by Brian Hodge
They launched into a jack-hammer riff.
The tommy-gun drums cracked the air open, bouncing off stone, and it was good, finally it was good, and it was loud, and Parker started sawing power chords, fast and hard, and trying to forget, trying to clear his mind.
But it was no use. Not even the wall of sound could distract Parker from the terrible realization that his index finger was discolored ever so slightly, discolored and changing at the spot where he had touched the surging sound.
The next night, in the darkness of Cotoaahd Dormitory, Parker dreamt he was a pack horse, a beast of burden, and his dead father was on his back, riding him down a narrow, treacherous trail into an ancient gorge, a vast primordial city spreading out across the dry river bed, pre-Aztec, prehistoric, pre-earthly, with alien Byzantine architecture rising along the fluorescent pink horizon, and the old man’s spurs jabbing into Parker’s ribs, drawing blood, sodomizing him, the blood flowing down Parker’s legs dripping out across the limestone ledges, puddling, droplets forming words on the stone, cryptic, gnostic words, words with horrible, obscene, subtextual portents —
Parker snapped awake with a jerk, slipping off the bottom bunk and landing on the cool floor.
“Fucking faggot,” the voice belched from the top bunk: Flannagan, the thick-necked rugby player. Parker hated the Neanderthal.
“Sorry,” Parker grunted and struggled to his feet. He went into the meager little bathroom, snapped the pull chain and squinted at the glare, his eyes focusing on the face in the mirror. He looked paler than usual, his fair Polish complexion the color of spackling compound, his sandy hair greasy and stringy. The sensation in his hand was worse. The purplish bruise on his fingertip had spread, his metacarpal swelling, tiny filaments of blood blisters snaking up his wrist. He opened the cabinet, found a pair of manicure scissors, and opened them so that the blades were nearly straight across.
Then he went about the business of carving up his hand and arm.
Sid Vicious had done it; Johnny Rotten, Iggy Pop, Kurt Cobain, even that mad man from Providence, GG Allin. They all had mutilated themselves for the sake of art and anarchy. And as Parker made the tiny incisions along the flesh of his knuckles and wrist, he realized he was doing more than flirting with suicide, or playing the role of punk martyr, or decorating his body for rock and roll. He was disguising the changes, disguising the hideous map-like marks that were radiating out from the point at which his finger had come into contact with the squealing feedback.
He finished the mutilation, mopped up the excess blood, cleaned himself, and went back into the dark dorm room. He got dressed and left in a hurry, slamming the door loud enough to wake the Neanderthal.
He crept across the dark campus like a restless ghost, past the Pickman laboratory, past the medieval spires of Hoyt tower, and past the rows of diseased oaks, their branches shivering in the night breezes like palsied elders. The air was heavy with river smells, mixed with the burnt-fuse metallic tang of Pickman’s vent stacks. Parker arrived at Lapham Hall at precisely 1:00 A.M., and he used a skeleton key that he had stolen from his father years earlier to get inside the service door.
The inner corridor was as dark and silent as a morgue.
Parker slipped through the janitor’s closet and descended the cellar steps on sheer memory. It was pitch dark, but Parker knew every knot hole, every creak, every warp. Heironymous had taken young Parker down here numerous times for punishments, for certain unmentionable lessons, for secret hideous intimacies. And when Parker reached the base of the steps, he knew precisely where to reach for the light switch.
The light bloomed yellow, illuminating the dungeon.
Their equipment was just as they had left it. The drum kit was overturned from one of Angela’s patented musical tantrums. The bass stack was shoved against the scabrous, porcine boiler. And Parker’s rig was still in the far corner, covered with empty beer bottles and overflowing ash trays.
The amplifier’s light was on.
Parker’s mouth went dry, not only because he distinctly remembered turning the amp off, but also because he knew the amp was on as an invitation meant only for him. “I’m coming,” Parker murmured without even knowing that he had made a sound, and he went over and kneeled before the Marshall like a supplicant, his newly scarred arm prickling hotly, burning with the change. He turned the volume dial to ten and plugged in the guitar and slammed his fist down on the capo.
The sound was immense, and the sound was irresistible.
Parker pressed his nose to the speaker.
Backstage in the assembly hall at Campbell Student Center was like a Chinese fire drill. Techies were shuffling road cases through fog banks of Marlboro haze and patchouli oil, while 60-cycle noise hummed incessantly.
“What the fuck is the deal with Parker?” Angela was crouched by her kick drum, futzing with the hardware, resting her skinny derriere on the upturned heels of her Timberland boot.
They were about to kick off an opening set for some cockamamie benefit organized by Miskatonic’s Coalition for the Study of Paranormal Phenomena, and Angela had had just about enough of Parker’s crap. It had been nearly two weeks since the morose guitarist had tapped into the feedback routine, and each day he seemed to be veering closer and closer to bug-fuck city. Angela was getting tired of accompanying nothing but arrhythmic waves of dissonant feedback.
“Just ignore it,” Tim muttered absently, staring down at his tuner, tweaking his E-string. “It’s just some Eddie Vedder thing he’s going through — it’ll pass.”
“What’s with the fucking war paint?” Angela took a seat behind the tom toms.
“Those are tattoos, darling.”
“Get outta here!”
“I’m serious; brand new ones,” Tim nodded, rolling his eyes, and he was about to say something else, but stopped himself when he saw Parker pushing his way through the tattered stage curtains beyond the PA stack. “Here comes the illustrated man now.”
Parker swished through the black duvoteen and scooped up his guitar. In the low magenta load-in light Parker resembled a punkified Cleopatra. Face filigreed with purplish water marks, neck and arms etched in Byzantine vectors that vanished down the sleeves of his Butthole Surfers t-shirt, Parker was a walking canvas. His eyes were blood-shot and hot, and his expression was oddly beatific.
He was in a major zone.
Parker plugged in his guitar and glanced up at Tim. “We’re going to make the walls bleed tonight,” the young guitarist intoned, his eyes milky as he focused on a place far outside the Arkham area code.
“How ’bout some actual tunes?” Angela was standing behind the kit, hands on her hips.
“Yeah,” Parker smiled drunkenly.
Tim and Angela exchanged a glance.
Five minutes later, the stage lights flamed on.
The crowd howled.
Parker pegged his dials and began assaulting the Gibson six-string, lashing Townsend windmills across the fat-wound strings, the amplifiers peaking, and the sound erupting. It came off the stage like a tsunami. Crashed against the scattered audience of slackers, grad-students, and townies. It was palpable. It was bright magnesium blue and day glo pink, and it weedled into auditory canals and infected nervous systems. It was so loud, it was positively viral.
The display went on for a little under thirty minutes. Toward the end, Parker was the only musician left on stage, stoking the inferno of feedback like a zealous Maori warrior oblivious to the dwindling audience, or the fact that his band had already disbanded, or the fact that his capo had fused to the neck of his guitar in its strange, tilted position, doomed to forever conjure the mysterious nether-key.
A couple of junior rent-a-cops from Miskatonic’s Department of Public Safety had to ultimately pull the plug and wrestle Parker off the stage. The struggle got a little ugly, too, with Parker spitting and spewing inarticulate threats — polysyllabic epithets that sounded to the DPS guys like the ravings of a lunatic Gihad terrorist. Unfortunately t
he cops were too busy barking and cursing and shoving Parker out the loading dock door to see the subtle physical manifestations, the changes, the way the tattoos were incubating, teeming across the last square inches of unmarked skin on Parkers shoulders, neck and back. And more importantly, the rent-a-cops were too distracted to notice that the tattoos were not tattoos at all.
They were messages, blood-blister scrawl originating under Parker’s skin.
“I don’t care about Parker anymore,” Angela announced as she strode across the matrix of sidewalks crisscrossing the quad. It was an overcast afternoon, and the day was fast succumbing to the dank New England twilight. Angela cradled a stack of anthropology texts across her boyish chest.
“C’mon, Angie,” Tim ambled alongside her as only Tim could amble, like a gangly stick figure with dry rot. “He’s on some kind of freaky metaphysical-Jim Morrison-schizo-altered-states trip, man, and I’m scared for him.”
“Let it go, Timothy.”
“No, Angie, listen, I’m serious, it’s not the band. Fuck the band. It’s that fucking practice space.”
Angela paused and looked at her friend. “The practice space?”
“Yeah,” Tim looked off across the horizon, across ancient sky so laden with secrets it seemed to slump. “This fuckin’ place, man, sometimes it gets so fuckin’ weird around here I can’t even tell what’s what.”
“Yeah, I know,” Angela patted his shoulder. “It’s a weird place. So what? What’s that got to do with Parker and the practice space?”
“He’s down there all the time now, his nose in that speaker grill, digging that Godawful feedback.”
Angela shrugged. “Hendrix was doing it thirty years ago.”
“Wait, Angela, there’s more,” Tim bored his gaze into her and the look must have done the trick because she got very still. “I found out something this morning,” Tim clucked his tongue, “something about that basement room.”
“Yeah?” A nearby gas-light flickered on and reflected in Angela’s eyes.
“Orvis McGee,” Tim said, “dude who works over in administration, he told me that Parker’s old man died in that basement.”
“Professor Heironymous Pivok.” Angela said it like a chant.
“The same.”
Angela thought about it. “I knew the old man had died, like, under mysterious circumstances.”
“Yeah, well, it happened down there, and it happened because the old fucker was decoding some kinda’ satanic score, I dunno, something about some lost culture, you know how Orvis get’s with all that occult history stuff.”
The pause seemed to stretch between them like poison taffy.
“Is Parker there now?” Angela finally said.
Tim nodded.
“I gotta drop these books off,” Angela said. “I’ll meet you over there in twenty.” The wall of sound was opening.
A crack in the dike of reality, fissuring wider, blooming with light and blasphemy.
Parker kept his face pressed against the Marshall stack, every gain control on TEN, the speaker cones long ago blown to shattered bits, the guitar like a blacksmith’s iron in his hand, the speaker grille engulfing his body with liquid noise, eardrum-perforating noise, noise of the gods, seeping into him through the micro-tributaries of limned flesh and horrible miracles stewing in his blood stream, and there was no turning it off now, his father’s breath, the horrible sugar-stench wafting out of the speaker grille, evoking stillborn memories of the dungeon, the horrors thrust into young Parker’s body, they were in the sound now, woven through the fabric of the noise like tendrils of radio static, transmissions from the other place, the hellish place, pulsing, tidal waves, surging, surging into Parker, the messages, coalescing crystal-filaments, otherworldly music, coalescing like kaleidoscopes turned out-side in, aspic-bright, gelid, cold and cruel, something slithering chrysalis-like through the sieve of speaker flesh, and Parker finding his voice, a shriek leaping up into the light, the last kernel of Parker’s humanity crying out for deliverance —
Parker suddenly whip-lashed twelve feet across the cellar floor, landing hard against the boiler. His back struck cement, a gasp leaping up from his lungs. He blinked, and he gasped, and he struggled to see in his horror stricken infant-state, pain shooting up his spine.
The shape emerged from the plane of speaker-grill, a hideous nymph from the dream pool, its hand coming first, birthing silently, as though through smoke. The fingers positively dripped in delicate cryptic markings.
“Father —?” The utterance fluttered out of Parker like a wounded bird, drowned in the noise.
“Yesss,” the thing replied from the bulging speaker, its face pressing vacu-form through disintegrating fabric, penetrating the sound.
“Wha—? What’s happening?” Parker managed to stand, facing the dark visitor.
“You’ve punctured the veil, son,” the thing said, and urged itself further through the envelope of the speaker, reaching out to him.
“Oh my Gahhh —” Parker stood paralyzed.
The professor’s face was inside out, dangles of glistening sinew and cauliflowers of grey matter forming insect eyes, backward teeth as sharp as fractured diamonds. The thing was horribly beautiful. Its breath made hellish percussive music. “You’ve stumbled on to a portal, my darling boy,” the unearthly obscenity spoke in atonal harmonies like a broken wind chime. “You’ve translated the untranslatable.”
“I don’t — I — I don’t understand —” Parker’s soul was shriveling away.
“Your rage was your music, your hatred of me a doorway,” the thing explained, and it was reaching for Parker now with its backward hands, swimming through the air. “Now you’ve reached Valhalla,” it said, “where all the black sounds make sense.”
“No,” Parker objected softly.
It was too late.
The hands were embracing him, assimilating him, welcoming him to the void. “What the fuck was that?!” Angela was careening down the rickety, warped steps behind Tim, her heart a spastic skin-drum in her chest. The feedback had risen to a window shattering level, then dipped violently, like a plane lurching through turbulence.
“Stay back, Angie!” Tim had reached the base of the stairs, and was gazing into the hellish, dimly lit pit.
“What’s he doing?!” Angie’s cry was swallowed by feedback.
She tripped on the last step, and she went down in a heap, eating ancient stone and dust, and she yelped instinctively, the gloom pulsing organically in the cellar, the noise pouring over her. She rose to her knees, and she slammed her hands over her ears.
Tim was across the room, hands also plastered to his ears, watching the abomination.
“Stop it!” Angela screamed into the gusting sound and watched the miracle.
Parker’s face was almost absorbed.
It sank into the tattered grille of the speaker, a human soufflé, collapsing, writhing, its pain-rictus the most hideous expression of torment that Angela had ever — would ever — witness. And she watched it melt into the thunder, become one with electronic agony, one with the feedback.
Tim screamed.
The process ended.
The sudden silence crashed like a nuclear warhead — impassive, inanimate silence — its abruptness so violent and unexpected, that both Tim and Angela flinched against their respective corners of moist stone.
Then the stillness set in, and the founding members of Black Celebration sat gaping at the stone cold silent speaker stack that had eaten their friend.
The silence waited, patiently, for them to understand.
And the silence would wait as long as necessary.
STEAGAL’S BARBER SHOPPE AND SMOKE EMPORIUM
Davey Marsh was in such a state that day he could hardly remember how he got down to Steagal’s, not to mention how he got home from the Middle East.
The barber shop was in a gentrified part of town, on a side street just off Taylor, sandwiched between a Korean dry cleaners and a foreign auto body
shop. The front of the shop hadn’t changed since Nixon was in office — a broken-down little candy-striped pole planted in concrete by the door, whiskered in weeds, a window covered with chipped black paint and sun-faded photos of Sears catalogue models with hairstyles that had gone out of vogue sometime around the heyday of the hula hoop — styles such as the flat top, the brush cut, and ‘the Princeton’.
Davey pulled his S-10 up to a meter right front of the place — the vacant spot a miracle in itself — and yanked the stick into park. For the nearly two decades Davey Marsh had been getting his hair cut at Steagal’s, he had never seen an open parking spot right in front of the place. But that’s just the way that day had been going.
Like a waking dream.
Davey twisted off the ignition and climbed out of the pick-up. He was a big kid, and he seemed to unfold himself to his full six foot four lank as he got out of the truck, arching his back and squinting up at the high blue sky. His blue chambray shirt was damp under the arms and sticking to his back. It was late summer in Chicago, and the afternoon was heating up, but it was nothing like Iraq-heat. Nothing like that devil’s furnace that pressed down on you and matted your field gear to your back and turned your sweat to glue. Davey loped up the cracked sidewalk to the glass entrance door.
A little bell jangled overhead as Davey entered Steagal’s Barber Shop and Smoke Emporium.
“Scorcher of a day out there, ain’t it?” came a voice from the cool shadows in the rear of the place. The air inside the barber shop was musky and fragrant with hair tonic blown around the old linoleum and plaster walls by squeaky, rotating ceiling fans. It was a smell that immediately wrenched Davey back to his childhood, and all those sticky visits for crew cuts and suckers. There was an old naugahyde sofa on one wall strewn with well-thumbed men’s magazines spanning the last few decades: Gent, Oui, Modern Man, Soldier of Fortune, Club International, and Swank.
What was he doing here?
