The Scream

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  “Yeah,” said the man who’d helped him out: a wiry little black security guard with salt-and-pepper hair. “Look, Mr. Walker. You’re out of line here.”

  “This man has no business backstage.” Mr. Walker’s manner was incalculably cold.

  “Maybe so, but he’s not gonna hurt anything!” Frank said, exasperated. “I know him. He’s with the Jacob Hamer Band, for Chrissakes!”

  “Yeah, what is it with you people, anyway?” Pete said with some effort. “I just came to see your damn show, man! It’s not like I came to assassinate the president or something!”

  Walker was about to say something else when a door behind him opened. Pete thought he noticed a flicker of apprehension on the man’s icy face. Then he, too, turned to look.

  As Tara Payne stepped into the hallway.

  Suddenly, his eyes were focusing perfectly. It was still not enough to fully appreciate the sight.

  Rock music had always had its share of breathtaking women; be it Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Sheena Easton, Whitney Houston, Pat Benatar, Madonna, or a host of others, unique and exotic females were well within the rock V roll tradition. Pete had met a great many of them in his time and was continually awed by the strength of their allure.

  But there had never been a woman quite like Tara Payne.

  She moved, and the air around her shuddered as if she had just thrown the switch on some carnal Van de Graaff generator. She moved again, closer, and Pete felt the tiny hairs on his skin sway in her direction. There wasn’t a man in the corridor who didn’t appear similarly affected.

  But she wasn’t looking at every man in the corridor.

  She was looking at Pete.

  And he found himself lost in the dark depths of those almond eyes, lost in the abandon they so insistently imposed. He felt the rearing of kundalini’s spinal serpent of fire, felt his heart palpitate wildly in his chest.

  She looked at him, and he was hers.

  It was as simple as that.

  She moved closer. She moved closer. She moved right to Walker’s side. Pete found himself staring at her lips, which were soft and full and painted a ripe berry-red. They stopped an inch from Walker’s ear and parted, revealing perfect white teeth and a small glistening tongue.

  “Leave him be,” she said very softly. The words resonated in Pete’s ear as if she were leaning into him. His ear flamed as if sunburned. He stared at Walker.

  And Walker shuddered. There was no getting around the fact. There was an element of pain in the way the ice floes of his face gave way that was perfectly understandable. It was evident that he suffered her proximity quite a bit; given the way Pete felt, it was only human for his discomfort to be nigh unto unbearable. She whispered something else that Pete couldn’t hear; a trickle of sweat ran down the back of his neck. She whispered something else. Walker nodded and grimaced and produced a bright yellow backstage pass. He handed it to her. She took it, whispered something else.

  And all the while, she was staring at Pete: a trained and searching gaze that made his every nerve ending feel scrutinized and aflame. Omigod, a voice in his head informed him. Omigod.

  Tara smiled then, as if she knew precisely what effect she was having.

  She left Walker’s side.

  Moving. Toward him.

  And he could feel the crackling tension mount as the space between them diminished. It made all the short hairs on his body want to leap straight out of their follicles; it was as if she were a Tesla coil, an electromagnet supreme, with the most perfect body on this or any other planet. He tried to swallow; it was like trying to turn over an engine that had been out of oil for years.

  He tried to think of Jesse.

  His mind said, Jesse who?

  And then she was upon him, an inch from his face. He was vaguely aware of Frank’s moving back—of all of them, in general, retreating. He was vaguely aware of his own pounding heart. Her smell was what overpowered him now; he could almost see the pheromones, sweet and musky heart-shaped molecules that touched his soul with satin lips.

  “I want to see your eyes,” she said.

  “You do,” he barely managed.

  “Yes.” She smiled. “I want to see them now.”

  His hands hung, helplessly trembling, at his sides. He did not seem to have the strength to lift them. A warm paralysis, snake-venom intense, had gripped both his body and his conscious will.

  But something else was there: a serpent’s guile, a reptilian charm from the oldest and most powerful part of his brain. It was enough to force his mouth to work, force his lungs to give voice.

  “Help yourself,” he croaked.

  Her hands were small and long-nailed and articulately-boned and absolutely perfect. She brought them up to either side of his head, gently pulled the sunglasses away from his ears and his face.

  The world went instantly brighter.

  And her eyes . . .

  . . . her eyes . . .

  “Ah, yes.” Her smile was absolutely radiant. “I thought so.”

  Confusion let off a dim and insignificant flare in the hack of his head. He was staring into her eyes.

  And her eyes were everything.

  “You thought what?” he heard himself ask.

  “You know that the eyes are the mirrors of the soul.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been looking for a soul. And I think that I just found it.”

  “You are incredible.” At last his lips did his bidding.

  “So are you. In fact, you are perfect.

  “Let me feel your heart.”

  His skin was quite damp now. The slick wet heat of it only stirred him more deeply, intensified the tremors that racked him as she brought those delicate hands to rest against his chest.

  And his heart, his heart was going mad, his heart was a lunatic Edgar Varese percussion ensemble that rumbled and thudded and clattered against his breastbone, sending black-red heartblood and adrenaline pulsing from crown of skull to sole of shoe and back again. If there was a bottom-line message to be found in his being, it was pounding out now, perfect braille for the discerning.

  Tara had her hands upon his breast.

  She read him.

  Loud and clear.

  “I will want to see you tonight,” she said, handing him the pass. “When the show is over. You will still be here?”

  The laugh he managed was not under his control.

  “This is a trick question?” he gurgled.

  She smiled again. “No, it’s not.”

  “Well, it should be.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means yes.” He said it with all sincerity. “Yes, I will be here.”

  She came closer then, which seemed barely possible. The lips that had been driving him crazy brushed up against his earlobe as she spoke. The tongue touched briefly, hot and feather-light. Then withdrew. Touched perfect teeth. And whispered.

  Three words.

  “I need you.”

  Then she turned away, and he staggered back, and the rest of the world clicked back into gear. He looked at Walker, whose face had set back to stone; he looked at Frank, whose eyes were bugging out, almost as wide as those of Hook, who had finally caught up to the scenario. Their paralyses were less-than-aptly mirrored by his own. They stood. And they watched.

  As her perfect body vanished through the doorway from whence it had come. Her breath, still ringing in his ears, second only to the last words she’d spoken.

  I need you . . .

  Fifteen minutes later his brain began to work again.

  He was sitting in the front row of the otherwise-empty press box, overlooking the already-massing throngs below. It was early yet, with another forty-five minutes or so till showtime. To his left and down was the massive stage setup, concealed from the masses by a matrix of black, flowing curtains. From his vantage point he could make out the frantically scrambling crew hastening through their last-minute preparations: Hook was visible stage left, gesticulating
to a pair of roadies beside a blinking wall of massive power amps. Looking across, he could see the scaffold crew at Pete’s-eye level, crawling along the L-shaped catwalk to the front spotlights. An enormous-scale replica of a Cobra gunship hung wobbling in the wings. All told, there must have been a good sixty people at work getting the Scream-machine ready to rock and roll.

  “Jesus,” Pete whispered. “What a setup.”

  Above, at the center of the theater, an enormous two-ton, six-sided video module called ArenaVision dangled. ArenaVision was Spectrum’s baby, Pete knew: a prototype system that allowed up to six cameras to give everyone a jumbo front-row view. Pete also knew RJ, the amiable young guy who ran the system, from previous gigs. He laughed as he thought of a conversation he’d had about RJ’s preshow rationale: “How else do you keep an arena full of stoned kiddies quiet?

  “Turn on the giant TV.”

  Right now it was showing a series of vintage Warner Brothers cartoons, which at this moment entailed showing the classic Duck Amok. Daffy had just endured the indignity of having his entire body erased by an enormous pencil, only to be replaced as a polka-dotted, four-footed, flower-headed freak. Stoned giggles wafted up from below.

  Ordinarily, Pete would have been similarly absorbed in the grim travails befalling Daffy; it was, after all, one of Pete’s favorites, and he’d never seen it on quite so colossal a screen. But tonight was different.

  To say the least. Tonight was shaping itself up to be the screwiest and most convoluted night of his life.

  There were two voices speaking in his head right now, neither of them his own, both pulling in separate directions. The first one was Jesse’s, full of anger and dread and woe. Oh, Pete. Do I have to spell it out for you? it said. Are you that fucking stupid?

  It was the voice that he was running from.

  The other one, of course, had something much nicer to say.

  —I need you—

  “But that’s not the point,” he told himself, cross. “She’s pregnant. She needs you . . .”

  —This is a mistake—

  “. . . whether she wants to admit it or not,” he continued, but there wasn’t much juice behind it. Pete was big-time confused. He could scarcely believe the words that blurted

  —THIS IS A LIFE!—

  out of his mouth. He never really realized that he felt that way, was barely sure now that he really agreed. He was trying to whip up some righteousness

  —you’re just going to KILL one!—

  get behind the thing that he knew he ought to be doing.

  But he couldn’t figure out quite what that was.

  Jesse was right. That was the bottom line. He did act like a little kid, and he wasn’t ready for the responsibilities of father-hood, not to mention just treating his lover right. He knew it. He’d always known it.

  But he didn’t like to have it rubbed in his face like this.

  Because it made him wonder what was the matter with him. It begged the question why. He was twenty-six years old, for God’s sake. Wasn’t that old enough to start getting his act together? I mean, here you are, Mr. Rock Star, waving your dick at anything with tits, not really worrying about it, having a good time . . .

  And the next thing you know, you’ve knocked up one of your best friends, one of the people you love the most.

  You put her through all kinds of personal anguish that she won’t even tell you about.

  And she won’t have the baby. Zygote X eats the big one.

  Cuz you’re a fucking little, kid.

  Yeah, that was nice. That was a swell bit of self-realization. His ego withered like a slug with salt poured on it. Pete slammed his fist down on the press box counter, simultaneously bruising his hand and spilling a dollop of his beer. “Ah!” he yipped as the pain hit home. It only brightened the futility of the gesture.

  He did it three more times in rapid succession.

  It was still not nearly enough.

  Suddenly the vacant expanse of the press box seemed too confining. This wasn’t why he came here. He didn’t come here to think about his problems. He came here to get away from them. And maybe, just maybe, get in touch with something far more fundamental. He wanted to party. He wanted to forget.

  He wanted to rock.

  And that’s just what he was going to do.

  Pete looked around in mock-caution, pulled out his vial, and laid out two jumbo lines on the shiny black surface of the press box ledge: a good quarter gram in one mega-toot. Two for the road. He sucked them up, donned his shades, stashed his bag under the counter, and headed out. To mingle.

  He had just hit the mezzanine when the first soundcheck power-chord slammed out from behind the curtain. The crowd roared. The Merry Melodies theme receded into the concentric cartoon hole from whence it came, and the ArenaVision screens went momentarily blank.

  The concert was still a ways off, but the effect was unmistakable.

  “EEAYOW!” The cry rose up from the hordes amassed around the front of the stage, rang out from the surrounding seated throngs. A bass drum thudded: boom boom BOOM. With each successive BOOM more hands jerked up in the classic two-fingered metal sign: index and pinkie fingers erect on a raised fist. It was like some sort of Pavlovian response. It was thunderous and fervent and exhilarating as all get-out. It yanked Pete out of his self-abasement and pulled him into the maelstrom of mad teenage enthusiasm.

  He bopped down the stairs, hit the main floor, and looked around. Hand-painted banners made from pilfered bed sheets fluttered from the balconies. METAL RULES. PHILLY LOVES TARA.

  WE LOVE THE SCREAM.

  This kind of response didn’t happen at a Jacob Hamer concert. The audiences were older, more restrained, too damned tight-assed. He couldn’t remember the last time an audience had hollered, “HA-MER! HA-MER!” or spray-painted his name into perma-pressed infamy.

  It was too cool. The air buzzed with the excited abandon of people temporarily cut loose from the cubicled constraints of parents and principals and preachers and everyone else who ever tried to make them knuckle under to the wisdom of their elders and betters, who held the absolute answers to absolutely fucking everything. Here they were a tribe, they had power, they were loose in a far wilder world than the old farts ever dared to admit. You could see it in the wary stance of security people, who really only wanted to get them in and out with a minimum of mayhem. It was mysterious and exciting. It was a blast. It reminded him of his own rebellious teenhood, catching groups like Alice Cooper and Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Stones, Black Sabbath.

  So now it was Ozzy or Iron Maiden or AC/DC, Van Halen or Twisted Sister or The Slabs or The Scream. Plus ça change, dude. The more it changed, the more it boiled down to the same damned thing: getting pumped up, caught up and lost in the frenzy of twenty thousand screaming lunatics who had come to catch fire in the realm of the forbidden. Hard Rock or Heavy Metal. These kids weren’t here for scholarly edification or hairsplitting subdivisions, any more than they were here to sell their souls to the devil.

  They were here to rock out, God bless ’em.

  Every fucking one.

  Then the lights went down, and the howling began in earnest, and the curtains parted, and the power quad called Cleaver head-banged their way into the cranial spotlight.

  * * *

  A power-slam from the rhythm section, a howl from the vocalist, a blistering lead from the guitarist, and they were off and running. The whole thing was orchestrated at peak breakneck pace. They were the warm-up band, and they were bloody well going to warm things up.

  It did the trick: the guitarist was an absolute maniac. Pete could feel his own fingers itching for that kind of license to excess as Cleaver propelled itself into the first verse of its opening tune.

  The singer sang about the Mark of The Beast and the number 666 and a few other cultural totems. No big deal. Pure comic-book, bone-thudding, head-banging Fun. From where Pete stood, it was pretty clear that these guys were approaching the who
le issue of good and evil from a neo-Wagnerian, muscle-flexing type of stance. It was about as dangerous as a Conan the Barbarian strip. Hard to see the harm in that. Boneheaded adolescent oversimplification has its place, after all, in the scheme of things.

  Its place took up the next forty-five minutes of smoke and thunder. He watched it all from the floor. By the end of that time, the kids were stoked, and Pete felt almost sober. He stood there screaming with the rest of them over Cleaver’s showpiece finale, “Saigon Lullaby.” Oh, well, he thought. Nam chic is all the rage these days. Especially for those who’ve never been there. It’s like they missed out on something big, and they want like hell to recreate it. And damned if the singer didn’t come out dressed like a mutant Buddhist in a head-to-toe skintight asbestos bodysuit, goggles, and saffron robes, douse himself with what certainly looked like gas from what certainly looked like an army gas can and Zippo the whole shebang.

  WHOOOOOSH!

  There was a blast of flames, flashpot-smoke, and blinding strobelight, and the band was gone.

  The audience flipped. They were stoked, alrightee. And Pete could scarcely remember having had such a good time. The eternal fifteen-year-old in his brain was firmly in residence, with an added plus.

  The eternal fifteen-year-old still had half a vial of blow in his pocket.

  And it was high time to have it.

  There was the obligatory intermission as the crew ripped down the Cleaver set and stowed it to the side. A hardcore contingent of Cleaveroids stomped at the foot of the stage, chanting, “CLEA-VER! CLEA-VER!” Their call would, alas, go unanswered.

  Cleaver was gone.

  And Scream-time was near.

  Intermission ran nearly forty-five minutes. Pete left the sprawling floor of the arena and decided to cruise the drafty promenade for a bit. He was more than a little disappointed that the beer concessions were closed—it was a kiddie-fest, after all—but what the hell. He could always breeze backstage later. Right now he was digging the energy of the Cock Walk, as Jesse had so neatly pegged it: thousands of kids cruising the outer perimeter in their best leather ’n’ spikes Strut dey stuff! EEAYOW! He was half-tempted to go ahead and scream, thought better of it, changed his mind yet again, and—