The Devil of Echo Lake (15 page)

Rachel moved on, cruised over to the end of the alphabet and picked up a copy of the only disc Upchuck had put out. She took the long way back to the registers, avoiding the quiet Jerry Springer moment her boss was having over there among Pearl Jam, Pink Floyd and Prince. She also pulled copies of Guttermonkey and the Drowning Lisas before returning to the stockroom where she immediately sliced the three discs open with the little razor knife that hung from a nylon cord around her neck beside her nametag. It wasn’t stealing if the merchandise didn’t leave the store.

Brickhouse had recorded Gutter Monkey in Jersey City, the Drowning Lisas in New Orleans and Upchuck (bingo!) at Echo Lake Studios, New York. That sure didn’t sound like the name of a studio on Fifth Avenue. Back to the web. Google: Echo Lake Studios. The studio home-page roster of previous clients included producers and engineers and showed not only Kevin Brickhouse for Upchuck, but also Trevor Rail for Cradle of Fire. She felt a tingle in her belly.
He
was there. Right now.

The pictures looked nice. It was like a summer camp in the woods, only with more buttons, dials and lights than a 747. There was even a studio in an old church. Of course. That’s the one he would be in. She jotted the mailing address on a piece of register tape. Two more stops on the web and the printer was spitting out schedules and fares for Amtrak and Trailways. Rachel folded the pages and put them in her purse, tossed the opened CDs in the defective bin and returned to her post at the register.

Before her break, she had been tired. Now she worked through the rest of the day in a flurry of busy energy as if she’d taken a double espresso instead of a research binge.

Shortly before her shift ended, Steve Singleton plodded past her register on the way to his office.

“Steve,” she called over her shoulder and received the best
What now?
look he could muster.

“I need to talk to you about my vacation time.”

Eleven

Jake was in the driver’s seat now and Ron Gribbens had been assigned to assist. Jake had asked Eddie if he thought that was a good idea considering Ron might still be shaken by the accident. Should he be working on the last project Kevin Brickhouse had set in motion when he felt responsible for the man’s death? They had been friends, after all. Jake had said all of this in a single breath before pausing to think about what he was doing: questioning Eddie’s judgment to his face.

Eddie replied that Gribbens wanted to work, and he was the only body available. “If they want you behind the desk, he’s all I can spare right now. All three rooms are working. Is it a bad idea? The whole fucking project’s probably a bad idea at this point. What do you want me to do, tell Gravitas I don’t want their money? Moon will probably have a breakdown before Ron can do any real harm. Just keep an eye on the kid, would you? Try not to let him do anything stupid.” Eddie looked down at the paper on his desk and the pen in his hand, indicating that the matter was settled.

Jake knew better than to push it.

Eddie sighed. “I wish I could give you a better assistant. But he’s been here a long time. It’s his turn. And he may know more than you think.”

In fact, the first few days back at work had introduced Jake to a new Ron Gribbens, much more sober-minded and focused on what he was doing. Jake was relieved that he didn’t need to have the talk with Ron he had imagined might be necessary, about keeping a low profile. He'd wondered, before they resumed the sessions, if Ron’s nervousness might manifest as an overdriven sense of humor. Fortunately, all of the comedic flair seemed to have been drained right out of the younger man, who now walked with a slight limp and wore a temporary knee brace. Jake figured that the new demeanor could mostly be attributed to his brush with death, but he wondered if some of it wasn’t also the result of Gribbens possessing some ability to read the tension in a room after all, and attenuate his personality accordingly.

Because there was no denying the vibe in the room. In the days after work resumed, the tension between Rail and Moon droned underneath everything like a sixty-cycle hum.

The subject was a ballad called “After the Storm.” Billy had spent the morning laying down the acoustic guitar and vocal live to a click track, and Jake was pretty happy with the sounds he was getting. Rail had maintained silence. He was either satisfied enough with the sound not to comment, or he didn’t care how it sounded because he intended to shit-can the song after indulging Billy for a little while.

A couple of takes in, Rail finally spoke up and asked Billy for the lyric sheet. His pen hovered over the page, tracing empty lines in the air. Then he dropped the paper onto the field of knobs and leaned back in his chair, looking at a fixed point on the ceiling as if something intensely interesting was occurring up there on one of the acoustic tiles.

After an adequately suspenseful silence, he said, “It’s too optimistic for you. And too literal. Your audience expects darker, angrier material.” He looked at Billy. “You could have your publisher shop it around and find an artist who could make a killing on it for you in the triple A format, but if
you
put this song out, I promise you the critics will crucify you. So will your fans. They’ll say you’re selling out, that you’ve lost your edge, gone soft.”

“I guess I have more faith in my audience than you do.”

“And that, mate, is why I’m here. Take a cue from Nine Inch Nails, Billy. If you’re going to write a ballad, at least have it be about self-mutilation, not getting
better
. You don’t even know your own demographic,” said Rail, and before Billy could argue, he turned to Jake. “Put ‘Black Curtain’ on the machine. We’re going to focus on something that’s working, because this isn’t.”

Gribbens had the “Black Curtain” master off the shelf before Jake could get out of his chair.

“Fuck this,” Billy said. He snatched his pack of cigarettes from where they lay atop the left monitor speaker and stormed out of the control room through the side exit, climbed the stone path beside the building, and disappeared in the direction of the creek and the woods beyond as the glass door hissed shut behind him.

Rail turned to Gribbens and said, “What are you waiting for? Cue the bloody song up. He’ll be back.”

The studio clock ticked out most of an hour. Rail listened to “Black Curtain” over and over again, making notes on the lyric sheet. He went out to the big room and picked up Billy’s red Les Paul.

For some reason he couldn't quite put his finger on, Jake felt unsettled watching Rail tune Billy's guitar. Then it came to him: it reminded him of a story he'd read about how Robert Johnson had handed his guitar over to the Devil at a crossroads, to have it tuned by the arch fiend, in effect, selling his soul.

Rail put on the headphones and told Jake to keep rolling the song and give him some guitar in the cans without recording it. Then he played a tight mechanical riff that locked in perfectly with the hi-hat, giving the song a chugging, metallic pulse. Jake and Ron exchanged an astonished look, but didn’t say a word.

Rail had just finished tracking his first pass at the song when Billy reappeared at the side door, walked straight through to the big room, and yanked the cable out of the amp, eliciting a loud crackle of static followed by a brief hum, then near silence, except for the tinny chatter of the backing track in the headphones when Rail took them off and handed them to Billy, who was now holding out his other hand for the guitar neck.

“Give me my guitar, you fucking hack.”

Rail slipped out of the strap and handed the guitar over. Billy slung it on and pulled the headphones over his neck. The two men stared at each other. Rail said, “Can you play that part or shall I teach it to you?”

“I can play it better than that. Go back to your side of the glass.”

They recorded guitar overdubs for the next three hours with scarcely any talk. Billy’s playing became more ambitious with each new take. Some of it was brilliant—a dissonant little melodic hook he played on a Stratocaster—and some of it was mere noise. Jake estimated maybe half of what they got would make the final mix and half of that would be buried in the background.

While they worked, Rail kept turning up the master volume of the monitors. Then he switched from the little near-field speakers to the big ones the size of refrigerators suspended on chains from the ceiling on either side of the glass doors. He turned it up some more, eyes closed, snakeskin boot tapping on the scuffed floor. Jake pulled a tissue from the box on the side of the console, ripped a couple of pieces off, rolled them into balls between his fingers and stuffed them in his ears. Just then, the left speaker went dead. Rail switched back to the small monitors, their white cardboard cones visibly jumping to life. He shot a look at Gribbens and shouted, “Fix it!”

Gribbens looked at Jake, who was keeping an eye on the pumping needles in the meter windows. Jake waved him to lean in and shouted directly into his ear. “The fuse is in the back of the speaker cabinet.”

Gribbens sprinted to the amplifier closet and rummaged through some plastic drawers looking for a replacement fuse. The control room was dimly lit, making the closet even darker. Gribbens pulled the chain to switch on the light.

Jake saw something fly past his face across the front of the console and only realized it was a beer bottle when it smashed against the metal chassis of a power amp inside the closet, right above Gribbens’s head. Gribbens flinched and looked up, foam splashing over his arm. Rail yelled, “You’re killing the vibe!”

For two seconds Jake feared Gribbens was going to yell back, but the guy’s face just twisted into a look of horrified indignation. Then he stood and pulled the chain again, vanishing into darkness.

Jake realized he'd been holding his breath when he exhaled at the sight of Gribbens disappearing back into the shadows. He took a small red Maglite from his pocket (he was never without it) and rolled it across the floor toward the closet. There was a brief moment of dim, dancing light from the darkness, during which Jake watched Rail out of his peripheral vision, but the producer was swaying his head to the deafening music, eyes half closed.

Gribbens, fuse in hand, emerged from the closet and pushed an extra chair over to the dead speaker. Jake saw he intended to stand on the wheeled chair to reach the speaker, and ticking his head firmly from side to side, pointed at the stool Billy had sat on while playing the acoustic guitar that morning. Gribbens moved the stool to where the chair had been, and stepped up onto it with fuse and flashlight in hand. When he stepped down, he gave Jake a thumbs-up and Jake tapped the button to switch the big speakers back on. The bass vibrations shook the glasses on his face. The left side was working again. Rail opened his eyes and gave Jake a tight smile.

Sometime later Billy spun the volume knob on his guitar down, took it off and laid it on the couch. He said to his microphone, “I’m done. Go home.” And without looking up for a reaction, he climbed the spiral stairs to the loft.

*  *  *

21 November

11:23pm

Hey Jake — I finally decided to stop procrastinating about this communicating by way of journal thing and just get started. I find that I think more clearly in writing anyhow, so maybe this will help us figure some things out. It sounds like you have some questions to answer for yourself lately about what you really want from this career you’ve chosen, and while you may need to find the answers on your own, I know that I’ve been carrying around a lot of questions in my head too. Maybe we can clarify just what we’re doing here, living together but never seeing each other.

I just read that last sentence over and thought about erasing it because I don’t want you to worry when you read my first entry at four in the morning, or during a break in the studio tomorrow. Don’t think that I’m questioning my decision to move here or to be with you. I just want to be
with
you. I’m proud of you. You’re in the right place at the right time and you’re ready for it. If this is your big break, I wouldn’t want to hold you back. I knew what I was getting into when I met you and you were talking about your hopes for a placement at a big studio. I just wonder if your hopes and dreams are still the same now that you’re here and it’s really happening. We haven’t had time to talk about it and you probably haven’t had time to even think about it. But I see the pressure you’re under and I’d just feel a lot better about what you’re going through if I knew you were happy.

I’ve seen how happy you get, like a little kid, when you’re recording a band you like, and I know you’re trying to do something that few people succeed at. But when there’s no room for anything else in your life and I catch these glimpses of you between crashing at dawn and running out the door a few hours later to do it again and you look like the walking dead (I’m sorry but you do, lately), I have to wonder if this is what you really want.

So tell me what you think about this whirlwind you’re living in. Or just tell me something that happened to you during the thirteen hours I didn’t see you. I feel better already having started writing in this thing. Let’s see where it takes us. I love you.

Goodnight,

Ally

23 November

12:08am

Jake – There is an enormous bug on my desk. Seriously, it is huge. I wish you were here to get rid of it. I don’t think I can smash it with my shoe. Not only would that make an absolutely nasty mess, but I’d feel bad. I mean it’s not his fault that he’s gross or that so many houses got built in the woods where his little bug family has probably been living since forever. But I don’t think I can pick him up either. Yuck. Maybe if I give him a name I won’t mind picking him up. He looks like some kind of beetle. Is there a nuclear power plant around here? I shall name him Herman. YIKES! It moved. Here, I’m going to draw you a little picture of Herman the beetle. This is going to be ACTUAL SIZE. Really. Wait — I hear a key in the door. You’re home! I’ll show you the critter himself.