Welcome to the Show

by Keene, Brian

  I was in high school when that outpouring of strange alien beasts brought their spit and teeth, their blood, their claws, and the mites on their skin through the sky hole in Atherton. Sure, maybe those illnesses they spread weren’t deadly because their biology is so different from ours, but I remember all those classes cancelled or quarantined when some student was sent terrified to the nurse because he or she suddenly sprouted long growths or glowed green, or dripped those foul-smelling brackish fluids from ears, nose, and the corners of the mouth. I remember the evacuation drills, because creatures would wander onto school property or crash through windows sometimes, drawn to the noise of school bells and chatter and movement.

  We’d learned to live with those shifts in society; every day, we coped with the alien and unusual in our streets, our homes, our social media. Food and drink changed. Medicine changed. Homes and schools changed. Politics changed. Art changed. Jobs changed.

  Music, of course, changed the most drastically. This coming April would have marked six years that I had been working at The Shantyman. When Congress enacted the federal music ban eight months ago, it didn’t just break my heart, but it put me out of a job. I suppose the government’s fears were not unfounded; the sounds and vibrations could have continued opening portals to other worlds. It was possible, now that the tech was out there. Nonetheless, it was the one thing none of us adapted very well to. There were no more bar bands, no more music promoters or record labels, no concert venues or opera houses. Spotify, Google Play, and iTunes pulled their music and focused their business on audiobooks and podcast talk shows. Music, as primal to the human soul as storytelling, was now a crime, and suddenly, the rock gods that had made churning one’s way through adolescence remotely bearable were criminals and murderers. They fought it—we all did—but it only made things worse. The flora and fauna of that other world followed the sound. They thrived on it and multiplied. They fed on it and grew stronger, and their grip on our world grew tighter.

  We could have music, or we could protect ourselves and our loved ones. So the elimination of everything from commercial jingles to the national anthem to lullabies became part of the new normal, whose creeping stranglehold was so very much like those alien vines.

  And we accepted it, like we’d come to accept wars no one was ever really going to win and laws taking away fundamental rights in the name of safety or technological progress and everything else the conspiracy folks warned us about. We accepted being silenced.

  And when folks took martial law in stride a few months ago, they told themselves the scientists and the soldiers had needed to commandeer homes and businesses to set up containment units. They told themselves those scientists and soldiers would bring back the old normal again. That’s a funny thing about humans in these situations; they hold onto hope, no matter how crazy or absurd that hope might be. They adapt to radically new lives and all the while hold onto the idea somewhere in the backs of their minds that these universally life-changing events are temporary, and that Someone In Charge Somewhere is going to make it all right again.

  It didn’t work like that; it never could have, even if the ones like that thing in the cage hadn’t come through.

  ***

  We weren’t as afraid as we should have been at finding one of those creatures, even if it was in a cage. If anything, we were more annoyed that the new normal was intruding on our one last trip down memory lane. We were angry that a representative master of that invading, choking otherworld was intruding on one of the last standing monuments to an art form that defined us and the most important eras of our lives. Angry doesn’t even adequately describe the feeling, to tell the truth. It was more like a feral kind of loathing, part anger and part fear, which fed the ignition of another primal force—bloodlust. I wanted to kill the thing, and I admit, if I’d had a means to do so then and there, I would’ve. It wasn’t a fugitive or a prisoner in that cage; it wasn’t something yanked away from everything familiar and safe and thrust into an alien world; it wasn’t another sentient, feeling being. Not in those first moments, it wasn’t—not to us. When we walked into that club, it was a monster, a thing whose very existence had ruined all our lives, and instinctively, I wanted it dead.

  And then Joey noticed the door locks.

  Some time while we were gawking and glaring at and cursing the creature and its attendant dead body, those vines I told you about snaked out from beneath the cage. They moved fast and silent in the gloom of the club’s interior, and it’s kind of a wonder they didn’t wrap around our legs; I’d heard they could squeeze a calf muscle so hard that they could rupture it. They didn’t come near us, though, not just then. Instead, they’d tangled around the legs of chairs and tables, then around doorknobs and through keyholes. The acid-stuff inside them had fused into useless, immobile lumps of metal in the door handles and locks of all four exits accessible from the stage room, as well as the women’s room and the inner doors to the cloak room and both corridors leading out. Maybe we pissed the thing in the cage off, or our voices agitated the vines, or we somehow aroused in both a mutual, murderous kind of hate. Maybe it was some kind of otherworld lockdown, or maybe the vines just did what alien vines do. I don’t know how it happened, but it did, and we found ourselves confined to one bathroom, the bar, the backstage green room . . . and the main stage, with that . . . thing. We were trapped.

  Proximity to the cage or maybe the creature inside it fried our cell phones; we discovered that right away. The damn things wouldn’t even turn on, let alone let us text or call anyone or even take a picture of the thing. Not that it really made too much of a difference, anyway—I mean, who could we have called? 911? The police? The military? And what would we have said, that we had snuck into my old boss’s club without permission, specifically to play music in secret and to reminisce about old times, and had instead gotten ourselves locked in with one of the government’s little pet projects? It wasn’t exactly the kind of situation we wanted to post on the band’s Facebook or Instagram. Some of us already had police records and others were on probation; none of us wanted to see the inside of a prison, especially the way they are now. And I had seen too many conspiracy documentaries about people knowing more than they should and ending up with mysterious incurable illnesses or in unexplained fatal accidents.

  We were on our own. For the time being, we had to sit and wait.

  ***

  I took the first watch, the shift from midnight until four. My brother Joey would take over after that. Just then, he and the guys were crashed out backstage on the flimsy, stained, lime-colored velvet couches and on the sticky floor, their leather jackets folded like pillows beneath them or draped like blankets over their bony bodies. They didn’t care. They were exhausted. We all were.

  Another funny thing is how even in the face of the terrifying and unbelievable, little quirks that make people human force their way through. An interdimensional being capable of melting faces clear off a human head was right in front of me, not even four feet away from where I sat on the edge of the stage, and I was debating whether I could get away with sneaking off to take a piss. I didn’t, though; beneath the uneasy peace I’d made with the situation, I couldn’t quite turn my back on the creature, even in a cage, or leave it unattended.

  I found myself thinking about the cage, too, after a time. Was it really? I couldn’t help wondering if it was keeping that thing in or keeping the rest of us out . . . and that seemed like an important distinction, if we were going to get out of there.

  As I sat there fiddling with a Shantyman matchbook I’d found in my jacket pocket, I wondered what my old boss, Ferguson, would have thought of all this. He’d taken his time closing up shop, pushing the government grace period right up to the limit. Then everything happened pretty fast. Gigs were cancelled, papers signed, and we were doing rounds of shots to celebrate the closing of the club. He told us the government had paid him off, and that he was happy to unload the club on them; it was their problem now, and he w
as off to early retirement. Ferguson was probably fine—probably retired someplace tropical where the women wore next to nothing and the sun and surf would keep the arthritis from kicking off in his bum knee. He probably wasn’t thinking about this place anymore. That’s how we came to normalize his disappearance. He was off to some island and the club was now the government’s albatross and he was better off being free of it. He’d never even asked me for the key back.

  Of course, I knew better, deep down; Ferguson had left the club and cut us loose because he’d had to. Someone had insisted he make a clean break, and a fast one. He didn’t believe a single word he’d said during that last day of work, and certainly not during that final gathering. He’d been a good boss and a good man, and Jack and Emory and I had liked working for him. He knew we counted on our pay and he always looked out for us, sometimes fronting us smokes or advances on our checks or even money from his own pocket to make sure we were fed or had coats in the winter. And he’d cut us some pretty damn generous bonuses when he’d let us go, “courtesy of the government dicks taking over this place.” He’d tried to laugh when he told us, “We’re finally out of here, thank the metal gods,” and we tried not to notice the wistful look in his eyes when he said it.

  See, Ferguson lived for music. He loved discovering new bands and giving them a stage to play on. He could bitch all he wanted about San Francisco rent and taxes and paperwork and the pain in the ass that was The Shantyman, but music was in his soul, and without it . . . well, the government wouldn’t need goons orchestrating some disappearance or accident to kill Ferguson.

  I glanced at the clock above one of the fused-shut, vine-encrusted doors. It was six-thirty. We hadn’t brought anything other than the clothes on our backs, our wallets, car keys, a few joints, and Eddie’s guitar. We hadn’t expected to be there long enough to need anything else. We’d assumed from the cage that The Shantyman was still an active containment or research facility, and that employees would probably be back by Monday morning. We thought a day, day and a half was little more than an inconvenience, really. When Monday morning came and went, we chalked it up to some holiday none of us could recall just then. By the end of Tuesday, the panic set in. Even if it took some time to find a way in around those fused locks, we thought we should have seen or heard someone from the outside world. When most of Wednesday came and went, and even the painted windows stopped changing colors with the rising and fading sunlight, we knew something was very wrong.

  I didn’t say it to the guys, but every shift I took sitting across from that thing in the cage, the surer I was that either the outside world was gone, or we were somehow gone from the outside world. I think I knew it because the thing in the cage wanted me to know. At first, I thought it just wanted us to feel as isolated and alone as it did, and I almost felt sorry for it. Then it started getting into my head, making me think crazy things about every groan and creak of the old building. Its withering silence never broke, but every time I got within feet of the cage, I’d feel cold all over, and while I stood there shaking, it would show me things—pictures in my head of faceless, disjointed things lurking in the shadowed, long-untouched corners of the club and hordes descending from the ceiling like amorphous, eyeless spiders. It showed me swirling galaxies of blue-black stars, strange nebulae, and exploding suns just outside the club. It showed me the vines bursting through every crack in the club walls and slithering under the ruined doors until the building began to crumble all around me, and I was hurtling through alien space on a chunk of concrete floor, my frozen body imploding, eyeballs floating away into endless nothingness . . . .

  I shook my head. I was sitting inches from that liquid glass, though I would have sworn I’d never moved so much as an inch from the edge of the stage. I jerked away from the cage, my vision still blurry. My head hurt and my arms and legs ached and my heart thumped silently in my chest.

  I was also ravenously hungry.

  My attention drifted to the bar. Nothing had been done to change the place yet; it still looked pretty much like it had when I worked there, with the exception of the cage a few feet away and a few immaculately empty desks out on what used to be the dance floor. I assumed the acoustics of the place assisted them in researching the effects of sound on the portals they’d opened, so maybe modifications weren’t needed. The bar was still intact and the shelves remained fully stocked with bottles, but we were running out of stuff to eat. The Shantyman didn’t serve food, but Ferguson used to set out pretzels and chips in small bowls on the bar. We’d nearly run through all the bags he’d left in the cabinets behind the bar. Joey smoked the last of the weed that morning, and had been particularly hungry all day.

  There was plenty of booze, yeah, but I didn’t drink anymore. I had the one-year chip from AA on a chain around my neck and I was proud of that. I’d been a mess of a drunk, the violent and reckless kind that even other metal-heads came to avoid. No one picked you up out of your own puke or even bothered to turn you on your side when you were a drunk like me. Even the worst speed freaks and dope fiends half-hoped you’d get to the overdose part sooner rather than later, because no one could keep going like that and it was painful to watch, and there was really no other direction your life was going to go anyway.

  I shocked the lot of them when I quit drinking, and blew their minds when I stuck to sobriety for a year. I spent it learning the bass guitar and got pretty good at it. My whole recollection of that blurred and tumultuous time was of throwing myself into learning that bass—even the changes in the world around me took a back seat to that simple hard scrabble for my life. I played when I got the shakes and I played when every part of my body was screaming to get stupid knock-down drunk. I’d never cared about learning to play anything before, but for that year, it was all I had. It was a kind of hope, I guess—a faith in the possibility of something existing that makes getting up in the morning worthwhile. A therapist once told me I was perpetually driven by the journey, not the destination. Maybe that was true. Probably it was. Maybe finding a reason to live would never be as satisfying or illuminating to me as the search for that reason. I guess that’s why I’d never picked up how to play any one specific song all the way through. It was the learning, not the knowing.

  Regardless, it kept me sober. I didn’t want to drink; the thought of it made me feel a little sick, to tell the truth. I felt a distinct aversion to the glittering rows of glass even then, with the monster on the stage and the mismatched shadows growing longer and more distorted and somehow noisier, even though the windows had stopped letting in light.

  I clenched and unclenched my fingers. I wanted to play so badly, first little breezes of melody, then whirlwinds whipping around the room, drowning out all the things that I used to think alcohol could wash away.

  I told myself the bass was a crutch, and I didn’t need it to not drink. I actually mumbled the words out loud until the panic from looking at those bottles subsided. We were okay. We might be stuck at the moment, but it wasn’t like the thing in the cage was shooting laser beams at us from its eyes or anything. We were alive and in one piece. We could hang out there for a few days more if we had to, no problem. We’d be okay. It would all be okay . . . .

  Someone might notice we were missing and come looking for us—my girlfriend or Joey’s or Roger’s. It was more likely they wouldn’t. Shara was used to going long stretches without hearing from Roger, and both Kelly and Dana had their kids this weekend. Most likely, no one would miss us until Monday or even Tuesday. We were looking at a few days, at least, without anything but water . . . and booze.

  I tried to ignore the gnawings of hunger in my stomach and returned my attention to the thing in the cage. It might have been sleeping, but it was hard to tell. Its eyes looked half closed and it was sitting so still that it could have been a statue, some gargoyle concert prop or something.

  It didn’t look at all like those little grey men you see on t-shirts and Aliens Unsealed and Exposed shows. For one thing, it was k
ind of a gun-metal color, and was probably about seven feet tall. It had gotten up only once since we’d been there, and I saw that it stood on two legs whose knee joints bent backward like a bird’s. They were no scrawny bird legs, though. They were sinewy, muscular, like the rest of it. Its hands and feet were large and taloned, and its head was crescent-shaped, like a moon or a grin with its corners pulled back over its shoulders. Its jaws were large and I thought I’d caught a glimpse of tiny, pointed teeth behind those thin, black lips.

  And it had those big, black unfeeling eyes, just glassy enough to reflect my face back at me when I looked too closely into them. I didn’t like looking the thing in the eyes.

  “W-why did you lock us in here?”

  I didn’t intend to say the words out loud, but they hung there in the air between us, my voice hollow and small in the shadows.

  If the creature understood me, it didn’t let on. It watched me, silent and unmoving.

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  No response. I shifted my weight. I was getting stiff sitting there on the stage floor, and the silence was starting to get to me.

  “Is anyone coming for you?”

  The creature tilted its head. It was the first genuine movement it had made in hours.

  “Do you fucking understand anything I’m saying?”

  I held my breath, waiting. I wanted it to answer me. If it was anything more than an animal in a cage, then I could maybe let go of some of the anger. It was the anger, I told myself, that was making me restless—that desire to bash its head in with Eddie’s guitar.

  When it remained unmoving and utterly quiet, I let go of that held breath in a hostile rush of air and turned away. The silence was almost palpable, a weight on my shoulders, a thickness coating the insides of my nose and throat. I began drumming on the edge of the stage by my knee.