Deep Blue

by David Niall Wilson

  Liz heard something wholly different, perfectly harmonious, and deep. The vocals were . . . wrong somehow. The man’s voice reached to her soul, drawing out her insecurity and laying it on the table. Liz wanted to withdraw her hand from Shaver’s before he felt it too, before he heard. She felt her father’s eyes sliding over her, her mother’s eyes sliding away, and still she held on.

  “No,” she whispered.

  Dexter was caught up in the beat. His hands were moving, his feet were tapping, harder at each stanza. He could feel the sticks in his hands, the pedals beneath the soles of his boots. The notes sped through his mind, dragging him along in their wake. Faster, deeper, challenging him to keep up, to make the grade and bring the rhythm to life. His hands flew over the table top. The drinks shivered . . . danced. The floor shook.

  On the stage, the vocalist stood very still, watching. The music played out around him like a rich, warped tapestry. His slate gray eyes were fixated on the table where Shaver, Liz, and Dexter sat, transfixed. Everyone in the room was transfixed. Each heard the pain of their heart, the song they least wanted and most needed to hear. There was no interaction, no discussion. Not a word was spoken as the music cascaded off different walls. As worlds played out in parallel agony, and pain that had been bottled in separate containers through the entire spans of separate lives echoed through the room.

  The door opened with a soft “Swoosh!” The music, for that one instant, hesitated. No eyes spun to the door, except those of the man behind the microphone. He smiled.

  Eight

  Brandt pushed the door open, and the sudden absence of sound sucked his breath from his lungs like a giant vacuum. Synthia stepped in beside him, pressed close. The smoky interior was dark. Music, loud and powerful, rolled off the stage in waves, shivering through the cigarette smoke that danced serpent-like above the tables and shimmered beneath the low-slung fluorescent lights.

  Even the twilight on the streets had been bright in comparison, and the garish glare from the overheads and from the spots backlighting the stage nearly blinded them. Brandt could make out nothing but the nearest tables. Two were empty; at a third, a short, stooped figure leaned in close, hands cupped around a glass.

  Stepping closer, Brandt caught a flash of color from the table and turned to look. He stopped, clutching Syn to his side. The hand stretched out flat on that table was aged, withered, and thin. Slender, wrinkled fingers danced across the dingy, water-stained surface, but Brandt ignored them. Beyond their reach, as if forgotten, the cards lay stacked. Brandt drew nearer, all else forgotten, staring. As he neared the table, the old woman turned, gap-toothed filthy grin flashing—ignored.

  The Wheel of Fortune. The image on the card mesmerized him, the colors clarifying quickly, symbols. The hook. The ankh. Circles, endless circles. Brandt staggered forward, reaching for the card, Syn staggering in his wake. He leaned into the table, too hard, and it toppled, spilling glass and ice and cards in a whirling dash of color that blended to the shadows of the floor. Syn gripped his arm hard, dragging him back, and Brandt blinked. In that moment, things shifted.

  Brandt’s gaze flashed to the stage. Locked to those slate-gray, endless orbs, gazing back at him over the top of the microphone. Beyond the stage, the deep, roaring blaze of a fire flickered for just a moment, and the shadowed skeletal nightline of the city replaced the back wall. The world tilted, but somehow Brandt didn’t fall. Maybe the counterbalance of Syn leaning on his arm, maybe some inner strength he wasn’t familiar with. He swayed, held, took a step forward, and nearly fell again.

  Arms grabbed his then, fingers gripping much more tightly than Synthia ever could. Brandt shook his head back and forth, slowly, not letting his gaze waver from the stage. The music swelled, and the vocalist grinned, white teeth sparkling in the darkness. Laughter rolled out to accompany the guitar and the drums.

  “Brandt!”

  Hearing his name, so close, and so loudly voiced, rocked Brandt back on his heels. Then he turned, eyes wide.

  Shaver glared at him. “Watch where the fuck you’re going.”

  Brandt blinked. The music rippled again, tangible, powerful. Brandt stood, and Shaver released him, slowly. Even more slowly, Brandt became aware of his surroundings. His guitar case slapping against his knee. Syn moved up closer, protectively. He felt the eyes of all those at the table he’d nearly trashed. Ignoring it all, he lifted his arm and brought the guitar case up, dragging it across the top of the table, brushing aside the glasses that remained and sending them crashing to the floor. The sound was lost in the pounding of drums and bass, overpowering and impossibly amplified. The vocalist grew taller and more slender, mocked them with his eyes and beckoned with the fingers of one hand in an eerie mockery of Jim Morrison.

  Shaver was still glaring at Brandt, but his fingers were flexing.

  “Fuck,” Dexter interrupted eloquently.

  They turned to the stage, all of them. Those still seated, staggered to their feet. The band still played, but it wasn’t the band of a few moments past, strange as those musicians had been. The vocalist was unchanged. If anything, his sharp, too-handsome features stood out more prominently against the backdrop of those supporting the sound.

  They seemed dead. That was the only single word description that fit, and yet, it was more than that: death denied, pain prolonged. Their fingers moved over the strings of their instruments, the drummer’s sticks beat intricate patterns on the drum skins, but there was no animation in their eyes. There was desperation, frantic hunger, a madman’s expression of helpless creation, but no spark of anything you could call life.

  Shaver’s hands trembled. He brought them to his chest, trying to still the motion, this bringing the tremble to his heart.

  “Fuck,” Dexter repeated. His own hands were fisted, clenched so tightly that if anyone had been paying attention to him, they might have feared that he would jam the nails straight through his palms. His foot tapped. Stopped. Tapped again, and trembled to a halt.

  Brandt unsnapped the guitar case and flipped open the lid.

  The pain rolled from the band in waves. It brought no memories. It dragged nothing from their past. Not like the music Brandt had played. That music had released pain. This music offered it, forced it upon the listeners, and bound it to their minds and hearts. The temperature in the room had dropped several degrees, and all pretense of reality was banished to the shadows.

  Brandt hesitated. He wanted to close his hands over his ears. He wanted to slam the case closed, fling one of the empty tumblers at that grinning caricature of a singer’s face and drive the smile away, but something held him in check. The guitar. He leaned in, hands caressing the polished wood, and with a quick jerk he dragged the instrument from its case. Somehow, Synthia moved as well, slipping in and wrapping her arms around him to grip the shoulder strap and draw it up and over his head. Brandt felt the familiar weight and his hands caressed the neck—the strings. He concentrated, blocking out the sound.

  “What’s the matter, boy?” the vocalist called out from the stage. “You like to play the pain, don’t you? You know they don’t come to you to dance, or to love, don’t you boy?”

  Brandt stiffened. Long years growing to be a man warred with that subtly-tossed insult. He steadied his hands and closed his eyes, willing the visions of bonfires to the dark recesses of his mind and ignoring the desperate hunger for a connection with his mind that he sensed in the members of the band.

  Brandt opened his eyes and managed to avoid the stage. He glanced at Shaver. No longer angry, the young guitarist stared, fixated by the wavering, dancing figures on the stage. His fingers clenched and unclenched, and Brandt saw from the bandages and the controlled grimaces of pain that it hurt each time. Shaver didn’t seem to notice.

  Brandt swept his gaze over the others. Syn had released him and stepped up beside him, standing very still with her hands on the table. Her attention was focused on the bassist. Brandt glanced up, just for a moment, and the stage flickered a
gain. The bass was there, as it had been in the park, glittering and smooth, lacquered surface gleaming in the dim light. Not electric. Not Fender. Upright and old, the musician’s fingers flying up and down the neck in intricate counterpoint to the drums.

  Drums that were echoed beside Brandt, where Dexter had picked up the beat, his nails rattling across the water-soaked wood of the tabletop, snapping into empty glasses for cymbals and clattering against the edge of Brandt’s guitar case. Brandt wanted to stop him, wanted to slap his hands over his friend’s, ending that connection, but he knew it would do no good. Dragging Synthia from the park had only been a bandage on a larger wound.

  The guitar. Brandt brought his fingers to the strings and closed his eyes. He didn’t play. Not at first. He reached deep inside, reached for those who sought him. Synthia could have told him where they were, but she was swaying now, captivated by the sounds from the stage. Wally could have just led them to the club and circled them like Indians at a stagecoach barbeque, but that wasn’t happening. Not this time.

  The voices were there, faint, but growing, always growing. The music from the stage, deep and raw, paled before the weight of that endless chorus. Years piled upon years of misery, decades of unrequited agony. What the band on the stage played was new, raw and unfocused. It was pain without purpose, seeking an outlet, latching onto anyone or anything close enough to release a bit of its fury. What Brandt felt, welling up in his soul, was ancient, honed and sharp. The images riding those voices were etched into the bedrock of time. The band could scratch at the surface, could promise pain to come and eternities filled with more of the same, but it could not match the depth, the sheer overwhelming power, of what had come before.

  Brandt felt it. It wasn’t his pain, but he was the channel, the conduit to a million tiny pockets of agony and grief. He rippled his fingers over the strings, checking the tuning. He was in no hurry, despite the intensity of the moment. Wave after wave of anger and hatred washed over him, and he felt the tiny, silver-threads of his friends’ lives spinning away from him, winding toward that brilliant, blinking abyss that was the stage. The man. The hell, they faced.

  “Hold on,” Brandt whispered.

  He struck a chord. It rippled through the overwhelming tide of sound, slicing clean and pure. He struck again, letting his fingers slide quickly up and down the strings, sliding, wishing he’d remembered a Bic lighter, or a steel socket. He knew the notes, knew the fluid, half-lazy, half-inspired motions required to blend them and bring them to life. He had only his fingers, a half-dead pick, and the memory of a thousand hours playing the old records again and again.

  “Crossroads music, boy?” The man on the stage grinned. “You want to chase me away or call me home?”

  Brandt ignored the taunting. He reached for the notes, willing his fingertip smooth, sliding it to the higher E and dragging it down, letting the notes shiver. He felt it tremble deep through the bones of his finger, up his arm, and into his heart. The smoky air rippled and in that instant he saw the vocalist’s face clearly. Not handsome. Not powerful. Empty. Eyes like deep pits and a mouth open to howl in insane fury.

  The band, no band at all, swayed crazily beside that specter, wisps of red flame, their instruments shadows, the notes they played visible, undulating from the center of the stage like dark serpents, winding through the crowd, choosing targets, rising to strike.

  “No,” Brandt said simply. He closed his eyes, concentrated, bore down on fingers and pick, drawing out the notes and letting his own thoughts dissolve. The notes were not about him, not part of him. The world slipped away and he felt his hands gripping an older instrument, felt the coarse wood, the rough cat-gut strings. The notes were tinny, clanging with a crude resonance.

  Brandt turned, not letting his fingers hesitate. The club was gone. He stood in a clearing. Trees rose above him on all sides, a wooded cathedral, and in the center, a long, low-slung table. Candles lit the scene, flickering and wavering brightly atop four-foot stands. The banjo, rough-hewn and held together as much by love and luck as craftsmanship, rang with the voice of desolation. The sliding blues of Brandt’s guitar had faded, and the jangling, discordant notes of death slipped easily into that void. Backwoods minor-chorded dirge, half-gospel, half bluegrass, and all pain. Brandt had never held a banjo, but his fingers floated easily over the ragged strings.

  On the table, endless platters of food, roast beef and broiled fish, apple pie and casseroles of all description. The air was alive with the aromas of meat and boiled vegetables, baked goods, and the soft, lingering undercurrent of wine. The lingering, death-sweet scent of lilies hung damp and heavy in the air. The feast was piled high, backed by tacky, hand-crafted horseshoes of roses and carnations in every color of the rainbow.

  A plaque leaned against one of those horseshoes. It was etched with deep, burn-cut letters on a backdrop of hard oak.

  “Isaiah Johnson. Brother to all, enemy to none. Soldier of the Lord. May he rest in peace.”

  Brandt bent the notes double, feeling the emotion embodied in this simple, plaintive display of grief and loss. Isaiah. Such an appropriate name. But the food? The banquet? It was a party with no attendees. A funeral with no deceased. Then Brandt looked closer, and he stopped playing, nearly losing what food he’d eaten earlier in a quick spew of bile.

  The feast was centered around a long, lean body, platters piled on its chest, its throat, lining the legs, bread resting in the cleft between the thighs. Flasks of wine and small wooden kegs of beer leaned against the base of the table, and the face was wreathed in an intricate halo of fruit and vegetables.

  Footsteps sounded to one side, rustling branches and crushed leaves. Brandt stepped back into the shadows, concentrating on the sound, lacing one note to the next and scanning the clearing carefully.

  Stealthy motion to his right. Brandt leaned back against a tree. It wasn’t as if he could hide, not with the banjo announcing his presence and insinuating him into the moment, but having the trunk solid at his back bolstered his failing courage. Bright eyes flashed across the table at him, glaring, searching, dropping away. Brandt watched as a tall, slender form melted from the trees and began to circle the table slowly, no longer paying the slightest attention to Brandt, or the music.

  A slender hand snaked out to grasp a bit of bread. That bread disappeared, and moments later, long strips of beef were torn free. Consumed. Replaced by chicken and handfuls of radishes. One of the flagons of wine was lifted, tipped . . . drained, washing over thin cheeks and down a narrow throat.

  Something rippled through the air. The man made no sound, other than the chewing and swallowing of food. No one else was present, and yet there was something . . . something powerful . . . slipping in and about the shadows of the clearing. Brandt fought the urge to chase those shadow-glimpses. He played, letting his mind and soul flow into the unfamiliar notes of the banjo’s bright voice, trying desperately to fight off visions of Deliverance as he gaped at the feasting madman before him.

  The candles flickered madly. There was no wind, and yet they danced in eerie time to Brandt’s song. Shadows moved just beyond the soft pool of light. Brandt couldn’t focus on any of them long enough to make out a shape, and his eyes were drawn, again and again, to the wraith-thin maniac sliding along the table, gripping meat and vegetables, guzzling wine, and stuffing his mouth again and again. Impossible amounts of food disappeared with alarming speed. Brandt caught the man’s gaze now and then, those deep, too-white, too-deep eyes.

  “That’s you, boy.”

  The voice filtered in through the banjo’s wail, whispering from the shadows, familiar and deep. Brandt’s skin grew clammy, but he didn’t let go of the song.

  “That’s you, same as the ol’ Sineater, boy. Everyone else’s sin, everyone else’s shadows. You take it in, they let it go, ‘round and ‘round. Look at him. Go on, look.”

  Brandt tried not to look. He tried to drag his gaze to his fingers, to follow the intricate dance that drew them from
string to string, the glitter of the metal picks that adorned each finger of his right hand. Anything, everything, nothing but that man, and that food, slowly disappearing, nothing but crumbs and droplets of spilled wine left behind. Methodically, the Sineater moved about the dead body, revealing a pale, lifeless thigh, drawing a plate of pork from atop a too-round bulging belly. So much food, so much drink, and disappearing steadily. Impossibly.

  “He will take it all in,” the voice went on, “all of it, bite by bite and drop by drop. Nothin’ spared, boy. Nothing. Every bit of that man’s sin is in that feast, every guilty portion his friends and family and priest could dredge from their communal memory. Laid out, open to the world. Nothing between that dead body and me,” a wave of soft laughter drifted through the song, “but that skinny-assed fool over there. Got so much of what is mine he can’t even come to town, don’t have a friend in the world, or a love. Nothing but death, and food, and music. Music from boys like you, setting others free and bearing the pain.”

  The voice fell silent, and Brandt was suddenly aware of the rivulets of sweat running down his face, the taste of salt in the corners of his mouth. His mind raced. The pain hadn’t receded, but it flowed smoothly. When he played, it eased. It flowed up and through, out and away. It didn’t fill him.

  Was it the same? Is that how the man ate and ate and fucking ate and never stopped? Never.

  Brandt thought, and thought, and tried to stop those thoughts, concentrating on his fingers. No friends. Not able to come to others, or love. Alone with the pain of others. He thought of Wally. Of Synthia, and Shaver and Dexter. Of himself.

  The Sineater spun on his heel. The food was gone, all but a single turkey leg, gripped knuckle-white-tight in one thin hand. The man’s wild stare tore through Brandt’s whirling thoughts and pinned him to the tree like a dead bug in a science project; spread and helpless. Only his fingers felt alive, and they danced to a tune Brandt couldn’t even name, let alone control. The man moved away from the table, turkey torn from the bone dangling from his lip. His steps were steady, the gait of a beast stalking prey. Hair, wild and silver-gray, spun out behind him, and wine, gravy, and bits of meat flecked his chin and shirt.