Billy thought he saw a flash of lightning behind the stained glass. Maybe it was in his head. He was not enjoying the game, but he thought it might get better. He felt buzzed and luxurious in his skin. Trevor Rail’s voice was small and far away, as if it came to him through the talk back mic in headphones, but he wasn’t wearing headphones. In fact, Rail must have been shouting to be heard at all over the blasting pulse of the music. Billy knew he had heard this song before, but he couldn’t place the title. It made him horny. Who was this anyway? It sounded so familiar. He tried to focus.
A heavy rope swung before his eyes like a hypnotist’s chain. But where was the watch? I Like to Watch, he thought. That was one of his songs. Oh, right! This was one of his songs, too. One of the new ones that he didn’t care about anymore. Not since he started writing with Pan in the forest.
The rope was tied in an elaborate knot around a pair of wrists. A pair of hands poked out of the coarse bouquet. One of the fingers was wearing his platinum ring, but it looked too big for the finger. Shaggy black hair brushed the collar of a leather jacket. That’s mine, too. Between the hem of the jacket and a bunched up pair of faded black jeans, a pale ass was exposed in the candlelight. He had the vertiginous sensation of having been pulled out of his body, viewing himself from behind and above. But that wasn’t quite right. There was something familiar about the body beyond his hair and clothes.
“Rachel?” he murmured.
“She’s not here, Billy!” Rail shouted in his little headphone voice.
Rail stepped between Billy and his doppelgänger, holding another length of rope, which also hung down from the ceiling. He pulled on it with both hands and Billy watched the bound figure before him rise. Rail handed Billy the rope and said, “Hold this tight!”
Billy did as he was told, watching fascinated as Rail picked up a tube of lubricant in his right hand and squirted a glob of it into his latex gloved left hand. Then he reached down and caressed the cleft of buttocks framed between jacket and jeans. Billy noticed his own charcoal-gray boxers stretched between his doppelgänger’s thighs. He was surprised to feel the jeans he was wearing tightening around an erection at the sight. He grasped the rope tighter. The rough threads dug into his palms.
Rail smiled at him—the man’s teeth looked like a stone wall polished by a sandstorm. “Come on, Billy,” he said, “Come on and fuck yourself. Merry Christmas! It’s what you’ve always wanted. Fuck yourself, Billy. Do it.”
Billy tugged his jeans free of the button with one hand, the other still holding the rope.
* * *
Jake had found a view of the big room through the kitchenette window—one of the few that weren’t stained. It was enough of a view to see that Rail was spending his night off from the job of record producer exploring a sideline as a porno director. Jake couldn’t see a camera in the room, but neither did he see Rail’s gun, so apparently this evening’s festivities were the sport of consenting adults. Billy had probably forgotten all about the acoustic session. He had seemed high when he’d asked about it.
Jake felt uncomfortably like a voyeur for watching whatever this weird shit was they had gotten up to after more wine and probably some of Rachel’s pot. He was about to go back to his car and head home before the still falling snow made that difficult when he saw Rail tie the other end of the rope into a noose and slip it over Billy’s head.
Billy didn’t resist. Perhaps he had experimented with this technique before. Even Jake had heard of it, but it was notorious for tragic mishaps. In Billy’s present condition, it could not be okay to let him do this. What the hell was Rail thinking? Was he there to spot Billy, or was he trying to kill him?
Jake started for the front door. But as soon as the thought of intervening formed in his mind, so did the image of Rail holding him at gunpoint and tying him up as well. Why couldn’t all those candles just set off the fire alarm? That would at least get Eddie up here.
Jake circled the building and considered climbing the tall pine tree nearest the second-story bathroom window. But that was crazy. The branches up top were probably too thin, and he knew his athletic limits. He would only end up badly scratched and covered in sap before having to give up. And time would be wasted. Fortunately, when he tried the side door off the control room—the one Billy most often used to embark on his afternoon walks—he found it unlocked.
There were no candles burning in the control room, but the recessed lights had been dialed down to a yellow-brown haze. The red and green LEDs on the console and outboard gear sparkled like a Christmas tree. The glass doors to the big room were closed, but he could see Billy and Rachel through them when he peered between the speakers, hunched low over the console. He craned his neck until Rail came into view.
Rail was standing in front of Rachel with his latex gloved fists held together before him in imitation of her own bound hands. He was sweeping his hands toward the floor, presumably to demonstrate that she should do the same. But it wasn’t working the way Rail intended. Rachel was too out of it to get the instructions, her eyes flickering between a squint of pain or pleasure and an upward rolling motion, her irises disappearing under mascara-smudged eyelids. She didn’t look like she could focus on Rail at all.
In frustration, he grabbed her forearms and pulled them downward. High above them on the catwalk, the thick rope slid over the arm of a heavy boom stand weighted with sand bags. The stand acted as a pulley, and Billy was lifted up on his tiptoes by the noose around his neck. The expressions on their faces told Jake that this act of leverage brought Billy deeper into Rachel while simultaneously cutting off blood and oxygen to his brain.
Rail let go of Rachel’s arms. They rapidly swung back up above her head as Billy came down again onto his heels. Rail held something too small to make out under Rachel’s nose. He cracked it with his thumb and she jolted into a momentary state of alertness—eyes widening, nostrils flaring—and shook her head. Ammonium nitrate. Having restored her to consciousness, Rail demonstrated the mechanism to her again. This time, she took up the rhythm of her own volition.
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.”
“Do what you will. I have no use for frozen music.”
“Will you help me kill him for the joy of it?”
Pan smiled. “For the joy of it, yes. He has masqueraded as a cheap perversion of what I am. Bring your master to your monster and we shall play.”
Pan gazed into the pool for a moment with a look of faint amusement on his craggy face. He said, “There is something else you must bring.”