The Scream

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  Usually, the empty rooms spoke to him first.

  Down the hall, outside his door, the ice machine clattered. Another frozen payload delivered. Walker had reserved one whole floor for The Scream and another for the crew; shortly after five, it had finally fallen still, given way to stuporous sleep.

  The whore was gone, as well; paid for and all but forgotten, just another wet spot on the endlessly changing bed. He lay beside the moist souvenir of her visit, nickel and diming his fifth of Finlandia to death and chain-smoking Lucky Strikes.

  While his mind spun off reel after reel of doom for the back of his eyes to see.

  Walker had always smoked unfiltered Luckies. Maybe it was the name. Maybe it was the fact that, if any cigarette could finally nail his coffin shut for good, where so many men had failed, Luckies would have to be the ones. He was, like all good soldiers, superstitious in the extreme.

  Especially now.

  Especially now that he knew.

  Walker had one choice coffin nail ablaze in his fingertips, nearly singeing the skin; its tip was the only light upon him. It flared as he dragged on it, setting his gaunt forty-six-year-old face off in stark jack-o’-lantern relief. There was no looseness to his features, no smile; all his angles were jagged and tight as the sheets on a boot-camp bunk. The glint in his eyes fell back to black-lagoon stillness when he exhaled and the light receded.

  And that, of course, was when Alex began to scream.

  Walker jumped, at first; then his brain kicked in. You little asshole, he thought. Why can’t you just hold out a little longer? He already knew the answer; unfortunately, that did nothing to solve the problem.

  Alex screamed again. It was the genuine article: agonized, terrified, in full view of death. It was a sound that Walker’d come to know intimately, had hoped against hope that he’d never hear again. Not for the first time, he thought about how nice it would be if they could just leave the little fucker behind.

  But no. Like it or not, the crip was critical to the plan. Momma had made that plain. Without our boy genius, there is no Scream.

  Something black as oil and heart-blood in the tone: a sarcasm born of dread. Even Momma is nervous now, Walker noted with an inward grin.

  The question is: Why aren’t I?

  “Listen,” Walker said “Tonight is Philly. Saturday is Rock Aid. Monday is Labor Day. Tick tick tick. We take over the Spectrum in eighty-eight hours. That’s not very long in the scheme of things, is it?”

  “It only takes a second to die.”

  “He won’t die.”

  “I wasn’t speaking of him. I’ve tried this before.”

  Touché, Walker thought, taking a moment to focus.

  “Yes,” he countered. “But now you have me.”

  Momma chuckled. Schizophrenia: darkly divine.

  “Yes,” it said. “Now we have each other.”

  Alex screamed again, but this time it was muffled. Walker turned and surreptitiously scoured the room with his gaze. The only light in the room crept through the slit beneath the door, laying an ornately corrugated slab of brilliance across the thick pile carpet.

  The light distended, grew long and wide.

  It smiled at him.

  “You say he’s fine,” it said. “I’m sure you’re right.

  “But go check, all the same.”

  The light had teeth.

  “You got it,” Walker said. He didn’t bother with shoes. There were still things to be feared, even this close to the end.

  If there are no guarantees, he thought, then the end might just as well be the beginning. . . .

  He moved toward the door.

  Carefully side-stepping the mouth of his master.

  * * *

  TWELVE

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4

  Morning on the mountain came up picture-perfect: sunny and bright, with broad hints that the rest of the day would follow suit. The temperature was gently warm and inviting, the humidity unseasonably low. Birds’ songs riffled through the lush greenery of the mountain. A cool western breeze swished the overhanging branches, the last hints of the darkness receding from the insistent press of day. If you strained an ear toward the southern lee, you could hear the faint burble of the stream that spilled down the falls on its way to hook up first with the Swatara creek, and ultimately the Susquehanna itself.

  Slim Jim loved that. He was a city-turned-nature boy, his very name an anomalous holdover from younger, leaner days. A lot had changed since then: he’d traded in a big green Huey Bell for a fleet of sleek, black Engstrom turbos, and his clientele had switched from scarred armies of teenagers to well-heeled, traveling businessmen. Like rock stars, for example.

  He’d also traded in his bean pole physique for a barrel chest and a full head of cropped black hair for a half head that culminated in a piratical ponytail. But James Edgar Willis had managed to keep a few things intact over the years, in spite of it all. His smile, which was still wide and genuine and easily invoked. His friendship with Hempstead, door gunner/saxman supreme, which had ebbed and flowed over time, but invariably returned to its source. His love for the sticks of hickory-flavored beef by-products that forever graced the right-hand corner of his mouth.

  And his love for the morning. The morning was always his favorite time of day, the absolute finest for flying. The air seemed clearer, somehow, and the still-sleeping world appeared an incrementally more peaceful place. It was an illusion that had proved itself wrong more than once. But it was one that he held on to, nonetheless.

  Especially here; in a lot of ways he preferred an overnight stopover on the mountain to just about anywhere in the world. He munched on a doughnut as he did a little impromptu inspection tour around the parking apron/landing pad to the rear of the lodge.

  Not that he really needed to or anything—he always tucked his bird in nice and tight at night, making sure the rotor blades were anchored and everything stowed right. He just liked the excuse to get out and appreciate the silence.

  Besides, he had a relatively low tolerance level for zealots of any stripe, and he didn’t want one of the righteous to help the wrath of the Almighty along any. By dinking with the helicopter’s clutch, say, or loosening the bolts on the tail rotor. The idea of losing power and crash-landing on these piney rocks appealed to him not in the slightest.

  And who knew? The way Hempstead was talking, these clowns were probably harmless. But it wouldn’t hurt to take a little sunrise stroll around the perimeter. Just in case.

  So he walked, munching his doughnut. And he checked.

  And when the twig snapped behind him, he whirled like a two-hundred-pound ballerina and brought the .38 out of his belt clip with a deft and practiced grace that belied his bulk.

  It was head-level and cocked in a second.

  “Sloppy, very sloppy,” Jim said, smiling.

  “If I was tryin’, you’d be dead,” Hempstead replied. “And a pleasant good morning to you, too.”

  “In your dreams, homeboy,” Jim said sarcastically, uncocking the pistol and slipping it back under his shirttail. He turned his attention back to the sleeping whirlybird. “Out communing with nature, are we?”

  “‘Bout half.”

  “Know what ya mean. How is the dear girl?”

  “She fine, but she wish you’d quit scaring the wildlife with this bug of yours.” Hempstead smiled and gestured to the Engstrom.

  Slim Jim nodded. “Be scarier with your ugly ass on board, squatting behind a .50-calibre. We could buzz the bozos.”

  “Just like DIE HIGH.” Hempstead grinned nostalgically, and both men broke up. DIE HIGH was the name they’d given to their Lucky Bird, the only chopper in the entire wing of their Airborne Brigade that had made it through the entire tour. It was the source of their bond and helped explain why Spectra Helicopters, Jim’s Jersey-based transport operation, had landed the bid for the fairly lucrative Rock Aid gig.

  “Any idea when we’re heading for Philly?” Jim asked.

 
Hempstead shrugged and checked his watch: oh-seven-thirty. Most of the system was already taken care of by the concert promoters; the particular specialty items that the Hamer Band required were broken down and loaded into the truck the night before. They weren’t due at JFK Stadium until early afternoon. Everything appeared to be right on schedule. “I dunno; we prob’ly ought to head out around ten or so.”

  “Who’s going with me?”

  “Jake, Pete, the Bobs, and me.”

  “What about Jess?”

  Hempstead looked back to the lodge. “She riding in later,” he said, his tone veiled. “Said she got some last-minute shit to take care of.”

  “Problems?”

  “I dunno. She say she can handle it.”

  They both caught the hollow clunk of a car door slamming around front at the same time. They walked around the building in time to see Jesse’s red Suzuki 4x4 disappearing down the drive, kicking back a trail of tiny gravel projectiles in its wake.

  “Well, she’s sure’s shit gettin’ the jump on it, whatever it is.” Jim said.

  “Yeah,” Hempstead sighed. “Or vice versa.”

  * * *

  THIRTEEN

  There was no one at the gate.

  Thank God, Jesse sighed, although she somehow doubted that He had anything to do with it. Certainly, if the Pastor Furniss was to be believed, the heavens should go black and great fiery holes should open up in the macadam to swallow her, carnal sins and all. At the very least, a gaggle of finger-waggling tongue-cluckers should appear in white raiment, beseeching her to Please, please, stop before it’s too late!

  But there wasn’t, and they didn’t. The sky stayed clear and blue. The road wound on, unbroken.

  And the good Lord was mercifully keeping His opinion to Himself.

  So much the better.

  After all, He isn’t the one who’ll be on His back with His legs spread wide, is He? The thought blurted out; instantly regretted, if not retracted. She was just feeling a little bit crabby, and torn.

  It helped that she hadn’t gotten more than one hour’s sleep in the past thirty: she’d lain in bed last night, alone—a fact which thrilled Pete to no end and precipitated yet another stressed-out confrontation—writhing helplessly as the demons of guilt and self-doubt crawled up to torment her. Was it right to do this—again? Could she go through with it with the same kind of laissez-faire ambivalence with which it was noted in her Pocket Planner?

  She looked at the purse on the passenger seat beside her. The notebook lay within it like a bug in a Venus flytrap, its finely ruled pages serving as a repository for the endless onslaught of notes, expenses, appointments, and detritus that packed her days. The log for Friday: Things to Do was as abbreviated as it was chilling:

  9 A.M.—Big Z Music, get MIDI disks, Maxell digital tapes.

  9:30—Computerland, get extra cables for DIOS.

  10 A.M.—Women’s Clinic. Get it over with.

  She wished it were that cut and dried.

  It certainly looked that way yesterday. After the fight. Before bed.

  But actually lying there, with the music down low and the covers up high and the lights turned out, was another story entirely. It was suddenly lonely and complicated and terrifying, the only choices available either brutal or suffocating.

  Maybe it was the fact that nocturnal fantasizing always brought out vestigial traces of the other child within her, the little girl lurking within the adult. Maybe it was purely hormonal, the biological sense of pride in her ability to reproduce colliding head-on with the adrenaline fear-rush of the unexpected.

  And maybe it was the music.

  Just about anything would have been better, she knew: from Lawrence Welk’s greatest hits to The Scream, for Chrissakes. Anything but the music she ended up picking.

  Anything but her music . . .

  Not the band’s. Not Jacob Hamer’s. Hers. Her private stock, the stuff she’d been working on in the stray spare moments of the last year. The music that allowed Jessica Malloy to flash a glimpse of her inner self to the world outside herself.

  It was Jesse’s song of life, her symphony: ethereally esoteric soundscapes that she cultivated and tended for no one but herself. The music was as a garden in her mind, the place to which she could always turn for solace and solitude. Her love was there, and her pain, and her joy and frustration; all sculpted in shimmering chords and textured, rhythmic underpinnings. It grew as she grew, and she wasn’t nearly done yet.

  The second, slightly more complicated rationale, involved the technological infancy of it all. She had wanted to go further, to use her music as an expression of the deepest reaches of her soul, the places beyond her ear’s ability to hear. And she needed something to lure it out and capture it.

  Five years before it wouldn’t have been possible. Or even two.

  But that was then. This was now.

  And now there was DIOS.

  The Digital Interface Operating System: a black box translator that had hit the booming musical firmware market in the last year or so. It was designed to make the burgeoning world of MIDI—Musical Instrument Digital Interface—a less confusing mishmash for the musicians who employed it.

  It did this primarily by making it possible for virtually any computer-controlled musical system to “talk” to any other system. With DIOS one digital microprocessor-controlled synthesizer could understand another’s programming and use it at will. It made the working musician’s world a breeze: one controller could now run whole banks of different keyboards. DIOS, the master translator, had deciphered the digital Tower of Babel.

  Jesse simply put it to another use. One the designers had never really considered.

  It was common knowledge, by the mid nineteen eighties, that synthesizers could be used to simulate almost any sound found on the planet, and quite a few which harkened to whole other worlds. With the microchip revolution came the development of digital wave sampling, and the ability to not just simulate but recreate the essence of any sound and reproduce it, at will. It added yet another dimension of clarity and control to the fundamental concept that sonic energy could be translated from one form to another, simply by converting it into upwards of fifty thousand cycling slices of reality per second.

  Jesse had seen this wave coming and ridden the crest. And it had dawned on her: Why stop with just sampling sounds? DIOS made it possible to translate and transfer digital information. And if DIOS could allow her synthesizer to understand virtually any input from another system, why couldn’t it allow her to “hear” anything else that could be digitally graphed? Things like muscle contractions. Magnetic fields.

  Brainwaves . . .

  That was the ticket. Brainwaves: EEGs, EMGs, MEGs, her brain’s myriad natural electrical impulses, amplified a millionfold and turned into neat little squiggles on a computer screen.

  Squiggles that ofttimes looked an awful lot like the waveforms that were her stock in trade.

  So she did it: scoring some secondhand med-tech equipment, reaching up and tapping in. Most of the readings were too random to register as anything but noise; and even some of that was usable, at least as a filtering agent.

  And then, a few of them . . .

  A few of the readings were periodic. They ran in discernable cycles. They could be looped. And once looped, she could use them . . .

  She experimented on herself at first, sampling and blending, shaping the sounds of her life. Her brain waves, awake and asleep and even meditated into as pure an alpha state as she could attain. Her day-to-day emotions. Joy. Anger. Anxiety. Excitement.

  She collected these readings and replicated the waveforms. And from there she began to weave it all into the growing tapestry of her music.

  The results were surprising, and surprisingly beautiful; the melding of the various timbres of her being into hybrid instruments. The effect was subtle and deep, like the presence an underground stream exerts upon the world above it.

  The symphony grew over the
months, until about eight weeks ago, when she decided that the symphony was missing something. She was almost finished with the first movement; she needed an accomplice for the second. She wanted to capture Love. She needed help.

  And she had found it. In Pete.

  He was certainly willing enough; that was for sure. He didn’t even mind the many electrodes stuck to their naked bodies; he thought they were kinky and made several characteristically crude references about their being “wired for love.”

  “Save it for the meters,” she replied dryly, pressing him back onto the bed and powering up. She loaded a disk into the sampler’s drive and then worked him over like a professional, with tongue and hands and lips, alternately tending the needs of the flesh and the patchwork jumble of sensors that connected to their scalps and ran down their spines until the heat and the motion of the sweat ultimately broke the connections to the higher points and left only enough concentration to hold on to the lower ones, as their priorities shifted and he pressed deeper and deeper and—

  She considered the experiment a major failure at the time, but neither of them cared. It wasn’t until sometime afterward that Jesse discovered the true extent of the failure.

  And the success.

  Because she discovered, in the aftermath, that they had tapped some very usable stuff indeed. In fact, the traces were like nothing she had seen before. Curiously powerful: particularly the signal she recorded at the moment of orgasm.

  On the screen, it read like a spike with a long, ghosting trail; through the speakers, with a little tinkering, it sounded like a clear steel bell. She’d gone on to use it repetitively in the weeks that followed, in the second movement. For emphasis.

  In the solitude of her bed last night, she suddenly realized what that little spike of energy might just be. Maybe more than a bell. Maybe more than she could handle.

  Maybe the spark itself: the exact moment of miracle.