Lords of Salem

by Rob Zombie

  Heidi nodded. “Exactly,” she said. “So what’s stopping you?”

  He looked at his watch again and then shook his head and smiled, followed her in. Things were back to normal, Heidi thought. Well, if normal was what they’d actually been before.

  They were inside and on the inner stairs leading up to her apartment when a door on the first floor opened. Fuck, thought Heidi, we’ve woken the landlady up. She kept walking. From behind her, she heard Lacy call her name.

  She turned, putting on her nice company face, trying not to look too drunk. Whitey hesitated a moment, but turned with her. Lacy was standing there, still wearing that same batik wrap, her hair no longer loose now but instead gathered in a ponytail.

  “Hi, Lacy,” Heidi said. “Sorry if we woke you up. I’ll try to be quieter next time.”

  Lacy just shook her head and smiled. “I’m a night owl,” she said. “You didn’t wake me.”

  Then what does she want? Heidi came down a few stairs, lifted her eyebrows expectantly.

  “So, I took a look at five,” Lacy said.

  “Yeah?” said Heidi. “And?”

  “And everything looked just as expected,” said Lacy. She came a little farther into the hall, to the very base of the stairs. “Dusty as hell and full of cobwebs,” she said, “but normal. No sign of any intruders… alien or otherwise.” She smiled.

  What? thought Heidi. But I saw the door open, and there was someone there. I know it.

  “I’m positively sure I saw somebody standing in the doorway,” she said. “My eyes are bad, but I’m not blind.”

  Lacy shrugged. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I don’t see how it’s possible. The place was locked tight and I have the only set of keys. And even the dust on the floor hadn’t been disturbed. I’m afraid nobody was there.”

  “Wow,” said Heidi. She thought for a moment. Could she have imagined it? Maybe. She’d been hungover, after all. Or could there be someone there but for some reason Lacy didn’t want her to know about it? No, that was crazy—Lacy was a nice old hippy lady. She didn’t have any reason to hide someone and then lie about it. What reason could there even be to do so? She shook her head. “Okay, well, I guess I’m seeing things… again,” she said. She smiled, turning it into a joke, but was worried that Lacy would see the fear in her eyes. “It’s been a while since I’ve had that problem.”

  Lacy nodded and smiled back. She crossed her arms over her chest. “It happens to the best of us,” she claimed.

  But Heidi felt less sure than she sounded, and she knew she didn’t sound all that sure. Something weird was going on, maybe inside of her. “Yeah, I guess,” she said. She turned to start up the stairs again, saw Whitey hovering above her. Almost forgot, she thought. “Lacy,” she said. “I should introduce you. This is White Herman. He ‘works’ at the radio station with me.” She made artificial quotes with her fingers as she spoke the word works.

  “White Herman?” she said. “What kind of name is that? Some weird family thing?”

  Whitey came down a few steps and held out his hand to her. She took it and shook it briefly. “Well,” he said, “we have two Hermans on the Big H team and the other is an African American guy. We kind of figured that Black Herman sounded a bit… you know.” Heidi had to stop herself from feigning innocence and saying, What? No, I don’t know. But it wasn’t a good idea to do that in front of her landlady, particularly when she was drunk. Whitey continued: “Most people just call me Whitey,” he said.

  Lacy nodded. “Nice to meet you, Whitey. Good night,” she said, but made no move to go back into her apartment.

  “Good night,” said Heidi. She turned and headed with Whitey up the stairs. When she reached the top, she looked back. Lacy was still there, at the bottom. She seemed to be watching them closely. Heidi waved once, but Lacy didn’t wave back, nor did she look away. What’s wrong with people today? she wondered. And then shaking her head she went to unlock her apartment door.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Whitey tried to take the apartment in. It was both like he’d expected it to be and different from what he’d imagined. It felt like Heidi all the way through—same kind of eclectic mix of objects and items that he would have guessed, considering the way the girl dressed, same sorts of things dragged in from thrift stores, but not just anything. She’d been pretty careful about what she’d chosen, but there was a lot of it, and things were scattered pell-mell. There was what looked like some kind of antique fainting couch, the upholstery beginning to fray and wear through so that the stuffing poked out. She’d thrown over that a striped, fringed blanket that looked like it had been picked up from a street vendor in Tijuana. Next to that, on the end table, was a lamp with a hula girl for its base, complete with faux grass skirt—the kind of thing you would find in a bad Hawaiian restaurant called Tiki Joe’s or something. The whole apartment was like that, carefully chosen objects that clashed in a way that you couldn’t help but like. Or that he, anyway, couldn’t help but like. Heidi he couldn’t help but like either. She didn’t care all that much about what people expected her to look like—she just dressed however she wanted and that was what you got. But that was all right with Whitey.

  Everything was jumbled and mixed, except for the milk crates. She had dozens of them, stacked floor to ceiling on either side of the stereo and filled with old records. The stereo setup, too, he had to admire. She wasn’t messing around there. It was good-quality gear, great speakers, plus several turntables, a couple of CD players, and a top-of-the-line eight-track tape machine. And the eight-track looked brand new rather than something from a salvage yard. Sure, Whitey had an eight-track, but it was something he’d pulled out of a junked car, and it sat on the floor next to his stereo with wires running every which way. But hers was a home stereo model and didn’t look more than a year or two old. Didn’t even know you could still get those, thought Whitey. Maybe she’d had it for years and just took great care of it. Fuck, hot and knew her electronics, too—that was not only rare: it was downright impossible.

  “Where’d you get the eight-track?” he asked.

  “Huh?” she said. “My dad.”

  “Was he a DJ, too?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “He just liked his music.”

  “You see him much?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, her eyes a little absent. “He died.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, and gave him a sad smile. “It’s been a while now. I’m getting used to it.”

  She went into the kitchen. After a few minutes of looking the stereo up and down, he started in on the vinyl. Great collection. Lots of stuff he used to have before he dumped his own vinyl, and lots of stuff he wished he still had. Good taste.

  “Like what you see?” she asked when she came back from the kitchen. He swallowed, then nodded.

  “You are the only chick I’ve ever met with such a killer rack,” he said, gesturing at the stereo, and then wincing when he realized what he’d said.

  “What was that about a killer rack?” she asked in her dumb-blonde voice from behind him. If he turned around, she’d probably be standing there with her hips canted and one knee bent like some Miss America contestant. He decided to ignore it.

  “Man,” he said, continuing to thumb through the albums. “Seeing your collection really makes me miss my vinyl. I can’t believe I sold all my shit.”

  “I warned you,” she said.

  Well, maybe she did, but that was no reason to lord it over him. “Yeah, well,” he said, a little defensively. “I mean, CDs do technically sound better, but they’re dead, too.”

  She came around to where he could see her, gave him an exhausted stare.

  “Fuck that.” Her voice, too, was exhausted and didn’t have much fight to it, but she wasn’t going to concede. “You and every other muso miss the point,” she said. “Everything sounds the same, but my records only sound like my records. The pops and scr
atches are my pops and scratches, you know. They belong to me.”

  “I guess I never really thought about it that way,” he said. He sat staring at the albums in front of them. Yeah, she was right. It was like the way your car, as it got older, became even more your car: the key you had to jiggle just right, the window that wouldn’t roll down all the way, the ceiling fabric that came loose and brushed your head while you drove—all the little problems that gave it personality. “Fuck,” he said. “Now I’m really depressed. I’ve destroyed my entire musical history. What was I thinking?”

  She had gone back into the kitchen. He cast a glance over his shoulder, saw her flip a pancake.

  “You weren’t thinking,” she claimed. “Just walking off the cliff with all the other lemmings.” Then she laughed. “Don’t worry, these will make you forget your troubles.”

  Whitey shook his head. “I doubt it,” he said. Though it was true, the smell of the pancakes was already making his mouth start to water. “Mind if I play something?” he asked.

  “Go for it,” Heidi said, “but choose wisely.”

  Choose wisely? Was this a test? “Oh no,” he said, shaking a finger at her. “You’re going to make some judgment based on my choice, I assume?”

  Heidi flipped the pancake out of a pan and onto a plate. “Don’t assume,” she said.

  He couldn’t decide if she was serious or joking. That was always the problem. It wasn’t like he was a stupid guy, only that when it came to people like Heidi, girls he liked, it was like some switch turned off in his brain and he found himself doubting how he should read them. With Chip it was different—the way that guy thought was just too boring and predictable to follow. His mind rebelled against that. But with Heidi it was probably that he listened too closely and worried he was hearing things that weren’t really there.

  He flipped through the records, found the Velvet Underground & Nico’s self-titled album. Shit, she actually had the early edition, where the banana peel was still a sticker, and the sticker was still on. Not bad. That, and wondering where the pops and scratches would come on Heidi’s copy, was enough to convince him to get the record out of the sleeve and put it on one of the turntables, side one up. He started the table spinning and carefully lifted the needle, placing it on track four.

  The sound of “Venus in Furs” filled the room. When he turned, Heidi had her wrist balanced on one hip, the spatula balanced loosely in the other hand. She was giving him a wry look.

  “What?” he said.

  She rolled her eyes. “Nothing,” she said.

  “Too obvious?” he said. He liked her, so what? It wasn’t like he thought playing “Venus in Furs” was likely to get her to invite him into the bedroom.

  She shrugged and began to sing along to the record. After a moment, he joined in as well.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Steve made his appearance as soon as the pancakes were served. How he’d known food was on, and why he hadn’t come before when he’d first smelled them, Whitey didn’t know. Steve was like that. A much smarter dog than he let on. Kind of freaky, if you thought about it.

  But there Steve was, begging bites of pancake until they’d finished their first round and got their second and Heidi told him to go lie down. He did, with a kind of exasperated noise, crawling up onto the fainting couch where he quickly fell asleep. “He’s not supposed to be up there,” Heidi confided to Whitey, but she let him stay anyway. Considering how unhesitatingly Steve had hopped up there, Whitey would guess that probably happened a lot, that Steve had her wrapped around his little finger. Or whatever it was that dogs had rather than fingers.

  “This is one sweet apartment,” said Whitey, carving off another bite of pancake. “The rent must be insane.”

  “Only three hundred bucks a month,” said Heidi.

  Three hundred bucks? He was paying basically double that for a shit hole. “How is that possible?” said Whitey. “What’s the catch?”

  Heidi shrugged. “Weird story,” she said. “I was walking Steve and ran into my landlady. We got talking, just chatting about nothing really, and she told me she thought she was going to have an apartment open and asked if I was interested. I was perfectly fine where I was, so I told her no, but then she told me how little she wanted and how could I say anything but yes?”

  “You couldn’t,” said Whitey. “Not if you were sane.”

  “Right,” she said. “But she’s kind of a freak, too. When we were talking, very first time we met, she grabbed my hand and stroked it like it was an animal or something. For a while she wouldn’t let go. I was on the way to getting creeped out when she told me I could have the place for three hundred bucks a month. I couldn’t believe it.”

  Whitey shrugged. “Old ladies have different rules about how long they can hold your hand. My grandma was that way. And for the price, you’re just lucky,” he said. “That’s probably all it is.”

  Heidi smeared her syrup around her plate with her fork and shrugged. “I think maybe my landlady has the hots for me,” she said. “That probably explains it. You saw her. She’s kind of got that hippie free-love vibe going on. I mean, she’s sweet, but… I don’t know.”

  “My place sucks ass,” said Whitey. “I’m paying a fortune for absolutely nothing. My landlord is some asshole Russian guy, Kazmir Yakov… total cunt.” He pulled himself straight and tried to imitate his landlord. “Vitey, Vitey, you got my rent? In Ukraine, rent is due when landlord knock on door. If landlord have to knock twice, then KGB knock next.”

  But Heidi wasn’t listening. She wasn’t looking at him but at some indefinable space beyond him. “Dead air,” she said.

  “Huh?” asked Whitey.

  “Music,” said Heidi.

  Oh, right, thought Whitey, the record ended. He got up and took the record off the platter, slid it back into its sleeve, and then kneeled down to put it away.

  “You manage to file things right over here,” said Heidi. “Why can’t you do it at the station?”

  “What?” asked Whitey. “Oh, here it matters,” he said. Inwardly, he winced. What was that supposed to mean? She must think I’m an idiot.

  He flipped through the closest stack of records, looking for the next thing, his mind wandering. How was he supposed to choose something when she’d make assumptions about him from anything he chose? Heidi’s bag was right there as well, leaning against the side of the milk crate. It was half open, the wooden box sticking out of it. There we go, he thought. Neither of them had heard it, so it wouldn’t say anything about either of them if he chose it.

  He put on his landlord’s accent again. “How about this? In Ukraine, music always delivered in wooden box. Like dead body.”

  “Sure, whatever,” said Heidi.

  Whitey took out the box and tried to open it, but it seemed stuck. He could tell where the lid stopped and the box started, but there didn’t seem to be any latch or hook to separate one from the other. How had she done it again? Embarrassed, he pried at it.

  “See those two dots in the symbol on top?” said Heidi. “Press them at the same time.”

  “What for?” asked Whitey, but when she didn’t answer, he pressed them. The box clicked and the lid became slightly loose. “Clever,” he said. He carefully lifted the lid off, removed the record from inside.

  He held its edges against his palms, still speaking in mock-Russian. “Ah, very thick vinyl… strong like bear.”

  Actually, it was unusually thick, and strong, too. He stood and laid the record down on the turntable.

  He lifted the needle and set it in place. But as soon as he let go, it immediately slid across the entire record. What the fuck? he wondered.

  “Whoa, sorry,” he said, lifting up the needle and hoping Heidi hadn’t been paying too much attention. “Let’s try that again.”

  But when he replaced the needle, the exact same thing happened. He set the needle in place and released it and it fled to the center of the record, as though it were blank. But he could
see the grooves, which meant something was pressed on it.

  “That’s weird,” he said, reaching out for the needle again. “The needle keeps jumping to the other side of the…”

  But before he could lift the needle, the record began to play, the needle moving slowly backward across the vinyl, from the center toward the rim.

  “Huh?” said Heidi. “The other side of the track?”

  “Well, I was going to say ‘that’s weird, the record won’t play,’ but now it’s playing…”

  “So what’s the problem? Why don’t I hear anything?” asked Heidi.

  “It’s playing backward. Look at this. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Heidi got up and went over to the stereo.

  “What the fuck?” she said. “How is that even possible?”

  Whitey just shook his head. “It’s not,” he said. “The motor doesn’t work that way, unless you’ve made some weird sort of mod on it.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  Whitey shrugged. “I’m just trying to explain it,” he said. “I’m not accusing you of anything.”

  Together they looked down at the needle moving in reverse. No, it shouldn’t be able to do that, but there it was, doing it. Damn, Whitey couldn’t help but think. This isn’t Heidi messing with me somehow, is it? But she seemed as confused by it as he was.

  “I guess it’s blank,” said Whitey. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Why would it be blank?”

  “I don’t know,” said Whitey. “Some kind of joke?” He began to reach out for the needle, ready to pluck it off the record.

  “Hold up a second,” Heidi said. She reached down and cranked the volume all the way up. And then Whitey could hear something, a sort of faint moaning sound. But how Heidi had been able to hear it with the sound turned down to normal levels damned if he knew. Maybe she hadn’t been able to hear it and had just made a lucky guess.

  It was moaning voices, he was pretty sure, a bunch of them, or the same voice overlaid a bunch of times. It sounded strange, definitely. Gradually the sound grew louder, melding with a rhythmic and repeated booming sound. The booming was repeated three times in succession, followed by a fourth strike at a higher pitch, then repeated again. Together with the moaning it was almost hypnotic, and as Whitey continued to listen he heard something else. What was it, exactly? A kind of crackling noise, like a fire, or like twigs being snapped, but not quite either of those things. And there, far beneath the other sounds, was the strange discordant noise of various primitive instruments, a flute or a kind of pipe, a screeching from some sort of stringed instrument being played wrong, a sound like someone blowing through a long tube, a sound like sand being thrown against an echoing surface: spat, spat, spat. It was all pretty chaotic, but it definitely added up to something. Not really a song exactly, more a kind of drone or chant, the music (if it was properly speaking music) wandering and shapeless. But there was a note pattern there, too, if you listened for it, a structure of repetition beyond the rhythmic boom of the drum, but one that seemed to have little interest in resolving itself. There was something there, too—it was hard for him to put his finger on it since so many aspects of the music were so different—that reminded him of the tracks they’d played from Leviathan and the Fleeing Serpent earlier. Maybe a tone? Even just a repeated gesture, something very slight? Very hard to say. But yes, there was definitely a connection. Was it just the fact that both that and this kind of made his skin crawl?