I wrote this story in response to Widge’s “Get Off Your Ass and Write Something This Weekend” challenge at Needcoffee a couple of years ago. The story was originally hosted on kevyspice.com, but that domain and its contents disappeared as part of the whole Leafycaust debacle. I’m reposting it here during a rare fit of weekend industry. There’s a bit of self-indulgent commentary at the end of the post, but I probably wouldn’t bother reading it if I were you.
Anyway, here’s the story:
Jeffy
The amber lights on the right side of the interstate flickered on. She wondered whether they were on a timer, or if they had some kind of sensor or something. Jeffy said sometimes they were affected by human physiology or auras or some shit, but then he also thought interstates were secret UFO landing strips. Fucking Jeffy. The speedometer ticked over 110 mph.
The cold November air roaring through the sunroof would probably keep her awake through Mississippi. No music tonight, though. Maybe no music ever, if she could help it. Not after what she’d heard in the practice room. She gave herself a couple of light slaps, shook her head, and lowered the windows.
There was still too much light pollution from Meridian to see more than a few stars overhead. Jeffy complained all the time about light pollution, but said he’d know when the stars were right. Said they’d all know. She had her doubts, but he had been right about that astronomy professor guy three years ago.
She finally passed a black Camaro she’d been gaining on for two miles. Florida plates, tinted windows. Probably waiting to hit the Louisiana line before turning off the lights and really letting loose. She never could remember which states had the strictest HPs, or state troopers, or whatever they were called. It didn’t matter, really. She’d worked out some contingency plans since Tuscaloosa. Not all pleasant, but plans nonetheless. Jeffy always bragged about preparing himself mentally for whatever situations he might encounter, so he’d know what actions he was willing to take ahead of time and not have to struggle through any moral quandaries while under undue stress. She’d heard the story about the frat boy in the park a dozen times at least.
The parallel streaks of ugly pine trees blurred in the headlights as she rubbed her eyes and eased back into the right lane. The dash clock read 3:30 a.m., and a green sign noted that Jackson was 25 miles away. Maybe there would be a Waffle House or something. Grab some coffee, stretch her legs, maybe pick at some toast. That’d probably get her to Texas.
Her fingers tingled. Waffle Houses have jukeboxes. They played crappy music, usually, but still music. Rest stop coffee, then. Maybe at the state line.
—–
She had parked next to Big Ted’s van, stopped the car, and put in her earplugs. Jeffy’d warned her that they might be especially loud tonight. Matt had gotten a new speaker cabinet and wanted to show off some new riffs on it, and Jeffy was trying out some new lyrics to some older stuff. When she got out of the car, though, she didn’t notice any of the usual noise coming from the 10’ x 12’ storage room the band used for rehearsal. Removing her earplugs again, she walked up to the lowered garage door and listened.
At first, she didn’t hear anything except a slight hiss from the vocal monitors and the annoying 60 Hz hum from Big Ted’s bass that he’d never gotten around to fixing. As she listened more closely, the hiss and the hum seemed to interact with a higher pitched drone whose source she couldn’t locate. It wasn’t the familiar squeal of feedback; it sounded more like a bagpipe playing almost out of earshot, except it was coming from the practice room.
She grabbed the handle and shoved the garage door open. Jeffy, Matt, and Big Ted stood in front of their microphones as usual, instruments strapped over their shoulders, but their hands all dangled limp at their sides. They didn’t react at all to the opened door, nor to her tentative greeting. Their lips were moving, but she couldn’t hear anything. At first.
The distant bagpipe was clearer in the room, randomly oscillating in and out of phase with the monitors and the bass. When the noises combined, the whole room seemed to thrum, drum heads resonating at the same frequency as the door and the rusty crosspieces that supported the ceiling. The sound tickled her sinuses and made her want to sneeze. When the noises cancelled each other out, she thought she could hear faint, indistinct chanting. It didn’t seem to come from the speakers, but from wherever that piping originated.
She walked over and snapped her fingers in Jeffy’s face. Nothing. Moving the mic stand, she leaned in close and put her ear next to his mouth. The chanting and the bagpipe noise got stronger. She closed his slack lower jaw, and the sounds were muffled. Same thing with Matt and Big Ted.
She turned off the crappy powered mixer they used to run vocals, and then turned off all the other amps. The keening pipes continued. The drum heads kept vibrating in the same jerky pseudo-rhythm as before, but now the chanting was constant and seemed to be getting closer, almost coalescing in the room. The chant’s halting rhythm was completely out of sync with the movements of the guys’ lips.
“Good. You’re here.”
She yelped and whirled around to see the band’s new drummer standing in the open doorway. She’d met him once but didn’t remember his name.
He walked in and closed the door. The chanting intensified. She could almost make out individual syllables now, and the resonant heads and metal seemed to vibrate in counterpoint with the chant. There were more pipes now, and she thought she could just make out the screeching noise of a violin coming from Big Ted.
“What the hell’s going on?” she demanded.
“I think you have a good idea, Mickie.”
He walked around the edge of the room, sat behind the drums, and started rummaging in the stick bag hanging from the floor tom.
“The stars aren’t right yet, but that shouldn’t interrupt our work.”
He made a quick waggling gesture with his fingers and muttered something under his breath. Jeffy, Matt, and Big Ted began playing their instruments. At least, that’s how it looked. No sound came from the strings, but a random series of notes emanated from each of their mouths. She put her earplugs back in, but they did nothing to block the cacophony.
The drummer emerged from behind the drums with a small shard of shiny black rock clutched in his left hand. The chipped edge looked very sharp.
She grabbed the milk crate full of spare cables from beside the moldy couch and hurled it at him. The crate smashed into some toms and one of the cymbal stands without touching him, but the wing nut and bolt at the top of the falling stand ripped through his jeans and tore a bloody gouge out of his right calf. Screaming, he dropped the stone knife and picked up the cymbal stand.
She tried to open the metal door, but the damn thing was stuck again. She couldn’t remember if she had to kick the right side or the left side to get it to open.
The drummer lurched toward her, but he got tangled up in Big Ted’s bass cable. He tried to throw the cymbal and stand at her, but she ducked out of the way. He lost his balance and tripped over one of the wedge-shaped floor monitors. She immediately whipped around and kicked him hard in the head; he twitched a couple of times, but made no move to get back up. The other guys, still emanating a maddening jumble of noise, didn’t react at all.
Trying to ignore the din, she collected her thoughts. If the drummer didn’t care about the stars being right, he was probably working for something else, which meant he’d probably co-opted Jeffy and the rest, or at least diverted their attentions from the Master’s real work. That couldn’t be allowed.
She grabbed the knife and walked behind the drum set. At the bottom of the stick bag, she found a small, black-bound Gideon New Testament. When she grabbed it, the cacophony reached a crescendo and the random noises picked up their tempo. She flipped through the book. Sure enough, the last five chapters had been replaced.
She ripped out most of the book’s pages and stuffed them into the drummer’s mouth. He moaned a little, but didn’t try to stop her. Nor did Jeffy, Matt, or Big Ted. She pulled down the gig fliers and amputee skin pics from the smelly, stained carpet that had been attached to the room’s concrete walls. Piling them up around the drummer’s head, she grabbed the black Zippo out of Jeffy’s pocket. No reaction at all from her friend. Shaking her head, she snapped her fingers to flick the lighter’s wheel. She’d always liked the smell of cooked lighter fluid.
The chanting intensified further while the shrill melodies cascaded over each other, but the guys’ eyes were all still glassy, and they made no move to stop her.
The paper went up quickly.
She kicked the door and opened it a little. Seeing no one outside, she raised the door high enough to crawl under and then slammed it shut again.
Whispering a final farewell to Jeffy, she closed the hasp on the padlock, and then she turned away.
***********************
Here’s the bit of self-indulgent commentary:
A quick re-read just renewed my discomfort with the ham-handedness of the Cthulhu angle (the “stars are right” business) and revealed several bits that could be tightened (most especially the last sentence), but I’m still pretty happy with the results of a fevered few hours’ writing. (The big criterion for the challenge, aside from “250+ words of prose in ~48 hours,” was that the story had to end with the phrase, “and then she turned away” — hence the somewhat awkward construction there at the end. I may get off my ass again and do a rewrite sometime, but not today.)
