Songs_of_the_Satyrs

by Aaron J. French

  He began to thumb through the racks of musty, dog-eared albums in the Rock section, starting properly at A and working his way through the letters one by one. Flip, flip, flip, the tired old titles he always saw, making his spirits sink. By the time he got to D, that creeping sense of despair had begun to steal over him. What was he doing in this draughty, smelly shop, what was he doing in this dingy, sodden town, what was he doing with his life even, on his own in a rundown rusty caravan without wheels, hidden in the corner of a nestle-infested field, hooked up to an uncertain power supply? The collection was better housed than he was. It had a shed to itself, from which he would fetch records to play, alone at night. Or he would play Record Roulette: roll a dice, count the albums from the number thrown, and you must play that. All the way through. Then roll again and start where you left off . . .

  He realized his fingers were flipping automatically, and he wasn’t looking at the sleeves. He stopped, sighed, and let his arms drop to his sides. And then he did something that he never did, or hardly ever, only if the bus or train was due and he had to hurry. He skipped over the letters and went straight to the place where he really wanted to look, under S. He stood in front of it, the section that was always the biggest, and he stared, as if willing it to hold what he wanted, the rarest album ever, the mythical work he had never seen.

  He stretched his pale hand out slowly, as if he were taking part in some ritual, because he practically was. Then, very carefully, he drew the stacked records toward him, one by one.

  It wasn’t a bad selection. Sublunar was here, those cosmic travellers; Stray Horse, the country band; Swiftwillow, the dreamy folkies; Saturn Temple, the overlords of occult gloom; and . . . and . . .

  He froze.

  His fingers stopped, and he swallowed. He hardly dared to look properly. But it was there, all right: Goat Songs by Satyr. He had seen enough pictures of the album to know it at a glance. The title and the band’s name were done in curled lettering, all adorned with thorns, and there was a painting showing an English lawn, with croquet hoops, flower beds, a fold-up chair and table, and a jug of lemonade. A Tudorish sort of house could dimly be seen in the background. A girl’s straw hat lay negligently on the grass, as if it had been thrown aside. There were shrubs of laurel in a virulent green, and topiary cut into curious swirling shapes, not quite rooted to the ground.

  Despite the title of the album, he knew that there would be no goat or mythical creature to be seen, just the placid, genteel garden vista. Except if you looked carefully, and he was looking very carefully now, there they were, right by the edges of the shrubs, a pattering of marks in the grass: the marks of cloven hoofs. And, trailing through the bushes, fading off into the edge of the picture, was a pink ribbon such as a girl might wear about her, like a sash.

  He stared at the album cover as if he could will himself into the scene. None of the blurry reproductions he had viewed in collectors’ magazines or guides did it justice. They were no more than a gray ghost of the full eerie splendor he now saw before him. He stole a glance at the guy behind the counter, who was ruminating over a crossword and taking no notice of him. He stood in front of the album a few seconds longer, as if to preserve the precious moment. Then, with gentle delicacy, he reached slightly forward and enticed it into his fingers, as casually as he could.

  He stared once more at the cover design, then turned it over. The other side was much plainer, simply a wash of a faded, fawn colour, and the essential facts delineated in a deep brown ink. He checked the track listing and they were all there, the five titles whose general shape he knew by heart, four on side one and one long track, nineteen minutes, on side two. Shape only because all five were entitled in Greek lettering, which apparently even when translated (yes, some aficionado had taken the trouble) didn’t mean anything in that old tongue, other than a sort of set of exclamations. So they were known instead, uninspiringly, as “Goat Songs I to V.”

  He would have to have it, even if the record itself was badly scratched and smeared, but he still thought he ought to check. That was part of the ritual also: always ease the sleeve out, span your hand from the label to the black rim, and tilt the disc to the light, so that the sheen would show you where the blemishes were.

  With painstaking care, he reached inside, teased out the white envelope, with its crackling cellophane centre. He put the album cover down carefully and took out the holy thing itself, the record that he, and hundreds of others, had so long sought. He was fearful that he would stupidly drop it, so he let his moist thumb and forefinger touch the edges, something he always tried to avoid. In the dim light of this shack of a shop, lit by a single bare bulb, it was hard to see for sure, but there didn’t seem to be much wrong. Perhaps the slightest hint of scuffing here and there, and something had been incised in the run-off groove, some sort of crude symbol, probably not a pressing mark. A couple of curves, like parentheses. But from his long years of experience, he thought the record would play well enough. He replaced it in its sleeve, and slotted that back in the cover, pausing once more to admire the cover painting.

  He realized he had not dared to look at the price. There wasn’t one. He turned the record over several times, looking for it. The excitement of the find was still keen upon him, but he also now began to feel a heavy dread. If you had to ask for the price, did that mean it was going to be vast, well beyond his range? And yet it hadn’t been kept behind glass, in a special case, as was usually the case with records known to be rare. Did they really know what they had here?

  He set the record right again in its niche in the S shelves, and quickly scanned back to the other albums. They each had a small oblong sticky label on the front top left—he wished they wouldn’t do that, it always left a residue of gray skin—and the price was written in smeared blue ballpoint. They were at the lower end of usual: not a giveaway, not a collector price.

  Well, there was nothing for it. He flicked back to pick up Satyr’s album and take it to the counter. For a few moments his heart pounded when it wasn’t there, wasn’t where he thought he’d put it back: he flipped frantically, making the albums thud against each other and raising a haze of gray dust, until his trembling fingers found it again and took hold of it firmly by the corner. It was as if the damned thing had deliberately tried to elude him, had gone off to hide in the dimmer recesses of the racks.

  There was no point in looking for anything else now. He didn’t even go to see if White Lantern’s Mothlight LP was there, his second (but now, he hoped, promoted to his first) greatest want. He took his find as calmly as he could to the drowsy gentleman at the counter, who was perched uncomfortably on a three-legged stool.

  The deep, rank smell he’d caught when he entered the shop emanated out in greater waves now, that mingling of joss sticks and continental cigarettes, and some sort of riper, rawer stench he could not really place. The shopkeeper, or the guy looking after the place, whichever he was, had thick gold rings on most of his fingers, bearing the signs of modern witchery—a horned figure, a pentacle, an ankh, and, less commonly, what looked like a black moonstone.

  The album was turned over in the adorned fingers a few times, and there came a noise from the throat, halfway between a grunt and a bleat. He waited in what seemed like a long brittle silence, broken only by the curious ululation.

  “It’s priceless this, mate.”

  Here we go, he thought, talking it up.

  “Yes?”

  “Ha ha, just kidding. I mean it hasn’t got a price, you see?”

  Oh very funny.

  “Yes, I couldn’t see one.”

  “Nice cover.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Well—say a tenner?”

  Oh yes. That tenner was tendered with the utmost celerity.

  “Need a bag?”

  “No, thanks.”

  No. Just need to get out very, very steadily, but very quickly, before anything changes. Before the shop folded in on itself and he was lying on the bunk in the caravan a
nd the rain was leaking through the hinges of the skylight.

  ***

  All the way home on the rattling, creaking green bus, he held the album carefully and thought of everything he knew about it. Made in 1970 in the far west of Cornwall, it was said, sometime after the Glastonbury Fayre, by a group of four musicians nobody had heard of much then, nor very much since. Singer with acoustic guitar, then one each on flute, fiddle, and a girl on tambourine. But not what you could call folk music, supposedly, at least not English folk music. No fol-de-rols and no gallant highwaymen nor sailors neither. Somebody had once done a feature on them in a fanzine, a huddle of pages stapled together, and they had photocopied a few interviews from the freak scene of the time. What Satyr was about, it seems, was going deeper back, to the very origins of music, to the sounds the ancient Greeks knew. Of course, in those times they had a lyre and a syrinx and a cithara, it said, not modern instruments, but Satyr claimed they could still get close to the spirit of what the Greeks heard.

  The other odd thing about them, he remembered now, was a bit of a gimmick: they didn’t give themselves names. They said they were all Satyr. So the interviewer then had had to refer to them as singing Satyr, flute Satyr, fiddle Satyr, and girl Satyr. Nice idea, but a bit too outlandish really, and much good it had done them. The album, and the band, had vanished without a trace. The seventies wore on to a weary and disillusioned end, and they fell well out of fashion. Only a decade or two later did the old word of mouth begin to tell of them. Whispers passed among the red-eyed collectors at fairs and at the meetings of the Society of the Seventies.

  He got off at the village green, resisted the urge to go and have a celebratory drink at the Black Lion because something might get spilt, and took the rutted cart track through the woods to the concealed plot, no more than a paddock, where he was allowed to keep the caravan, and to live (if the council never found out), for a few quid in hand or a bit of jobbing work every now and again, when the farmer remembered.

  The rain had stopped and the leaves of the oak and ash were translucent with jewelled green. The birds sang in delight at the bounty the rain had brought, and a pale sun gilded the gray clouds. Away on the horizon were the low blue hills, little mounds and cones that always seemed to call to his soul, in their misty indigo haze. There must have been temples there once, he sometimes thought, shrines hidden in the hollows. Perhaps he would go to find out one day when his collecting days were done. His foot slipped in a rut, and he clutched the precious album more closely to him.

  Round the corner, and his decrepit old caravan came into view. Many days he loathed it, this tin box where he lived, and wondered why he had never made the effort to get on, find a job, find real friends (not just collecting friends), maybe even get a girl. One gray day succeeded another. He grew sick even of his albums, and very lonely. He’d walk into the village for no particular reason, just to talk to someone, in the pub or the post office. But there were also days when he seemed to have all he really wanted, even the list of albums he didn’t have, since that gave him dreams and a purpose.

  He tugged on the corroded chrome handle, and the door sagged open toward him. The place was a bit of a mess, he had to confess. He put the album down carefully on a shelf where he could not possibly sit on it, and began tidying up. He knew it was daft, but he wanted to enjoy the great find in the nicest surroundings. And he also knew he was putting off the moment when he had to find out whether the album was as legendary as its reputation.

  After fifteen minutes or so, it was as neat as it was ever going to get. He fumbled in a drawer and found a packet of Pan incense sticks. He lit a few so they stuck upward like a smoldering crown. The spirals unwound and he snuffed appreciatively: there was something in the perfume, just some elusive hint, that reminded him of the shop. He thought he might as well make a real ceremony of it too, so he uncorked the bottle of Macedonian red wine someone had given him when he’d helped get their car out of a ditch. By god, it smelt like vinegar, almost as acrid as, as . . . yes, as that blessed shop again. But it tasted all right, good enough anyway.

  All he had was a portable record player in lurid orange leatherette, found in a junk shop. He liked it because it reminded him of the early seventies, when it would have been quite an in thing. He took great care to get the right needles for it, that was important to save your records. Sometimes he paid more for a stylus than his food bill for a week. It didn’t matter. That old music was what mattered.

  He took Goat Songs out of its cover and out of its inner sleeve and carefully lowered it onto the spindle. He moved the playing arm and the turntable started up at that slow, hypnotic 33 rpm speed he knew so well, which almost seemed a part of his own inner rhythm. He lowered the needle onto the outer groove. There was the satisfying sound of the sharp point drifting over the spirals. He knew he was holding his breath.

  A fanfare-like acoustic guitar burst out in great chords, and the tambourine shivered across them. After a few moments, this gave way to the most extraordinary sounds he’d heard from a human throat, a snarled, goatish singing, soon joined by sinister flute and violin flourishes. Then a young woman’s ethereal voice echoed as though from some deep cavern, in a beautiful, imploring chant.

  He found himself entranced. The pace was fierce, frantic even, and yet it did not sound like rock. There was no deep bass pulse or thudding drum, no wailing guitar: the sounds from the instruments were pure, untreated, and yet no less urgent. Oh yes, certainly: Goat Songs was all he had hoped, as weird, as wild as its repute. He felt a surge of delight well up in him, and wondered if he had ever been happier. The thrilling, and so rare, so precious music, the wine that blazed in his veins, the fine surges of incense, all swept over him so that he did not want these moments to end.

  In his imagination, he dwelt upon the lovely, but also rather sinister scene on the album cover. It was as if he felt the colors: the vivid green of the lawn, the lurid yellow of the lemonade, the pale straw of the fallen hat, and the fluttering pink of the torn ribbon. And then he laughed to himself, and he remembered the marks of the cloven hooves, and he saw himself barefoot, placing his own soles upon the marks, and how the hollows they made seemed to seep around his feet, drawing them in.

  But the mud of the hoofmarks was not clammy or cold. It was fiery. He danced upward and found that he was cavorting on the lawn, singing, prancing, uttering at intervals incantations, he and the others, his four companions. As the last song on the first side shimmered into silence, he found his eyes were closed, and this vision began to fade. He was swaying a little in a blissful reverie. All around him the overpowering, musky stench rose in waves and he snuffed at it with deep, animal pleasure.

  Out of the silence, gently, as one who conducts a solemn ritual, he felt toward the disc, turned it over, and set the next side going. Then he sank back again. The needle clicked over the opening grooves with that well-loved scuffling sound. And the scuffling continued: the fifth song did not start. Ah, so there was a little fault then. Not a serious matter. He bent forward and placed the stylus closer to the first track and waited. Still only that sound of slow, spiraling, circular pacing. Some little trick, perhaps, to fool the listener? But nothing else began. He found himself being drawn in to the monotonous, regular rustling, like something . . . like something making its way through tall grasses, through bushes and twisted trees. Like hooves, like cloven hooves, pacing steadily, stealthily . . .

  Uncle Kantzaros

  By Iain Grant

  People might find it hard to imagine how Nell could possibly fail to see such radical change come over her, but those people, just like the rest of us, perfectly aware of the invisible progress of the hour hand, are still capable of looking up at the clock and declaring, “Is that the time?”

  Nell’s life seemed to be composed of nothing but monumental yet incremental transitions that inevitably took her by surprise. By the age of twenty-three, she discovered that without effort or choice, she had acquired a job in a gray and win
dowless call center which she neither liked nor was suited to, a flat in a converted Victorian townhouse furnished with items that she could not recall buying, and, most baffling, she had acquired a man called Robert who might be regarded as her boyfriend or possibly just a work colleague who she had sex with from time to time and who had once told her that he thought he sort of loved her and if he didn’t then he certainly jolly well liked her a lot.

  It was in this manner that, over the course of months, Nell acquired a pair of goat legs, complete with hooves.

  It started as four large calluses, two on the ball of each foot. Actually, it started on the day when she realized her sensible flat shoes were too small. Actually, it started one Sunday morning when Robert rolled over in his bed, ran his hand up her leg, cleared his throat and said, “My, how continental.” She protested that she had shaved just the day before. Robert said he didn’t mind. Of course he didn’t mind. He, like her, was a great accepter of change.

  The following month, she shaved, applied depilatory creams and hot waxes, and eventually made an appointment with her doctor. During the same period, she found her feet beginning to ache, her shoes suddenly too small, and saw the skin underneath her toes and the balls of her feet harden and thicken.