Save the children. God, she realized, how could I have been so stupid?
Easy enough: she was in shock. They were ready for her.
She was vulnerable.
And they were determined to keep her that way.
For her own good, of course. Outside communication at the Village was kept to a bare-bones minimum, the better to allow the youngster a chance to purge the debilitating influence of our X-rated society, and to let the family-oriented, value-intensive curriculum at LCV take firm root in the soil of impressionable, PG-rated minds. Undoing the damage could often be an arduous task, particularly in young Mary’s case with the trauma and what have you, and so contact, both in and outside the facility, was scrupulously controlled. As were phone calls. And television. And radio. And newspapers.
And everything.
By the time it dawned on Mary that dear ol’ Liberty Christian had about as much to do with liberty as it did with Christ, things had once again descended into the realm of waking nightmare. Something had happened on Saturday, when The Scream came onstage. She felt it from a distance of several hundred feet.
Worse yet, she saw it . . .
. . . rolling off the stage in neon-bright flashes of kinetic energy, stroking the swarming masses filling the arena. For one fleeting, hypnotic moment she saw people not as flesh and blood, but as light: heart-fires burning as brilliant white whorls no bigger than pinpricks in the vast configuration of space before her. The stage pulsed in rhythm with the music, which was filling her, insinuating itself through every opening to her interior: as sight, as sound, as smell as taste as flesh as flesh . . .
Mary stood bolt upright, knocking the red plastic chair clattering over. And she stayed like that: swaying, eyes closed, as the images flashed back over and over, and she felt the Spirit moving through her . . .
. . . as the light went red, then purple, then glowing, squirming black as a crevice split the floor of the arena and the mouth of Hell itself opened wide, and she clamped down hard harder than she knew how and she prayed to Jesus please God no please no make it stop maaaaake it STOPPP!!!!!
She gripped the rim of the table, felt the wave of nausea rise and crest and recede without spilling out, and managed to hold in the sound that threatened to come wailing out of her. She kept it down to a compressed squeak that was laughable in the face of the terror that propelled it.
All eyes were upon her. Suddenly she felt too absurd, standing there lobotomized with a stupid smiling plate stuck to her chest and the big clunky TV cameras staring at her as though she were a Nancy Reagan poster girl: See What Drugs Did to Me. Just Say No. It was too much.
She gazed across the crowded confines of Studio B and saw Paul Weissman waddling toward her, petulant as ever, a technician’s commset perched on his head. It wasn’t connected to anything of importance, the unplugged cord sticking out to one side like a lopsided neoprene antler.
Paul was one pissed-off penitent. He’d violated policy by actually taking a group into the concert, instead of staying safely out in the parking lot, and she’d heard he’d gotten a royal drubbing for it. He had, in turn, taken it out on her, in ways that would leave no telltale marks, and then he’d locked her in the Quiet Room for thirteen hours. He’d turned every cheek she had, and she hated him. That hatred burned bright inside her, warming the cold places that she couldn’t otherwise reach. It was something to hold on to. It was a start.
“Mary!” he sniffed, voice redolent with ersatz compassion.
She had to get out of there.
“Mary, are you alright?”
She had to get out of here, now. She unpinned her button and laid it on the table. The legend shifted; the smiley face frowned.
GET SMART!
She turned, all eyes upon her, and started walking.
“MARY!”
And then she ran.
It was impossible to get out of the chair.
Across from him, on the edge of the bed, the ghost of Chris Konopliski was rolling another joint. Or trying to anyway. His fingers kept going through the papers, the smoke, the open album cover. “Son of a bitch,” he would say, shrugging in confusion.
And then the blood would fly out of his mouth.
“Stop,” Ted hissed, but it did no good. If it wasn’t one vision, it was another. It had been that way for the last nineteen hours or so.
And it was impossible to get out of the chair.
Once, in the middle of the night, when Jake had begun to scream. That time he had been terrified, thinking of the Screamer with the grease-slick skull. And once, when everyone was asleep again, he had gone to piss: terrified again, of the silence this time, and of the darkness that seemed to be everywhere.
To just sit in the chair was terrifying.
But to leave it was even worse.
That was why he fought the clouds of sleep when they came to claim him. Awake, he at least had his body to distract him. Asleep, anything could happen. Like a visit from Freddy Krueger, without the shoddy saving grace of a John Saxon or Heather Langenkamp performance, the nightmares would come . . .
. . . and he would be back in the crowd, with the knife going in and the blood coming out and the face coming off. And he would once again be struck with the helplessness, the no-time-at-all-to-react, the cringing cowardice that had allowed him not only to do nothing, but to run away after . . .
NO!
So he would not sleep, and he would not dream, and he would not leave the chair.
That way, nothing could hurt him.
That way, no one would ever know. . . .
Ted punched up the volume on the Sansui’s remote control, letting the music wash over him, as if the decibels could drown out the nattering voice of guilt. He took another hit off his skull-bong, and listened to the dirgelike chant that opened Side Four of the album that Chris’s murderers had provided in the hope that he might better understand.
And he stared, intently, at the tickets in his hand. Then at the lyrics embossed on the album’s jacket.
The words to “The Critical Mass.”
The words themselves were right there on the back cover, laid out in a raised, quasi-archaic, blood-red script, repeating and overlapping as they traced the shape of a pentagram. It overlaid a bastardization of the classic Da Vinci anatomical study of the-man-in-the-circle: legs spread, arms outstretched.
Except the figure on the jacket was that of a gloriously naked Tara, facing backward in mute supplication, head thrown back, wild black hair cascading all the way down to the juncture of her succulent buttocks. Her skin glowed red in the sheen of the fire that ringed her. One hand gripped a microphone, the other a dagger. The glint of razor-thin Band-Its crested the top of her skull.
Ted stared at her—an illusion on glossy paper and cardboard, product of slick art directors from Bedlam—and his drug-heightened synapses saw the figure shimmy and tremble with life, heard the worlds layered within the stereophonic folds of state-of-the-art digital mastering that pounded out of his Advent speakers:
“Magdhim Dios! Satanas Dios!
Asteroth Dios! Ellylldan Dios!”
The bass and drums pounded in droning syncopation.
Ted started to cry.
“Sancti Dios! Omnitus Dios!
Malebog Dios! Baalberth Dios!”
The chant swelled in a wash of reverse-gated, reverberating sound; the beat picked up by the microsecond.
Ted lost himself in thoughts of vengeance, the urge to rend and smash and tear uncoiling inside him.
As the tempo picked up.
And “The Critical Mass” kicked in . . .
* * *
THIRTY-ONE
ticktickticktick . . .
The second hand chugged through its ultramagnified paces, sandwiched in its customary between-teaser niche. It punctuated the break, as yet another segment on CIA/Contra drug-running in and out of El Salvador gave way to the full-tilt energy of The Scream, transforming their audience into a mob.
“It began as ‘Rock for Rock’s Sake,’ and ended in disaster . . .”
Cut to a jerking journalist’s frieze of smoke and fire, flailing limbs and howling feedback, then to a gaggle of whey-faced teens torching shattered vinyl as the dulcet tones of Harry Reasoner concluded, “. . . now many people are saying it’s time to ‘Knock Rock’ altogether.”
ticktickticktick . . .
“Nice,” Jake said under his breath. The room breathed a collective sigh of unease as the voice-over concluded by promising all this plus much more, when they came back with another edition of 60 Minutes.
Jake felt like shit. He had good reason; 60 Minutes was about as subtle as the stamping on a claymore mine when they went after something. FRONT TOWARD ENEMY. You could tell by the teaser where they were going to point these things.
And this setup had none of the glowing reverence they had reserved for their report on Bob Geldof and Live Aid; indeed, the ticking of the stopwatch sounded more and more like a time bomb, about to blow up in all of their faces. All day, the damage reports had displaced the trade deficit and Central America in the news, and they had been condemnatory in the main, and the free-for-alls on Washington This Week and Face the Nation made it look as though the esteemed senator’s legislation was gonna ramrod home. He felt like a blast victim, just coming up from the anesthesia and wondered what all was missing. He vaguely wished that he’d stayed in bed this morning. He vaguely wished that he’d stayed in the womb.
Too late now.
Some of the band and most of the crew had departed for downtown Harrisburg to hit the clubs and drown their sorrows in bright lights and beers; Jake, Hempstead, Junior, and Bob Two hung back and now huddled around a freezer chest of Heinekens in the Twilight Zone, savoring the slow-rake-over-hot-coals that was imminent. Gram was not present, which surprised no one.
Neither, not surprisingly, was Jesse. And Pete, the voice in his head added. Mustn’t forget ol’ Pete.
He winced and shifted uncomfortably, as a Coke-hawking Max Headroom blipped onscreen, all digitally enhanced winsomeness and wit. It was lost on Jake, who stared fixedly inward as he contemplated the basic truth that said Pete’s continuing absence was beyond merely inexcusable. It was crazy. It was scary.
And getting worse, practically by the minute . . .
Because deep down inside, Jake knew that Pete’s disappearance signaled big-time weirdness. Just as sure as he knew that that dream last night was some kind of warped message, a subconscious cue card that he couldn’t quite see to read. It went light-years beyond the guilt rationale of survivor’s syndrome. It was tangible, sensate reality.
“Rock and Roll.” Harry was back. “It’s been called Devil Music, Drug Music, Porno Music, Murder Music . . .” Harry intoned, seated before the iconographic freeze-frame of a strutting Tara Payne vis-à-vis a preening Pastor Furniss. “Depending on whom you listen to, it will lead you to have sex, use drugs, kill yourself, or simply sell your soul.”
Harry paused bemusedly for effect, then set up the critical question.
“Certainly many bands today go out of their way to reach extremes.
“But how much is ‘too much’?”
Derisive snickers rippled through the room. Junior muttered, “Too much is never enough!” and ceremonially clinked bottles with Bob Two. Hempstead fingered his sax and blew a short, rude blaaat! It was defensive posturing at its finest, but Jake couldn’t bring himself to join in.
“. . . and increasing numbers of people are wondering just that, in the aftermath of an event that was supposed to bring a generation together . . . and wound up tearing it apart.”
The frozen image animated then, Tara exhorting the crowd to madness. Jake stood up. He suddenly decided that he couldn’t sit through another ten seconds, no less ten minutes, of this. Cody was taping, if he needed any of it. What he needed much more, right then, was fresh air.
He walked over to the back door and stood at the screen. It was twilight on the mountain: a magical time, eerily beautiful. The sun going down in flames, streaking amber and orange and gold through the descending canopy of night. The Susquehanna River snaking like a ribbon of fire to the west.
Standing there, breathing in the night, it was almost possible to believe that this entire thing was going to blow over somehow; that Pete would wander in eventually, wasted and disheveled, and Jake and the band would take turns kicking his ass and razzing him about it for the next six months or so, but otherwise let it slide; that the enormity of the disruption and destruction would eventually disperse, like a monsoon rain that goes for days and days on end, only to yield to the sun.
Fat chance. It’s monsoon time, now and forever, amen. Jake cursed the dour sullenness of the thought, but he couldn’t shake it. And though it was bad enough that he felt crazy himself, both Hempstead’s rap and Slim Jim’s proposed solution were entirely over the edge.
Jake stepped outside. Jim was out there, dangling his feet off the end of the porch, puffing on a meerschaum pipe. He walked up and sat down beside the chopper pilot, who exhaled a long, philosophical trail of vanilla-scented smoke and squinted into the sunset for a while before he spoke.
Finally, “Well, bossman, whaddaya say?”
“Don’t know, man. It’s too complicated. Too weird.”
“Ain’t nothin’ complicated about it. These people are what’s weird, and when they find out whoever torched Rock Aid, I’ll betcha my bird there’s a trail of bread crumbs leadin’ right back to The Scream. Them and their spook manager.” He spat into the dirt. “Oughta just ice the little fuckers.”
Jake shook his head. Ice the fuckers. He made it sound so easy. Maybe it was, a long time ago. As for now . . .
“I don’t know if I can do that.”
“So call a professional.”
Jake looked at Jim, slightly annoyed. “You’ve just got an answer for everything, don’t you?”
“Yep. Phone numbers, too.”
Jake looked at him. “You’re serious.”
“Yep.”
“That’s murder.”
A pause. A sigh. “Yep.”
Neither man looked at the other; Jake stared at the ground, Slim Jim at the receding sun. A scant twenty-four hours had passed since Rock Aid blew up. In that time Jacob Hamer had come in contact with more carnage than in the preceding twenty years. And here he was thinking, however speculatively, of coming even closer. A lot closer. Too close for comfort or sanity or maybe even survival . . .
It was stupid, he decided. Stupid. He wasn’t some wacked-out war vet creaking under the weight of his own emotional scar tissue. He’d busted ass to build a dream and make it real. He had a home and a family he loved, a career he loved, and a community that damned near depended upon his viability for its very existence. He couldn’t risk all that on the basis of a few weird dreams and some scraps of decades-old memories. They had no proof. They had no probable cause. He couldn’t even safely say that Walker was the same guy; and so what if he was? So fucking what. Lots of guys torqued out over there, but they readjusted to The World just fine, thank you very fucking much. Contrary to the popular myth, not everybody ended up as fringe-element junkie psychopaths or road-warrior rejects, shouting out their rage from the dark edge of the world. Some of them went on with their lives. Becoming lawyers or truck drivers or doctors. Or rock stars even.
Such were the thoughts racing through Jake’s mind. They were cool, solid, rational: the stuff that clearheaded game plans were made of. Jake believed them with all his heart. And he was about to tell Jim exactly that.
When the shouting from the Twilight Zone began.
It lasted for no more than three seconds.
They were the longest three seconds of her life.
“Oh, my God.” Jesse whispered, not wanting to accept the image on the screen, unable to deny it. She stood in Rachel’s living room and stared helplessly at the 60 Minutes concert footage, taken from the Spectrum press box.
It was footage from Friday ni
ght’s Scream performance.
And Pete was there.
Pete was there. The knowledge pummeled her with fists of lead, slid through her nerves like mercury. She watched his face pop in and out of the picture: not the focus at all, a peripheral detail sandwiched in with the rest, its significance utterly unspoken. Harry Reasoner made no comment about the missing rock star, his surprise appearance there, the fact that he had not been seen by anyone since.
But suddenly, Jesse couldn’t hear what Harry Reasoner was saving at all.
Because Pete was there. Smiling. Wasted. Less than three hours after their final meeting in the lobby of the Penn Towers Hotel. Poking out from behind a corpulent Bedlam Record exec, cigarette in hand, laughing inaudibly. Disappearing for a moment. Reappearing to bounce up and down in his seat to the rhythm of the thundering music from beyond in typical Pete-like fashion.
And then he was gone.
In the next room Natalie was noisily resisting dinner. Rachel could be heard over the prattle on the tube, saying. “C’mon, Boobie. You love your yummy Spaghetti-Os! Eat up. dammit! Go ahhh . . . ahhh . . . MMMM!” It was a combination of sounds that threatened to drive Jesse mad.
“I gotta get out of here,” she told herself, the room at large. Her belly came alive with sudden pain. Tension. Dread. Terrifying suspicion. She stood, moved unsteadily toward the kitchen. A wave of dizziness hit her, and she whined, low in her throat, staggering into the doorframe with a mute thump and leaning there for support.
“Jesus,” Rachel said. “Are you okay?”
Jesse turned to look in the direction of the voice. Both Rachel and Natalie stared back at her. The overhead light in the kitchen was piercing. It borrowed some of the pain from her belly and placed it squarely behind her eyes. She could feel the blood leaching back from her flesh, feel herself grow faint and pale.
“No.” It was only partially in answer to the question. She had only partially heard it. There was a void at the core of her, and it was sucking her toward it, pulling the outside in. “No,” she repeated, and her eyes pinched shut.
The Scream Page 34
