The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (21 page)

“And you’re educating exactly one of them.”

But Tomas seemed unconcerned by the math. “Even the longest symphony starts with a single note.”

#

Day two:
“I would rather scarf up a rotting platter of serpent roadkill scraped off the Highway To Hell, tail-to-head, washed down with a bucket of demon jizz.”

Tomas held him to it.

It wasn’t anything I wanted to see, so I’m not sure what he had prepared, exactly. In contrast to yesterday’s ordeal, this was something that required Derrick’s active participation, rather than passively lying on the ground as it happened to him. Which explained the taser that Tomas took with him to the barn. Cooperation now meant coercion.

So no, I didn’t want to see it. But I could hear it.

Mr Sunshine was in stronger voice this morning, and I could clearly make out what he was saying when he shouted that he would listen to the music, for fuck’s sake, he would listen all day, it had just been figures of speech, exaggeration for laughs, just empty words, nothing that any sane person would take seriously.

He still hadn’t grasped that it wasn’t about that at all.

From the kitchen table in the cottage, still working on morning coffee, I found it a one-sided conversation. I couldn’t hear anything Tomas said. I once heard him profess that he wanted whatever he had to say to be worth straining to hear, and so it must have been in the barn. Wrath, with him, was not coloured red. It was the blue of glacial ice.

All I could hear were the sounds of pain, and soon the sounds of sickness, of gagging and retching, broken up by wails of utter despair. It came and went in cycles, as if after a certain point Derrick Yardley was too stricken to go on, and Tomas allowed him time to recover before resuming the putrefied feast where he’d left off.

It went on all morning.

You could call such things a taint on what was otherwise a glorious late spring morning in an unspoiled paradise. But they only augmented and enhanced something that was already there.

I didn’t like this place.

After twenty-three years of reducing world travel to a daily grind, I’d developed a sensitivity to places. I don’t know how, it just accrued, an awareness of what certain places had absorbed and what they exuded. Clubs and concert halls radiate an energy from all the performances they’ve hosted. Hotel rooms are mostly soulless and anonymous, but now and then I’ve stepped into one that’s toxic, and known that something very bad happened there.

Here, though, it wasn’t the cottage so much as everything else.

I could step outside and come face-to-face with it, in any direction, until it drove me back inside for the illusion of refuge. It was in the hills, and the way they seemed to leer down in curiosity and contempt. It was in the trees, and the way so many of them grew twisted even though they were sheltered from the corkscrewing gales that would have done this to them. It was in the rocks and the way they weathered, as if some truer, crueller form were trying to break through. It was in the shadows, and the way they seemed to hide something, all but its piercing and inquisitive gaze. It was in the wind, and how it fell just short of an intelligible whisper that I feared I would learn to decipher if I stayed long enough. And when a torrential shower swept through that afternoon, it was in that, too, if only because, in conspiracy, it cloaked everything else and gave me room to doubt, wondering if it wasn’t just my imagination. Three months of exhaustion, jitters, and road nerves catching up with me all at once.

“What made you buy this place?” I asked Tomas that evening, as the sun went down on another terrible day in Derrick Yardley’s life, and we sat before the fireplace sharing wine.

“Don’t you know anything about real estate?” he said. “Location, location, location.”

“You know what I mean.”

Tomas nodded, studying me again. “So you’re cueing into it already. I wondered. I can’t say what most people are like because hardly anyone has been here and I want to keep it that way.”

“Somebody had to bring you up here the first time. What about them?”

“It was just another normal transaction for both of us. I sensed it was a good fit. I sensed that very strongly, but I couldn’t have explained why. I try not to be arrogant enough to think whatever’s in this place might have sprung up or settled here because of me, but it’s hard. That huge rock star ego, you know.” I caught a strong whiff of sarcasm. “Maybe some of both. We fed each other.”

I imagined him here alone, doing the things you would expect anyone in his line of work to do: recharging, decompressing after spending months meeting the demands of other people, writing new songs. Exploring, too; there was a strong undercurrent of nature worship in Balrog’s music.

But I could also envision him doing the sorts of things that you might
not
expect, not if you dismissed the band as nothing but creatures of hollow image.

They and I went back far enough that I took it for granted that their look, their sound, their lyrics, everything, was more than mere theatre. While theatre was important, it was still a reflection of something real. Ghast wasn’t just Tomas Lundvall’s stage name, a character he put on along with the leather and paint. It was a part of him.

“Balrog isn’t a band that’s about exorcising demons,”
I once overheard him say in a backstage interview.
“What we’re about is communicating with them.”

Sure, that could only be more myth making. Yet I believed he meant it. I was just never sure exactly where the lines were with him.

So I had to ask: “Am I even going to be taking Yardley back to Chicago?”

Tomas didn’t seem surprised by the question. “Why would you still be here if you weren’t?”

“To give me time to get used to the idea,” I said. “You couldn’t have me just drop him off and turn around, because that would be admitting upfront that he wasn’t going to be leaving here alive.”

Tomas swirled his wine and held it up to the fire, mesmerised by its red glow. “Would it be a problem if he didn’t?”

“I didn’t sign on for that.”

“I know. The question is, what would you do about it?”

Could I take Tomas, if it came to that—was this the bottom line question here? Almost certainly I could. Yes, he was imposing, and almost fifteen years younger, but I was the size of a movie Viking and still had the muscle from back when I started as a roadie, along with fifteen years more experience brawling. We could both put a hurt on each other.

“I don’t know,” I finally said. “Yet.”

“Neither do I.”

“You sure you’re not just playing coy?” I almost jumped when, in the fireplace, a knot of wood went off like a rifle shot, in a shower of sparks. “I know what that review says. I know what’s coming tomorrow. Go through with that, and you’d be sending him back with physical damage.”

“And your point is…?”

“That makes it harder to square with him losing a week to a binge. He doesn’t just have a wild story now. He’s got real injuries, and, oh hey look, they’re exactly what he wrote about in his review of
you
. You’d be stupid to send him back with actual evidence. You know that.”

“You’re right. So maybe I shouldn’t.”

When shit gets real
—I’d heard this expression for years, but had never felt the full weight of it until now. Finally, I recognised the real reason why I’d gone along with Tomas’ plan. I was in awe. Who would be crazy enough, committed enough, to do something like this? I could think of only two scenes. Some rappers, maybe. But it wouldn’t be this elaborate. Just quick payback, all about the disrespect. And then there was the darkest fringe of extreme metal, where they thought the devil was real.

Except Tomas didn’t believe in him either.

“Why don’t we name it,” I said. “Sacrifice? Is that what you’re thinking about?”

“That’s too simplistic a concept. But for the sake of discussion… okay.”

“Weren’t you just saying yesterday that the devil is as real to you as Saturday morning cartoons?”

“That’s why I called it too simplistic a concept.” He lingered a moment, as if he’d never had to explain himself before. “The way I see it, there are things infinitely older than any childish conceptions of god and some adversarial devil. There’s only chaos, and the manifest forms that come out of it, and the fleeting intelligences that guide them. Magnitudes of order rise and fall, and all we are are the building blocks it uses to make things and then topple them over to start again.”

He stared out at the dusk, and the only sound was the fire and, beyond the open window, the dripping of the newly ended rain from the eaves.

“I can’t say for certain what’s going on in this place,” he told me. “If it’s that the membrane between chaos and order is thin here. Or if it’s because, right here, the process has already reached its height on one side of the fulcrum, and now it’s started to drop the other way…

“I just know that, if you’re willing to put in the work, you can play with the other blocks.”

#

Later that evening I went out to the barn to see Derrick Yardley for myself. He was a disheveled figure huddled against a rough wall under the tepid light of a dangling sixty-watt bulb. Something else dangled from another crossbeam, low enough to hang tools on, but this one I had to stare at until I comprehended that it was the ragged, meat-stripped skeleton of a snake longer than my arm. The barn interior stank of bile and decay.

Across the dirt floor, in a pen, yesterday’s goat munched happily on sweetgrass. No place smells bad to a goat.

Mr Sunshine was as degraded a human being as I’d ever seen. A thick leather cuff was snug around one ankle and a ten-foot chain anchored him to a huge, honest-to-god anvil that looked like it had been around since the formation of the earth. In a radius around him, and on nearly every square inch of him, was the evidence of violent and explosive sickness.

“Fuck you too,” he croaked as I approached.

I offered him a plastic bottle with the clinical look of something that had come from behind a pharmacy counter.

He eyed it with suspicion. “What’s that? Something else for me to puke up?”

“It’s an antibiotic. Liquid ampicillin. He thought it would be a good idea.” I looked at the chunks and splatters in the dirt. “Considering.”

He grabbed it, uncapped and sniffed it, and took a sip.

“Not all at once. Just a swig or two every few hours.”

“I know how antibiotics work. Jesus. Now, if I just had a clock to tell me when a few hours have gone by.” He rolled his eyes. “Are we done here?”

I respected that he wasn’t feigning gratitude, trying to win me over, beg. No Stockholm Syndrome for him. It was business as usual: all spite, all the time.

“You’ve got a style to what you do. No denying that. I’m just curious why. Why take that approach?”

He stared at me like I’d spoken gibberish. “
Why…?
I don’t get the question.”

He really didn’t, did he? “What do you get out of it?”

Again, more incredulity. That little open-mouthed, side-to-side headshake when someone can’t believe he’s hearing such idiocy. “I get more hits than anyone else there. More page views, more sticky-time, more link follow-throughs. I win.”

Okay
, I thought. Just as calm and clearheaded as could be.

Fuck this guy.

Maybe 90% of everything really was crap. I don’t know. But he’d made it his life’s mission to punish people for even trying, regardless of the outcome.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re done here.”

Then, finally, I looked up into the hayloft, because I was starting to feel gutless for avoiding it, telling myself that whatever I’d heard shifting around up there was just a rat. Or a barn owl. Or a snake the size of a fire hose. Or any of the other manifest forms allowed by chaos. In that moment it looked like all of them, all at once, at least what I could make out from filling in the gaps between the shadows… until even the shadows unravelled, and perhaps there had been nothing to see after all.

So maybe Derrick should’ve paid attention to the music. He might have learned something: that in stirring up all that hate, he should’ve expected to someday summon up something worse than a simple ass-kicking.

#

Day three: “
The prospect of performing acupuncture on my testicles with rusty needles is preferable to the idea of waking up tomorrow suffering the knowledge that this is still a world afflicted with a Balrog infestation.
”

When you’re in, you might as well go all the way.

The day threw another downpour at us, and I was glad of it, the sonic insulation between my ears and what was going on inside the barn. The shrieking rose and fell, sometimes cutting through lulls in the rain. But for the most part it sounded far away, the kind of screams you’re willing to dismiss as coming from a neighbour’s TV.

At what point had I stopped seeing Derrick Yardley as human? At what point had this become irreversible? I had a long drive ahead to mull that over. My luggage was packed and ready to go, not that it took long. I’d been travelling light for twenty-three years… lighter than ever, now that I seemed to have left my conscience behind. Maybe I would find it at home. Maybe I’d lost it along some road I would never recognise if I travelled it again.

I stepped out the cottage’s back door and stood beneath the awning, staring through the watery curtain at the mouth of the barn. There was no sound but the rain. I wished Mr Sunshine a quick death. A
meaningful
death, as one of the building blocks of chaos and order.

I didn’t know what Tomas’ specific intentions were, and he hadn’t said, maybe because he didn’t want the embarrassment of committing to something he couldn’t deliver. Some kind of transfiguration, maybe. Some act of will that would send ripples through what he called the noosphere… the sphere of human thought. The world according to Ghast.

By now I was considering that I’d been wrong all along about what Tomas’ stage persona meant to him. I could see it, finally. It wasn’t so much that Ghast was a part of him but, rather, something he aspired to be.