The Devil of Echo Lake (30 page)

Rail turned away from the S&M seesaw he had set in motion and walked toward the control room doors. Jake ducked under the console, scurrying as far back into its shadow as he could get. He pulled his knees to his chest just as the doors opened, flooding the space around him with the music from the speakers in the big room. Black slacks and snake skin boots moved into view less than a foot away from him. The music cut out abruptly.

Jake slowed his breathing in the now silent room. The boots stayed firmly planted for what felt like an aeon, during which Jake could vividly imagine Rail sniffing the air. Then he heard the unmistakable click-scratch of the Zippo flipping open and igniting. The pungent, bitter aroma of a cigarillo wafted down to him. He could picture Rail sucking smoke through his cupped fist in that odd, deviant way of his, while admiring the spectacle he had initiated.

A dirty yellow wave of smoke drifted under the console and lingered in the claustrophobic space. Jake’s heart beat harder, driven by the certainty that Rail had come in here and muted the music because he had seen him. Was the hunter toying with his quarry, smoking him out of his hole? The involuntary urge to cough seized him. He covered his mouth and held his breath until his eyes watered. Then Rail’s snakeskin boots pivoted and strode away.

When he heard the control room doors close, Jake allowed himself to breathe again, daring to believe that Rail was on the other side of them, returning to his game.

After a couple of minutes had passed, he crawled out from under the mixing desk and looked around. The control room was empty. He almost laughed when he thought of telling Rail with a straight face that he’d just been checking a few connections under the hood. Staying low, he scanned the field of buttons, pressed one, slid a fader up, and listened to the sounds of live air, creaking rope, and raspy respiration, picked up by one of the mics in the big room. Then he crouched back down and sat Indian-style under the console, listening.

Rail’s voice came through the monitors. “Have you heard the story of Olivia Heron, Billy?”

“Mmm. The ghost.”

“Do you know how she became a ghost?”

No reply. Only creaking rope.

“She was the church organist. One night a priest caught her playing lascivious music in the nude. Perhaps he requested a duet and she refused. Word got around town that she had engaged in congress with Satan in return for the gift of infernal song. Are you listening, Billy? Billy.”

Jake winced at the sound of a loud slap. It was followed seconds later by the crack of a paper-wrapped glass capsule and labored breathing in fits and starts.

“You’re okay, Billy. All of the blood is in your dick. Not much in your head. Feels good, doesn’t it? Are you getting that full body buzz?

“As I was saying, Olivia Heron was accused of practicing witchcraft, and a very rare event occurred right here in this church as a consequence. The priest performed an exorcism. A
failed
exorcism. The rite lasted seven hours. When the sun cleared the horizon in the morning and it was determined the Devil had not loosed his grip on the girl, they ended it by hanging her. Right here in this room. And I know this because I was there. D’you take, my meaning, mate? I was right here when it happened.”

Billy mumbled something. It might have been “liar.”

Silence for a while, then the seesaw sound of rope creaking in rhythm. Jake wondered if Rail was assisting Rachel again.

“History repeats itself, Billy,” Rail said. “But sometimes the echoes of history cancel each other out. Tonight, we complete a circle. Only, on this darkest night of the year, our ritual transforms the noose, the instrument of fear and hatred, into the stimulus for ecstatic union.

“This is it, Billy, the ultimate act of unabashed self-expression: fucking yourself in defiance of the very grip of death at your throat. Isn’t it what you’ve always wanted? Isn’t this what the stadiums full of adoring fans are a substitute for? The need to love yourself?
Such
hunger for others to love you, to fill that hole. And now, it’s my gift to you. Embrace your darkest drive, Billy. Rock-and-roll always has. That’s the glory of it.

Do you know what instrument Nero played while Rome burned? The chittara, a forerunner of the guitar. And they said he was the Antichrist. The same sound seduced you as a boy, the sound of six strings. Those timeless vibrations of shameless lust and aggression. Are you getting off on what I’m saying?
That’s
it. Put your hips into it. The sound of
power
. The sound of
fire.
Harder! The sound of Holy Fucking Thunder. Now rock harder!”

The control room doors swung open. Jake froze. He watched Rail’s boots come into view again, moving swiftly this time, motivated by his own rant. Jake felt sick at the thought of Rail noticing that the mic was on, noticing the controls he’d changed. Then the music came blasting on again at distortion-laced maximum volume. Rail left again, this time leaving the doors open in his wake.

Jake ventured a glance around the side of the console just in time to see the front doors of the building swinging shut on a flurry of swirling snow beyond the pumping, swinging spectacle that was Billy and Rachel.

Was Rail going to get something from his car?

He took a step into the big room, feeling terribly exposed. Now he could see that Rachel was standing on one of the milk crates they sometimes used to raise guitar amps off the floor. He thought of the gloves Rail had been wearing. Had the ringmaster left this high stakes freak show to run its course and look like an accident?

He scanned the room. On the table in the kitchenette, the Japanese dagger lay tangled in the silk scarf Rachel had once used to blindfold Billy. God only knew what other games had preceded this one. Jake seized the knife and ran to the interlocked couple with it. They took no notice of him. Rachel’s eyes were closed and Billy’s were turned upward and inward. The rhythm of their sex was now labored and drowsy. Billy weighed more than Rachel, but if she collapsed, if she fell off of that crate, he would hang.

Jake slid his left hand between Rachel’s bound wrists, catching the rope with the web between thumb and forefinger. He pushed it up, raising her arms above her head, taking her weight off Billy’s end. Holding her up like that with one hand, he sawed at the rope with the knife.

Highbeams flared in the windows—Rail pulling out onto the road. Thank God.

Three times the blade slipped. Sweat trickled from Jake's hair into his eyes. Coarse threads sprung from the rope in clusters, but sawing was taking too long. He drew the blade back beside his ear and placed his trust in its flawless geometry. He slashed, the rope severed, and the lovers fell.

Jake removed the noose from Bill’s neck and checked them both for breathing. They were sprawled on the floor in a semiconscious state that might soon become sleep, but they were both alive. He draped a pair of packing blankets over their partially naked bodies before collapsing onto the couch. He looked at the ceiling, where the rope still dangled from the boom stand on the catwalk, pressed his palms to his eyes, and sighed with relief.

“Oh, man, she’s right,” he said to himself. “I do not get paid enough.”

In a little while, he checked on them again. Feeling more confident that he didn’t need to call an ambulance, he pulled the rope down, coiled it around his elbow like a microphone cable, and brought it out to his car, where he tossed it in the trunk just for the comfort of knowing it wouldn’t be instrumental in any more mischief. Then he drove home in the snow, hoping it would continue to accumulate through the night and cover his tracks.

*  *  *

Billy woke up on the floor in the ashen light of dawn. Rachel was sleeping on the couch, wearing his clothes. He slipped the platinum ring off her finger and put it in his pocket. She didn’t wake.

He ran his fingers through his stiff hair, then felt his throat. Touching the bruised skin caused enough pain to tell him everything he needed to know without a mirror. It wasn’t a dream. He felt like he had a bad case of the flu. His head was cloudy, his tongue, cotton. He drew a glass of water from the kitchen sink and drank. It hurt to swallow. Then he fished in the pocket of the leather jacket Rachel was wearing and found his cigarettes. He lit one and pulled a drag. The result was twofold and entirely predictable: he had a coughing fit and his head cleared.

He pulled on his boots and an inadequate hooded sweatshirt. Outside, the virgin snow glowed golden in the creeping morning light. Individual crystals sparkled with rainbow colors as he turned his head, taking in the silent landscape. The powder crunched under his combat boots as he waded through a knee-high drift between the church and the woods. Under the cover of the trees, the accumulation was much less, just a few inches. It would be an easy walk to the pool. Not that it mattered. He would have trudged through chest-high drifts to meet his daemon on this Christmas morning.

Although their exchanges had been wordless, hours spent in a dialog of flute and guitar, he brought no instrument with him today. Today there would be no music. Today they had something to talk about. Billy Moon wanted to make a deal. By the time he was on the path he knew so well, his extremities felt colder than he thought they should in such a short time. Maybe it was fear contracting the blood from his limbs. He couldn’t predict how the creature would react to his request.

As he approached the clearing, he was stopped in his tracks by an impossible sound—the voices of birds. Not crows, December’s lingering scavengers, but the sweet, varied chirps and trills of the migrators who would not return until April. Billy couldn’t tell one kind of bird from another but he knew enough to be unsettled by their chatter. He knew
these
birds had no business here on a winter’s day. He kept walking, and a few paces on, a dragonfly crossed his path, soaring in a wide arc around a gnarled oak. It hovered at Billy’s elbow for a brief inspection before continuing over the white ground, weaving between the dripping black branches of the trees.

A warm breeze that should have smelled only of wood smoke or nothing in this time and place lifted his hair, bearing the clean fragrances of peat and honeysuckle. Soon, a green mirage shimmered between the sparse trees.

The stand of naked birches through which he glimpsed the clearing soon revealed one or two among their number bearing clusters of leaves. Stepping between them, Billy found that trees closer to the glade were even more profusely aroused from hibernation. Oak, sycamore, even flowering dogwood were not merely budding, they were cloaked in rich garments of green, swaying in the balmy breeze. All Billy could think of to make sense of it was that it looked like the opposite of a bomb site. Every step closer to ground zero—which he knew to be the pool—brought him out of the dead winter terrain of skeletal black and gray, and deeper into the epicenter of a green explosion.

He pulled a limber branch aside and stepped into the clearing, eyes widening, breath quickening.

The creature sat on the mossy tree stump where Billy himself had so often perched these past two weeks. In that time, he had only caught fleeting glimpses of the enigmatic piper in the wood, fragments like those even Jake had seen. Now here the creature was, revealed at last: shaggy legs stemming from cracked cloven hooves, olive-toned muscles bronzed by the sun, ancient dirt detailing every line of the powerful hands, noble face draped with a curly black beard wherein ruby beads of wine or blood glinted like dying stars in the fraying fabric of uttermost night, eyes veiled by drooping lashes, hair a mane of frozen fire swept back between ridged horns, serpentine cock undulating in the shadow of the reed syrinx flute laid across his lap.

The pool, which on Billy’s previous visits had always been black, now cast a limpid sheen on the trees, radiating shafts of green and gold light from its heart. The creature looked up from the hypnotic dance of light in the water, and as those lazy lidded eyes passed over him, Billy saw in them the same luminous hues of green and gold that danced in the pool.

His right knee started shaking. He knew performers, some of them very successful, who got weak in the knees with stage fright. Something about coming face to face with such a primordial creature in the flesh was triggering a similar response in him. As was his usual practice with fear, he bypassed it by stepping through it without giving himself time to think.

Billy said, “Are you Pan?”

The sound that arose from the creature’s throat only resembled speech in the consonants that broke the drone into familiar shapes. The vowels were modulations of a waterfall after a heavy rain, October wind through the hollows of a lightning blasted tree, the sigh of a millstone dropped down an endless well. The creature smiled and said, “I am Pangenetor, the bornless one. Some call me Silenus or Faunus.”

Billy said, “The melodies you’ve given me. Why did you play them for me?”

“To play is bliss.”

“Is there another reason?”

“No!” The leaves on the trees trembled, casting off golden morning light like spinning coins. “How could there be more than the bliss of creation?”

“But I thought…” Billy felt his knee shaking again and forged onward, “I thought you wanted me to record them, so that the whole world could hear our music. I’ve been making false music all this time, for a cruel master.”

“The Liar.”

“Yes. And I thought…” Billy sighed and said, “I wanted to ask you… if I did what you wanted, would you help me be rid of him? But now I don’t think I know what you want.”

Pan laughed. The sound would have tickled a needle on a Richter scale. “I want nothing,” he said. “I am.”

Billy thought about that for a moment, and said, “But you want to play, right?”

“I play, I slay, I lay, as the urge arises. There is no want.”

“I need you to help me kill the Liar. Will you help me?”

“Begetting and devouring are equal pleasures.”

“Why haven’t you killed me?”

“To play is bliss.”

“I was going to tell you that I would destroy the false music and record your music, if you would help me.”