointing to a bass amp all covered with stickers and spray paint.
So I unpacked the Ibanez and uncoiled my cord and got ready.
Jerod said, "It's just a tryout, OK? We're thinking about other guys too. We've got to find exactly the right one. So don't get your hopes up."
And Butt kept looking at me, staring, actually. I guess he was wondering if I had what it took. The bass player and the drummer have to be locked in like two gears in a machine. They've got to mesh and turn together perfectly. He looked at my hands, which aren't huge. And he looked at my bass, which wasn't huge or flashy either. I'd saved for two years to buy the Ibanez. Flipping burgers, "Do you want fries with that?" never getting the smell of grease out of my hair, saying "Have a nice day" to mean, huffy customers. Two years of fast-food stink so I could buy the bass. Butt looked me over and he didn't say a word.
"So what do you know?" Relly asked.
"You guys do any Zeppelin?"
Butt nodded. Relly whanged his Strat, making a big grinding chord. Jerod grabbed the mike with both hands.
"How 'bout 'Black Dog?'" I asked.
A little pause. A little gap of silence, like they were taking in a deep breath, all three of them at once. I thought maybe I'd said the wrong thing, that I'd shown myself to be a feeb and a loser.
But no, it was exactly the right choice. Did they know "Black Dog?" Oh yeah. Could they play it? Oh yes indeed.
Maybe it was all strutting showoff. Or it could have been they wanted to blow away the girl wannabe bass player. Or maybe it was meant to be. Because afterward Relly told me they'd never played like that. Butt nodded, grinning and working his kick drum pedal. And even Jerod had to admit they'd never sounded better.
We ripped into the first tune like we'd been playing together for years. Butt was heavy as ten sledgehammers. Me and Relly doubled the snakey riff, note-for-note perfect. And Jerod was on top, doing his best sexy tomcat yowls.
And the whole band seemed to lift right off the ground. I mean it: like suddenly we went from being lowly humans to brilliant angels. It was an amazing feeling, a scary, gasping buzz. My fingers moved and the logical part of my brain kind of shut down. Pure sound came roaring out. Loud and wild and relentless. And we rose, all four of us, rose up free as flames, no longer trapped, pouring ourselves up and out.
Twelve
UNTIL THAT NIGHT, Relly wouldn't tell me the name. This seemed kind of stupid. How was he going to get famous if he wouldn't reveal the name of his band?
"Not till everything is in place," he'd said. "When we're ready, then we conquer the universe."
He wiped the neck of his Strat and looked at the other two guys. "Well?" he said.
"She's in," Butt said. He did a drumroll and then whacked a crash cymbal. "I say she's in."
Jerod shrugged. "Sure. Whatever."
Relly nodded. "Welcome to Scorpio Bone."
"That's the name of the band?" I asked.
"Scorpio Bone," he said again, louder.
Then he played a dark, crawling riff. Butt joined him, just tom-toms and kick drum, a deep throb. Finally Jerod wailed on top of the noise, "Scorpio Bone!" like this was the theme music to some monster metal movie.
"You're in," Relly said when they'd finished. "Welcome."
We played another hour or two. It was mostly covers. A lot of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, and one more Led Zeppelin tune, a weird, looming version of "The Ocean."
Then Relly taught me the bass line for one of his originals, "The Three-Prong Crown." It didn't come easy. But it came right. I mean I had to work at it. Still, the line fit my hands and the chords fit the words. And the sound fit my brain.
Thirteen
"BUT SCORPIONS DON'T HAVE BONES," I said the next day at lunch. "They have a shell, right? Like armor. They're arachnids. They don't have any bones."
Up till then I thought Relly was just plain weird. But I didn't know how weird till he started explaining the name. "Don't you see?" he said, whispering like it was some earthshattering secret. "That's what makes the name so cool. It's something that doesn't exist but it's real. Like if scorpions had bones, what would they be? They'd be us."
Butt took two pieces of baloney off his sandwich and ripped holes in the middle. Then he slapped them on his face like a mask and started singing the old Batman theme music.
"I don't get it. How can something be real and not real at the—"
"That's the whole point."
We were in the cafeteria, me and Butt and Relly, at a table off in the corner. "Did you believe in Santa Claus when you were little?" He didn't let me answer. "You sure did. And it was cool, right? Some fat magic maniac comes out of the sky with presents and a sleigh and zero-gravity reindeer. Christmas Eve was the best, right? But it's not real. Not like school and pizza and scumpack teachers yelling is real. So our name is ten times more cool. Like in some other world scorpions do have bones."
In some other world? "What are you talking about?"
"Nothing is what it seems to be," Relly leaned close and whispered. "You know, like the whole world is wearing camouflage. Everything and everyone is hiding." Butt wasn't paying much attention. He could only take so much of this weirdness. "They're all like puppets. Only, they don't want you to see their strings. Every person in the world. They all tell lies. They all wear a mask."
Butt nodded, then pulled off his baloney disguise and grinned. Relly pointed over to a table where some of the popular kids were sitting. Good-looking football players, girls with beautiful hair and clear skin and perfect figures. "In a couple years," Relly told me. "They'll all be pumping gas or working as a greeter at K-Mart. 'Hello, have a wonderful day!'" He sneered the words. "And you know where I'll be?"
"No," I said, edging a little closer.
"I don't know, either. But wherever it is, I'll be big. I can tell you that. I will be immense. "He said that word like a challenge, like he dared anyone to disagree. "I will be so big, all those jocks and jockesses won't even be able to see me. Like ants can't see a person, just a huge shadow looming over before you squash them flat. I will be so big that these losers who think they're such winners won't even recognize me."
One minute I thought he was pathetic. And the next he seemed awesome. Then he was both at the same time. A whispering scrawny kid with a fiery look in his eye.
"Now that we're together, the four of us, it's gonna start. The big time. The biggest thing you ever saw." He kept watching me as he talked, waiting for me to laugh or say this was all stupid. But I didn't.
"It's the Ghost Metal thing," he said. "When we really get cranking, the four of us, we can cross over to the other side, the other world."
He needed Scorpio Bone with him. That's what he said, sitting there watching the clock in the cafeteria. Going over to "the other world" was too dangerous just by himself. "Four sides of the square to make it safe. Seeing in all four directions.
It takes four and no more.
It takes four to win the war."
Were these lyrics from some song he'd written?
I didn't find out that day. The bell rang and we pushed back from the table. Relly went to math and I had English.
Fourteen
BEING AROUND RELLY made me feel very strange. Like when I watched a magician, I knew it was all fake and still I wanted to believe. Card tricks, pulling coins out of midair, sawing a lady in half. It's all bogus, of course. Still, part of me wanted to believe there was such a thing as magic.
Sitting in the cafeteria with Relly, or hanging around his attic after practice, I felt the same way. He talked about the magic four thing, how we had to be "four and no more." Like North, South, East, and West. Or the four Gospels in the Bible. Or the Sex Pistols, who my dad grew up listening to. Or the Four Winds, or the Four Seasons, or the Four Stooges, if you counted Shemp.
"It's always four guys," Relly said. "Every real band is four: bass, guitar, singer, and drums. That's all you need. Orion Hedd and Metallica and Sabbath and the Who. Superheroes, too: the Fantastic Four and those guys in the Tales of Asgard comics. The Ninja Turtles and the Four Horsemen at the end of the world. War. Conquest. Famine. Death."
It was like those crazy old men in the library downtown who smell bad and babble to themselves for hours. Aliens, secret mind control, werewolves, messages from heaven. It was all a bubbling stew of weirdness.
Yeah, Relly read a lot of comics and watched way too many Videos about wizards and warlocks. Yeah, his mom sure didn't discourage him from thinking that way. Yeah, he'd stay up sometimes three days straight with no sleep, which makes your brain do some very strange things.
But still, I never thought his talk of the fourfold gods was a put-on or a figment of his fevered brain. He really believed it. And the more time I spent with him, the more I did, too.
Fifteen
SO I FELT STRANGE when I was around him. But I felt even stranger when I was alone.
Our house is pretty empty at night with my dad gone to work. Sometimes I watched TV, of course, or put on some music.
After Relly said I was in the band, I started practicing more. He gave me some tunes to listen to. He gave me some charts to work from and explained what the symbols meant. Minor and major chords, repeats and intros, that kind of thing. He even said I could bring in songs for the band, if I wanted to write some.
And this was great. It really was, to be part of the band.
Still, sometimes when I'd sit home by myself, a feeling came over me that really scared me. The nights were getting colder and I'd turn on the electric heater in my room. Behind the metal grate there were coils. And they'd glow orange-hot, like a burning snake all wound in on itself.
I'd sit there and look at those glowing coils and I'd wonder what it would feel like to touch them. I know this sounds crazy. It would hurt, and hurt bad. What more did I need to know? Why would anybody want to touch something hot enough to sear the flesh?
I know some girls cut themselves on purpose. And some guys get into fights just to feel the pain of getting hit. That's not what I'm talking about here. Not at all. I know what pain feels like and I don't like it. Not one bit.
One night, the fever came back and my nose ran like a broken faucet. It wasn't the ick and the sweat that bugged me, though. Or the thought that I'd never shake this flu. It was the feeling that I couldn't look away from the orange-hot coils.
There was power in that glow. And I don't mean electric power. Power to burn, to heat, to cook, to hurt. And feverish power to bring something out of me that I'd never seen before.
When my mind would go down that way, it really scared me. That night I thought of calling my dad at work. But he'd be mad. I could go down to the Chimes and just sit in a booth for a while. He'd be in the back, and once in a while I might see him go by the pass-through window. Still, he'd be busy and I'd be out there all by m
yself.
I picked up my Ibanez and played for a while, pretty loud, pretty cranked-up. But without the rest of the band, it just didn't do the job.
There was TV. There were books. There were dishes to wash and homework to do.
But no matter what I did, my brain kept dragging me back to those orange, snaky coils, burning hot.
So finally I called Relly, which I'd never done before.
"Hey," I said. "It's me. Zee." My voice was a shaky whisper.
"What's wrong?" he said.
"Nothing."
"Then why are you—"
"Does something have to be wrong for me to call?" I said.
"I don't know. You just sound weird. You OK?"
Hearing his voice calmed me down. We didn't talk about much. School, mostly. Music a little. Five minutes on the phone and I was OK again. The bad feeling was gone.
"All right, well I should finish up the laundry before my dad gets home."
"Sure. See you in Bio."
I hung up and took a deep breath. Wherever my panic had come from, it was gone now, back like a snake crawling into its secret hole.
Sixteen
RELLY CALLED HIS MOM by her first name, which was Tannis. I found out later that she changed it from something normal back in the olden days. But her name wasn't the strangest thing about her.
"Why don't you sit down here for a second?" she said as I headed through the kitchen for the stairs.
"The guys are all—"
"Sit down." It wasn't exactly a command. But she wasn't asking politely, either. "We need to talk."
So I leaned my case against the wall and joined her at the kitchen table.
"Jonathan called. He'll be late." That was Butt's real name. Jonathan Vincent Butterfield.
Tannis had a trippy kind of feel about her. I don't mean she'd fried her brains with acid in the olden days. And she wasn't one of those have-a-nice-day gra-nola types. Mood rings, wheat grass, tarot cards, yoga.
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