"IT'S A REAL GIG," Relly announced. "The all-ages show at Waterstreet. There's five other bands and we have to go second. But we'll burn the place down. When we're done, there won't be anything left but smoke and ashes."
We only had a week to get ready. So we had to get the set list together fast, narrowing the songs down to a half-hour set. The big question was, Do we do any covers? We could do Zeppelin and Priest and AC/DC. But we also had original tunes. Relly's and mine.
Just a couple of days before the gig, we'd written our first tune together. Jerod had taken off at about eleven, driving back to his nice big house in Pittsford. Butt stuck around. He had nowhere to go, and nobody at home who cared how late he stayed out. And I knew my dad was working till close that night.
So we banged out the new tune. Relly's black surging riffs and my words. It was called "Ten Thousand Charms." And all three of us agreed that we had to do the tune when we played out the first time.
"That's it," Relly said when we finally got the tune where we wanted it. Sometimes I thought the sound went on forever, up there in the shadows and weird peaks of attic roofline. Echoes above our heads. The traces of lost chords, broken riffs, whispers and screams.
"That's it. That's the sound I kept hearing in my head." He had that strange look again, half mystic and half maniac. "This song is the real Ghost Metal," he whispered. "Till right now, till tonight, it was just in my head. But now it's out. It's finally really in the world."
It was important to him that I understood what he meant by ghost. It wasn't cheap booga-booga horror or little kids on Halloween in old sheets. "Uh-uh," Relly said." Ghost is the old word for spirit. Like Holy Ghost. Spirit, not stupid scary-movie crot."
Butt shrugged. I guess he'd heard this routine before.
I said, "OK, so we do the tune?"
"Yeah. We do it last in the set. And we leave 'em all shaking and gasping for breath."
Butt gave his bass drum a couple of powerful kicks. That was his way of saying "Count me in, all the way."
"All right. We'll run it tomorrow with Jerod," Relly said. "And it'll be ready for Sunday."