Chapter Twenty-Seven

Muddy looked at his brother’s eyes and saw little remaining, but still, something of his family was in there. He needed to save Zack.

“Now listen and please, take your places.” They gestured to the harnesses.

The song they played on Zack sounded like a mash-up of Bach and Mozart crossed with Def Leppard and Metallica. It was beautiful, complicated, but with the power of a thousand electric guitars though a wall of amplifiers. As the song intensified, Muddy felt it penetrate his bones.

“Think of your lives here,” said the first. “No more pain from society. None. Your song would feed nations and bring them happiness.”

One placed its spindly arm on Corey. “Boy, you came from nothing and moved into everything, but you still feel an emptiness nothing can fill. Until you came here.”

Another placed one of its long arms on Poe’s head. She recoiled in revulsion.

“You, dear,” said the creature, its finger-things lifting her hair. “We have sensed from your first trip here, the pain you feel, the most of all in your group. A father should be a father, not a monster.”

“So says a monster,” she said with tears in her eyes. The music from Zack was killing their resolve.

“You can escape it all here and make scores of children smile in the way your parents couldn’t.”

The third hovered over Otis. “Son, you have nothing back home.”

Although he writhed in pain, he turned his head to glare at their captors. “I have more than you ever will. I have my family and friends.”

“They will stay with you until the end of your life, but you know it’s not far off if you go back where you came from. Here you would never fade, never hurt.”

Lyra was next. She still tore her brother apart with the fire in her eyes as he sat next to the captive instruments. “Your people have never known freedom. Your village will be spared if you cooperate, but they’ll be vaporized if your brother doesn’t honor his agreement with us. We have no use for you, so please don’t stand in our way.”

Finally, they came to Muddy. “Your brother was always the golden child. You know that. Without your mother, your father and Zack have withered into themselves, leaving you, the child with needs they couldn’t address, to be neglected.”

He felt his fists curl, aching for the guitar. No. They wouldn’t rattle him, or cause him to sell out all that mattered to him.

“Here, you will never be picked on, never be the low man. Alongside your brother, if you wish, you can rule the music and be adored by many worlds.”

Again, the voice whispered in his head. You know the truth. You came here for a reason, for a task you knew you could accomplish. Now save your brother, my son.

His anger boiled over and he kicked his left leg high, right into the joint where the Triton’s knee should’ve been. Yet it didn’t flinch.

But his assault did have the effect he wished.

All three turned to laugh at the teen on the floor.

Lyra winked at Muddy and attacked Luke—hurtling herself into him, sending him towards the windows. As they tussled on the precipice in front of the window, they rolled into the pedestal which contained the band’s tools in the clear case. It shook and teetered.

“I tried!” Luke screamed, pushing her off him. “When Zack first came to the village, I warned him, told him to go back home if he wanted to live, but he didn’t listen.”

“Liar!”

“No,” he said, pinning her as she still kicked into the pedestal. “The prophecy. We’ve been told all along that someone would come to set us free. To give us the music that we see the visitors come for, and leave with, as we are left with nothing, time and time again.”

“Someone was coming. I knew it and they found me in the forest. It was either them or the village. I didn’t know them!”

“But now you do!” She rolled him into the pedestal, toppling to the floor in a shattering crash. The instruments scattered across the black floor.

“That boy, Muddy’s brother, he never had a chance. He was clouded, they said, and I saw it too. He wanted to accept their power. He wished for power, for answers and would die if he stayed his course.” Lyra skittered out of the way as the band grabbed their instruments. “But these guys stayed their course and now you’ll probably not survive because of it.”

Luke crawled toward the window and shuddered. “I just wanted to save us.”

“And kill these people? You knew you shouldn’t trust these…things!”

He cried. “I didn’t know! I did it for us.”

Silver Eye’s voice echoed again in their heads. Now! Play the music that makes the earth move!

Each slung the instrument he had given them and played the song that had been in their heads since the moment the old man’s ghost sung it to them the previous night.

This is your song, the one you played the first time we crossed over. I just helped pull it from your souls.

“It worked once before,” Muddy said, to both the band and to their mentor, thinking of the melody and rhythms they wrote for Poe to escape her father.

“Ready?” Poe cued the band.

They stood on the stage before Zack, facing off against him, just like they would back home in a Battle of the Bands. It was simple, except that this one might end in the snuffing out of someone’s life.

“You can’t!” The Tritons screamed at once. “We’re offering you what you can never have back home. Stop now and you can still live.”

“I’m through with threats,” she said and nodded to Otis, who slammed his sticks into the edge of the rim on his drum to begin the song.

Muddy hoped that their instinct was dead on, the blues rock fire opus they planned to one day win the Battle of the Bands with back in their real world. He hoped its off-beat, up-tempo blues-rock would keep the creatures off steady ground just long enough to get out of there with all of them intact. He churned out the earthy riff, something he’d come up with while listening to his buddies jamming as they waited for Poe to join them. Born of worry for her, it carried with it an emotional weight he doubted these Tritons had ever heard first hand. Otis laid down the groove under Muddy and Corey added a line that functioned as a bass before snaking into other lands.

Luke had passed on his chance to be the bassist here. Muddy didn’t need him.

The song rocked, tearing into the fabric of who they were. It embodied the songs they’d survived that day.

As the creatures roiled in confusion and terror, something nobody was expecting, Lyra rose again and gestured for Corey to move toward her. In a smooth motion, after he finished his line, they threw themselves linebacker-style into the structure of the man-instrument on either side. It shook. Zack’s eyes flittered open and his song halted in an instant.

As his music stopped, the others grew in volume. The rest of the band appeared to double their intensity and come to life as the Tritons slowed their movements.

The metal and wire structure leaned to and fro, then again, tipping more each way. The instrument in the middle struggled. Did the teen wish to get out to protect himself or to continue the song?

Muddy tried to keep himself in the song, pushing himself harder, but wished to help his brother, hoping that thing confining him didn’t crush him.

As if on cue, Lyra and Corey hit it again, harder and up a little higher. It rocked further, once, twice and on the third time, she reached onto the edge and jumped up on it.

It fell like a musical tree into the wall next to the window with a massive, discordant crash. The tones it emitted when it broke nearly halted the band, but Muddy and Otis were locked in tight. Poe was no longer of this dimension as she sung with sweet pain her lyrics and melody.

Corey stepped up and launched into his solo, giving birth to deep, rich tones that killed off the reverberations of the Zack-thing as the boy collapsed in the harness, still strung tight by the myriad strings.

He lay still while the creatures gathered around him, inching further from the band.

The band became one again and turned up the heat on the Tritons as they simultaneously lost themselves in the music.

Somewhere in Muddy’s mind, he understood Hendrix, Vaughan, Page, Lennon and the others. The feel of the music was beyond intoxicating. Nothing he could imagine would ever match the intensity of the feeling, but many tried. Some did it with more songs and playing. Others turned to booze and drugs, like Zack, adding pain to his equation.

Muddy hurt just as bad over mom’s death. Plus, he’d had to endure much more in school, and his future didn’t seem as bright as his dad’s or his brother’s, but he wouldn’t let himself wallow. He was nowhere near the strength he wished to be, but the band helped a lot.

What happened next helped him even more.

The Tritons skittered around like roaches caught in the light. Without their song, they appeared lost and without protection. Up and down the walls and across the floor they ran, everywhere except where the music emanated. They screamed. “You can’t destroy us.” Their dissonant voices displayed fear and anything but confidence. “If you destroy our bodies, true power will find you. Those who live below the River will know.”

“What?” Muddy almost stopped until he realized they’d nearly killed his brother. It was a ruse. Keep up the song, a voice from within urged.

“We are only a conduit for those who lie beneath. They have always been here and always will.”

As Poe sung the last note and appeared to glow with power, back-to-back with Corey as Otis performed his rock star ending, Muddy held tight onto his final chord and let it ring.

“What lies beneath? Beneath what?”

“The River. We have powers you can’t imagine and live in places no beings like you could ever survive, because of them.”

“It wasn’t you,” Poe said. “It was the River who guided us. It wanted us to get here, to keep things pure.” She stood up to their towering height as they still shook from the reverberations of the song. “Not by you. It was the River.”

As the trio cowered, they appeared to shrink a little and said, “The River is power, but it doesn’t choose. It doesn’t love or hate. Our father, who lives beneath it, does and we feel his desires now. He wants you to die.”

Muddy suddenly remembered something about his father’s name. He’d changed it long ago. Right after he’d sold his first book. Why? Had he come here, too? Had he recited a poem or story at the crossroads for the door to open? He never knew his dad’s real last name, but he kind of wondered if it mattered now. He was part of this place just like his father. The River was part of their family, as it was for so many others, but if something horrible did live beneath, it was time to leave a family member behind.

“You can’t just leave,” said the trio. Were they regaining their strength so soon? “We won’t—and it won’t let you.”

Lyra stood up with Luke, who looked like he had just realized he’d lost his puppy.

“You said you’re part of the power,” she stated, “of those who live beneath.”

“What do you mean, girl?”

Lyra turned to Muddy, mouthing a goodbye before kissing Corey on the cheek and winking. “We’ll meet again. I promise.”

She threw herself at the Triton closest to her and hugged his three arms so he couldn’t raise them or right himself. They both screamed as they tumbled out the window. Right before they fell, Muddy noticed a coil of something in her hand. Before he could cry out they were gone, but he knew she would survive, somehow.

The other two stumbled, weakened. Broken from the whole, their power lessened. The Accidental’s song had worked.

Luke screamed for his sister in a howl that sounded anything but human. He turned to the others and cried, “I’m sorry,” to anyone who was listening. He powered his sturdy frame into the other two and in their awkward, weakened state, caused them to crash into each other and slam against the wall with him. Then, in one swift move, like a cowboy at an otherworldly rodeo, he wrapped them with a coppery wire. He pulled them both through the middle window behind Zack’s device. With nary a sound, all three bodies fell out of the window to the rocky shores far below. Muddy noticed that Luke had the wire attached to himself like his sister did.

“Holy…” Otis mouthed. “What was that?” He ran to the window and looked down. “I can’t even see the bottom. We must be over a thousand feet high.”

“At least,” Corey agreed, a tear forming in his eye. “She did promise, though, didn’t she?”

Poe hugged him and whispered, “Of course she did. She’s not a stupid girl.”

* * * *

Muddy rushed to his brother and began to unfasten the wires jutting into his flesh. Most of them simply pierced him by less than an inch. After carefully pulling a few out, Zack’s fist suddenly tightened around Muddy’s. Zack turned his taut, pained face to the others and spoke the words that would haunt his brother for years.

“I am the Dark Muse,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Don’t you get it? I belong here. I belong to the River, to them.” He gestured downwards with a shaky hand.

“How could you want that?” Muddy stuttered the words. “They’re monsters. They only want to use you. Besides, they’re gone.”

“Not them,” he said, shaking his head. “Not them. I’m talking about something much, much more than they ever could be.”

“What?” He pulled away at more of the strings.

Zack began to slip, but fought his brother to remain in the harness. “I can’t go home. They own me.” His voice rang hoarse, but with spirit. “I can be someone here. I can be their power. These people don’t have the music. They need someone to show them. His head bowed. “They make it all happen.”

“What? Who are they?”

Instead of answering, Zack crumbled into near unconsciousness and became Muddy’s brother once again.

“Do we take him back or not?” Otis leaned over him as they all helped remove the wires.

Muddy grabbed him by the shirt. “You’ve got to be kidding. After all this?”

Poe and Corey helped Muddy lay the teen flat on the floor as he slept.

“We have to,” Poe said. “He’s family.”

“But he said he wanted to stay.”

Muddy erupted again. “He was under their influence. It’s like a drug, but worse. We need to get him back home.”

They looked at each other and even Otis nodded. “I’m sorry, bro. I’m just worried about something else following behind us and ruining our world.”

“What about Lyra?” Corey asked, looking at the window.

Otis laid his hand on the big teen’s shoulder. “She promised to see us again.”

“But she’s not music, like we are. How can she?”

Poe looked at him. “I guess we’ll have to visit. Maybe she’ll come back with us if this place doesn’t improve.”

“Think she will?”

She smiled. “Someone’s got a crush. Yeah, I think she would, if only to visit.”

“Let’s get out of here.” Muddy stood up and turned to the others. “Zack needs to see a doctor or something.”

“Is that smart?” Otis asked. “They might ask questions.”

“He’s my brother. I have no choice. Besides, it’s not like anyone would believe him. They’d think his story was crazy.”

Poe paled just a bit. “But what do we do about that thing? That thing we let in that ruined Emerson Street? People will be asking questions about that.”

Muddy grinned as he propped up his brother, wrapping his arms around Zack’s, the guitar underneath both. “Two things. One, we remember to lock the door tight this time. And two, we’re The Accidentals. People might not think we’re important—yet—but they will, someday.”

“How are we going to we transport him back home? The crossroads are too far for us to carry him. We’ll never make it. Besides, how do we get out of here? I won’t go back the way we came.”

Muddy smiled as he remembered Silver Eye’s words. “There are many crossroads, all over the world and beyond.” He looked down at his feet and saw that the Triton’s inner sanctum was a crossroads. “Finally,” he announced to the others, gathering them together, “we’ve encountered something easy.”

They returned to their world playing the same song that brought them there, the song that Silver Eye taught them, the same one that automatically locked the door behind them.

As they shimmered out of sight, Muddy wondered when they would experience anything like this again. He had a feeling it might be before they were ready for it.

This world had more dark secrets than they had time for; ones that now placed bulls-eyes on each of them and would likely come to collect sooner than later.

He hoped the music would be enough the next time.