Passing Through the Flame (83 page)

Who just kissed me? Susan—or Star?

“Let’s go on with the performance,” she said. “Please....”

Horvath nodded, rehooked his mike around his neck, and looked out over the audience, fixing a false smile on his lips. We’ve gone too far to back out now, he thought. Maybe we went in too far the moment we stepped up on a stage and started to put a handful of people on our trip.

The stage tower suddenly seemed vertiginously high and narrow, and as Horvath looked out over the huge audience, individual faces and bodies seemed to leap up at him from the abstraction of the crowd and become
people.
A young girl pressed against the fence, looking up at him with adoring eyes. A dude who must have been close to forty staring at the stage with belligerent longing. A black face with cynical watchful eyes under a thunderhead afro. A couple with their arms wrapped around each other, but with eyes only for the people who stood on the stage in the center of their universe.

Eyes. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Waiting eyes. Wasted eyes. Loving eyes. Angry eyes. Hungry eyes. A world of eyes demanding that they deliver the magic, the magic that they had held out, had promised, had traded on since those days in the Haight when they too had believed in it with utter blind faith. And now Horvath saw that what magic there was, what magic there had been, was in those eyes, not up on the stage. It was the dream behind the eyes that had made the Velvet Cloud, not the Cloud that had made the dream. But if the people had once known that, they had long since forgotten. The only way to get off the wave they were riding was to give the dream back to the people.

No, we’ve come too far to step down now, nobody will let us. Like Jango says, the way out is the way through.

Horvath stepped to the middle of the stage. “I’m not much for talking,” he said. He felt his words reverberating up at him from the speakers scattered all over the meadow, making them sound larger than life even in his own ears. “I let the music talk for me.” The utter silence of the crowd terrified him; he felt the awesome power concentrated in his frail flesh by a trick of position, by the sound system, by the very fact that he had never spoken to an audience this way before.

Who the fuck are we to have this power? he thought. Just some people singing some songs. Who wants it? Who deserves it? Who knows what to do with it? Even his hesitancy, even his silence, made those thousands of eyes look to him—for what? For some magic words he didn’t have? For salvation? For a fucking rabbit to pop out of his mouth?

Leave us alone, he wanted to say. We’re just like you, let us be just like you. Let us just sing our songs. “Like to do another new song for you,” he muttered, and even that was amplified by the sound system into the mumbling of a god. “Means something to us, we hope it’ll mean something to you. Next time you hear it, let’s hope it’ll be the birthday song of better times... because if it’s not... because if it’s not...” The silence was uncomfortably deafening. Because if it’s not, he thought, we’re leading you to the slaughter. “That’s all I want to say. Called ‘New Worlds for Old.’”

He concentrated on the tuning of his guitar, focusing his eyes on the strings, drawing away from the thousands who were hanging on his words, on his very silences, forcing himself to become the musician that was really all he wanted to be. He nodded to the boys, glanced at Susan, then struck the high keening opening chords, gliding them up into a nearly sitarlike drone that rattled the skull with subsonics. Bobby’s organ rolled out thin sustained notes in the upper register as they all sang the opening chorus.

New worlds for old,

Warm worlds for cold

Bright worlds I’m told

Brighter than gold

New worlds for old....

Clear and thin like chorus boys on Sunday, the sweet longing of gentle people praying for a sunlit world of their own, and only he heard the understructure of irony. He watched the audience melting into the warm, sappy, nostalgic hope of the opening chorus, and it was the Summer of Love, that long-ago lost Camelot of the Haight in 1967, and they were all Flower Children reaching toward that certain sunrise, high on the power of love.

But the organ jumped to a greater volume laced with slightly painful supersonics, and the guitars took on a stronger, driving beat, and a raspy cutting edge as Susan began to sing it out in an expanding, rising voice that drew overtones of sadness from the words that Horvath hadn’t known were there.

Bright sun rising on the moment of our birth

Bringing the fire of the gods to a dying earth

Brothers and sisters, seize this moment to be free

Or sink back into night’s slime-black sea

Born into the dawn of the age of our kind

Or dead in the ashes of the ruins of your burnt-out mind....

And when they sang the chorus again—word for word, note for note—the sweet chorus boy longing mocked itself, became sad adult nostalgia for a past that never was. For this was the day after the morning after the Summer of Love, and the old gods had died, had probably never lived, and boys and girls, you’re out here all alone, and you gotta
take
some shelter before you fade away.

It seemed to Horvath that the song was working, that those thousands of faces out there were going through a sea change. He had led them into the easy nostalgia for the lost dream of the sixties that they just
loved
to wallow in, and then he had confronted them with where they were at now, out here in the seventies without leaders or parking meters. Oh, yeah, they felt cheated, oh, yeah, they were pissed off! They didn’t want the responsibility for the fulfillment of the dream dropped off the stage and into their laps where it had always belonged, This wasn’t what they expected from the Velvet Cloud. They were pouting like kids who were being told there was no Santa Claus, having known it all the time. What hurt was being told, being confronted with the fact that they weren’t kids anymore, and having known
that
all the time. But he not busy being born is busy dying....

The rosy aura of the sea of people dopplered up toward shrill ultraviolet, and Star felt as if she had betrayed something, as if she had fallen off her golden wave in sight of all. She could sense the mockery of the music worming its way into the consciousness of the crowd, grating the nerve endings under their skin, blackening the sky with its ominous painful energy. Bill held his guitar away from his body, wielding it like a weapon, his face a tapestry of hard, angry lines. Bobby seemed to be attacking his organ, and Jerry’s sticks were striking blows against the empire.

This is revolution rock, she thought, this is the music of bad vibes written under a dark star. This isn’t the Velvet Cloud; we’re calling down bad, bad karma.

But Bill’s guitar got inside her as it was insinuating itself inside the people, pulling the feelings up out of them, and the words out of her, and she found herself singing them with a piercing, demanding clarity, an ecstasy of Mick Jagger swagger. A cloak of darkness wrapped itself around her, and now it seemed that the people were speaking to themselves through her, through the music, not of the love within them but of the hate that surrounded them.

All light’s children gotta rise to meet the sun

Blood must call to blood till the day is won

Fire must call to fire at the edge of night

Raise your hand and seize the torch of light

The sword of love will burn the wall of ice

And those who fear will pay the loser’s price.

Ghastly black vibrations shimmered over the stage as Bill’s guitar teased and flayed at lost hopes, as Bobby’s organ blasted out pure pounding energy. Bill tapped time with his foot and each slap of foot on steel seemed a challenge. Mark attacked his strings like enemies. The power was there, roaring through her, but it was the power of darkness, and the vibrations they were putting out were like those of a saw cutting bone.

Looking out over the crowd, she saw the black energy reflected at her from two hundred thousand uptight, angry faces. Deep within the heart of the people, a twisted black serpent thing stirred its scaly coils, fangs thirsting to sink themselves into an enemy throat.

Bill’s guitar screamed ever upward into a shrill demon’s yowl of rage, a volcano of black energy, shards of black glass clawing at the flesh of her mind. The chorus became a serpent’s war hiss, joined by a soundless lowing from the soul of the people, as of ten thousand glowering black bulls pawing at the earth in red-eyed ire.

New worlds for old

Warm worlds for cold

Bright worlds I’m told Brighter than gold

New Worlds for old....

Horvath inhaled the mood of the audience like coke, sucking up the energy through his body, through the sight of all those eyes starting to look older, harder, more awake, and blasted it back at them through his guitar. Yeah, that’s it, he thought, stand where we stand—all by yourselves and knowing it. Let this be the last piece of bullshit you take from people just like you standing
up
here and pretending they have the answers! Wake up, you fuckers, do it for yourselves, and let us be! Let us get the hell down off here! Let us be Bill and Susan again.

This is the moment of our death or our birth

This is love’s last chance to rule the earth....

The sudden quaver in Susan’s voice made his heart flutter, made him look at her, as she stood beside him, hunched forward, supplicating the crowd, her eyes bright and misty, rendering his words, speaking for the two of them as only she could.

The enemy is the ice in the human heart

Now is the time for the thaw to start

Now is the time to fight for a land of our own

And the children of light will sit on the ice king’s throne....

Ah babes, babes, tell ‘em! Wake ‘em up! Make them grow up and let us get down off here. Tell them that the free ride is over.

New worlds for old

Warm worlds for cold

Bright worlds I’m told

Brighter than gold

New worlds for old....

The chorus ended and the music trailed off slowly into a terrible yawning silence. It seemed to her as if the stage were an island of metal floating in a pool of total blackness, an endless void that went down, down, down forever, a hole through the universe of sun and sky and light into another reality of complete and total nothingness. Of death and decay and the absence of all things living and warm.

“Power to the people,” Bill muttered sardonically under his breath, and his microphone caught it, made his voice reverberate down there in the black emptiness, goading the thing that lurked there toward wakefulness, and Star could see coils of a greater black stirring within the darkness, pinpoints of red that flickered and glowered as scattered voices answered him.

The great serpent coiled its cold black body around the frail roots of the stage tower, and she could hear the hiss of scale on scale, coil on coil as the beast moved fitfully toward full wakefulness.

 Horvath looked out over the quiet, brooding crowd. No cheering, no applause, just hundreds of thousands of thoughtful, sullen eyes looking back at him, questioning the meaning of the song, the meaning of his uncharacteristic and unintentional sloganeering. Maybe John Lennon would make some dumb little speech now, he thought. They seemed to be waiting for it, waiting for someone to break the silence so they wouldn’t have to be alone with their own thoughts.

But I’m not Lennon, and I’m not Dylan, and I’m not Jagger. And Lennon, Dylan, and Jagger aren’t Lennon, Dylan, and Jagger anymore either. If they ever were. The magic’s gone, and we’re just some people singing some songs. That’s all we ever were. I can’t tell you that any better than I have already.

Horvath basked in the silence, digging it, digging the tension, digging the people forced to dig themselves for a change. A low murmur began to shake the hills, the sound of thousands of people muttering uncertainly to themselves. It was a sullen sound, but it seemed to him a healthy sound, the sound of people confronting their own reality, facing an empty throne.

“Play ‘Take This Body,’ Bill,” Susan’s voice said in his ear. “Please... please....”

He turned, annoyed at this awful suggestion that they step back into the place they had vacated, and then he saw her face. Her features were a mask of absolute terror, her lips were trembling, and her eyes, her green glassy eyes were looking right through him down into some black pit of horror he didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand.

“What’s wrong, babes?”

“The dark... the snake... play ‘Take This Body’... it hurts... I’m afraid... we shouldn’t have....”

Horvath shook her by the shoulders. The crowd made a strange, awful, rustling, oohing sound. “Susan, Susan, snap out of it!” But Susan wasn’t there. He was staring into the opaque jewellike eyes of Star, green crystals feverish with some unknowable psychotic need, some terror that only she saw. “We’ve got to bring back the light! Bring back the light! Please... please....” More rustling in the audience, massive, uneasy shuffling. Babes, oh, babes, don’t flip out! Don’t stay flipped out! Come back! Come back! But Susan wasn’t there. Susan wasn’t there.

Horvath’s eyes met Bobby’s. They nodded to each other. Bobby looked at Susan, then back at Horvath knowingly, sympathetically, sharing his fright.

“Better do it,” Bobby said.

“Yeah.”

Hesitantly, sadly, angrily, Horvath played the opening chords of the song, feeling the sounds as a dagger of ice in his own heart, an admission of defeat. We can’t get down from here! They won’t let us. We can’t get away from Star.

Star stood above the black void, her consciousness a thin membrane of awareness between the darkness without and the darkness within. The beast stirred, and the void yawned, and Bill’s guitar was a soulless mechanical thing, the voice of a fading memory of light. Only she stood between them all and the night. Only her voice could bring back the light.