by Chris Ward
‘It was probably spaghetti sauce,’ Ogiwara said, and this time Kirahara-sensei actually nodded. ‘Let’s hope that’s all it was,’ he said. ‘Now, I’ll call in to the centre’s landline as soon as I know anything. You all have phones in your rooms, so you can be contacted.’
‘You’d better go, Sensei,’ Jun said.
Kirahara-sensei nodded again. He looked at Rutherford Forbes, still standing inside the door, and for a moment his expression soured. ‘Take care,’ he said to the students, and headed back down the steps to the waiting snowmobile.
They stood and watched the snowmobile trundling away in the snow, moving so slowly as it paused to make a turn that it looked like it had stopped altogether.
‘That piece of shit’s never going to make it,’ Ogiwara muttered. ‘They’ll all freeze to death out there in the snow. They’ll be found in the morning turned into ice.’
‘Just be quiet,’ Akane said.
Jun felt something pressing against his palm. After a moment he realised it was Akane’s hand. He gave it a squeeze, but she didn’t look at him. Her eyes stared straight ahead, out of the little window into the snow, following the tracks of the snowmobile that had now trundled out of sight, taking most of their friends away.
As Jun watched, the snow began to fill in the tracks, as if they were never there.
11
Bee freaks out
‘So where do you think Dai’s gone?’
Bee shrugged, but didn’t answer.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t sound it.’
Bee didn’t answer. Ken fell silent, and with Bee trailing along behind him he headed back towards their dormitory building. Luckily, it wasn’t far from the Grand Mansion, so they were able to get most of the way under the covered walkway of the west wing, and then beneath the overhang of the adjacent building, but there was a section of around fifty metres where they had no choice but to wade through the deepening snow.
As soon as they stepped out into the blizzard, Bee gave a little gasp.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Just a little claustrophobic.’
Ken frowned. Bee was more than a little claustrophobic. After just one tour across Europe they’d never played overseas again; the bass player couldn’t handle air travel. When the band had been successful enough to dictate its own security terms, they’d been able to slip him enough sedatives to get him through the flights, but once their popularity and their entourage began to decline—at the same time that O-Remo’s reputation began to burgeon—travel became far more complicated, and after one particularly painful incident on a short internal flight, they’d gone back to travelling by van.
Ken reached the porch of their building and turned back to look for his bandmate. Bee was standing halfway across the snow-covered road, buried up to his waist, staring off into space. His arms were held out at his sides, and with the snow falling all around him he looked like a zombified incarnation of Jesus, in his white shirt and with his long, straight hair.
‘Bee!’
‘Can’t … move.’
‘Shit.’ Ken waded back out into the snow and gripped his bandmate around the waist, wrestling him forward. Bee moved one tentative step, then another. ‘Come on, damn it. You’ll freeze to death.’
‘Death … is … everywhere.’
‘Shut the fuck up.’
Ken glanced up at Bee’s eyes, and saw the terrible glazed look that he hated so much. On stage it happened sometimes, when Bee drifted off to another place, only his hands remaining rooted in the music they were playing, his mind elsewhere. Back in the early days, when they’d all been happy recreationals together, Bee had scared the crap out of them on many a drunken, drugged-up early morning with the weird, otherworldly ramblings he used to come out with.
‘It’s coming,’ Bee whispered, leaning into Ken’s ear.
Ken almost threw him down in the snow and left him behind. He shivered from his toes to his neck, and not because of the freezing cold and the snow. His whole mind seemed to be shivering.
‘I can feel it coming closer,’ Bee whispered again. ‘But it’s just the start, Ken. It’s … just … the start.’
‘Shut u—’
A screech cut through the suffocating press of the blizzard, like the sound of glass being scraped across metal in some factory construction project gone wrong. Ken gasped and looked around him. Something shifted in the snow just a few metres away, but the blizzard was too heavy for him to make out more than just a silhouette that might not have even been there at all. He dragged Bee forward onto the porch steps of their dormitory, and bustled him through the door into the warm interior. He pulled the door shut behind them and pushed up the latch just as something shadowy darted past the door.
‘Just let it in,’ Bee mumbled. ‘Let it in and let’s finish this. Resistance only leads to suffering.’
‘Keep going,’ Ken said, pushing Bee through the second door into the main first floor corridor. The kitchens were to their right, the lower floor’s bedrooms up a couple of steps to their left, with the toilets and shower room at the far end. Across from them, a staircase led up to the second floor, a lounge room, and another row of guest rooms.
Inside the comforting heat of an air-conditioned guest dormitory building, Ken’s heart rate began to slow, the panic that had overcome him out in the snow gently subsiding like the last chord of a song. Bee stood beside him, eyes slowly coming back into focus, his head topped with a triangle of snow that would have been hilarious in other circumstances. Ken reached up and swiped it off the top of Bee’s head, then brushed down the bassist’s clothes.
‘I’ll be retiring to my room,’ Bee said. ‘I have something I can take to help me sleep. Do you want one?’
Ken shook his head. ‘No, I’m good.’
‘Okay.’
Bee walked up the corridor and turned into a room a couple of doors down. The two intervening rooms were silent. O-Remo was locked in the King’s Bedroom in the Grand Mansion, but Dai was still missing. The drummer had told them he had forgotten something and disappeared out into the snow. None of them had seen him since.
Dai, with stacked shoulders and thick arms from years of pounding the drums, could take care of himself better than any of the rest of them. If he managed to avoid getting lost in the forest he’d be fine.
Still, that thing…
Ken had barely got a look at it. Just a shadow, shifting in the dark, but it had been tall and thin, as O-Remo had said, and that sound had been something inhuman.
As he heard the rattle of the door behind him, he had a sudden urge to be behind a lock. He rushed into his room and pulled the door shut. The latch was flimsy and could be easily broken, but he attached it anyway, then pulled one of the two twin beds across in front of it. Turning back to the window, he stared in horror at what he hoped were just shadows and drifts of snow, not eyes peering in through the foggy glass. He pinched his eyes shut, and pulled the curtains across before he could look too closely.
Then he sat down on his bed and wiped the sweat off his hands.
An air-conditioner hidden inside a wooden cabinet hummed softly beneath the window. The room was comfortably warm at least, although Ken’s teeth were chattering. In the corner of his room was his guitar case. All of the rest of their equipment was in the back of the van, but Ken never let his guitar out of sight. It was a crutch that had got him through a lot of stressful times, and he had never forgotten the debt he owed it. More than one woman had walked out of his life due to feeling second best, but when you played lead guitar in a nationally famous band, there was always another waiting. At least there had been.
He picked up the case and turned it over in his hands. It felt strange, unfamiliar. It took him a few seconds to figure out what should have been obvious.
It was too light.
With shaking hands he flicked up the latches and pulled the lid open, staring in horro
r at the empty space inside.
His prized instrument was gone.
Dai had spotted the opportunity at the end of the hall on the second floor. When you went somewhere new it always paid to explore a little, because you never knew what little nuggets of interest you might find. Leaving the boys to go ‘look for something’, rather than use the toilets in the pub, he had headed along the east covered walkway beside the dining hall and back into the Grand Mansion. Then, after relieving himself, he went for a little stroll.
The girl was sitting on a chair, one finely formed leg crossed over the other, tapping into a smartphone with a look of frustration on her face. She had straight jet-black hair to just below her shoulders, fake eyelashes that seemed to flutter as if a little motor had been installed into her forehead, and pouty lips that looked like they rarely did anything else. He recognised the type easily: she had that world-hates-me-and-I’m-pissed-about-it look that made her a perfect target.
‘No reception?’ he said, ambling up to her. ‘There’s a fucking surprise, up here in the middle of buttcrack nowhere.’
She looked up and a sour look flashed across her face. It’s the drummer from that band no one likes anymore, that look said. It set him at an immediate disadvantage, but it was merely a perception he had to replace with one more appropriate.
‘The fucking retard driving our van made a wrong turn,’ he said, neglecting to mention that he was the man in question. ‘Ended up here. Fucking moron.’
This time she smiled. There was nothing this girl liked more than criticism of others. ‘What a dick,’ she said.
‘Honestly, we thought about leaving him in the snow, but we make the douchebag carry all our gear while we sit around and get pissed. Can’t be dealing with that shit ourselves, you know.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘So I suppose you have to put up with him. And you ended up here.’
‘And the fucking pub shuts at eleven.’
She looked at her watch. ‘It’s almost nine. You don’t have much more time. Why aren’t you in there now?’
He smiled the smile that had opened a thousand pairs of legs. ‘Because I don’t like drinking with the same dickhead that got us stuck up here in this storm. Looking at his ugly mug makes everything taste bad.’ Now to cast the line. ‘Don’t worry, I have all the booze in my room that anyone could want. I took the liberty of stocking up.’
Her eyes flicked across his broad chest and over the muscles that bulged through his shirt. While not big compared to most Western drummers, Dai considered the tight t-shirt to be the essential fashion accessory. Clothes a size too small made what meat you had stand out. If you had a beer gut it was counter-productive, but he didn’t have to worry about that just yet. Not selling many CDs meant he got plenty of exercise behind the kit on their seemingly endless tours through the dives of the country.
‘This place sucks,’ she said, looked up at him. ‘It would probably make it easier to deal with if I had a drink or two.’
Dai nodded slowly. Her eyes watched him, unblinking. She had taken the bait and was now rolling the hook back and forth across her tongue.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
He led her down the stairs, out under the west wing’s covered walkway. When they reached the steps leading down, now thigh deep in snow, Dai turned back to her. She was glaring at the snow as if it had done her a personal slight, her nose wrinkled, her eyes narrowed. He felt that familiar gnawing sensation in his gut, that he needed to get with this girl, and needed to do it now.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You can either start wading through this shit fucking Arctic storm and risk getting those rather lovely thighs of yours frostbitten, or you can let me carry you.’
She held his gaze again. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’
Dai smiled. He leaned over and let her leapfrog up onto his back. He wrapped his hands under her legs, loving the way they shivered beneath his touch, and stepped out into the snow.
He’d never had to give someone a piggyback through a snowdrift before. He made it halfway back to his dormitory building doing a kind of high-kneed frog walk, before slipping over on a patch of hidden ice and upending them both in the snow. One moment they were standing straight, the next he was covered in a dense blanket of powder, and the girl was thrashing around in the snow beneath him.
As he dragged her back upright, he waited for the slap, or the accusation, or the berating. He was used to women shouting at him and had a number of strategies to either re-rail his intentions or make a hasty exit. It would be a disappointment to lose her when he’d been so close, but these things happened. Just like drumming, there would be another day.
When he found her arms wrapping around his neck and her lips pressed against his, his mind went blank. This was one situation he couldn’t ever remember being in.
‘Get me the fuck inside your room, and I’ll let you warm me up,’ the girl said, and as Dai lifted her up, this time wrapping her legs around him from the front. ‘I’m tired of all this cold. I want something warm, and I want a lot of it.’
Dai smiled. Feeling his arousal rising and the way she shifted to accommodate it, he realised he’d never even asked her name.
The first time was the best. She said she was eighteen, but he’d been with women ten years older than him, veteran groupies who spent more time in the beds of minor rock stars than in their own, who hadn’t known the tricks she did. He guessed the Internet must be as useful for women as it was for men.
By the time she’d quite literally fucked him across the room, he was ready for a rest. The girl though, full of the vitality of a teenager still early in her sexual life adventure, sat with her head propped up on the back of her hand, gazing at him with predatory eyes.
‘That the best you’ve got?’ she asked.
‘Sweetheart … after the drive I had today…’
‘I thought you said some retard was driving,’ she said with a smirk.
‘Yeah, I meant as in … as a passenger … um…’
‘Kaede.’
‘Yeah, that’s it.’
‘So, I’ll ask you again, is that the best you’ve got?’
The upper half of his body felt drained and ready for bed, but the lower half thought otherwise. Before he could answer, Kaede had slipped a hand into his pants and was helping him wake back up.
‘So,’ he gasped, a few minutes later, ‘are you going to tell your friends you got laid with the drummer of Plastic Black Butterfly?’
Kaede, now straddling him, working herself back and forth, shook her head. ‘No. I’ll tell them you were with some better band. Practically anyone would do. Even the house drummer for some shitty variety television show would be preferable.’ She grinned and patted his chest. ‘It’s all about appearances, you see.’
Dai grinned and rolled her off him, turning her around on the bed so she faced the window, on all fours. He stood on the floor and lined himself up behind her. ‘I have something to show you,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll agree when I’m done that not all of our songs suck.’
‘Prove it.’
‘I’m going to play you one of my favorite rhythms.’ He gripped her buttocks and slid himself into her, loving the way she moaned.
He couldn’t play anything complicated, because while it was easy to replicate the bass drum rhythm, he only had two buttocks available to combine as the kick, snare, toms, and cymbals. But, using Kaede’s body as his kit, he made a good show of it.
Four minutes into the song, Kaede’s breath was coming in little gasps as Dai surged towards the growing crescendo. It was an old party trick that had got him mentioned on several dedicated groupie websites, and even in one published book. He was known in the industry as the drummer who could fuck in rhythm, and it was a title he was proud of. As he entered the last few bars of the song, he was sure he could hear Ken’s frantically strummed guitar chords over the top, although they sounded oddly dulled, as if the instrument was being played unplugged behind glass—
<
br /> As Dai heard Kaede groan, reaching orgasm at the same time as he did, he looked up at the window where the curtains were pulled back, and saw a hideous birdlike face tapping its beak against the glass, the sound of a guitar chord coming from the instrument it held in its arms.
It looked like a man in some nightmarish Halloween costume, and for a moment Dai felt the urge to laugh. Then the creature let out a hideous high-pitched screech that rattled the glass in its ancient frame. Kaede looked up and screamed. Dai pulled his flaccid dick out of her and fell back across the bed, rolling onto the floor as the girl tumbled down on top of him.
The window imploded with a crash of glass and the scream came again, filling the room. Dai slapped his hands over his ears, and squeezed his eyes shut. The world seemed to fill with a smacking, smarting pain. Then he felt something small and hard club him just over the ear, and realised the girl was slapping him across the face.
‘We have to get out of here!’ she screamed.
Dai groaned and tried to sit up, but the girl was sitting on his chest, crushing the air out of him. He shoved her aside, feeling an immediate chill from the open window. He had felt only pleasure a minute before, but he now felt exposed and terrified.
He looked up and saw a thin, bony arm, with talons where fingers should have been, reaching in through the window. The claws scraped across what was left of the glass, and a feeling like a dead man’s fingers ran down the back of his spine.
12
Creaks and groans on the mountain road
The snow was so thick it was like the snowmobile was driving into a shoal of constantly moving albino fish, darting away from the vehicle’s dim headlights as they dipped and rose over the drifts of snow piling up on the road.
In the back, the groans of the still-conscious students made a dying chorus. Kirahara-sensei leaned forward and peered out of the windscreen at something he thought might resemble blindness. Only the occasional sight of a tree or a hedgerow in their peripheral lights reminded him that they were actually on a road.
