The Scream

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  “With Mr. Crane are two men whose rock bands will performing at Rock Aid: Yke Dykeburn, lead singer for the heavy metal group The Slabs, and Jacob Hamer, founder of the aptly named Jacob Hamer Band.”

  Jake’s calculated third of the crowd came through with applause. It was interesting to note that fewer Christians than rockers booed the opposition. He tried to imagine Aunt Bea standing up, raising her fist, and shouting POLITENESS RULES! at the top of her lungs. Somehow, it didn’t quite jibe. Maybe that was the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. Or maybe not. Who knew.

  “Mr. Hamer,” the show host said. “You came to notoriety with your recent hit song, ‘TV Ministries.’ Not only is it enjoying its seventh week on the Billboard charts, it has also aroused the ire of virtually every evangelical group in the nation.”

  Jake smiled.

  Moynihan smiled back. “We’d like to show a clip from that video, if you don’t mind.”

  “Please do.”

  There was a pause in the stage monitors, a second or two of video static that the home audience didn’t catch . . . and then the last verse of the song kicked in, rock-solid and pumping. Peter Stewart, the Hamer Band’s lead guitarist, appeared on the screen in the guise of a gawky and ludicrous nerd, lying on his bed, watching television. His hair was slicked back with sweat and Brylcreem. Enormous horn-rimmed glasses perched on his beaky nose. He was clad in a white pajama shirt, a black pajama tie, black pajama pants, and black and white bunny slippers. A big fuzzy Bible-shaped pillow was clutched to his bosom as he lip-synched to Jake’s voice . . .

  “I am a sinner,

  Yes, I’m lost in sin.

  Each night I

  Let the holy angels in.

  I do exactly

  What they want of me;

  I give them money

  And they set me free.”

  The nerd scribbles checks furiously and holds them out to the screen as an impossibly long arm reaches out to grab his big fuzzy wallet.

  “I have no trouble

  When I go to sleep.

  I lay me down

  The Lord my soul to keep.

  I work for Jesus

  By the light of day.

  We fight abortions

  And the E.R.A.”

  Cut to extreme close-up of Pete, in fish-eye distortion, stamping big red forbidden symbols on records, tapes, magazine centerfolds, books, newspapers . . .

  “They told me

  ‘Blessed are the poor and meek’!

  So now I send them

  Money every week.

  It’s so nice

  To be e-van-gel-i-cal.

  It’s been so peaceful

  Since they took control!”

  Then came the thundering chorus, with the visuals jump-cutting rapidly:

  “TEE-VEE MINISTRIES!

  TEE-VEE MINISTRIES GOT ME!

  TEE-VEE MINISTRIES!”

  Cut to the nerd in the straitjacket, clutching his Bible-pillow and howling as he’s overwhelmed by a half dozen gorgeous, nearly naked women . . .

  “TEE-VEE MINISTRIES!”

  Cut to the Jacob Hamer Band in live performance, Jake spinning, guitar in hand, as Hempstead the sax player ground out his lines over Jesse’s wall o’ synth sound and Bob One and Bob Two thrashed through the beat . . .

  “TEE-VEE MINISTRIES GOT ME!”

  Cut to a hundred black and white bunny slippers, goose-stepping in unison, then black and white documentary footage of ten thousand lock-stepped Nazi jackboots . . .

  “TEE-VEE MINISTRIES!”

  And Jimmy Pastor, pounding the pulpit to bring his point home . . .

  “MINISTRIES!”

  And Adolph Hitler, exhorting the crowd to hysteria . . .

  “MINISTRIES, MINISTRIES!”

  And brownshirts, burning piles of forbidden books . . .

  “MINISTRIES!”

  And Pastor Furniss, tossing a pile of records into a blazing pyre . . .

  “I think you get the idea,” Dick Moynihan said, as the music faded and the screen went blank. He needn’t have bothered.

  Because the audience was waving its hands and wiggling in its collective seat like an assembly of grade-school kids who all had to pee at once. There was a beehive hum of mutterance, some hoots and hollers from either side of the theological fence. They had gotten the idea, alright; and they all had something to say.

  Dick Moynihan moved up the aisle toward the back of the churning throngs. There was no way of saying where he’d stop. who he’d pick, what the chosen would choose to say. All that Jake knew for sure was that the smell of blood in the room was stronger now. Much stronger.

  Much closer to the surface.

  Let it come, Jake thought. Let’s see your best shot, clowns. I’m ready.

  Dick’s mike went down in the next-to-last row. It came up with a steel-eyed matron who looked fit to spit nails. “That was the most insulting thing I’ve ever seen,” she said, staring straight at Jake. “And I’d just like to know who in the world you think you are!”

  CLAPPITYCLAPPITYCLAP! Aunt Bea and roughly a hundred other people seemed to agree. Boy, were they pissed. Jake did a spot-check of his people: the redhead and her boyfriend were smiling and shaking their heads; the guy with the mustache was laughing his head off and waving his hand at Dick; the eagle-lady looked as pissed as his opponents. Good for them, he thought. The salt of the earth, the spice of life.

  Then it was time to address the nice lady’s statement. The applause was dwindling at last.

  “Thank you, thank you,” he said, feigning bashfulness. “And I’d especially like to thank you, ma’am, for bringing up the word ‘insulting,’ since I’d put it right at the heart of this debate.

  “See, it’s like this: everybody’s got a different idea as to what they want out of life. Some people like Lawrence Welk, some people like the Dead Kennedys. Some people kiss hot and sloppy, and some people like it with their lips sealed tight. These are largely matters of taste and disposition, from people who have different ways of looking at the world.

  “But then you’ve got your born-again types, and they’re a very special group. They’ve got exclusive dibs on the voice of God, you see. It says so, right in their manual.

  “Now, Pastor Furniss and his friends are going to sound very logical and reasonable today, because they’re in front of a secular audience. That means us heathen folk.

  “But let me just read you this ‘Action-Gram’ that we intercepted just last week from Liberty Christian Village, and then tell me how reasonable they sound.”

  Jake glanced over at Furniss as he pulled the letter from an inside jacket pocket and lavishly unfolded it. Furniss was trying hard to conceal his anger and, yes, sudden embarrassment, but it wasn’t working all that well. Ha ha, fucker, Jake thought, and then began to read in a teary, tremulous voice:

  “‘Dear friend of Liberty Christian Village,’” it began. “‘You hold the future of America in your hands. Without a blessed miracle, every teenager in our great land could well find himself facing the roasting fires of Hell!

  “‘I’m speaking of the vicious assault on our children’s moral fabric that Satan is waging through his insidious Murder Music. We must have a MILLION-DOLLAR MIRACLE immediately—or we will lose the fight!’”

  The first chuckles began to issue from the prorock crowd. Yke laughed out loud. Pastor Furniss did not.

  “‘Satan has hit us like never before since we obeyed God’s call to “stand in the gap” for North America’s teenagers. Satan has been hurt as we’ve led the fight against his life-destroying rock music—a fight others have feared. Thousands of teens are finding our blessed Savior through our ministry, and Satan is trying to shut us down before we can reach millions through our TV specials.’”

  The laughter was getting louder now. Yke’s face was almost as red as Fumiss’s, for exactly the opposite reason. The furious silence of the Chosen was a palpable, terrible thing.

  “�
��Please—we must have your help now. The guillotine is hanging over our ministry.’” Jake couldn’t resist a throat-slitting pantomime. Several unbelievers howled with delight “‘Everything hinges on God using you to be a part of a million-dollar, ten-day miracle—or Liberty Christian Village, and our entire ministry, will be gone!

  “‘We must not lose one precious teenager! God has entrusted us with so many lives! Please help us. Send the largest possible gift you can TODAY!’”

  “One has to wonder,” he concluded, “what kind of massive assault ol’ Satan was launching there, and how a million bucks would help; but, Pastor, I’m pleased to see that you survived.”

  Aunt Bea, the nice lady who’d addressed Jake in the first place, and the other hundred who’d flapped paws against him were unsurprisingly outraged, but there was another hundred or so who seemed to agree with him. The CLAPPITYCLAPPITYCLAP of their hands slapping was a source of enormous gratification to Jake as he continued.

  “So there you have it, folks: if you disagree with these people, you’re not just wrong. You’re in league with the devil himself.

  “Which brings us back to the word ‘insulting.’ I think that these pious idiots are the most insulting people I’ve ever met. They act as if they own morality. They act as if they own God.

  “Well, let me tell you something, people. They don’t. They don’t own God, they don’t own morality, and they don’t own this country. At least not yet. But they will, if we don’t start standing up for our rights.

  “And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in the kind of sexless, joyless, brain-dead theme park that they’re trying to pawn off as God’s will for America!”

  That did it. Half the audience broke out in a flurry of ovations. Jake caught flickering glimpses of Moynihan through the craning crowd as the host moved swiftly toward the stage. Dick’s face expressed a concentrated excitation, the confidence that he had a winner here, as the creeping theme music went bah-dah dah dah-dahhhh, insinuating itself into the dialogue and indicating an impending commercial break.

  “OKAY, FOLKS! LET’S ALL JUST CALM DOWN HERE A MINUTE!” Dick’s voice boomed through the speakers. He wasn’t yelling—there was a lilt in his voice—but the nascent boom of his words plowed through the crowd noise like a strike through tenpins.

  Jake panned his gaze back along the semicircular stage seating, locking eyes with Pastor Furniss. Furniss was smiling ever so slightly. Jake nodded. They were opponents of the most severe stripe—they were adversaries, with every conflict of flesh and will that the word implied—but they seemed to understand each other like chess players of the very top seed.

  They both knew the game. Well enough to understand how very badly they needed each other.

  Well enough to understand the next round was only just beginning.

  * * *

  STEWARTSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

  “Oh, la-dies,” Pete Stewart insisted through the copy of Spin magazine draped over his face. “Let’s not get too comfortable, shall we? Break time’s almost over, and there’s still a half a show left to rehearse.”

  “Oh, certainly, Mr. Dedication,” the Jacob Hamer Band’s irascible bass player replied. His real name was Robert Epstein, but everyone called him Bob One. “If we find ourselves slipping,” he muttered, “we’ll just follow your sterling example.” Bob Two, otherwise known as Robert Baker, tapped tedious polyrhythms on every available surface that wasn’t his drums.

  “Do as I say, not as I do,” Pete insisted. “I am, after all, de Heap Big Boss Mon ‘round heah—”

  “Only until Jake gets back,” Bob Two sighed, between paradiddles.

  “—and I have big plans for Saturday. I think we should start the set with something special, maybe a nice musical salute to Jim and Tammy Bakker entitled ‘She’s So Big’ . . .”

  “Jake!” Bob Two rolled his eyes and called to the ceiling. “Hurry! Please!”

  “It’s no use,” Pete replied. “You’re all in me clutches now!” He cackled maniacally, the sound slightly muffled by the magazine.

  Pete and his guitar lay sprawled upside-down across the sofa, legs hanging over the back. He wore black and white fuzzy bunny slippers and neon-bright mismatched socks. His baggy black ripstop pantlegs were crossed at the knees. His rainbow suspenders covered a black T-shirt that featured a smiling Shicklegruber and the words ADOLF HITLER’S WORLD TOUR 1939-45.

  Pete Stewart had two heroes. One was Eddie Van Halen, whose technical virtuosity on the guitar and rampant good cheer onstage were the ongoing inspirations behind his own not inconsiderable style.

  The other was the utterly fictional Chris Knight, a character played by an actor named Val Kilmer in the 1985 comedy Real Genius. The film promptly died in the theaters and was resuscitated on video, at which point it became Pete’s favorite torture device: he insisted that everyone he met watch it with him at least three times, whether they liked it or not. He even looked a little like Val Kilmer: blond, hunkish, with the same winsomely Aryan features that would have been arrogant were it not for the gleam of mischief in his eyes. Pete was a great guitarist and a great showman and was completely out of his mind.

  “Oh, Jesse, dear,” he said expansively, “whole life forms have evolved and become extinct waiting for you to fix your program. Entire species have gone the way of the wind. . . .”

  No response was forthcoming from Jesse’s corner. She sat listening to a developing waveform and staring out across the room to the phone table on the far side, near a well-worn Castro convertible that usually lay between her and the main stairs. They’d both been pushed unceremoniously back from their normal positions to free up floor space for more of the rampant techno-sprawl, which clashed against the rough-hewn expanse of the hunting lodge like chrome bumpers on a grizzly bear.

  Yeesh, Pete thought. Better hurry, Jake.

  It was 10:30 A.M., which meant that, barring disaster, their fearless leader would soon be finished playing Joe Public Relations and Doing Lunch and Talking About Important Things, and Slim Jim would be flying his ass back to the mountain.

  And not a moment too soon, Pete thought. Last rehearsal before Rock Aid, and we sound like a goddamned garage band.

  It was true. From a performance standpoint, the last few weeks had swung between half-assed and nothing at all. The band was increasingly uneasy about the growing perception of Jacob Hamer as a one-trick pony, a smart-assed pariah with a trendy cause. It had started out as a good thing, and they had willingly milked it for all it was worth. There was an old saying: Even bad press is good press, so long as they get your name right.

  And it was true, at first.

  The news crews ate it up, of course; especially the local ones. They played heavily on the visual contrast. It made for great TV: the lodge itself, a rustic, rambling turn-of-the-century structure with a spectacular view, peeking out on a southern slope of the Appalachian spine northeast of Harrisburg; the band, riding the crest of the Rock Aid wave, giving the area a claim to fame other than nuclear plant meltdowns.

  As stories went, it had all the right elements: national media splash with a scenic local slant. It had good pull. It attracted a lot of attention.

  Not all of it favorable, he thought, as the wind shifted slightly and brought a faint trace of the protesters’ insipid rally songs wafting up the drive. The lodge itself was not visible from the road and, except for the big stone-and-wrought-iron gate and the sign marked PRIVATE DRIVE, was just another fleeting bit of scenery on Rt. 443.

  That is, up until the Moral Majoritroids got wind of it. Now it’s practically a mountaintop fortress. A regular citadel of evil, heh heh heh.

  And, he thought, it’s under siege. . . .

  That was only one of the irritating side effects of their big hit-fluke, and not the most worrisome at all.

  Because worse still was the amount of time that it took Jake away from the band. Pete had been around long enough to know that it could be the critical difference between th
e #1 slot with a bullet and the cutout bins at K mart. It was clear in the boredom of Bob and Bob, who were beginning to lament having turned down an offer to play with The Del-Rays. It was clear in the lion-in-a-zoo restlessness of Hempstead, the sax player, who was even now roaming the grounds and waiting for them to get their parts together, and in Pete’s own increasing reliance on Hawaiian bud, nose candy, and videos for jollies.

  But nowhere was it clearer than in Jesse Malloy, who hadn’t spoken a nontechnical word all afternoon. It was exceedingly clear that she’d made intimate friends with the end of her rope. There was no talking to her. There was no reaching her at all. She was lost inside her headphones and the sampled waveforms on the synthesizer’s computer screen.

  Her back was to the rest of them. It seemed broader than usual. Oh, God, he thought. She’s even gaining weight. This was as un-Jesse-like as humanly possible. In the two years he’d known her, she’d never strayed from her picturesque borderline anorexia. It was as if she just knew that the next call in would be from Rolling Stone or Playboy, and they just needed her bold, tight little lines for the cover. O Vanity! he thought, where is thy shame?