The Devil of Echo Lake (25 page)

While Billy strummed idly, Jake walked around him in a semi-circle, microphone in hand, listening through headphones. Jake stopped when he found the sweet spot and said, “Okay, I think I’m all set. Thought I’d be picking up wind and bird sounds, but it’s dead quiet here. Birds should be going nuts at this hour.”

Billy nodded gravely.

Jake pressed the record button and a tiny red LED came on. The slightest breeze stirred the trees like a curtain parting on a stage. Tiny ripples moved across the pool. Jake felt a tingle of fear, like a splinter edging under his skin, as Billy started to strum a syncopated minor key progression.
He’s going to turn on me in five minutes.
He won’t forgive me for not hearing it too.

But then he did hear it, and that little shard of social fear seemed to grow and radiate throughout his body, mutating into a different thing entirely, a multifaceted blazing star of spiritual dread.

They were not alone in the woods. The flute wove in and out of the chord changes. Billy sang a wordless melody in his husky tenor, the notes spinning and dancing with the lilting flute line.

Jake focused on keeping the mic from shaking too badly.

Toward the end of the song, Billy’s voice shifted direction slightly, and Jake glanced up to see him looking at a little stand of birch trees in the bracken while he sang. Following the direction of Billy’s gaze, Jake saw a flash of ridged animal horn that reminded him of the color and texture of a conch shell. Then a glimpse of brown fur and ruddy flesh—
human flesh—
in another narrow gap between two papery white birch trunks.

But before he could focus on it, it was gone with the flute melody, punctuated by the percussion of hooves on stone. Jake knew in that moment that if he had caught those hoof beats on tape, it would freak him out even more than the flute because he wouldn’t be able to convince himself they belonged to a deer.

Billy let the final chord ring out and then stowed the guitar back in its case. He didn’t comment, just stared into Jake’s eyes, daring him to contradict what they had just witnessed. Jake, who still trusted machines more than his senses, looked down at the digital Walkman in his hand. It was trembling. He pressed rewind, listened to the whir and click, then pressed play, holding his breath, feeling his heart in his throat.

In the headphones he heard the guitar intro, followed by Billy’s voice, but no flute. “It’s not there,” he said. He took the phones off and held them out to Billy, who didn’t accept them.

“But you heard it, right?” Billy said, “You heard it.”

Jake nodded.

*  *  *

Ally was throwing clothes into a duffel bag, missing the mark half the time, the volume of her voice rising as she ranted at Jake, who stood dumbstruck behind her in their bedroom. “It’s wrecking
you, Jake. This job is wrecking you. You’re going
gray
.” She punctuated the word with a thrown garment. “You don’t get any
sleep
, or
sunlight.
You live on takeout. That producer is going to give you PTSD, or at the very least a good case of tinnitus. And now you think you’re seeing
devils
or something.”

“It was more like a satyr,” he muttered.

“What you saw was probably a deer,” she said, turning to face him with something new on her face—pity. “You know that, don’t you, Jake? It was a deer. You can hardly drive down Main Street without hitting one.”

“But what about the flute?”

“There’s nothing on the tape but Billy, right?”

“Billy and the hooves at the end. I’m telling you, I saw human skin, human muscles, not just animal fur.”

She held up her hand for him to stop.

He had come home to shower before the day’s session and found Ally waiting for him at the kitchen table. Over eggs and toast, he told her about the encounter in the forest and what Billy thought it was, and now she was leaving him.

She gently placed the hand she was holding up in a stop-don’t-say-any-more gesture on his cheek. “Jake, this isn’t like you,” she said, “You’re sleep deprived, and you’re spending a lot of time with a charming but delusional man. It’s affecting your judgment, and you’re scaring me. Tell Eddie you can’t do it anymore.”

Jake took her hand from his face and dropped it. He felt his cheeks flush with heat. “I can’t just quit my job in the middle of a project. That’d be the end of me. The deadline is just two weeks away now. There are a lot of guys who would give anything to be in my position.”

“Give anything? Give what? A life? A wife? You’re giving everything, and it wouldn’t amount to peanuts if it wasn’t for the overtime.”

“Yeah, well, it’s been enough to support you.”

She cast her eyes down. “I guess you won’t have that expense anymore.”

“You’re breaking up with me for Christmas?”

She laughed. “You won’t even know it’s Christmas. It’ll be just another day in the studio.”

She was right, of course. Rail and Moon probably would work on Christmas to make the deadline. Maybe Rachel would make hot chocolate and string the control room with popcorn.

“There’s nothing here for me, Jake. We’re in the middle of the woods. I came here for you and you’re not even here. You won’t even know I’m gone.”

He could think of nothing more to say. He plucked his keys off the hook at the top of the banister and lumbered down the stairs. Time to go to work.

His wrist itched where Rail had scratched it.

Eighteen

There was no aspect of the album that Trevor Rail lacked a vision for, including the cover art. In his wildest fantasies, the cover would feature Billy’s autopsy photos—just imagine how that would sell—but Rail knew how to attenuate his vision for what the market would allow, and he would settle for pictures of Billy posing, in the church and winter woods, with the suicide knife.

“The setting has been a big part of Billy’s creative process,” Rail told Don Lamar on the phone. “We should carry that influence over into the artwork. Give the fans a sense of place.”

Eddie had put Rail in touch with a local photographer, Joel Eastman of nearby Woodstock, who had begun his career photographing Bob Dylan back when the bard had walked these same woods. After leafing through a coffee-table book that Eastman had donated to the studio lounge, Rail decided that the old-fashioned documentary quality of the work had just the right gothic undertones. There was something about the shadows under Robbie Robertson’s sunken eyes and the tragic aspect of how Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic clothes rendered in black and white. It was perfect. Eastman would capture Billy Moon with a realism that would make his spooky persona even more disturbing than if it were played up in a conventional way.

Lamar agreed to the shoot, but it took a little extra finesse to talk him out of sending an A&R guy to oversee the thing. Rail argued that he wanted to get pictures of Billy at work, in addition to the posed shots. Didn’t Lamar understand the concept of candid photos? An unfamiliar body in the studio would only distract Billy, make him self-conscious. It would kill the vibe.

As it happened, Joel Eastman was skilled in the art of invisibility. After warm introductions in the morning, the tall, skinny photographer in a fleece pullover and jeans (sporting an afro that made him look even taller) somehow managed to draw almost no attention to himself during several hours of overdubs, which he spent roaming the church with his Nikon, capturing Billy from odd angles: through windows and doorways and from the loft overhead with a zoom lens. After a break for lunch, which ended the recording session for the day, the focus shifted, and Billy had his hair and face done by a pair of makeup artists up from the city who worked quickly to beat the early setting December sun.

Then it was show time, with Billy posing in a long black overcoat. Eastman was up close now, the new music playing loud as they moved from one stained-glass window to another, capturing Billy in front of the purple-robed Virgin, the Stations of the Cross, standing in the arched Palladian doorway as a silhouette, or striding up the spiral staircase in an out-of-focus blur of moving hand and swirling coat.

Rail kept his distance at first, letting Eastman coax Billy out of his shell into performance mode. Once the ice was broken, he inserted himself between them with small comments and suggestions until he was directing the shoot, selecting the next background, the next pose, moving Billy outside among the trees, placing the
tanto
in his hand and encouraging Eastman to romance the blade with his camera.

A change of lenses brought out the details of the silver cherry blossoms on the handle and the watery grain of the folded steel blade. Billy, ever the showman, did not disappoint. Even without his heart in it—this music, this image all seemed to have lost its luster for him—he could still slip into character. Rail supposed it was a mark of pride that even when Billy was being typecast against his more authentic inclinations, as a person he no longer was, he refused to give his fans a half-hearted version.

He may only be playing a role at this point in his career—the role of his younger incarnation still beloved by legions of Rachels—but he still played it to the hilt, slipping into that dark mystique with ease and authority. Billy might secretly wish some other, older and wiser version of himself could land on the record store shelves, but if that was not to be, if it had to be the Dark Moon yet again, then at least he was committed to making sure that fellow didn’t come off as some clumsy poseur or mere caricature.

Billy Moon had arrived. There he was in the intense green eyes. There, wrapped around a wet tree branch with the blade in his teeth, exuding sex and violence. And there, pulling the waistband of Rachel’s skirt down with one hand while holding her shirt up with the knife blade in the other, exposing her Ouija board tattoo, and licking the crescent moon that was a part of it, on the underside of her left breast.

They finished the session back inside the church with a series featuring Billy naked, a dim silhouette, his own tattoos a muted blue in the fading light from the colored windows. He stood behind a mic stand in the center of the empty floor. Inserted in the clip where a mic should have been was the red silk-wrapped handle of the
tanto
, blade arched toward his rouged lips.

Then the light was gone, and they wrapped for the day, Jake and Ron leaving first for once while Eastman packed up his own minimal equipment. “That’s a beautiful knife,” Eastman said to Billy, his eyes on the LCD window of his camera where some detail of the hilt was magnified.

“It was a gift from Trevor,” Billy said. “He has impeccable taste in wine and weapons.”

“Ha. What’s that texture under the fabric?” Eastman asked.

“Stingray skin,” Rail answered. “The Japanese use it in much the same way Europeans use leather.”

“Fascinating,” Eastman said, slinging his camera bag over his shoulder.

Rail continued the lesson for both Eastman and Billy, who was still within earshot, buttoning his black cotton shirt with Rachel’s assistance. “A samurai would have used this knife for close combat, and it would have been presented to him on his empty dinner plate when he finished his last meal and composed his death poem, if he was called upon to commit
seppuku
.”

“What’s that, like
hari kiri
?” Eastman asked.

“Yes. Ritualized suicide to avoid shame. Leaving a legacy of honor was supremely important to the Samurai. More important than life itself. If that honor was jeopardized in any way, suicide would redeem it.”

“Huh.” Eastman looked like he found the alien practice distasteful, his enthusiasm for the artistic merits of the knife waning. He glanced at his watch.

“This blade,” Rail continued, “is an antique, refurnished with new fittings. It may once have served the very purpose we speak of.”

“Interesting. Alright. Well, pleasure working with you all. I should have a contact sheet for you tomorrow, Trevor. Then you can select some proofs.”

The four of them strolled out of the church together, Eastman in the lead cutting a brisk path to his own car, Billy and Rachel lingering on the stone steps, sharing a cigarette. Rail could hear the girl asking Billy if she was really going to be in the CD booklet. He gave a non-committal answer about how her ink very well could be. It had been a good bit of improv on Billy’s part to include her tattoo.

Maybe he did understand his audience after all. Rail wondered if the girl would want financial compensation for modeling. He doubted it. For now she seemed intoxicated with the mere possibility of her skin being immortalized in print. Billy offered to take her to the Mountain Lion for dinner to celebrate. She accepted, of course, with a joyful pirouette, and then in a small, reluctant voice, asked, “Should we ask Trevor to come along?”

Before Billy could answer, Rail spared him the anguish, saying, “No, no. You two lovebirds go and have a proper date. I have some phone calls to catch up on. But here, why don’t you take my car so you don’t have to ride with dirty laundry in some runner’s rust bucket? The walk up the hill will do me good.”

Now she was glowing. Billy caught the keys Rail tossed at him and opened the car door for her. He was almost in the driver’s seat before he remembered to dash back up the steps and lock the studio doors.

Rail felt one of his own psychological levers sliding into place as he watched Billy do this—the satisfaction of knowing that Billy would remember locking the church when he discovered what would be waiting for him inside upon his return. Billy was the only person outside of studio staff who had a key, because the building was also his lodging.

Rail ambled toward the road, but when the taillights vanished below the hill, he turned back and climbed the steps.

The art of lock picking came back to him easily—one of those skills rooted in muscle memory and intuition—even though he had long since moved onward and upward from the simple crimes and cons of earlier years when such tricks were practiced daily. Looking around the empty church, he was reminded of just how far he had come.