13

They wandered winding streets that led out of downtown until they were in a quiet neighborhood. It was the kind of place Fiona’s dad would call industrial and Edgar Hokes would call a dump, made up almost entirely of looming warehouses and garages, where the occasional passersby walked with their head down.

The silence of the maze around her was more unsettling to Fiona than the honks and shouts of the city. She felt like she might get lost and disappear among the buildings without the Pit Viper to guide her through the endless labyrinth of boarded-up windows and corrugated metal gates. But in his own way, the Pit Viper was frightening and foreign. His fearlessness made Fiona see him in a dangerous light, a ghost from her past leading her into an underworld he knew all too well. As she watched his lanky form stride purposefully down the quiet streets, she considered just how little she knew about him. If she had to tell the cops anything about him later—his name and age, his address, the things he’d told her—all she’d be able to point them to was an album with a snake on the cover.

He stopped in front of a green door in the side of one building, with a single word tagged across it in silver spray paint—“sounds”. He opened it and waved her inside, but at the last minute she froze. The doorway made her think of the mouth of a grave, and her paranoid parents had read her more than enough news stories about naive girls in big cities.

“What is it?” he asked.

“This is a strange building,” she said nervously, kneading the cuffs of her hoodie sleeves. “You’re taking an eighteen- year-old girl to a strange warehouse.”

“You think I’m going to rape you?” he said in the same careless, blunt tone he’d used to ask if Aunt Emily was the dead boy’s mom at the town council meeting all those years ago. “Do I really come across as that kind of guy?”

“No,” she said, “but my mom didn’t raise an idiot.”

He nodded. “No, she didn’t,” he said. “Fiona, I can offer you no assurance other than a solemn promise that I won’t harm you. And you know from what I did in your town that I’m a man of my word.” She felt her skin crawl when he said it. “But if you want to know how I cleaned up Hamm, you have to trust me. What’s it going to be?”

They ascended five musty flights in silence. The Pit Viper took the stairs two at a time. She tried to keep up, but was panting when she reached him. He stopped and yanked a canvas handle, and a wall-size door rolled open.

The room was vast, with enough empty space to smell cold and only faintly like paint dust. Windows on all walls bathed the floor in gray afternoon light. The Pit Viper wandered down an aisle of blocky shapes that stood along the floor. For a moment, Fiona thought they were tombstones, and that he’d taken her to some kind of indoor graveyard, or a portal to a really shitty part of Narnia. But they were speakers—amps, heads, PA wedges, desktop pods, clunky new age living room units and professional studio numbers, broken up by the occasional desktop monitor or keyboard. Some of the husks of listening technology had obvious defects—torn wires, cracked casings, blown-out subwoofers—but others simply stood there gathering dust, preserved like museum pieces. A few of them looked relatively expensive and rare; one amp Fiona had definitely lusted for in the back of an issue of Guitar World, and one was covered in Chinese lettering. The Pit Viper didn’t give them a second glance.

Sections of freestanding wall cordoned off a corner of the room. As she passed them, Fiona saw that the walls were a quilt of heavy speakers and sturdy shelves that held row upon row of books, some freshly bought and glossy-covered, others old and wrapped in crumbling leather. Only two shelves held records.

“You have less vinyl than I thought you would,” she said.

“I used to have more, but a lot of them ended up in a dumpster in your hometown,” he responded.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine, that was a small thing of me to say anyway. Honestly, I hate those DJs who have massive collections but don’t really enjoy them. The music is important, not the medium. If you have more records than books, you’re doing it wrong.”

Fiona savored the last part. Please be a good dude, she thought.

She took in the rest of his headquarters—a pile of mattresses and pillows, an overstuffed La-Z-Boy, two DJ tables, a keyboard on a stand, and a desk piled high with paper and refuse electronics. Three laptops sat on his bed, each hooked up to countless cords and wires.

“This is quite a setup,” she said, “for a squat. You’re not worried about getting robbed?”

“I own this floor of the building,” he said like it was nothing. “But even then, I don’t lock my door. No one around here is stupid enough to fuck with me.” He flipped a switch on the wall, and a series of dingy lights flickered on.

He flopped down on the bed and began typing on one of his laptops, and Fiona felt her breath catch. Without thinking, she reached up and ran her fingernails along her collarbone, mentally rehearsing for a scenario she’d half-shamefully pictured a number of times. Here she was, in the DJ’s inner sanctum. There he was, sprawled out on his bed, every muscular inch of him. No one knew she was here, not Rita or Caroline or Horace. It was the two of them, alone in the big city, close enough to smell each other.

Anything could happen.

“You said you were going to show me something,” she said in a husky tone that she quickly tried to hide by clearing her throat.

He nodded, stood, and went to the floor beneath his desk. He removed a key from his pocket, stabbed it into a metal lock, and then opened a trapdoor. From it he dragged a black metal crate with a weighty combination lock holding it shut. He took his time cracking and discarding the heavy steel fail-safe.

Out of the box came a book, huge and old. The cover was bound in some kind of leather, and its pale flaking surface bore a strange symbol down the middle in black paint, a three- bulbed string, a figure eight with one loop too many. As the Pit Viper offered the book and Fiona took it, it seemed to stick to her hands, like she and it were magnetically attracted. “What is that?” he asked, pointing to the symbol on the cover.

Fiona swallowed, trying to think critically through a haze of apprehension. This was another test, she knew. She’d seen that symbol before, different than this but recognizable, but she couldn’t be sure where. As she stared at it, it was as though the answer traveled through her fingertips and into her mind, unfolding gently but brilliantly.

“It’s a chord,” said Fiona.

“That’s right,” said the Pit Viper. “What you’re holding is the third edition of the Codex Canoris. Approximately three hundred and seventy years old. Very, very important. Take a look inside, but be careful.”

She opened the cover and beheld a scribbled depiction of the solar system, each planet marked with a sinister and carefully drawn glyph. As she flipped the yellowed pages, she took in scrawled Latin and diagrams of the planets, human anatomy, and musical theory, more clinical and carefully mapped than lovingly illustrated. As the book went on, the penmanship became more and more unhinged, as though written in a panic. Eventually, everything was replaced by bar after bar of handwritten sheet music, like the words had undergone an ugly werewolf transformation and had become notes.

“What is this, exactly?” she asked.

“It’s an instruction manual on the practical use of music,” he said. “There once existed a belief that there was music beyond the reaches of the human ear. Music that existed in spiritual dimensions we can’t normally understand. People thought that each celestial body emitted a frequency that had power behind it. They called it the musica universalis.”

A phrase from her cousin Jake’s favorite poem popped into her head. “The music of the spheres.”

“Exactly,” he said, gesturing to the book. “The Canoris outlines the way this music affects people, and then it instructs the reader on how to find it. And use it.”

She looked up from the book and into his eyes, waiting for him to shout “boo!” or mention that the Canoris was some kind of art project he was selling on Etsy. But no such luck—his brow was drawn; his arms were folded.

“You’re talking about magic,” she said.

“Maybe?” he responded, shrugging. “That word is really loaded. I’ve never met any fairies or vampires. The Canoris isn’t a spell book. But what I’ve discovered is that sound energy can control people on a mental level. And that if you have the right internal rhythm to channel that energy, you can be the one doing the controlling. Not everyone has it, but some people are gifted with a frequency of their own.”

“So you used this book to control the club rats from the old mill and make them leave,” she said.

“Not just the book,” said the Pit Viper. He reached back into the crate and removed a second item—a record in a simple white sleeve. When he pulled the black disc out, Fiona saw symbols etched into the wax. They glittered in the thick warehouse light and made her eyes sting. “This record is where I’ve focused my power. I call it my master copy. I had a similar one nine years ago that your dad destroyed. When I play it, most people just hear a single droning note, but there’s actually a lot going on here. I loop some digital recordings I’ve put together over it, and the sound comes alive. You have to merge certain sounds to wield the Canoris’s power. There’s a hum I recorded on a hill in Croatia during a meteor shower. There’s this steady beeping I got from a radiation counter off a piece of unbreakable rock in a museum in Virginia. There’s the heartbeat of this old woman in Quebec who says she can read God’s mind. All of them match the musical diagrams in the book.” He smiled. “And I haven’t even been to Asia yet.”

She slowly put the book down on his desk and backed away from it. Feedback rang out in her head. It was all too much. She’d expected lots of things, from mob connections to serial murder. Not some kind of mystical DJ from beyond the stars.

“Did you kill all those kids with music?” she asked, trying to piece the story together. “Did you use the power you harnessed to murder them?”

He froze with his mouth half open, the gravity of her question stunting his enthusiasm. “No,” he said finally. “That’s the point of musica universalis. It’s bloodless. You don’t kill with it, you just bend minds of others, and they follow you.”

“Those kids,” she snapped impatiently. “What happened to them?”

“I sent them away,” he said. “I wiped their minds, made them forget all their sins and addictions, and sent them off. They’re under the care of someone else now. He’s my…let’s call him my benefactor.”

“Why are you telling me this?” she whispered. “Is this part of your revenge against my dad?”

He returned the record to its sleeve and put it back in its crate before approaching her. “Why don’t you like my music?”

“We’ve been over this,” said Fiona, standing firm. “I just don’t. It feels wrong.”

“You shouldn’t be able to dislike my music, Fiona,” he said. “The way I’ve programmed it, you should love it despite yourself. Everyone should. But you’re not under my sway; you’re floating above it. Which means either I’m good enough to control all your friends but not you…or it means you have an internal rhythm that the Canoris understands.”

“Maybe I’m just not made for raves,” she said, trying to find an excuse not to believe him.

“You’re a guitarist,” said the Pit Viper, “but you’ve never been in a band, have you? You’ve always felt better than that, than playing along with the tabs. Like it should just be you and your guitar and no one else.”

She shuddered. He was inches in front of her now, staring down at her. She could smell him—dust and sweat, wire and tobacco, nothing like the youthful scent of Horace’s hoodie loaded with drugstore deodorant. Fiona’s instincts told her to back off. So why didn’t she?

“That night, when you gave me the apple, I thought you were just a sweet girl from some small town,” he said. “Now I’m wondering if you’re more than that. If there was maybe a reason you were the only one who wasn’t afraid of me.”

She shook her head. No way. This was a game, a lie, a way to get her onto that mattress. She was smarter than that—which was why she was so angry with herself for not following her gut, for not running. For wanting to be near him for however many more seconds she could allow herself.

“Bullshit,” she said.

“Fiona,” he said.

He reached out for her. She swatted his hand away, then shoved him with her palm against his sternum. He took a step back, and then gently took her hand and pressed it to his chest. The physical contact made her breath hitch. A burning river of energy flowed between them that made her knees shake, made the hair on the back of her neck stand up straight. She felt his heart pounding against her hand like a bass drum.

“You’re crazy,” she said, her head swimming.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” he said.

She yanked her hand away from him—and then, knowing she’d be angrier if she didn’t than if she did, seized his face in her hands and pressed her mouth to his. In an instant, she melted into his arms, hanging herself from his frame. She pulled his lower lip between her teeth and bit it, and his breath carried with it something like a growl.

When she released him, the nature of what she was doing—touching him, having him, after everything that had happened nine years ago—came to her in an embarrassing blast. All she could think of was Rita’s concerned gaze from the previous day, judging how easy it had been for her to give in.

She twisted out of his arms and marched down the shadowy aisle through the speaker cemetery before he could say another word and didn’t stop until she burst out of the door and onto the cobblestone street. She gulped fresh air and hugged herself, confused by how much she wanted to do exactly what she knew she shouldn’t.

As she walked toward downtown, his music came booming out of the warehouse at her back, making her jump as it ripped open the quiet air. Through her panic, she noticed that every garage worker and huddled junkie and bag lady she passed in that forsaken part of the city raised their heads to the sky and turned their ears toward the Pit Viper’s den.

She was back at the station, waiting for her train, when she got a text from him.

PV: I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.

F: It’s fine. This is just a lot to think about.

PV: Let me know when I can see you again.

Her breath caught in her throat. Was this wrong? Was it nuts?

She closed her eyes and listened to her gut.

F: I’ll be back next weekend. I want to know more.