Toxoplasma was making an impression. Rivulets of people were streaming forward, pressing toward the stage, dancing with the same chopping fervor as the three insect brothers. They hadn’t looked much different from the rest of the crowd until now, but suddenly they all moved like skinheads, a wiry strength playing over the surface of their bodies.
They were insects too, and my heart started beating faster, my fingers drumming. I’d never seen so many together before.
I already understood that there were different kinds of insects—Astor Michaels was very different from Minerva, after all, and I had seen many other kinds back when I’d played down in the subway—but the ones in front of the stage made me nervous in a new way.
They seemed dangerous, ready to explode.
My vision was starting to shimmer, which almost never happened with music I didn’t like. But the air was rippling around Toxoplasma, like heat rising from a subway grate in winter. In front of the band they’d started moshing, which is why I always stay away from the stage. Shock waves seemed to travel from their slamming bodies outward through the crowd, their twitches spreading like a fever across the club.
“Mmm. Smell that,” Astor Michaels said, tipping back his head with closed eyes. “I should have called these guys the Panic.” He giggled, still amused by his little joke on us.
I shivered, blinked my eyes three times. “I don’t like this band. They’re against normal, not beside it.”
“They won’t last long anyway,” he said. “Maybe a couple of weeks. But they serve their purpose.”
“Which is what?” Pearl asked.
He smiled, wide enough to show the Minerva-like sharpness of his teeth. “They shake things up.”
I could see what he meant. The tremors spreading from the insectoid moshers were changing things inside the club, making everyone edgy. It felt like when news of some strange new attack broke once while I was playing Times Square, and the crowd seemed to turn all at once to read the words crawling by on the giant news tickers. Most of the audience didn’t like Toxoplasma’s music any more than Pearl and I, but it tuned their nervous systems to a higher setting. I could see it in their eyes and in the quick, anxious motions of their heads.
And I realized that Astor Michaels was good at manipulating crowds. Maybe that was what made him feel more real.
“The audience expects something big to happen now,” I said.
“Morgan’s Army,” Astor Michaels answered, letting his teeth slip out again.
It worked: Morgan’s Army shook things up more.
Abril Johnson held an old-fashioned microphone, clutching it in two hands like a lounge singer from long ago. Her silver evening dress glittered in the three spotlights that followed her, covering the walls and ceiling of the club with swirling pinpricks. As the band slid into their first song, she didn’t make a sound. She waited for a solid minute, barely moving, like a praying mantis creeping closer in slow motion before it pounces.
Bass rumbled through us from the big Marshall stacks, setting the floor trembling. Glasses hanging over the bar began to shudder against one another—my vision already shimmering, the sound looked like snow in the air.
Then Abril Johnson started singing, low and slow. The words were barely recognizable; she was stretching and mangling them in her mouth, as if trying to twist them into something inscrutable. I closed my eyes and listened hard, trying to pick out the half-familiar, half-alien words entwined in the song.
After a moment I realized where I’d heard them before: the strange words were shaped from the same nonsense syllables that Minerva always sang. But Abril Johnson had hidden them in her drawl, interweaving them with plain English.
I shook my head. I’d always thought that Minerva’s lyrics were random, made-up, just leftover ravings from her crazy days. But if she shared them with someone else . . . were they another language?
My eyes opened, and I forced myself to look at the floor. Minerva’s beast was moving underneath us. Its Loch Ness loops rose and fell among the feet of the unseeing crowd—but much, much bigger than in our little practice room, as thick as the giant cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. It had been made huge by the stacks of amps and the focus of the spellbound throng, and I could see details in the creature now. There were segments along its length, like a sinuous earthworm testing the air.
“How’s that for intense?” Pearl murmured, her empty champagne glass clutched tightly in both hands, echoing the singer’s grip on the microphone.
“Very.” Astor Michaels cocked his head. “But not as intense as you’ll be, my dears. Not as authentic.”
I shuddered a little, knowing what he meant. Minerva’s songs were purer, unadulterated by English. Our spell would be stronger.
The beast coiled faster, and the floor of the nightclub rumbled under my feet, as if some droning bass note had found the resonant frequency of the room. I thought of how wineglasses could shatter from just the right pitch and wondered if a whole building might disintegrate when filled by some low and perfectly chosen note.
Pearl suddenly looked up, her eyes wide. “It’s them!”
I followed her gaze and saw a pair of dark figures on the catwalks high above us, climbing gracefully among the rigging of stage lights and exhaust fans.
“Those people.” Astor Michaels shook his head. “New fad: physical hacking, climbing around on roofs and air-shafts and down in the subways. Can’t keep them out of the clubs anymore. They especially like the New Sound.”
“Angels,” Pearl said.
“Assholes,” Astor Michaels corrected. “Takes away from the music.”
The song moved into its B section, and I dropped my gaze back to the floor, catching the last flicker of the worm disappearing. The hallucinations faded as the music grew faster, the air returning to stillness, the lyrics to ordinary English.
“She lost it,” I said.
“Yeah.” Pearl frowned. “Kind of blew the momentum there.”
Astor Michaels nodded. “The Army never gets that transition right, for some reason. It always feels like something is about to break through.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “But it never does.”
“Are you sure you want it to?” I asked. “What if it’s . . . ?”
Dangerous? I thought of saying. Monstrous?
“Not commercial?” Astor Michaels laughed. “Don’t worry. I’ve got a feeling that whatever it is, it’s going to be the Next Big Thing. That’s why I signed you guys.”
Pearl looked annoyed. “Because we sound like Morgan’s Army?”
He shook his head, pulling her empty champagne glass from her hands. “No, you sound like yourselves. But someone has to take the New Sound to the next level. And I’m pretty sure it will be you.”
He turned toward the bar to get her more champagne, and the band slowed into the A section again, as if trying to call back my visions. But they’d lost their grasp on the beast, and Abril Johnson’s lyrics were just normal words now. I saw that she wasn’t an insect at all; she was just imitating them, mimicking the madness she’d seen on the subway and in the streets.
I realized that Minerva was more real than her.
And I wondered: what if one day the beast under the floor turned real?
20. GRIEVOUS ANGELS
-MOZ-
The noise in my body never stopped. All night I lay awake, tissues struggling against one another, blood simmering. I could feel the beast fighting against everything I’d been, trying to remake me into something else, trying to replace me. Even my sweat raged, squeezing angrily from my pores, like a bar fight spilling out onto the street.
When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see my face. It wasn’t just that I was thinner, cheekbones twisting at new angles, eyes widening—it was something deeper, pushing up from beneath my skin, remote and contemptuous of me.
As if someone else’s bones were trying to emerge.
The crazy thing was, part of me was dying to know what I was changing into. S
ometimes I just wanted to get it over with, to let go and slip across the edge. I’d almost said yes tonight when Pearl had asked me to the Morgan’s Army gig, wondering what hundreds of bodies pressed in close would do to my hunger, already halfway to uncontrollable. I imagined their scents filling the air, the crowd noise mingling with the roar inside me. . . .
But not yet—not without Min. In her arms, I still felt like myself. Besides, I had plenty more to learn down here, playing for quarters underground.
A woman was watching me, listening carefully, clutching her purse with both hands. She wasn’t sure yet whether to open it and reach in, risking that extra tendril of connection with the strange boy playing guitar in the subway. But she couldn’t pull herself away.
Union Square Station was almost empty at this hour, my music echoing around us. The red velvet of my guitar case was spattered with silver, and more coins lay on the concrete floor. All night, people had thrown their quarters from a distance and moved on. Even through dark glasses they could see the intensity leaking out of my eyes. They could smell my hunger.
But this woman stood there, spellbound.
I’d always wondered if charisma was something in your genes, like brown eyes or big feet. Or if you learned it from the sound of applause or cameras snapping. Or if famous people glowed because I’d seen so many airbrushed pictures of them, their beauty slammed into my brain, like advertising jingles with faces.
But it had turned out that charisma was a disease, an infection you got from kissing the right person, a beast that lived in your blood. Connecting with this woman, drawing her closer, I could feel how I’d been magnetized.
She took a step forward, fingers tensing on the purse clasp. It popped open.
I didn’t dare stare back into her spellbound eyes. There were no police down here anymore, not late at night. No one to stop me if I lost it.
Her fingers fumbled inside the purse, eyes never leaving me. She stepped closer, and a five-dollar bill fluttered down to lie among the coins. A glance at her pleading expression told me that she was paying for escape.
I stopped playing, reaching into a pocket for my plastic bag of garlic. The spell broken, the woman turned and headed for the stairs, the last strains of the Strat echoing into silence. She didn’t look back, her steps growing hurried as she climbed away.
Something twisted inside me, angry at me for letting her go. I could feel it wrapped around my spine, growing stronger every day. Its tendrils stretched into my mouth, changing the way things tasted, making my teeth itch. The urge to follow the woman was so strong. . . .
I put the plastic bag to my face and breathed in the scent of fresh garlic, burning away the noises in my head, smoothing the rushing of my blood.
Min had given me the bag for emergencies, but I used it all the time now. I’d even tried to make Luz’s disgusting mandrake tea, which Mom said stank up the apartment. Nothing soothed the beast like meat, though, and nothing—not even Min—tasted as good. Raw steak was best, but there was a shortage these days, the price climbing higher all the time, and plain hamburger ripped out of the plastic still fridge-cold was almost as wonderful.
I stood there inhaling garlic, listening.
Min was right—you could learn things down here. Secrets were hidden in New York’s rhythms, its shifts of mood, the blood flow of its water mains. Its hissing steam pipes and the stirrings of rats and wild felines all rattled with infection, like a huge version of the illness inside my body.
My hearing could bend around corners now, sharper every day, filling my head with echoes. I could hear our music so much better, could almost see the beast that Minerva called to when she sang.
And I knew it was down here, somewhere . . . ready to teach me things.
A little after eleven-thirty, its scent came and found me.
The smell was drifting up from below, carried on the stale, soft breeze of passing trains. I remembered it from that first night I’d gone out to Brooklyn, when Minerva had led me down the tracks and pushed me into that broken section of tunnel; the scent made me angry and horny and hungry, all at once.
Then I heard something, a low and shuddering note, more subtle than any subway passing underfoot. Like when Minerva made the floor rumble beneath us as we played.
I scooped up the glittering change and stuffed it into my pockets, shut the Stratocaster safely into its case, snatched up the little battery-powered amplifier. By then the smell had faded, pulled away by the random winds of the subway, and I stood there uncertainly for a moment. Union Square sprawled around me, a warren of turnstiles and token booths and stairways down to half the subway lines in the city.
I half closed my eyes and walked slowly through the station, catching whiffs of perfume and piss, the bright metal tang of disinfectant, the blood-scent of rust everywhere. Finally, another dizzying gust welled up from the stairs leading down to the F train. Of course.
F for fool, I thought. Or feculent.
Downstairs the platform was empty, silent except for the skitter of rats on the tracks. The push-pull wind of distant trains stirred loose bits of paper and kept the scent swirling around me, the way the world spins when you’ve had too much beer.
I pulled off my dark glasses and stared into the tunnel depths.
Nothing but blackness.
But from the uptown direction came the faintest sound.
Walking toward that end of the platform, a cluster of new smells hit me: antiperspirant and freshly opened cigarettes, foot powder and the chemical sting of dry-cleaned clothing . . .
Someone was hiding behind the last steel column on the platform, breathing nervously, aware of me. Just another late-night traveler scared to be down here.
But from the tunnel beyond, the other scent was calling.
I took another step, letting the man see me. He wore a subway worker’s uniform, his eyes wide, one hand white-knuckled around a flashlight. Had he heard the beast too?
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m just . . .” I shrugged tiredly, adjusting the weight of my guitar and amp. “Trying to get home.”
His eyes stayed locked on mine, full of glassy terror. “You’re one of them.”
I realized I’d taken my sunglasses off; he could see straight through to the thing inside me. “Uh, I didn’t mean to . . .”
He raised one hand to cross himself, drawing my eyes to the silver crucifix at his throat. He looked like he wanted to run, but my infection held him in place—the way I moved, the radiance of my eyes.
An itch traveled across my skin, like the feeling I got climbing the stairs to Minerva’s room. I was salivating.
The fear in the man’s sweat was like the scent of sizzling bacon crawling under your bedroom door in the morning—irresistible.
“Stay away from me,” he pleaded softly.
“I’m trying.” I put down the amp and guitar and fumbled in my jacket for the plastic bag of garlic. Pulling out a clove, I scrabbled to peel it, fingernails gouging the papery skin. The pearly white flesh poked through at last, smooth and oily in my fingers. I shoved it in my mouth half-peeled and bit down hard.
It split—sharp and hot—juices running down my throat like straight Tabasco. I sucked in its vapors and felt the thing inside me weaken a little.
I breathed a garlicky sigh of relief.
The man’s eyes narrowed. No longer transfixed, he shook his head at my torn T-shirt and grubby jeans. I was just a seventeen-year-old again, tattered and weighted down with musical equipment. Nothing dangerous.
“You shouldn’t litter,” he snorted, glaring at the garlic skin I’d dropped. “Someone’s got to clean that up, you know.”
Then he turned to walk briskly away, the scent of fear fading in his wake.
I breathed garlic deep into my lungs.
Mustn’t eat the nice people, Minerva’s voice chided in my head.
I was going to try that mandrake tea again. Even if it did taste like lawn-mower clippings, that was probably better than the taste
of—
Down the tunnel the darkness shifted restlessly, something huge rolling over in its sleep, and I forgot all about my hunger.
It was down there, the thing that rumbled beneath us when we played.
I grabbed my Strat—leaving the amp behind—and jumped down onto the tracks. The smell carried me forward into the darkness, the tunnel walls echoing with the crunch of gravel, like Alana Ray’s drumbeats scattering from my footsteps. The scent grew overpowering, as mind-bending as pressing my nose against Minerva’s neck, drawing me closer.
The ground began to swirl, the blackness suddenly liquid underfoot. As my eyes adjusted, I realized it was a horde of rats flowing like eddies of water around my tennis shoes, thousands of them filling the tracks.
The Last Days Page 15
