Eight

 

 

Billy staggered out of Trevor Rail’s ink-black BMW and up the church steps. He dug the key the runner had given him on arrival out of his jeans pocket and unlocked the big doors. Inside, the studio was dimly lit and quiet. He found the spiral stairs and climbed them singing to himself as he went, “There’s a lady who’s sure, all that glitters is gold… hmm… hmm… hmm… hmm….”

At the top, he passed the grand piano and headed across the catwalk to the other side. The loft over here was divided into two areas, the catwalk running down the middle. Long white curtains hung from thick dowels to create private spaces, not quite separate bedrooms. The curtained-off area on the right side had two twin beds, the one on the left a queen and a closet-sized bathroom. Each room was furnished with antique dressers, night tables and lamps with handmade paper shades.

The air smelled of cedar and lemon, and it all added up to a cozy summer camp vibe that reminded Billy of a cabin he had stayed in with Evan and their parents one long-ago summer when they had been vacationing farther upstate in the western lakes region. The memory brought with it another scent—the smell of charred toast cooked on a portable propane grill. His father had called it Camp Toast. Billy pushed the memory down and focused on his surroundings.

His Martin acoustic guitar lay on an upholstered chair in the corner. He picked it up and sat at the edge of the bed, hoping that fatigue and the light buzz of alcohol might conjoin to jimmy the door between the hemispheres of his brain and let his muse slip through. But as his fingers roamed, he found nothing new forming on the fretboard, just the chords of the Zeppelin song he still had stuck in his head from Trevor’s car stereo. It was one of the first songs he had ever learned to play. He still remembered the very first.

Billy had learned the three chords that unlocked rock-and-roll’s secret language like the Rosetta Stone from his uncle the summer of his tenth birthday. Uncle Tim had dropped in for a couple of weeks that turned into a couple of months on his way to find God. The timing was auspicious because Billy had just discovered his mother’s box of Beatles records in the attic while digging out his snowsuit that winter.

By the time Uncle Tim arrived with a guitar and not much else, the last of the snow had melted, and Mom’s tulip shoots had found their way out of the dirt and into the light again, and a scratched and dusty copy of Rubber Soul had been flipped over on the record player in Billy’s room at least a hundred times, but it still had secrets to reveal. Like the sitar Uncle Tim pointed out on “Norwegian Wood.”

“Why are you going to India, Tim?” Billy asked on a sunny August afternoon as they sat on the deck, rocking gently back and forth on the big wooden swing seat, listening to the chiming sound of ice cubes knocking against the sides of their glasses of lemonade. “What’s there?”

“Yogis, young Will.”

Billy wrinkled his nose. “What’s a Yogee?”

“A very wise man. Some of them can even do miracles.”

“Like walk on water?”

Uncle Tim nodded, “Mmm hmm.”

“And fly?”

“Maybe. In a way.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“That’s okay. You don’t have to. That’s why I’m going, to see for myself. I’ll let you know if it’s true.”

“What else can they do?” Billy asked, knowing that believe him or not, indulging Uncle Tim was always more entertaining than dropping a subject.

“Oh, all kinds of wondrous deeds.”

“Like?”

Uncle Tim leaned forward, turned the palm of his hand up at the sky and wagged his index finger back and forth. Billy leaned in closer.

“I saw a picture of one of these fellows balancing the weight of his entire body on the tip of his dick.”

Billy sprayed lemonade out of his nose and bounced up and down on the swing, laughing until his eyes watered. Uncle Tim raised the calloused, nicotine-stained finger in front of his mouth like the big hand of a clock pointing at midnight. Billy could see the indentation of a guitar string running a dirty gray groove across the tip of that finger.

“Don’t tell your mother I said that.”

While Billy caught his breath, Tim put his glass down on one of the wooden deck planks at their feet. Perspiration spread a dark stain through the sun-bleached wood in an instant.

Tim took his acoustic guitar from its case and strummed a chord.

“So you’ve been listening to the Beatles, kiddo?”

“You bet.”

“You know that song ‘Falling?’”

Billy shook his head.

“Sure you do. You know, ‘Falling’.”  Billy’s expression turned serious, almost reverent as Tim sang the lines and struck the chords, but his eyes also lit with a measure of joy.

“That’s ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face,’” Billy said.

“Yeah, ‘Falling.’”

“You can play that?”

“Sure.”

“The whole thing?”

“Yup.”

Billy looked uncomfortable for a moment, as if searching for the words or the courage to ask his uncle for the keys to his rusted Camaro. Then he raised his eyebrow and said, “Can you teach me?”

Tim laughed, “Fuck yes, kemosabe. I mean, yeah, I can teach you, just—“

“Don’t tell my mother you said that. Got it.”

That late-summer day on the deck swing had been an unexpected awakening. His idea of what he could become instantly expanded. Through all of the chaos and trials that would follow in the years spent becoming, there would be so little of the easy clarity of that one afternoon when all of his life’s ambition was handed to him in the shape of wood and steel. That had been the real beginning of his ‘overnight’ climb to stardom. But when had he started falling? Where was the beginning of that?

He laid the guitar back on the chair, undressed and slid into the queen bed, surprised and pleased by the softness of the sheets. He lay there for some time but sleep did not take him. Even after the long trip out of the city and into the mountains, the recording, and drinking, he felt restless. God knew he was tired and half in the bag, but despite the comforts of this place, he remained unsettled. Something was most definitely wrong. He rolled over and lay there listening to the memory of the groove they had demoed, looping round and around in his head. It was mixed with a strange droning sound that he recognized, when he focused on it, as a symphony of crickets or cicadas. He tuned into the texture of their sawing rhythm. And then he knew what was disturbing him. The insect drone was the only sound he could hear at all. No cars, no planes, no people on the other side of the wall fucking, no urban techno chatter. No voices on the street. This was the quietest place he had been in at least a year.

He rolled back over, stared up at the shadows in the high wooden beams and fell into sleep.

 

He was going down the spiral stairs, but now there were many more of them. He kept going down and around in the darkness. On and on. He had to get to the ground floor to answer the door. Someone was ringing a bell. It was a chime, a chime-sequence doorbell, like the one his mother had at the house where she now lived alone. Four notes, a common pattern for a doorbell but something about it was strange, a little odd, a little dissonant for a doorbell, not very welcoming. What uninvited guest did that melody herald? Down he went and around. The bell chimed.

It was dark—very late or very early. Was there a faint light growing in the stained glass windows above? He couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was moonlight. Who could be calling at this hour? He stepped down and down, his shinbones aching, and at last he came to the bottom. Behind him were the oak doors. He went to them, grasped the handle of the one on the right, clicked the catch with his thumb and pulled it open. The dark air was cool and still. Even the insects had quit for the night. There was no one there.

The doorbell chimed again.

Closing the door, he turned and walked across the room. His computer equipment was gone from the floor along with the oriental rugs. Where the cables and rack cases had been there were now rows of pews. He walked past them down the aisle, up the few steps to the drum riser, where now there was an altar. Purple and yellow flowers spilled over its white-linen draped surface. Beyond it, the glass doors of the control room were gone. In their place, he found red curtains covering a little alcove with a floor made of flat paving stones. At the back of this space, a crumbling brick-and-mortar stair led down… to what? The answer floated up from nowhere: a root cellar.

The bell chimed. Could it be coming from down there? He listened. There was a slapping sound like a bare foot or a fish jumping in a puddle of water. Again the doorbell. Someone wanted in. Someone was persistent. But it was dark down there in the stairwell. He thought of lighting his Zippo, but it was upstairs in his jacket pocket with his smokes. He urgently wanted one now.

Billy stepped down the stairs. There were only five, and at the bottom he stepped into a shallow puddle. The smell of dusty earth filled his nose and mouth. And something else underneath. The something else reminded him of the time his father had recruited him to help take the bathroom sink apart because the drainpipe needed replacing. He had been fourteen at the time, and his father had decided he would make a good enough flashlight holder. The stench that flooded his sinuses when the sink trap was opened had been a putrid brew wafting up from black muck bound in tangled hair and clotted mucous. His father said the clog had probably been building up for forty years or more. Now that smell was here in this earth cellar, just below the cleaner scent of dirt.

Unable to stop it, he watched his hand floating out before him into the murky darkness. He expected to touch a tumorous façade of dirt, roots, and cobwebs. Instead, he felt wood under his fingertips. Sliding his fingers down the surface, he felt the grooves of spaces between the planks and at last, a cold metal latch that hooked down in an L-shape, pointing at the floor. It felt rough and rusty in his hand and he could picture orange residue staining his palm.

The chimes rang again. He lifted the handle and the latch popped open. The door swung toward him on shrieking hinges, a muted blue-gray light flooding the space around him. Somehow this was no cellar but a door to the outside. It was almost dawn beyond the threshold and the light delineated the figure of a man just a few feet in front of him. The brackish odor was overpowering now, and Billy wondered if it came from the figure in the doorframe or from the puddle at their feet—the puddle that encircled both his own Doc Martens and the black and tan sneakers on the other side of the threshold.

He knew those sneakers, had seen them toe to toe with his boots like this on more than a few plywood stages in Boston, amid stomp boxes and battered floor monitors.

Billy swept his gaze up the shadowy body over the dark brown corduroy jeans, feminine hands, red-and-white plaid shirt unbuttoned to reveal a faded KISS concert T. A shirt worn so often that it had become speckled with little holes in the thin fabric, the black cotton bleached to light brown here and there from too much cheap Laundromat powder. Jim had loved that shirt; Billy had hated when he wore it to gigs—and emerging from the ratty collar, the head of a dog, a Japanese fighting breed, its fawn-colored dewlap soaked with dark, syrupy blood, its muzzle dripping thick loops of saliva, ears pricked forward, lips curled back to reveal long, red-stained, incisors.

The dog-man cocked his head to one side and sniffed Billy’s neck.

Billy's flesh crawled, and his testicles tried to climb up inside of him. Then the sound of a piano lid slamming down jolted him awake.

Moonlight illuminated the long white curtain beside his bed. The church was silent. What had woken Billy? A piano lid? Were there mice in this old building scampering over the equipment at night? Or had it been a car door?

He rolled out of bed, fully alert now, and looked at the small, unstained window at the end of the loft through which the moonlight cast a milky square on the floor. He went to the window and looked down at the needle-covered ground where studio staff parked their cars. The lot was empty. He scanned the landscape—the brook, the dark line of the woods beyond, and in the other direction, the dirt road running up the hill to the main building.

A figure stood at the edge of the road.

Fear flushed through his chest like ice water when he registered the shape as a human form. Someone was standing down there, gazing up at his window, motionless. How long had the figure been there watching and waiting? Everything was painted shades of indistinct gray in the thin moonlight, but Billy knew the posture and stature of this man, the cut of his clothes and hair, well enough to identify him without the details. It was Trevor Rail.

Billy didn’t know if his own face was visible in the window, but he took a small step back, his eyes trained on the watcher the way a deer might focus on a wolf.

Rail slowly raised his left hand to chest level, palm up, as if weighing an invisible fruit. Fire bloomed in the palm of that hand, a ball of searing flame tumbling skyward and vanishing in the cool air. Billy took another step back. Rail mirrored the move, merging into the ground mist and shadows. Gone.

 

*  *  *

 

Jake was maneuvering his car around a series of potholes filled with coffee-colored mud a quarter of a mile from the church when he heard the first gunshot. He wasn’t sure of what it was until the second report crackled through the woods. He wondered if it was deer season. The morning was cold and bright beneath the brilliant blue dome of the sky. Jake parked under the pine stand and got out.

He was just setting his foot down on the second step up to the studio doors when another shot made him jump, this one so loud and close that he looked down to make sure he wasn’t hit. Scanning the tree line, he saw Trevor Rail perched on a large boulder at the edge of the forest, aiming a pistol into the dense foliage. Rail pivoted in a smooth sweeping arc, holding the gun with both hands. Jake didn’t know the first thing about marksmanship, but based on what he’d seen on TV, Rail’s form looked perfect.

Jake pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and tried to glimpse what the producer was aiming at. He couldn’t see any animals in the trees but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. He hoped Rail was just shooting wood.

Rail fired again and this time Jake saw a mist of blood floating between the trees for a second in a little clearing on the other side of the gurgling brook. It almost blended in with the autumn colors of the leaves. A buck with a full rack of antlers leapt into view and bounded off into the heart of the forest.

Rail swiveled, apparently keeping a bead on it for another seven seconds or so, but he didn’t fire again. When the sound of the buck’s retreat across the dry leaves had ceased, Rail examined his gun for a second, the first time he had taken his eyes off the woods since Jake's arrival. After this brief moment of admiration, he slipped the weapon into the pocket of his black wool overcoat and jumped down from the lichen-speckled boulder onto a litter of skeletal leaves.

“What the hell was that?” Jake said.

“Do you like venison, Jake?”

“What? You can’t just shoot deer around here.”

“I asked you a question. Do you like venison?”

“I’ve never tried it.”

“Oh, but you simply must. You've no idea what you're missing.”

“I don’t see a hunting permit on the bumper of your Beemer.”

“Touché.” Rail nodded at the church steps and waited for Jake to precede him. When Jake took the cue and stepped up, he half expected to feel the muzzle of the gun in the small of his back. His inner voice had almost refuted the irrational expectation when a fresh wave of fear surged over him in response to an altogether different stimulus.

As he opened the door, Jake heard the little melody that had come from the playerless piano the previous night.

Except now it didn’t sound like a piano. It was the same phrase, no doubt, but it was being played on some sort of bells—big, dark bells, like Malaysian temple gongs. He imagined heavy discs of hammered bronze, dirty and ancient. The flesh on his arms prickled, and he almost expected to smell ozone in the air as he stepped into the big room. Then he saw Billy, seated at his Kurzweil synthesizer, playing the phrase over and over again on the plastic keyboard.

“What’s that?” Rail asked.

Billy seemed not to have heard the question. He continued playing the little melody, slowly, meditatively. Rail stood beside him, hands buried in the pockets of his coat, eyes fixed on the keyboard and Billy’s fingers, one of which bore a plain platinum band.

Billy stopped playing, letting the last note die out in a long wash of reverb through the room monitors. He looked at Rail and said, “Just a little scrap I heard in a dream.” His eyes remained fixed on Rail’s face, which Jake couldn’t read as he walked to the control room, as slowly as possible, listening to the two men.

“Maybe it will become something,” Rail said.

“I don’t know. It’s a little dull. Sounds like an out-of-tune doorbell. Don't you think?”

“Yes, but it’s all about context. We may find a place for it, if only in a bridge or an intro.”

In the control room, Jake threaded last night’s master tape onto the multi-track and wound it back to the beginning. By the time he had his notes and coffee ready, Brickhouse had appeared and was asking Jake to fetch him a cup, too. When Jake returned from the kitchenette, Rail was giving Brickhouse the game plan for the day.

“We’re going to re-track ‘Language of Love.’ Burn over the version from last night—the vocals were useless anyway. This time we’ll get the whole song down, beginning to end. I imagine we’ll add live drums later. For now, I want to work fast and get Billy's ideas down while they’re fresh.”

The session went according to plan. The only snag came during Billy’s guitar overdubs. He had done three tracks of different riff ideas on his Les Paul, through a cranked amp, when he got frustrated during an attempt to double an exact performance of the third riff to fatten it up. Rail, who had suggested the double-track, finally told Billy to forget about it. They could go back and nail it on another day. It didn’t matter at this early stage anyway. But it was too late; by the time they moved on to vocals, Billy was already in a bad mood.

“Do you smoke when you sing?” Jake asked him while positioning the mic.

The rock star glowered at him before answering, “No. Why?”

“Never mind. If you’d said ‘yes,’ I would have asked you not to blow smoke on the U47. My boss would have my head if you did, that’s all.”

“Well you can relax. I can get through a whole take without a drag, okay?”

The vocals surprised Jake. He had been expecting Billy’s defeatist attitude after the guitar tracks to carry over into less than stellar singing, but in fact the reverse was happening. Billy sounded much better than he had the previous night. His voice was husky and sexy and oozing with sarcasm.

“Put a star on the track sheet,” Rail told Jake. “It’s a pretty special first take. He probably won’t be able to do as well once he starts thinking about it.”

“Like the guitar track,” Brickhouse said. “Too much thinking.”

“Not quite,” Rail replied. When Brickhouse looked up from the meters with a furrowed brow, Rail elaborated. “I wanted him to bang his head up against that one for a while. Billy sucks at doubling guitar parts, he always has. He’s too sloppy and spontaneous a player. If we need a good double, we’ll chop one together in the computer. But trying to get one pissed him off. And Billy sings best when he’s pissed off.”

 

*  *  *

 

At eight o'clock, Rail called for a dinner break and told Jake to get the Wurlitzer electric piano from Studio A and set it up for an overdub while he, Billy, and Kevin went into town for a bite.

Jake did as he was told and had just finished when the trio returned. His stomach was growling by the time they resumed work, tracking a little three-chord pattern that Billy played on the Wurlitzer during the choruses. It didn’t take long. After that, the session started to devolve into hanging out, and Jake could sense that Trevor and Billy were out of fresh ideas for the day. Maybe he would get something to eat before midnight after all. He kept busy tidying cables and organizing track sheets, but his curiosity was piqued when Trevor asked Billy, “Did you get the gift I sent you in Tokyo?”

Billy’s lax body language subtly tensed under his tight black clothes. “Yeah,” he said. “Thanks.”

“May I see it?” Trevor asked. “You did bring it along as I asked?”

Billy nodded, hesitated, then got to his feet and sauntered out to the stairs. When he returned from the loft, he carried a fancy silk brocade box, which he placed atop an equipment cabinet.

Rail took a languid drag on his cigarillo. The heavy smoke cascading from his nostrils made him look like a dragon as he lifted the lid of the box. Jake almost sighed audibly at the sight of a short, scarlet-and-black handled knife on a bed of gold silk. Flowers glinted on the black scabbard in mother of pearl, like the inlays on an expensive guitar.

Brickhouse breathed a low whistle of appreciation.

Trevor Rail drew the blade and turned it this way and that, admiring its lethal beauty, light flaring off the razored edge.

Billy said, “It’s cool and all, but I'm not so sure about using it in the artwork.”

“Why not?” Rail asked absently, his eye still on the keen edge.

Billy seemed to search himself for a reason. “Well, the flower theme, for one thing. It’s kind of feminine, don’t you think?”

Breaking out of his hypnotic examination of the play of light on steel, Rail met Billy’s eyes and said, “The samurai revered the cherry blossom because it doesn’t wither on the branch but falls at the pinnacle of its beauty, in full bloom. To them it represented a noble death, embraced without fear at the peak of a man’s powers. Better to burn out than to fade away, and all that. So you see, it’s a very rock-and-roll symbol.”

Billy just nodded. The knife went back into the scabbard with the decisive snap of well-oiled, snug-fitting hardware, and then disappeared into the box to the clicking of clasps. End of exhibit. End of discussion.

The night wrapped up with a rough mix of the song, and just when Jake thought he was done for the day at ten past midnight, Rail called over his shoulder on his way out of the control room, sliding into his wool overcoat. “Jake, dub three copies of that DAT onto CDRs for me. Tomorrow morning we’ll have a runner FedEx two of them to the bassist and drummer. Goodnight.”

Brickhouse shot Jake a Sorry, kid, but that’s the job look before pulling on his own jacket and following Rail out the door. Billy grabbed a beer from the fridge in the kitchenette and climbed the stairs to the loft where Jake heard him turn on the TV. Alone in the control room, he tore the shrink-wrap from the first CD blank and set about dubbing and writing labels.

He wore headphones while making the dubs, listening for any digital glitches or flaws. He was also still memorizing the lyrics and song structure to make the job of navigating the master tape a task he could perform without pausing to think.

When he took the headphones off, the sound of the TV was absent. Maybe Billy had gone to bed. Jake put the master tape away, turned off the lights and walked across the big room, touching the pocket of his L.L. Bean field coat on the way to make sure he had his car keys. Crossing the room, he noticed a tightening of his breathing and realized he was bracing himself to hear the piano. When the sound came, he wasn’t startled, but he still felt his stomach drop.

He almost quickened his stride, but then he remembered that Billy was here, possibly sleeping or possibly also hearing the phantom melody. Clearly, he had heard it last night, if only in his sleep. He had regurgitated it this morning. If it woke him now, would he think Jake was playing it? For a split second, the idea scared him more than the notion of a ghost in the church. If Billy complained to Eddie or Susan that Jake woke him up in the middle of the night, playing the piano across the loft from his bedroom… But what if Billy heard it and saw the piano bench empty?

Jake took a deep breath and climbed the stairs.

At the top, he saw that the most obvious explanation was the one that had evaded his tired brain. Billy was seated at the piano, hammering out those four uninspired notes, over and over. Jake turned on his heel and put his foot back down on the top step as quietly as he could, but Billy spoke, “I don’t usually dream melodies.”

Jake didn’t know what to say.

“I think the only reason I’m stuck on this one is because it came from a dream. It’s pretty unoriginal, don’t you think?”

Jake refrained from telling Billy exactly how unoriginal it really was. Instead, he said, “I guess Rail’s right about it depending on the context.” He took two steps toward the piano, looking over Billy’s shoulder to see what note he was starting on.

Billy played the four quarter notes again: C, D, G, C.

Jake said, “Maybe you’d like it better as a guitar riff, if you messed around with the rhythm. Or maybe on piano but in a different key.”

Billy asked, “Do you play?”

“Yeah, a little. Piano was my instrument at school.”

There was silence between them for some time, except for the piano. Billy played the monotonous sequence. Jake watched him play it. Finally, Jake said, “Try it up a whole step, in D.”

Billy’s fingers climbed up the keyboard and played the same intervals a step higher. It didn’t sound that different at all. Then he stopped playing and sat staring at the keys without blinking. The church was totally silent now. Billy’s lips parted but he didn’t speak. Jake felt a small pain in the palm of his hand and found that he was clenching his fists, digging his nails in as he waited for the D key to play itself right under Billy’s nose. It didn’t.

Billy looked at Jake, eyes wide, and said, “That’s a funny melody.”

Jake raised an eyebrow.

Billy played it again, this time singing the note names as he played them. His tired voice crackled, “Dee, Eee, Aay, Dee… Dead. It spells dead.” He stood up from the bench, picked up his beer bottle and drained it into his mouth. “I’m going to bed, Jake.”

“Okay.”

Billy closed the lid on the keyboard. He walked across the catwalk, leaving Jake standing alone beside the piano, trying to find his feet.

Billy parted the canvas curtain, hesitated, then said, “You were right; it’s much more interesting in that key.”