The Wreck of the Tartarus

By Lee Murray

 

 

October 2033

 

Strapped in her seat, Captain Kennedy R. Jones clutched the console as the submarine rolled on the Atlantic seabed. Seaman McNaught wasn’t so lucky; flung across the control room, his skull smashed against the interior wall. The young man’s face registered an instant of surprise before it slackened and collapsed. Then Kennedy lost sight of him, the submarine still toppling, rocks and debris from the volcano battering the Tartarus’s graphene laminate exterior. The sub groaned, and Kennedy caught a whiff of burning rubber—electrical circuits—tasted blood, fear.

Orange warning lights flickered.

The hull shrieked, grinding, sliding on rock.

Behind Kennedy, someone screamed.

The vessel spun 180 degrees to starboard. Kennedy gasped. Her grip broke. She snatched at the arms of her chair as the sub twisted, tumbled, then tumbled again. The pride of the US Navy tossed like litter scattered carelessly on the wind.

Would it never stop? And would the Tartarus survive? Kennedy prayed the ship’s designers knew their business.

For a moment, she thought of Cole and their girls, Carlotta and Marie, at home. Right now, it was fall in Wisconsin. At Devil’s Lake State Park, the trees would be glorious, all gold and red and green; nature’s fireworks reflected and amplified on the water’s surface. Kennedy swallowed as the vessel jolted again. Why had she forsaken that majestic landscape for the darkest vaults of the ocean?

Her head whiplashed, a stab jolting her spine. Was the roll slowing? She clung on. The wait was excruciating, interminable.

Eventually, the sub ground to a stop. Upright, thank God. There were only a handful of her crew members in the control room, yet Kennedy could swear she heard a collective exhale. Then, just as they dared to breathe, there was a tearing, followed by an inexorable thrumming on the hull. Once more, they waited.

Minutes passed.

At last, everything fell quiet.

Kennedy unsnapped her seat belt, ignoring the nausea that welled in her throat, and took two steps to portside to check on McNaught. She touched her fingers to his neck, but he was dead—poor man. Hardly surprising, given that the back of his skull was dented cruelly inwards. Had he lived, his seafaring days would likely have been over; his right knee was shattered, the lower limb twisted unnaturally back on itself. Kennedy winced. He’d been spared that pain at least.

Fighting dizziness, she reached for a handhold, instead her fingers touched her executive officer, Cohen, slumped against the wall. Glassy eyes stared up at her. His mouth agape in a silent scream, his still-warm skin already leaching color. Kennedy’s heart clenched. The Tartarus assignment was their first together, so she hadn’t known him well, but he’d impressed her as competent and dependable. Solid. The son of a single mother, he wasn’t—hadn’t been—ruffled by a female commanding officer, rare even in these progressive times. She closed Cohen’s eyes with her fingertips.

Where was everyone? Kennedy’s pulse thrummed. Her scalp tightened. Was she the only one still alive? She stifled panic, an odd pang of loneliness already stealing over her. No, she mustn’t panic. There were fifty crew members on the Tartarus, and she was responsible for them all. She needed to get her head together, assess the damage, see to the wounded, and make a plan to get back on course.

Steadying herself against the wall, Kennedy got to her feet.

“Captain Jones.”

She started at the voice close behind. It was Chief Petty Officer Masterton. A quietly spoken man out of Ohio, he was a meat-and-potatoes sort. The type you’d expect to find behind the counter of a hardware store. A large bruise was blooming on the man’s cheekbone. His eyes drifted to the side.

“Executive Officer Cohen?” he asked, squinting.

“Deceased. McNaught, too.”

“Shit.” Masterton shook his head. “Begging your pardon, ma’am. What do you need me to do?”

A console burst into flame on the wall behind McNaught.

The fire siren wailed.

Fuck! Extinguisher. Where is it? It’d come adrift from its bracket. Rolled somewhere. Where? Kennedy whirled, caught the flash of red, lunged for it. God, that’s heavy. Pulling the pin as she clambered over McNaught, she aimed the nozzle at the base of the flame, pressed the trigger, and let the foam fly.

Speckles of foam landed on McNaught; Kennedy kept spraying. The fire sputtered; she didn’t stop until the foam slid in clumps down the wall.

The siren ceased its blaring.

“It’s okay; it’s out,” Masterton said.

Panting, Kennedy nodded. She lowered the extinguisher. Blew out hard. “Right, well I’d better assess the damage to the Tartarus,” Kennedy said. “You check with the medic.”

Masterton lifted his chin. “Yes, ma’am.”

Several others were on their feet now, looking dazed and disoriented. Faces blanched when they spied the dead men.

“Masterton—before you do that, see about covering Cohen and McNaught.” Kennedy clicked the extinguisher back into its bracket. “Let’s give them a little privacy.”

“Ma’am.”

Kennedy took her chair at the console and checked the screens. Breathed in relief. At first glance, the Tartarus’s double-hull structure appeared intact. With thousands of feet of water above the vessel, it was a comfort to know they weren’t in any immediate peril. Kennedy illuminated the outer hull, set the built-in eyes to scan, then checked the screens.

Her heart fluttered. Please, no.

There was no denying the truth: the ship’s stern, including the propellers and the outflow for the internal motion turbines, lay buried under an avalanche of rubble. Even now, rocks still clattered against the hull. The propellers would likely be impacted with rock. To make matters worse, the Tartarus had toppled into a trench and was now pinned on a ledge.

Kennedy switched screens, her heart in her throat. She gave a squeak of joy; the aft escape hatches were still clear. Her excitement was short lived. They were how many feet down? Ten thousand? More? Even if the distress buoy had managed to make it to the surface amidst the rubble of the eruption, the Tartarus could be a mile away from the volcano by now. Searching the ocean would be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. And if the US Navy teams did manage to locate them, navigating the trench would be treacherous. Few vessels could withstand the pressures at the Tartarus’s crush depth. What if they were beyond reach?

No. Stop this. There’s time. The graphene hull is intact. The organic liquid-flow batteries are fully charged. This isn’t the Kurst, and the US isn’t Russia. The Tartarus isn’t going to vanish without trace like the USS Cyclops or the ARA San Juan.

Not on my watch.

“Hurst?” she called. “Do we still have comms?”

The ensign scrambled to her feet after retrieving her headset from the floor. She checked her screens. “We’ve lost the cable for the two-way ELF, but if we send up the reserve array, then, yes, ma’am, we should have comms.”

Kennedy forced herself to breathe slowly, in and out, mimicking the ebb and flow of ripples on the beach. Her anxiety dampened. Everything would be fine. The sub was teched to the nines. They would extend the reserve array to reestablish the low frequency radio and she would let her superiors know what had happened. Rescue teams would be dispatched. Cohen and McNaught may be lost, but Kennedy and the rest of the crew could still be plucked from the jaws of hell and delivered to safety.

When that happened, Kennedy would bury her face in her children’s hair and drink in the scent of apple shampoo and the Wisconsin outdoors. She would sob ugly tears into Cole’s chest, and let him rock her like a baby. Until then, she would be the unflappable captain of this ship.

Until then, they would stay calm and sit tight.

#

When the bodies of the dead had been stowed, the Tartarus’s medic and its chief engineer joined Kennedy in the control room.

Pale and drawn, the medic cleared his throat before giving his report. Kennedy’s throat was raw, too. By now the fire-retardant foam had dried; it was still like breathing acid.

“There are four dead, including Cohen and McNaught,” the medic said. There was a smear of blood on the cuff of his uniform.

Kennedy nodded. She’d already had the numbers from Masterton.

“On top of that, we have five wounded, not counting those with minor bruises and bumps—which is practically everyone.”

Kennedy couldn’t help lifting her hand to her neck, still aching from the whiplash. All around her, the control room hummed with the bleep of systems checks and the murmur of status reports.

“And the five wounded?” she asked. “How are they faring?”

“Two have concussion—I’ll keep an eye on them in case they deteriorate. One dislocated shoulder—I’ve already reset it—and one of the cooks has extensive scalding. All survivable. It’s Ensign Rafferty who worries me most. His pelvis is shattered; it’s likely he has some internal injuries. Without hospital care, he might not make it to Sunday’s ice cream social.”

Kennedy grimaced. “The navy is working on getting us to the surface as soon as possible, but it’s going to take time.”

“How long?” Scotty said, the engineer as brusque as his Trekkie namesake.

“I spoke with the commodore an hour ago. They’re working on a plan now.”

She pursed her lips remembering the terse conversation with her commander. To be fair, the navy was never going to be happy about the situation. The Tartarus was the outcome of billions of dollars of research effort, its recharging technology a closely guarded military secret.

“So, the vessel is lost,” the commodore had said.

“I believe so, sir. There’s an outside chance the propellers could clear the rocks without jamming, but in the event we don’t succeed, it would leave the Tartarus without power.”

Under normal conditions, the Tartarus recharged its liquid-flow battery by tethering to the seabed and allowing the ocean currents to spin the internal turbines like water over gills. The Tartarus’s inflow vents were intact, but with the water outflow buried, there were no currents to speak of. No recharging meant no power and no oxygen. Eventually, the Tartarus was going to flicker out, and its crew with it.

“We could certainly attempt to break out,” she added, when the commodore didn’t speak. “And as the ship’s captain, I’d be willing to volunteer myself for the task—but only after my crew are safely away.”

The commodore remained silent. A glitch in the line, or just a minute of reflection? To Kennedy, the moment felt heavy with accusation, as if she ought to have predicted the eruption and steered the Tartarus out of danger.

“Let me speak to Cohen,” he said eventually.

“Cohen is among the dead, sir.”

“Ah.” Another pause. “Shame.”

Kennedy’s eyes narrowed. Why ask to speak to Cohen? The Tartarus was her command. “Sir? Is there something I should know?”

“No, no. Cohen and I go way back, is all. Don’t worry, Captain. We’re going to get you and your crew out of there. But it’s going to take us a while to get things underway, so you’ll need to be patient.”

“At present, we’re at 89 percent charge. The Tartarus has oxygen tanks for two days, and we can also create oxygen through electrolysis. But splitting water will mean drawing heavily on the available charge,” Kennedy said. She was wasting air; the commodore knew all this.

“I’m fully aware of the ramifications, Captain,” the commodore had said tersely. “I’ll update you as soon as I have some information.” He had cut the connection.

The medic cleared his throat again, bringing Kennedy back to the crew briefing. “In the meantime,” he said, “we’re going to need to reduce our energy consumption.”

“We can cut some lights, turn down the heating. Keep everyone in their bunks. That’ll allow us to eke out charge,” Scotty said.

Kennedy nodded. “I’ll announce the measures on the 1MC and come back and chat to the wounded a little later.”

When the men had returned to their respective stations, leaving only the control room crew, Ensign Hurst turned to her. “Are we going to be shark shit, Captain?” she asked.

The other crew members looked to Kennedy. It was a fair question.

Another deluge of rock hammered the Tartarus, boulder-sized hail, louder than artillery fire, rattling her bones. Grunts and cries echoed through the ship. Everyone snatched for a handhold. Kennedy planted her feet. Held her breath. There was nothing to do but hold on and hope.

When at last the rocks clattered to a stop, the crew looked again to Kennedy.

“No, Hurst, we are not,” she replied. “Not if I can help it.”

#

A day passed. And another. In the watery limbo, an endless night hovering between life and death, Kennedy didn’t sleep. Even the wounded slumbered fitfully. If these were to be their last hours, no one wanted to waste them sleeping. Instead, they read, told stories, passed photos, sketched. One man played a blues harp.

In the control room, Kennedy wrote letters to Cohen’s wife and sister, to McNaught’s mother, and the families of the other deceased. She thought of her own babies, Carlotta and Marie, of the letter she might want to receive, and took her time perfecting her prose, using words like service, and honor, and courage.

That done, she had Hurst contact HQ again. “I’d appreciate an update,” she told her commander.

“We’re still working on it,” the commodore said.

Kennedy wanted to scream, but he was their lifeline, the man in charge of getting them off this ridge so, for the sake of her crew, she kept her voice even. “Ensign Rafferty’s condition has deteriorated.”

“Look, Captain, the US Navy is doing everything it can. We think we’ve located you, but there are issues on the surface—a storm is hampering our rescue efforts. You need to trust me, as soon as we get a break in the weather, we’ll get your people out of there.” His voice was overly cheery. Putting a positive spin on things to keep up morale.

Pulling her jacket around her shoulders, Kennedy checked the battery power: 38 percent. They were running out of time.

She wrote to Carlotta and Marie. Handwritten notes. So young, Marie, would likely forget her if she didn’t come home, her face blurring in her daughter’s memory, but Carlotta was older and would remember. Kennedy labored over the paragraphs, yet the words were insufficient and lackluster. Nothing could capture her feelings for them, the ache their loss would cause her.

In the end, she quoted Apollinaire:

“Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure / Les jours s’en vont je demeure.”

“Let night come, toll the hour. The days pass by, I remain.”

If they ever saw the letters, Cole would explain. Perhaps he would take them to Paris, so they could watch the gray water of the Seine pass beneath the bridge.

Of course, they might never get her letters. The US Navy was good at keeping secrets. The SSBN James Madison had clipped a Soviet sub in 1974 during the Cold War, and nothing was known of it for forty-three years. In forty-three years, her girls would be in their fifties—older than she was now.

The sub creaked under another tumble of debris.

Or, the Tartarus might just be one more in a litany of ships lost to the stygian depths. Kennedy folded the notes and left them on her desk.

#

On the third day, Rafferty passed away.

Kennedy wrote another letter, then put in another call. “Sir, you do realize that very soon my crew is going to be sucking rubber.” Already, the air in the sub was dangerously thin. Kennedy struggled to concentrate, her head fuggy with headaches—although that might also be sleep deprivation.

“I’m sorry, Captain.”

“The weather’s still too dangerous?”

“Yes.” His tone was guarded.

“We’re talking hours, not days.”

“I understand.”

Kennedy’s skin prickled. This was ridiculous. “Sir, exactly how far away is the rescue ship? Assuming the weather abates, how long before you can get a submersible down here? Because ten minutes or two hours too late, the result for us is going to be the same.”

The commodore said nothing.

Her heart skipped. The reality was as blinding as the ocean was dark. “There is no rescue attempt,” she whispered.

The commodore sighed. “Captain Jones, I’m so sorry. The Tartarus is state-of-the-art, the culmination of decades of investment in submarine tech. My people said the only way to get the Tartarus up fast enough was to hire outside help. Imagine if a tech company like MobyCorp, or Poseidon Industries were to get hold of the blueprint. They’d reengineer it and sell it on to the foreign power with the deepest pockets. The White House can’t allow it. There’s too much at stake.”

Kennedy shivered. So, there it was. After days of fobbing her off, here was the truth at last. “You’re sacrificing my crew.”

“For the safety of the American people, yes.”

“What of the forty-six American people on the Tartarus? What about them? What about us?” Her voice was shrill.

The commander clucked his tongue. “When we bring Tartarus up later—when we can do it in-house, quietly—your crew and your families will be…looked after.”

“Cold comfort, sir.”

“Executive Officer Cohen would have understood. He knew his orders…”

This time Kennedy cut the connection, blood thundering in her veins. Cohen! Dependable, solid Cohen, her executive officer, had been planted to countermand her orders in the event the little lady stepped out of line. Kennedy clenched her teeth so hard she risked cracking the enamel. What would his single mother have made of that?

But her anger wasn’t going to help things. She needed to think. Again, she focused her mind on the ebb of the tide, breathing in slow waves, dampening her fear. “Masterton—John—would you ask Scotty to join us, please?”

#

“Fuck!” Scotty cursed when he heard the news. “Fuckity-fuck-fuck!”

Masterton closed his eyes, his lips quivering. When he opened them, he said, “What about other countries? The Russians. The Chinese. South Korea. They all have subs. There might be someone out there. We could send out an SOS.”

“Fat chance,” Scotty said.

He wasn’t wrong. The Atlantic Ocean was massive. Depending on where their rescuers were, getting to them could take days.

Scotty shrugged. “But I’m not against giving it a go. I wouldn’t mind seeing Central Park again.”

“Ensign Hurst.” Kennedy turned to her comms officer.

Hurst lifted her earphones off one ear. “Yes, ma’am?”

“If there are any other subs within shouting distance, I want you to raise them, please. Anyone at all.”

Hurst’s eyes widened, but she bent her head and fiddled with her dials.

Kennedy looked at Scotty and Masterton. “For the record, this is on me,” she said firmly. Masterton opened his mouth, but Kennedy held up her hand. “No. If we come through this, my report will say you did your best to dissuade me, but I refused to listen.”

Her shipmates nodded. What they were suggesting was treason; if they succeeded, there would be hell to pay. Still, rescue, even by a foreign power, was better than being dead. Kennedy prayed there was someone out there.

At last, Hurst turned to her. “Someone’s scrambling our communications, ma’am. Flooding the frequency,” she said. “If there is a sub in the vicinity, they’re not going to hear us over the noise.”

Masterton’s shoulders slumped.

“Fuck,” Scotty said again. “They’re killing us.”

Kennedy glanced at her screen. “We’ve still got 12 percent. We could have a go at powering up and seeing if we can blast ourselves off this ledge. There’s a small chance we could get clear of the rock, make it to the surface.”

“And we throw open a window when we get there,” Scotty said glibly.

“We’ve got to try something,” said Masterton.

“Tell the crew to strap in,” Kennedy said.

“Ma’am,” Hurst interrupted, before they’d had a chance to move. “I’m getting something. It sounds like…like a craft.”

“Another sub?” The commodore had made it clear there was no help coming, still Kennedy’s hope flared.

Hurst frowned. “Maybe. Except…so strange…and it’s as if it’s coming from below us.”

That wasn’t possible; it must be some kind of echo caused by their position in the trench. Either that or Hurst and Kennedy were suffering from the same debilitating headaches.

Still, Kennedy rushed to her screens, punching buttons to illuminate built-in eyes on the Tartarus’s hull. She almost knocked skulls with Masterton as they searched the screens for their rescuers.

Something was definitely out there. Just nothing Kennedy had ever seen before.

Above them, near the escape hatch, hovered a lozenge-shaped object which looked to be about half the length of the Tartarus. Running along either side of the creature were a pair of frilled appendages that rippled in unison.

Kennedy squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again.

“What is that? A kraken?” Masterton breathed.

So, it wasn’t just the effects of sleep deprivation and hypoxia; Masterton could see the floating centipede, too.

“That’s mechanical, not organic,” Scotty said excitedly. He poked the screen with a finger. “See the Greek lettering on the side? That says Phaedra.”

Kennedy squinted for a better look. At this eleventh hour, the news seemed too good to be true—like a mirage, or a hallucination. A submersible like no other, and from such an unlikely source. “Last I heard, all the Greek Navy still operates is a couple of archaic diesel electrics,” Kennedy said. “How do they have something this advanced? And what is the Greek Navy doing in the Atlantic?”

“Rescuing us, I hope,” Masterton said. “Maybe they intercepted some intelligence about us and came to see for themselves. Who cares so long as they’re here?”

He had a point. Kennedy glanced at the battery readout: 11.8 percent.

“Look!” Masterton said.

Outside, in the gloomy depths of the ocean, a hatch opened on the hovering craft, and two shadowy figures emerged.

“What? They have suits to withstand pressures this deep? That’s not…that’s not…” Masterton trailed off.

He was right. It simply wasn’t possible. At these depths, the tremendous pressure of the ocean would crush a diver in seconds.

“What are they? Gods?”

“Fairy godmothers more like,” Scotty said. “Let’s get to the escape hatch.”

“Hurst. You’d better come,” Kennedy told her communications officer. “And bring your translator. My Greek is a little rusty.”

They hurried to the base of the ladder. “Let them in, Scotty.”

After three days of waiting, the three minutes it took for the hatch to drain seemed an eternity. Kennedy smoothed her hair, tugged at her grimy uniform. Finally, the hatch opened and two men wearing slick body suits descended. The first, a huge swarthy-faced man, was forced to bend his body in half to fit the submarine’s headspace.

“Hello!” Their other guest flipped back his head gear. Slim, with a seaman’s short-back-and-sides, he held out his hand.

Kennedy stepped forward and clasped it.

“Gordon DeWees of the USS Cyclops at your service, ma’am, and this is my colleague, Knoso of Mycenae.”

Kennedy snatched her hand back. “What? That’s not…you can’t…”

“Wait. Did you say the Cyclops?” Masterston said, stepping closer to Kennedy. “The cargo ship? But…that vessel disappeared in—”

“Nineteen eighteen. Yes.” DeWees’s eyes twinkled.

Kennedy’s knees weakened and she grasped a rung of the ladder. She must be dreaming—the deluded wishes of a mind addled by hypoxia. DeWees had to be over a century old, yet he looked barely out of his twenties.

Scotty must be bamboozled too because he spluttered, “This is crazy. Are we already dead?”

“Only God and the sea know what happened to the great ship,” Masterton murmured, echoing President Wilson’s comment about the Cyclops.

Except they were all seeing the same thing. And Kennedy had shaken DeWees’s hand; he was as solid as she was.

The giant spoke, his voice deep and gravelly, although Kennedy couldn’t comprehend a word.

“My friend reminds me that we haven’t got much time,” DeWees said. “We’ve come to invite you to join us. We don’t have the power to pull your ship free, but we can save your people.”

Kennedy turned to Hurst to check the translation, the woman nodding.

“Join you where exactly?” Scotty demanded.

“On Knoso’s island of Mycenae,” DeWees said. “You might call it Atlantis.”

Scotty grunted. He shook his head as if a bubble of water had collected in his eardrum.

“Atlantis is a myth,” said Hurst. “A utopian dream.”

And DeWees should be dead.

DeWees chuckled. “Actually, Atlantis does exist; I live there. Plato was correct, at least his dates were, but he was a bit off with the location. The island resides beneath the seafloor, its upper flank close to the Bermuda Triangle.” DeWees dropped his eyes. “As for it being a utopia, Atlantis is a sanctuary, that’s true. The island is beautiful, and its people are welcoming. But there is no utopia without the people you love. If you decide to join us, you can never go back. Your families will never know what happened to you.”

“I—” Kennedy paused. The Tartarus still had 10 percent power. Would that be enough to break free of the rock pinning them to the ledge? If they got to the surface under their own steam, the commodore would surely move heaven and earth to rescue the submarine. They might bob on the ocean for a few days, but the crew would get to go home. Kennedy could hold her girls in her arms again.

Or, she could use the remaining 10 percent to power the Tartarus’s life support systems while the crew evacuated to an alien submersible that would carry off them to an imaginary destination.

Kennedy almost laughed. She was literally stuck between a rock and a hard place.

“Captain,” DeWees said softly. “If we’re here, it’s because no one is coming to rescue you.”

Hurst touched Kennedy on the arm. “Ma’am? For what it’s worth, if Atlantis exists, I’d like to see it.”

Kennedy hesitated, her heart physically aching for her girls. For Cole’s breath on her cheek. For home. Kennedy straightened her back. Cole would look after their girls, but the men and women of the Tartarus were her responsibility.

She swallowed hard. “Assemble the crew, please, John. Tell them to leave everything behind.”

“And the dead? Cohen and McNaught? Rafferty?”

“Leave them.”

There was a clunk as the centipede submersible locked onto the hull of the submarine. While the crew evacuated the Tartarus in groups of four, Kennedy deleted the ship’s logs and powered down the screens. She glanced at her letters to Cole and the girls and considered adding a postscript—a private note to let them know she’d be okay—but what might her superiors do if they knew? They’d already sacrificed fifty-one lives to safeguard the technology on the Tartarus. How many more would they forfeit to uncover the fabled utopia? And what of the citizens already there?

No. Let the US Navy wonder where the crew had gone—if they ever bothered looking. She smiled bitterly and turned away.

#

Just 0.4 percent battery life remained when she entered the escape trunk, the last to leave the Tartarus. Scotty gave her a hand up, pulling her up the final rungs into the Mycenaean submersible.

“It’s modelled on the ancient triremes,” he said. “Those legs are flexible oars!” His eyes were bright, the blue tinge of hypoxia already fading.

Kennedy glanced back at the wreckage.

She turned to DeWees. “The US Navy may come looking for her. They’ll have questions. Do you…is there any way we could let her rest?”

The sailor arched a brow. “I’ll see what we can do.” He pushed some buttons and the Phaedra rang with the sound of ordinance fired.

Taking a seat next to Hurst, Kennedy strapped herself in. As the submersible pulled away, the lights of the Tartarus winked out.

Moments later, the cliff collapsed, burying the sub and all her secrets.

 

 

 

Six-String Demon

By Sebastien de Castell

 

 

Jen leaned into the Ford Galaxie 500’s voluminous trunk and hauled out her old Fender Bandmaster and the cable bag before reaching for the three guitar cases. The first held an acoustic with a cheap, glued-on pickup for amplification; the second, a decent Mexican Fender Strat.

She hesitated before taking out the third—the 1964 Rickenbacker 425. A beat-up, semi-hollow-bodied instrument that supposedly had been used by George Harrison to compose “My Sweet Lord” whilst in the throes of some sort of Hare Krishna religious ecstasy.

Jen sighed, trailing her fingers over the hard case. The Ricky was all that remained from those brief days when she’d had money and let herself believe she was going to be a rock star. But the advance on the Axe Girl record deal was gone, the recording itself deemed unmarketable. Now her life was shitty gigs in backwater towns.

Staring at the pile of gear, Jen gave one last thought about leaving the Rickenbacker in the trunk of her crapped-out car. But the asshole singer who’d called her in as a sub for his usual guitarist had been adamant about the Rickenbacker. Something about it having the right ‘vibes’ for the gig because it had once belonged to Lennon.

That made her nervous. It wouldn’t be the first time someone booked her as a side player, had her bring her best gear, and then tried to steal it after the show. Still, he’d been pretty insistent, and she did need the cash.

She loaded the amp, cable bag, and three guitar cases onto a foldable dolly she kept in the trunk, before hauling everything down the street towards the address she’d been given.

#

The house was smaller than Jen expected, not much more than a two-story box seated between larger—and substantially nicer—homes. She hated house-party gigs. Getting harassed was an occupational hazard at the best of times. The ass grabbing was always worse at house parties.

“There you are,” called a voice from the shadows beneath the hedge fence. At first, he appeared as nothing more than the red dot of a cigarette and the stench of stale Marlboros. The singer, then—only rock singers still thought it was cool to smoke.

“Car trouble,” she explained.

He stepped into the streetlamp’s sick light, thin limbed with stringy gray hair that probably hadn’t seen a comb since the black leather pants and vest he wore had still been cool. He was older than he’d sounded on the phone.

“Did you bring the Rickenbacker?” he asked.

She stopped pulling the dolly and nodded towards the case on top. “Still don’t know why it’s so important.”

“You’ll find out soon enough, Axe Girl.” He extended a hand. “Johnny Jacks.”

He hadn’t given the last name on the phone. Johnny Jacks. Good grief.

“Jen Farmer,” she said taking his hand. “Please don’t call me Axe Girl.” He held her fingers a fraction too long.

Two others sidled from the darkness. The man was young, early twenties at most, with tight curly hair and a thick-lipped smile.

“Levon,” Johnny said. “Drummer.”

A woman about Jen’s age stomped out the remains of a cigarette on the front lawn before joining them. “Lucy,” she said. “Lucy Bottom.”

The bass player, no doubt, hence the “Bottom.” These people might have been time travelers from the late seventies except even then, bands weren’t so on the nose.

“So,” Jen said, nodding towards the house. “What’s the gig? I never did get your song list.”

Johnny shrugged and headed for the front door. “Song lists are for feebs.”

#

Dragging her amp’s head, cab, plus the cable bag and two guitars up the walkway and through the door—only to be informed the gig was on the top floor—worsened Jen’s mood. The others left her to carry the equipment up in stages, starting with hauling the guitars and cable bag up the narrow flight of stairs to a tight hallway and then going back for the amp and cabinet.

When she passed an open bedroom, she caught sight of a man and woman sitting on the bed. They looked to be about Jen’s age, maybe thirty-five or so, and could have been Sears catalogue models except for their haggard looks and the tears running down the man’s cheeks.

“Sorry,” Jen mumbled when they glanced up to see her staring. She hoisted the amp head onto her hip and shuffled down the hall towards the next set of stairs going to the top floor.

“Are you…”

Jen turned to find the woman standing behind her, one hand on the doorframe of the bedroom as if she might suddenly run back inside and slam the door shut.

“Guitar player,” Jen said, then, not knowing what else to say, she asked, “Big party tonight?”

The woman stared, a horrified expression on her face. “A party?”

“Don’t mind her,” Johnny Jacks said, striding the hallway towards them. “Axe Girl here is…eccentric.” He gently shunted the woman out of the way, whispering as he passed Jen, “Never talk to the clients.”

“Whatever,” Jen said, following Jacks up the stairs. It wasn’t unusual for a band leader to insist that only he communicate with the clients, but it wasn’t as if she’d been trying to book herself for the next party.

“You’ll set up in there,” Johnny said when they reached the top. He pointed to a door on the left at the hallway’s far end. A sliver of yellow light crept from beneath the closed, peeling timber panel.

“Why up here?” she asked, guessing at the size of the room. “Isn’t it going to be kind of tight in there for dancing?”

“Nobody’s going to be doing any dancing tonight,” the skeletal singer replied. “Just get the rest of your gear and set up on the window side of that room. Lucy and Levon will be up with their stuff in a few minutes. Right now, I’ve got to warm up my voice.” He turned to go then stopped. “And when you get in there, remember what I said: Nev—”

“Yeah, yeah. ‘Never talk to the clients.’”

When she opened the door, only a small desk lamp provided dim illumination. The room was even smaller than she’d figured. “Great,” she said.

“Are you the band?”

Opposite the door, a single bed was pressed up against the wall. A kid, maybe eight or nine years old, lay under the covers. He wore some kind of beanie and she couldn’t see any hair underneath. Pale features. Wan expression. Probably chemo or radiation. Now, the whole scene made a lot more sense: the parents looking exhausted and miserable, setting up inside a bedroom on the top floor, and of course, the fact that the aging rocker hadn’t given her any details about the show. Probably the kid’s cancer treatments were going poorly, and this was a special present for him.

Geez, kid, she thought. You make your last wish to hear crusty old Johnny Jacks croon out his one hit song and collection of mediocre follow-ups? No accounting for taste.

“Are you the guitar player?” the kid asked. “Guitar’s my favorite.”

Jen held up the acoustic case and smiled. “Me too. You ever learn to play?”

The boy shook his head.

“Want a quick lesson?” She had done two years of afternoons in the back room of a local guitar shop teaching aspiring high school rockers and over-the-hill wannabes how to play their favorite AC/DC covers.

The kid in the bed pushed himself up to a sitting position. “Is it hard?”

Jen set the acoustic case down and flipped open the clasps. “Easy-peasey. You like rock?”

He shook his head.

“Metal? Pop? Jazz? Folk?” Apparently, none of those interested him, because his head just kept swiveling back and forth. “Help me out, kid. What kind of music do you like?”

“I don’t like music,” he replied.

She tried to guess at what she’d done to trigger this sudden bout of petulance. “You don’t like music?”

“No.”

“Everybody likes music, kid.”

“What the fuck are you doing?” Johnny Jacks demanded. His sudden appearance at the door and the snarl on his lips nearly sent her tripping over her guitar case.

“Just setting up.”

He stormed in and grabbed her by the arm, his long, thin fingers digging into her skin right through her jacket. He hauled her outside the room, kicking the door shut behind them. “I told you never to talk to the clients.”

Jen hesitated. She needed the money from this gig, but she also needed to lay down the law. She took a deep breath, then met Jacks’s eyes and served up the death stare she’d learned from another guitar player years ago—the look you gave band leaders to make them realize they’d crossed a line.

“Take. Your. Fucking. Hand. Off. Me.”

Jacks let go, smiling as he did. It was one of those asshole ex-rocker smiles that said he thought he was still too sexy to have some chick with a guitar tell him off, but if that didn’t work, he’d plead harmless old man.

She kept glaring. “I’m not kidding. Don’t ever touch me again. I’m here to play guitar, that’s it. I don’t want any of your shit. I’m not your date. We’re not going to flirt.”

“But you’ll actually play the guitar, right?” he asked.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Just go set up your goddamned rig and don’t let me catch you talking to the clients again.”

“The kid talked to me. What was I supposed to do? Tell him to shut up?”

“If he talks to you again, pretend he isn’t there. You’re here to play the songs I tell you, and then leave. Until you hear otherwise from me, mind your own business. In exchange, you get three hundred bucks, and I promise not to look at your ass when you’re soloing. Think you can handle that?”

“Whatever,” she said and went back into the room.

Creep.

#

For the next half hour she followed Jacks’s instructions to the letter, plugging in her amp, checking her strings, tuning both the acoustic and the Strat, all the while ignoring the kid.

“How long have you been playing?” he asked. When that got no response he said, “It’s my birthday, you know.”

“Yeah? How old—” she stopped herself. Fucking Jacks and his stupid rules.

“I’m going to be nine. The doctors said I’d never live past five, but they were wrong.”

She looked at the pale skin stretched over bony features. He may have beaten the doctor’s predictions, but he wasn’t likely to see ten.

Jen set down the tuned acoustic and then yanked the patch cable out, plugging it into the Ricky. It only took a couple of seconds to tune—that guitar almost never lost its tuning. She flipped on the standby switch on the amp and was going to do a couple of test chords, but Jacks appeared at the door again.

“Leave it.”

“I need to set my amp sounds,” she said.

“Do it with the acoustic and the Strat. Don’t play the Rickenbacker until I tell you. You’ll play the acoustic and then the Strat. If and when I tell you to, you’ll bring forth the Rickenbacker.”

“Bring forth?” Who talks like that? She set the Ricky back in its case and plugged the acoustic back in, strumming a few chords from “With a Little Help from My Friends.” She glanced at the kid to see if he liked it. He stuck his tongue out at her.

I’m surrounded by heathens, she thought.

“Meet me downstairs when you’re done,” Jacks told her.

“For what?”

“Band meeting, of course.”

Great. A speech about who was boss mixed with some pontification on his personal philosophy of live performance.

This was going to be the gig from hell.

#

“The first rule,” Jacks said, staring at each of them in turn, “is that once I start the song, you don’t stop playing until I give you the signal.” His gaze swept the other two. “What’s the rule?”

Levon scuffed a toe on the kitchen’s linoleum floor and Lucy Bottom slumped against a cabinet, but they dutifully repeated his words: “Don’t stop playing until Johnny gives the signal.”

“What is this?” Jen asked, suddenly irritated past the point of caution. “Some kind of fucking cult? You don’t think we know how to play in a goddamned cover band?”

Jacks, far from being angered by her rebellion, seemed heartened. “Cool. Okay, so what’s rule number two?”

“Oh, for fuck’s—” Shut up, Jen, she thought. So what if he’s a weirdo? They’re all weirdos, and you need the money.

Levon seemed eager to please, or at least to get that over with. “Don’t pay attention to the audience.”

“And why don’t we pay attention to the audience?” Jacks asked, with all the patronizing smugness of a primary school teacher.

“Because the audience is the enemy,” Lucy replied.

“Good,” Jacks said, wrapping his arms around Levon’s and Lucy’s shoulders.

Jen no longer had any trouble understanding how Johnny Jacks had descended into playing private parties for sick kids.

“Oh,” she said. “What about requests?”

“No requests,” the skinny singer replied. “That ain’t how the game is played.” He locked eyes with her. “We clear on that, Axe Girl?”

“Please don’t call me that.”

His stare remained. “Clear?”

“Fine. Whatever.”

“Good.” He removed his arms from the bass player and drummer and stuck his hand out, middle and ring fingers pressed into his palm, index and pinky straight out like devil horns. “Join with me, brother and sisters.” Lucy and Levon complied, and then all three had their hands out making the idiotic gesture that Jen hadn’t seen anyone over high school age do since…well, high school. “Axe Girl,” he said.

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“Just do it,” Levon urged.

“No.” She was all set to launch into a tirade because at this point sleeping in her car seemed better than playing with these psychos, but then Johnny Jacks reached his free hand into the back pocket of his skinny black jeans and pulled out a wad of bills.

“Three hundred, like we agreed,” he said, thrusting the money at her. “You decide to walk from here on out, you keep the cash.”

She reached for the wad, but he pulled his hand up. “But first…”

Jen stared at the money, then at her fellow musicians with their devil-horn salute, then back at the money. “You’re really going to make me do this?”

“Please, Jen,” Lucy chimed in. “It’s important.”

Ugh. I’m going to hate myself in the morning. She stuck out her hand and made the gesture, shaking her arm for emphasis.

Jacks grinned like the self-satisfied eight-year-old he was. “All right, my babies, time to rock this shit all the way to the gates of hell!”

#

“It’s MY birthday, and I don’t want any stupid music,” the kid declared as Jen, Lucy, and Levon got their instruments ready. Jacks stood by the bedroom window facing away from them as if he were a superstar meditating before leaping onto an arena stage to sing for fifty thousand fans.

“It’s okay, Kyle,” the kid’s mother said from the doorway. “Just try it and see what you think.”

“No! They’re shit. I can already tell.” He pointed at Jen. “Just look at her. Bet she can’t solo worth a damn.”

Little prick.

“Don’t be like that, kiddo,” the father said. He stepped past his wife into the room and instantly Jacks turned, eyes blazing.

“Get the fuck out. You know the deal.”

Jen fully expected the guy to take three strides into the room and punch Jacks in the face, but instead he bowed his head and backed out. “Sorry. Sorry, I just—”

“And close the door.”

Jen looked at Levon, waiting for some explanation of this insanity, but the drummer just shrugged with a “Hey, takes all kinds” sort of look. The kid—Kyle—apparently found it all hilariously funny.

“Did you see that?” He looked at Jen. “Daddy’s got no balls. Mom says it all the time to her friends.”

The level of disfunction in this household was terrifying in its ordinariness. Jen blocked it out by focusing on retuning on her acoustic and waiting for Jacks to tell her what the first song would be.

The singer paced the length of each wall of the room like a panther looking for gaps in his cage. When he got to the kid’s bed, he looked down at Kyle. The boy shrank under his blankets, which was a perfectly natural thing to do when faced with an emaciated, corpse-like old man in skinny jeans, with long gray hair hanging wild, and eyes looking like something from an old Iron Maiden album cover.

“Don’t,” the boy said.

“Shut up, motherfucker,” was Johnny’s reply.

“Hey man, come on,” Jen said. “Don’t.”

He turned his head and shot her a look that made her slightly more afraid for herself than the kid. “Did I tell you to talk?”

The wad of cash in her pocket was telling her to pack up her guitar and walk, but Lucy put a hand on her arm.

“It’s okay, just go with it.”

Five minutes, she told herself. One song. Then if this shit didn’t get real normal real quick, she was out of here.

Jacks left the kid’s bedside and came to stand with the rest of the band. “Grave Digger,” he said. “The Joe Cocker version.”

Not actually the worst choice in the world, Jen thought, waiting for Levon to count in with his drum sticks. Cocker’s version of Procol Harum’s barely known B-side love song was slow and soulful, a little on the raspy side, but that would probably suit Jacks’s voice. She got her fingers into place to play the opening riff, but Johnny started without waiting for the count or for her to play.

With a thick, deep and dirty voice, he began. “Where…did we bury…those kisses…long entombed…”

And then everything went straight to hell.

#

It’s hard for the human voice to overcome even as small a PA system as Jacks had brought, but the kid in the bed had no trouble doing it. The scream he unleashed on them made Jen’s ears feel like they were going to start bleeding. She nearly dropped the guitar, figuring for sure the kid was having some kind of seizure. But Levon kept the beat going steady, and Lucy, still holding down the bass line, jostled Jen with her arm to tell her not to stop playing.

“Please!” Kyle wailed. “Make him stop! Make him stop!”

“Lend…me your hand…” Jacks went on singing, with all the intensity and preposterous rock poses as if the tiny bedroom was filled with fifty thousand screaming teenage girls throwing their panties at the aging rocker.

If the chords hadn’t been so dead simple, Jen would’ve dropped the rhythm for sure, because at this point, she couldn’t decide whether to keep playing or call the paramedics. Or the cops. Why the fuck were the kid’s parents not kicking open the door?

The band hit the first chorus and Kyle started shaking, his scrawny hands gripping the sides of his mattress. Soon the whole bed was rattling, and foamy spit dripped out the sides of his mouth. Still Jacks kept singing and the band kept playing.

“I’m your gra-ay-ay-ve digger…”

The screams got worse, like an insect burrowing deep inside Jen’s ear canals. The kid hurled himself up and down on the mattress, the bed’s metal legs carving scratches into the wood floor. She looked around, hoping to see the solution to all this insanity even as her fingers kept finding the chords on the guitar neck.

Stop playing, she told herself. Nothing’s worth whatever the hell these cult psychos are doing to this kid.

Jacks lifted a fist high, then jammed his elbow down—the sign to end the song. Had they gotten past the last chorus? All she could hear was the sound of the kid shrieking his lungs out. Her eyes were blurred from tears she hadn’t realized she was shedding.

“Scream out the Demon,” Jacks called out.

“What?”

“Motley Crüe,” Lucy whispered fiercely.

Jen couldn’t remember that tune, so she had to wait for Lucy to start it up on the bass and followed along as best she could. Levon kept a heavy beat going on the kick drum, punching in with the background vocals.

“Yes. Shout. Scream the demon out!”

If she had any doubts about this being some perverse form of child abuse, they were gone when Johnny Jacks started dancing wildly about the room, grinding out the lead vocal in some mad, gesticulating performance that freaked Jen out so much it took until the second verse before she found something else that freaked her out even more: the kid.

Kyle stopped shaking and sat up in his bed, a grin on his face as wide as if he’d just shoplifted his first nudie magazine. His eyes had gone milky white because the eyeballs were rolled up into his head and he was laughing so hard she could hear him over Lucy’s bass line and Levon’s drumming.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked Lucy when she couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Hell is what’s going on. Now shut the fuck up and keep playing if you don’t want to end up there yourself.”

Kyle bobbed his head back and forth, as though lost in an ecstatic trance. Jacks sang louder and harder, like the two were locked in some sort of deadly struggle and trying to prove who was in control.

They hit the end of that song. Without even calling it out, Jacks started singing Ramble On by Led Zeppelin. Fortunately, this was a tune she knew, and so kicked in smoothly with Jimmy Page’s riffs.

Jacks turned to her, eyes blazing, and shouted, “Not the acoustic, you idiot. Switch guitars!” Jen let Lucy and Levon hold up the rhythm as she put the acoustic down and reached for the Ricky. “Not the Ricky!” Jacks shouted. She put that down, grabbed the Strat, and kicked into a solo.

Kyle was on his hands and knees on the bed, right near the bottom edge like a dog getting ready to leap off. His eyes looked nowhere in particular but he sniffed the air as if he could smell her playing.

“Bitch got no soul,” he whispered.

Whispered?

How in hell could she possibly hear the kid whisper over the music?

“Play faster, slut,” he growled, and it sounded as if he stood on a stool right behind her, his lips touching her earlobe. Jen shivered and the ring finger of her left hand missed the fret. The buzz it produced was like a thousand wasps stinging her face, swarming inside her mouth and over her eyes.

“Keep your shit together, Axe Girl,” Jacks said. He stood right in front of her, making her feel trapped. Caged. Still, she pushed through the solo until Johnny picked up the vocal again. By the time the song was done, she was dripping sweat. Her shirt clung to her chest and torso, her jeans were soaked and too tight around her waist, as though her body had turned into nothing but sagging layers of skin and fat.

Jacks sang three more songs, and by the end of the third she couldn’t remember what the first two had been. All the while, Kyle raced around the tiny circumference prescribed by his twin mattress, alternating between screaming, and chortling at them.

When Johnny signaled her to play a solo again, the kid pulled down his pajama pants and pissed on the floor, wiggling his hips and sending the stream sputtering into the air towards them. A droplet of something landed on Jen’s lip and she started to gag.

“It’s just sweat,” Lucy told her, thumb slapping the bottom string of her bass. “He can’t touch us yet. Just don’t drop any more notes.”

Crazy cult assholes, Jen thought, but she didn’t stop playing; she was too scared. Whatever was wrong with these people, she couldn’t be sure someone wouldn’t slit her throat if she stopped going along with the game. So, she kept shredding on the Stratocaster, barely aware of what key she was in.

“Four more bars,” Johnny called out.

Jen looked up. Kyle lay flat on his back. Her fingers flew up the neck looking for a passably decent way out of the solo, but as she did, she finally stopped thinking everyone around her was crazy and started wondering if she was the one who’d lost her mind, because Kyle was now floating three feet above the bed.

“Shit!” she yelled and dropped her pick.

The kid fell back to the mattress. Jacks turned on her, fists clenched. She flinched involuntarily thinking the skinny freak was about to hit her. But he didn’t. He just gave a nod to Levon who train crashed the end of the song.

Then, for the first time since they’d started, the room was silent. No drums, no instruments, no Johnny Jacks dancing around singing raucously, no kid screaming.

Silence.

Jen was so exhausted she could barely keep on her feet. “What the fuck was that?”

“That was the first set,” Jacks said.

#

Jen still had the Strat hanging off her hunched shoulders as she hurried from the room. She should’ve packed it up along with her other guitars and the amp, but by then she was too terrified to do anything but skulk down the stairs and make for the front door.

“Smoke break?”

Jacks stood in the shadows out on the front lawn, smoke from his joint already making her gag. Her ears were still buzzing. She couldn’t draw a decent breath to save her life.

“What the fuck was that in there?” she demanded.

“What do you think that was?”

She took the Strat off her shoulder, partly because it was getting heavy and partly because she might need something to hit Jacks with. “Tell me it wasn’t a…shit, I can’t believe I’m saying this. Tell me this isn’t some kind of exorcism.”

He took a drag from his joint. “Of course, it’s an exorcism. What else would it be?”

She snatched the joint from him and sucked in a long drag that made her head spin. She’d stopped smoking years ago. “And you’re what? Trying to force it out with rock music?”

He accepted the joint back and gave her a toothy grin. “What the fuck else would we use to get rid of it? Prayers? And don’t waste your time,” he added, dropping the remains of the joint on the lawn and crushing it with the heel of his boot.

“With what?”

“Telling yourself you imagined it. It’s real, kid.”

She wanted to call him a liar but doubted that would do any good. “Let’s say…let’s say for a second, I believed any of it. Are we done? You prayed the gay away or sang the evil out or whatever?”

“Not fucking likely. It’s a three-set show, Axe Girl.”

“Stop calling me that! And what do you mean, a three-set show? What happens now?”

He started back up the stairs to the house. “We got his attention. Now we kick the shit out of him until he decides to leave for greener pastures.” He stopped at the top of the steps. “You coming?”

“What happens if I don’t?”

The back of his shoulders rose and fell. “Who knows? Maybe he’ll live. Maybe he’ll die. Maybe everyone inside that house gets consigned to some living hell.”

“What? You can’t put that shit on me! I’m just a guitar player!”

Jacks just stood there facing the front door. “Not even a particularly good one from what I’ve seen.” His hand wrapped around the doorknob and turned. “If you stay, you’d better get real fucking good, real fucking soon, Axe Girl.”

#

She followed Jacks inside the house without being sure why.

Fuck, maybe I’m possessed now.

Through the hallway and up the interior stairs to the second floor, where she had to step over Kyle’s parents who were huddled on the floor holding each other and crying. They looked shell-shocked. Part of her sympathized with their plight. The rest of her wanted to kick them in the ribs until they got off their asses and did something.

“Don’t judge what you don’t understand,” Jacks said, as if he could read her thoughts.

Inside the bedroom, Kyle still lay flat on his back, seemingly unconscious, but when she walked by him, he said, “Gonna take you, baby. Gonna take you all the way down with me tonight.”

“Don’t know that song.” She plugged the Strat back into her tuner and plucked the bottom E string. She couldn’t believe how out of tune the guitar was. She’d never smashed the strings that hard before. It was a miracle they hadn’t all broken.

“What now?” she asked Jacks.

“First set was to get its attention,” he replied. “Now we soften him up, see if he can stand the heat.”

“And if he can?” She watched Kyle roll onto his stomach, then push against the mattress with his hands, his torso rising up like a cobra.

Jacks raised an eyebrow. “Just keep playing.”

“And what if we can’t?” They hadn’t even started up again yet and already she was more tired than she’d ever been at a gig. “What happens when we run out of steam?”

Jacks walked over to the bed and leaned down going eye to eye with Kyle. “Then this little fucker eats our souls.”

#

They were halfway through the second set when things got weirder—and worse. For the first few songs, Kyle stomped all over his bed acting for all the world like a petulant child determined to get their attention. He said things Jen shouldn’t have been able to hear over the music.

“You really believe all this garbage they’ve been feeding you, Baby Jen?” he asked as she was finished off an improvised solo during some blues song Jacks had called out. “I mean, which is more likely?” Kyle went on. “That, after millennia of exorcisms being proven to be bunkum, you happen to find yourself in the middle of a real one? Or that two desperate, gullible parents fooled themselves into believing the source of their son’s cancer is possession by the devil?”

Jen did her best to ignore him, which he didn’t seem to mind because he had no end of ways to get her attention back.

“Just look around,” he commanded.

Her solo done and Jacks back to crooning his lead vocal, she found she couldn’t stop herself from doing as the kid suggested. Signs of religious fervor were everywhere. The cross over the bed, family photos arranged into a cross on the wall, the sword-wielding angel bookends on the shelf. Books with titles like, Healing with God’s Power and No Such Thing as Coincidence: Seven Signs Your Child is Possessed.

“See what I mean?” Kyle asked. “These people are crazy.”

He stood on the edge of his mattress again, ignoring Jacks’s raucous performance and undoing the buttons of his pajama top. On his chest were several burns, all the shape of a crucifix inside a circle.

Shit, Jen thought. They branded the poor kid.

An elbow jostled her in the ribs.

“Focus,” Lucy said.

Jen stumbled over the next chords trying to get back on track, but her fingers felt awkward, swollen. She looked at her hands to find the skin a sickly white, the veins exposed like those of a corpse pulled from the water. Her mouth filled with bile that she tried to spit out, but it clogged her throat, choking her. Only after forcing a violent cough did she manage to spew it out onto the floor and all over her clothes.

“Keep playing,” Lucy warned. “The music’s the only thing keeping him out of you.”

With horrifying, stilted slowness, she forced her fingers to take the shape of the next chord and strummed. The nausea subsided a little, and her fingers found their positions on the fretboard again.

For the next six songs, Jen tried to ignore everything she heard from the bed, focusing only on the tactile sensations of her right hand, holding the pick and slamming it against the strings, the dull thud of Levon’s kick drum coming up through her feet, and the way Lucy’s bass sent vibrations through her whole body. All the while, Johnny Jacks sang his heart out in a pitched battle against something Jen couldn’t see but was utterly and terrifyingly aware of.

Kyle gesticulated at her, using his body to get the attention his words could no longer draw from her—not that he shut up at all. He shouted, pleaded, moaned, cackled, and made every other use of the apparatus of a boy’s throat he could.

Somewhere in that second set, Jen Farmer started believing in the Devil.

#

Johnny called a halt to the second set after just half an hour, and that, even more than the haunted look in his eyes, told her something was wrong. As her guitar’s last ringing chord died, the singer stumbled out of the room, leaving the three of them behind.

“Come on,” Levon said, leading her out. He, too, looked shell-shocked.

Lucy Bottom was crying, which seemed incongruous with the sureness of her bass playing.

At the bottom of the stairs, Jacks spoke in hushed tones to the parents. Despite the quiet, Jen heard the raggedness in the singer’s voice. Kyle’s parents shook their heads, pleading with Jacks.

“I’m sorry,” he just kept saying.

“What’s going on?” Jen asked Levon.

“Johnny can’t cut the thing loose.”

“So, what now?”

The drummer shuffled past her without answering and stepped into the little bathroom in the hallway. He slammed the door shut, and a moment later she heard him puking.

“Lucy?” she asked.

The bass player walked out the front door. Jen followed.

“Sorry you got pulled into this shit,” Lucy said.

Jen sat on the front steps next to her. “Would’ve been nice to get a heads-up beforehand.”

Lucy stared off at the empty street ahead of them. “Wanted: guitar player for exorcism, must be able to improvise in all styles and fight demons.”

“What’s really going on in there?”

“What do you think is going on?”

Jen balked at the question, finding herself unexpectedly on the defensive. She’d been prepared for Lucy to rattle off some nonsense about demons and possession—which would have let Jen scoff or deny it or maybe even allow it might be possible.

“The kid’s fucked up,” was the only answer she could come up with that neither denied the evidence of her eyes nor admitted that the thing poking at her guts seemed only to lack her belief before it would crawl right into her throat and choke her from the inside.

Lucy shrugged. “Let’s say that’s all it is. Let’s throw out all the…weird shit for a second, and say this is some unusual mental disorder.”

“I can live with that.”

“Fine. So how do you fix a kid with that kind of problem?”

“Drugs. Therapy. Um…electric shocks?”

Lucy spit onto the grass. “They tried all that. None of it worked.”

Jen searched for another answer. When nothing suggested itself, she asked, “So rock music is the last resort? I mean, what’s the…” Crap. She really knew nothing about psychology, neurology, or pretty much anything with an ‘ology’ appended to it. “How’s it supposed to work?”

Lucy held up a hand, palm parallel to the porch, and shook it up and down. “Music vibrates the air, right? Our brains turn waves into sound. But when those sounds take the shape of music, they vibrate other things, too.” She placed her hand low down on Jen’s stomach. “Here. And it turns out, this is also where those…whatever they are that can take possession of a human being…get inside us.”

“You’re back to talking voodoo shit.”

Lucy gave her a wry smile. “I tried to let you hold onto your hang-ups as long as I could. From here on out, it gets freaky.”

Freaky. Jesus Christ. Understatement of the year. “Fine. Let’s say I come along for the ride here, you’re saying the music—”

“Not any music. The right songs, the right intensity, hitting all the right resonances. That’s the only way to shake loose whatever’s inside that kid.”

“So how do you figure out all those ‘right’ elements?”

“I don’t.” The bass player looked back up the steps where light from the hallway seeped onto the porch. “Johnny’s the only one who can do it.”

That, as much as every other weird thing that had been said tonight, was almost the hardest thing to believe.

“A rock ’n’ roll exorcist.”

“Only one in the lower forty-eight,” Lucy confirmed. “There’s a guy up in Alaska, but he never leaves the state.”

“So, you’ve seen this work?” Jen asked. “You’ve seen people cured?”

“One time, yeah. Not a kid, though. An old woman in a nursing home.”

“You cured her?”

“Yep. She died peacefully in her sleep a week later.”

“A week? One week?”

“Hey, it’s better than nothing. Besides, where she was headed was worse.”

Jen chewed on that for a minute. “So, here you are, in some suburban house, crying your eyes out between sets while Levon hurls up his guts, and your one success story is an old woman who ended up dying a week later. Why would you even bother?”

Lucy looked away. “Because I’ve seen what happens the other times.” Still not meeting Jen’s eyes, she rose and trudged back up the stairs into the house. “You should probably go home, Jen. The third set’s always the worst.”

#

Jen was halfway to the kid’s bedroom when a visibly strung-out Johnny Jacks stopped her in the hall.

“Just wait here,” he said. “Me and Levon’ll pack up your gear for you.”

She’d been heading to the bedroom to do precisely that. She’d been prepared for an argument with Johnny to get her stuff. Figured he’d go all Jesus on her and give a hundred reasons why she should stay and help him fight the good fight over the kid’s soul. But Jacks just looked at her as if she was some dumb bystander he was pushing out of the way of oncoming traffic.

“Who says I’m leaving?” she asked.

The aging rocker’s sneer made its way to his face, but for a second, she saw the other thing in his eyes—the thing she’d never expected to see there: hope.

“Not your war, kid.”

Jen had played guitar since she was fifteen years old. Even then, her parents, her teachers, and most of all, every band she’d been in, had said she’d started too late; she didn’t have that ‘spark’; her playing was workmanlike at best and ‘girly’ at worst. She’d practiced every day but it was never enough; played until her fingers had turned numb and then gone through harrowing visits to a neurologist who’d told her she needed to lighten up on the practicing or risk permanent nerve damage.

“Besides,” the doctor had said, “I thought you rock musicians weren’t about perfection. Isn’t it all about soul?”

Soul. Yeah, Jen could’ve used some soul in her playing.

“So, you figure this ‘war’ belongs to you?” she asked Jacks.

He licked his lips, not like a perv but like somebody’s uncle trying to figure out a nice way to say a kid wasn’t ready for football tryouts. “You didn’t sign up for this. It’s the worst case I’ve ever seen. Three hundred dollars is a lousy payday for what comes next.”

“Then why are you going back in there?”

He ran a hand through greasy graying hair. “I’m old, kid. If I go down fighting, well, I wasn’t going to live that long anyway. I don’t try? Then what’s the point of living?”

Lucy and Levon squeezed past her in the hallway and headed into the kid’s bedroom.

“What about them?” Jen asked. “Why are they going back?”

“No idea,” he replied. There was a subtle break in his voice, and his eyes were wet. “Until five seconds ago, I figured they were going to leave.” He patted her on the shoulder and headed towards the bedroom. “It was good playing with you, kid. Couple of times in that second set I heard a lion clawing at the doors of her cage getting ready to bust out. Don’t ever listen to anyone who says you’re second rate, Jen Farmer.”

He left her standing there. A lion clawing at the doors of her cage. Twenty years of playing guitar and that was the only time anyone had described her playing in a way that made sense. Of course, given what a manipulative prick Jacks was, there was a decent chance he’d said it just to see if he could make her stick around.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Hey, old man,” she called.

Jacks poked his head out of the bedroom. “Yeah?”

She pushed him out of the way and entered the bedroom.

The air was thick with a kind of green-black haze that stank of every kind of death and decay. Lucy and Levon were barely on their feet, coughing from the stench and trying not to look at the eight-year-old boy who floated, cross-legged, two feet above his mattress. Particles of puke, shit, and urine floated around him like Saturn’s rings.

When she walked in, Kyle said, “You’re the one I’m going to rip apart first, Jennifer.”

She plugged the amp cable into her guitar, not even bothering to tune the Strat, but instead turning the gain all the way up.

“The name’s Axe Girl, you little shit.”

#

“No more covers,” Jacks said. “No more playing it safe.”

Levon started up a heavy, nasty beat on the drums. Lucy plucked a steady rhythm of straight eighths on the second fret of the bottom string of her bass, but Jen knew the key wasn’t going to stay in F-sharp; this was going to be E all the way—open strings wherever possible, the strongest vibrations with a standard tuning.

Jen turned the Strat towards her amp, not touching anything but the whammy bar, letting the feedback build up. It was such a cheesy, guy-liner-and-black-leather-pants thing to do. But fuck it: fighting a demon called for a little showing off.

“Well, all right, motherfuckers,” Jacks declared, the last syllable swooping up from a low baritone note all the way to a high tenor range that shook the bedroom windows. “Show me what you got!”

Jen blasted into an E-9 chord with an almost funk rhythm that ran counter to what the others were playing but would’ve made Prince proud. The effect was both dissonant and yet somehow sweet; the wrong move that sounded right.

In other words, rock ’n’ roll.

The room shook, though whether from their performance or from Kyle she couldn’t tell. The boy’s parents stood together in the doorway watching with impotent desperation.

“Help me, Daddy,” Kyle whimpered.

His plea would have been more convincing if his various secretions weren’t twisting and turning in the air, buzzing around the room like a swarm of wasps—and if he wasn’t giggling quite so much.

Jacks sang with a passion and furor that would have captivated an entire football stadium. So much so that it took a minute before Jen realized he wasn’t singing in English. She wasn’t entirely sure it was any kind of language.

But Levon’s drumbeats faltered. His upper body lilted back and forth as he struggled to keep up the beat. When he looked up, she could only see the whites of his eyes.

“What’s happening to him?” Jen asked Lucy.

“He’s losing it.” She slapped the drummer across the face. It didn’t do any good. “Come on, Levon, stay with me, brother.”

The rhythm from the drums started to drift then faded completely. The last trace of Levon disappeared.

“Hey, ladies,” he grinned at them, tongue lolling from one side of his mouth like a dog’s as foamy drool slid down his chin.

“Fuck!” Lucy cried stumbling away. She tripped over her own patch cable and fell, the bass giving a cacophonous crash that crushed the music, breaking it apart like stale bread.

“Ain’t givin’ it up,” Johnny Jacks continued to sing. “Ain’t givin’ it up to you.” What had been a gravelly, bluesy voice before had become ragged.

Jen slammed a power chord on the guitar then reached to help Lucy up. The bass player took her hand but started to drag her down to the floor. Like Levon, her eyes showed only the whites, and her grin was anything but human.

“Come play with me, Jenny,” she cooed.

Jen yanked away, lost her pick but managed to hit the strings with her fingernails to give Johnny something to sing over. He fell to his knees, the way a crooner would during the big emotional moment of the song, but his performance was lifeless, barely audible above Jen’s guitar and the hiss that had risen to take the place of the rest of the music.

That hiss…

She’d thought it was the usual noise that came through guitar and bass amps when you weren’t playing, but this was different. Feral. Gleeful. Like an ocean wave, it crested higher and higher before crashing down on them, drowning everything in its path.

“Come on, Jenny, give it up, girl,” Lucy said with someone else’s voice.

“On your best day you couldn’t play worth a damn, baby,” Levon crooned.

A creak from the bed made her turn. Kyle was crawling forward on his mattress, eyes milky white except for pulsing strands of red like blood vessels bursting one after another. A rabid rat preparing to pounce on a dying cat.

Kyle’s parents entered the room, no longer crying, but instead humming with the stilted, painful buzz of wasps. They ran their hands along Kyle’s back, the gesture not loving but obedient. Sensuous. Perverse.

They continued past the bed and kneeled in front of Johnny Jacks, opening their mouths wide—wider than their jaws were meant to—and Jen heard something first click then crack wetly. Their lower jaws hung loose and wagged as they took turns breathing on Johnny, a sick, urine-stenched haze that wafted over him, making him choke.

Johnny, still on his knees, turned to her. He’d stopped singing, but his lips formed a single word.

“Run.”

#

The urge to flee was overwhelming. Jen was alone in a room of human bodies driven by something not at all human. They looked at her and grinned, reaching out with sickly white limbs, the skin riddled with veins gone black and green as if the blood itself had been replaced with bile.

Johnny Jacks flailed, trying to shove away the mother and father. They dodged his feeble blows effortlessly.

“Don’t go givin’ it up,” he said—no, sang. It was weak and pathetic, not in any real key, but still it made the parents snarl at him. Their upper lips curled even as their broken jaws shuddered.

How he could manage even that much, Jen couldn’t fathom. Everything in the room stank. Everything was too hot and slick, and sweat dripped all over her, the salt burning her eyes. The right leg of her jeans was soaked, and her own piss dripped into her sock. Every time she tried to touch the strings her fingers felt like sausages left out in the sun, so hot and bloated, as if the skin would break apart and rotten meat would ooze out.

“Give ’em the shit,” Johnny sang feebly. “Give ’em the shit like ya never gave it before.”

Give ’em the shit? Like she had any shit to give. She’d never known real fear, the certainty that everything you believed about yourself belonged to someone else, and that all was left was an empty vessel, waiting—no, begging—to be filled.

“Yeah, baby,” Kyle said, crawling on the floor towards her, more like a spider than a rat now. “Gonna fill you up just right.”

She looked around, panic shaking her loose. There had to be a weapon here somewhere. The crucifix above the kid’s bed was out of reach. She doubted it would do any good even if she could reach it.

Only one cross I’ve ever needed, a small, rebellious part of her whispered. The cross I’m wearing. Her gaze fell to the Stratocaster—not some religious symbol to pray to, but her true cross waiting to be played. She’d never really thought of her guitars that way. It had always just been her instrument. Such a dull, lifeless word. The guitar had always been more of an enemy she had to force to her will than a partner. Now, it was all she had.

Kyle slithered past his parents and Johnny, and past Lucy and Levon, who genuflected before him. The boy floated up until he was eye to eye with Jen.

“Gig’s over, baby.”

Jen squeezed her hand into a fist, cracking the knuckles, daring the swollen digits to split at the seams. They didn’t.

“Not yet,” she whispered, then slammed her fist down, opening the fingers at the last instant so they struck all six of the strings and sent a blast of distortion that blew through the room like a bomb exploding the inside of a doll’s house.

“Haven’t gotten to my solo yet.”

#

There was a part of playing the guitar that wasn’t about holding the right notes on the fretboard or plucking the right strings, that wasn’t about rhythm or tempo or precision. It was that mixture of easing into the music, of being loose and reckless and abandoning oneself to the guitar. It was the…playing.

Jen had never been good at that part. Her whole career, she’d had to prove she was a professional to bandmates who seemed to know instinctively there was something wrong with her. In a desperate effort to be good enough she’d foregone any hopes of being great.

How great a player would you have to be to fend off a demon that was already creeping his way inside you?

Pretty fucking great.

With no drums to give her time, no bass to offer a chord structure to hold her up, she propelled herself headlong into a solo. It was just noise at first, hitting strings like a caveman who’d just discovered a guitar amidst the rocks and rubble.

“Whatcha doin’, little girl?” Kyle asked.

She heard him inside her head where he was taking up residence, pushing at the bits of her brain with probing fingers, licking them to get a taste for the place.

She ignored him, finding the straight rhythm first, just letting the notes ring out. She’d forgotten that the guitar didn’t really need finesse or elegance to sound good. It was all right there: the steel strings, the maple neck, the thick, solid body and the wound pickups, coiled like snakes just waiting to be let loose. She reveled in the dumb simplicity of it.

“That all you got, Axe Girl?” Johnny Jacks asked, looking up at her with blind eyes.

Her middle finger pressed the A string on the second fret. The note rang out true, going on forever to that infinity where every note goes when you think you’re done with them.

“Ain’t gonna work,” Kyle’s voice churned inside her skull. “I’m too deep inside you now.”

Jen kept playing, her fingers lazily tracing a pentatonic scale up and down in almost random patterns, not hurrying, not worrying.

“Are you really, baby?” she asked.

“Oh yeah. So deep you’ll never shake me.”

“Shake you?” She stopped moving her fingers, holding one note for a full measure, then another, letting it slowly fade out almost to that point of oblivion where she knew she’d be lost. “Who says I’m trying to shake you?”

There was time to hear the odd silence within her mind, like a sudden intake of breath. She felt him scratching at the inside of her skull like an animal that’s just discovered it’s been caged. Every clawing attack filled her with pain and misery—a migraine mixed with suicidal depression.

Kyle, or whatever had taken his place, understood what she was doing.

She disregarded everything except the guitar, sliding her hand farther up the neck, her fingers moving faster and faster, recklessly picking out a solo that was neither blues nor jazz nor classical but something more primal. The grunting of teenagers fucking for the first time, in the back of a car with the radio up loud. Awkward. Painful. Stupid. But full of whatever rock ’n’ roll was when you took away the chords and melody.

She played that on her Strat, reveling in it, the sounds from the amp both sweet and salty. Inside her, the demon struggled to get away.

“Don’t run off now, baby,” she said. “We’re just getting started.”

#

Somewhere in there, in the space between two notes on the guitar, between her fingers holding down one fret and another as her pick hand prepared to come down hard on the string, Jen got lost.

It was perfect.

She didn’t care anymore. She was halfway to hell, dragged by the weight of either a demon in her soul or a psychotic break in her fragile mind, yet she was flying. The essence of a great solo—the essence of being the guitar player she was meant to be—was in not giving a shit. Whatever came out of her amp right at that moment, for good or ill, sweet or stale, perfect or messy as all hell…was her.

It was Jen.

Let the demon take her soul if he wanted, because she had the music and the music was all the soul she cared about. The feel of her hands on the guitar and the sounds in her ears and nothing else.

Boom.

Boom.

A beat came out of nowhere. She let it carry her upwards.

Bah-duhn-duhn.

Bah-duhn-duhn.

Lucy Bottom’s bass came up alongside.

“Stop,” Kyle commanded, no longer with the voice of a nine-year-old, but something deeper and darker—something incongruously full of both malice and pleading.

She paid it no heed. The playing was all that mattered—and she was playing, not practicing, not trying to live up to anyone else. Just playing her guitar the way she wanted. The more she did, the freer she became, and the more terrified the thing that had been living inside Kyle grew.

“Jen,” Johnny Jacks said, his voice hoarse and wrecked but with a tinge of joy like the subtle half bend of the note she was playing.

“Yeah?”

“Levon and Lucy can hold it for a few seconds.”

“And?” What did he want from her?

“And it’s time,” he bellowed, like an old-time preacher standing at the front of a tent before a thousand hand-clutching congregants. “Bring. Forth. The. Rickenbacker!”

Jen glanced at the battered old guitar. Its fireglo paint job shimmered, already aflame as if with hellfire, demanding to face down the horrors around her. The strings hummed a defiant counter to the demon’s hideous buzzing.

She popped the patch cable out of the jack on the Strat and plugged in the Ricky. All the while Lucy and Levon pounded away at a rhythm that was nothing but straight eighths and pissed-off determination.

The Ricky let out a vicious twang, a belligerent melodic relic from another time. Jen kicked her amp around, so it faced the windows. It shouldn’t have been able to do more than rattle them, but as she played a run up the neck, the scornful dissonance of shattering glass added itself to the music. When she glanced at her guitar, there was blood on the strings. Her blood. She didn’t care.

Night air flooded into the room, and she breathed in the sweetness, not even minding the other stenches that still lingered in the room. Lucy had blood dripping from a cut on her forehead. Levon played using only one arm, his left twisted at an odd angle. Johnny’s face was pale, hair matted, his skin cracked and bleeding at the sides of his mouth. They all looked happy as pigs in shit.

“Come on, come on, come on,” Johnny sang. “Gotta get it up, get it out, send it down.”

Kyle floated before her, head hanging back, and arms spread wide in a Jesus pose while his parents hung onto his legs. Jen eyed the tendrils of black and green haze that filled the room and trailed back to the boy’s mouth. His stomach and throat convulsed, vomiting out whatever thing had made its home inside him.

Johnny sang something at her, but she didn’t hear, she was too busy playing the notes that would pull the last remnants of the demon out of Kyle’s mouth.

The filthy mist coalesced, taking on its own shape—a man with black wings and a face so beautiful it made her want to cry. He smiled at her, but she used his beauty against him, translating it into an aching melody that came from her guitar, from her guts, from her lust. The smile faded as the thing discovered that all its best weapons had been turned against it, that all the power in the universe is nothing but vibration, and music shaped vibrations according to the player’s needs.

“You’ve got him now!” Johnny said. He wasn’t singing anymore, just issuing commands like a general. “Hold him. Hold him tight!”

“I’ve got him,” she said, irritated. “Just tell me what to do with him.”

“Send him down, Axe Girl. Send him all the way down.”

Jen had no idea what that meant but knew exactly how to play it. She slid her fingers up the neck to the seventh fret, held down the same sweet E-9 chord she’d started with, and slammed all six strings.

Then she let go of the pick and twisted the tuning heads loose one after another. The chord dropped and dropped and dropped, passing through discordance back to proper chords and then into discordance again. By the time she stopped, she’d tuned the entire guitar down so far, the strings were slack and wobbling.

The creature, the demon, the…whatever, shattered into a thousand bad memories.

Jen slumped, her knees banging hard against the bedroom floor. Kyle’s parents, their jaws still broken and no doubt in terrible pain, hugged their son between them. The boy turned to Jen, eyes blinking away the salt and sweat. He said something, but no words came out at first, as if he’d misjudged how used-up his vocal cords were.

The second time she heard him.

“I like that song,” he said. “Could you play it again?”

 

 

 

The Shard

By Ian Irvine

 

 

I sensed him before he spoke. Sensed trouble, too.

“Why aren’t you at the party, Sulien?” said a gravelly voice I hadn’t heard since I was a kid and didn’t want to hear now. Too many memories. Most of them bad.

“Xervish Flydd,” I said, without turning around. I was in my studio, trying to take a print from one of my copper etching plates, and it wasn’t going well. “And older and uglier than ever, I’ll bet.”

“I was an ugly young man, even before that unfortunate episode in the scrutators’ torture chambers,” he said cheerily. “Hardly likely I’d improve with age. Turn around.”

“Why?” I snapped.

“I want to see how you’ve turned out.”

I sighed and wiped my inky hands on a rag. I hadn’t seen Flydd since I was nine, sixteen years ago. He hadn’t changed. Still a little, skinny man. Still grotesquely ugly, even when smiling, as now. But charming, nonetheless. It was hard not to smile at him, but I managed it.

“You didn’t grow much,” he said, gaunt head cocked to one side.

“Neither did you.” Feeble!

“What happened to your beautiful hair?”

“Gets in the way.” I raked my fingers through the loose curls, doubtless smearing black ink everywhere. It was thick and sticky and I was covered in it to the elbows. “What do you want?”

“We’re missing you at the reunion.”

“What’s to celebrate?” I muttered. “We live in a blighted world. Nothing’s gone right since the day we won.”

“There’s plenty to celebrate. We defeated an invasion by the bloodiest race ever to come rampaging out of the void. We saved a world from genocide at their hands. And we delivered Skald and his Merdrun nation to justice, something they never gave any of their victims. Especially poor Uletta.”

We had buried her on a mound by the stream, not far away. I hadn’t known her well, but the ghastly way she had been killed would never leave me. “Well, yes, but—”

“We paid a high price, Sulien. It’s important that we get together occasionally, acknowledge our dead and their sacrifices, and support our old friends.”

“I don’t want to relive that time—the nightmares do it for me.” I turned back to my bench.

“Well, I’m afraid you have to come with me,” said Flydd.

“Am I under arrest? Are you going to drag me to the damned reunion?”

“No.” The good cheer was gone. He sounded uneasy, and that was troubling, because Flydd had seen everything, and survived what few others had. “Something’s happened and we need you.”

I dropped the copper plate, which rang on my marble-topped workbench. “Is it Dad? Is he all right? He hasn’t been well—”

“Llian’s fine…apart from an excess of wine and good cheer. Everyone at the reunion is fine—or would be if you were there.”

“Then what is it?”

“Your kinswoman, Malien, mind-called from Aachan a few minutes ago. I’ve got to make a portal there right away, and I need you to come with me.”

Now he had my attention. “We have to go to another world? How?”

Flydd held up a small, irregularly shaped black stone that I recognized at once, because it glowed crimson in the center. “Lirriam lent me her Waystone.”

“Why do you want me?”

“You knew the Merdrun—and Skald— better than anyone.”

“I was only nine. I didn’t know anything.”

“You discovered the enemy’s fatal weakness and it helped to defeat them. We need your aid.”

“What for?”

“To solve a mystery that Malien’s people are unable, or unwilling, to investigate.”

“Am I allowed to clean myself up first?”

“The dead don’t care how you look.”

What was that supposed to mean? “But I do.”

I wiped the worst of the ink off my hands and arms, went into the back room and put on a green shirt, baggy black trews and brown boots. The mirror showed ink smears on my face, which I scrubbed off, and black clots in my dark red hair. Nothing I could do about that.

“Let’s get it over with,” I said when I came out. “Got work to do.”

We went outside. Flydd closed a fist around the Waystone, extended his right hand and I took hold. The bones were twisted and lumpy; they had been broken in the torture chamber and had not healed straight. He tapped the Waystone on a platinum ring, inscribed with black glyphs, that gleamed on his middle finger.

I’d been through a number of gates and portals in my time, and none of them were pleasant. There was no visible manifestation of this one—no hole in the air or dimensional opening of any kind—but I began to shudder so violently that I thought my teeth were going to vibrate out of my gums, and my stomach tried to explosively eject its contents.

I clamped down hard and clung onto his hand. Portals sometimes went wrong and people using them ended up between, wherever that was. Nowhere one could come back from.

We fell through an airless nothingness lit by pulses of orange light. My chest heaved, wanting air. Don’t breathe out, you’ll never get it back. Then we were falling in the real world, about six feet through frigid air. I bent my knees and landed on black rock crusted with snow the color of sulfur. The top of a ridge. A small red sun glowed in a mauve sky. Aachan.

I gagged but managed to prevent myself from throwing up.

Flydd, a few yards away, clutched his belly and grimaced. “Doesn’t get any easier.”

“You took your time,” said a very old woman seated in the middle of a platform twenty yards away.

I barely recognized Malien. Her back was bent and her hair, once almost as red as my own, was so thin and colorless that I could see her scalp through it. The voice was the same, though, and the sharp tongue. And the very long Aachim fingers, twice the length of her palm.

I looked the other way, over a precipice and down into a massive crater whose upper walls were sheer, unclimbable cliffs. The ink-clotted hair on the top of my head stirred. I knew where we were. But why were we here?

Had they escaped?

“Of all the decisions I’ve made in my long life,” said Malien, “this is the one I regret most.”

“Allowing us to send the Merdrun to prison here?” said Flydd.

“Why couldn’t you have dealt with them on Santhenar?”

It was an old argument. “They were already going through their portal, thinking they were invading their long-lost home-world. We had to trick them and send them to another world, and Aachan was the only one we could reach.”

“I fell out with my people over it,” said Malien. “And even on my death bed, which is comfortably close now, we won’t be reconciled. A hard thing, that.”

“I’m truly sorry,” said Flydd. “But needs must.”

She rose, supporting herself on a black metal cane with intricate silver tracery down its length. Symbols that meant nothing to me.

“We sentenced them to thirty years servitude,” said Malien. “A modest punishment, considering the ruin they visited on so many other peoples over the eons, and the utter lack of mercy they showed to anyone. If they worked hard to restore this desolation, and submitted to moral instruction, and changed at the end of thirty years, they would have been freed.”

“I remember,” said Flydd.

“No one could fault their work. They turned the crater into a garden…”

“But?”

“The Merdrun believe themselves superior to every other intelligent species. They refused to listen to guidance from their inferiors.”

“You’re saying…?”

“It became clear to us that they were incapable of change, and could never be freed.”

“You told them so?”

“Two years ago,” said Malien.

“How did they react?”

“They didn’t.”

“They see emotions and feelings as signs of weakness,” I said, “and crush them out of their children from an early age. Except for triumph after a military victory. That’s an allowable emotion.”

“And now?” said Flydd.

“Get on,” said Malien.

Mystified, I followed Flydd to the platform and climbed up. It was about five yards by three, the sides silver metal in sinuous curves. The flat deck was lined with swirls of small green and black tiles. A thick rod rose from the floor in front of Malien’s chair, which was made from some kind of black metal, twisted into a spiral. She sat, took hold of the rod, and the platform lifted with a nausea-inducing jerk and sailed out over the rim of the crater.

I had seen images of the place when I was nine, when it had been a stony, heat-baked wilderness. Now large areas of the crater floor, thousands of feet below us, were covered in dark blue and purple crops, strips of woodland and a patchwork of vegetable gardens.

As the hover platform angled across the crater and down towards the western slope, I began to sense pain, despair and overwhelming rage. With an effort, I blocked my gift. It was more often a curse.

Hundreds of long, low stone buildings, built from rubble, ran along the western slope of the crater. I saw no signs of life there, or in the fields.

“Those buildings look like barracks,” said Flydd.

“Living quarters,” said Malien. “Very cramped and basic. The Merdrun are prodigious workers, but they live in hovels, as if the conveniences of life are anathema to them.”

“It’s said they don’t want to become comfortable, in case they lose sight of their goals.”

“And now we come to why you’re here,” said Malien. “You picking anything up, Sulien?”

“Don’t know what you mean,” I lied.

“You’re an empath!” Malien said irritably. “The most sensitive one I’ve ever met. And you have a great gift for the Secret Art.”

“I haven’t used either gift in years.”

“Well, start! That’s why I ordered you here.”

“You’re distant kin, Malien,” I said, choosing my words carefully, though I seethed inside, “and venerable, and deserving of respect—”

“Spit it out, girl! Don’t hold back on my account.”

“I don’t take kindly to being ordered about. I had too much of that as a kid—from enemies and friends.”

Malien was the best of her people, and she had been good to me when I was little, but the Aachim were ever lofty and arrogant, and dismissive of all other human species. Especially those who share part of their blood.

She snorted. “What are you picking up?”

The platform skimmed over a small hill, then hovered a couple of hundred feet above the ground.

“Despair,” I said. “And humiliation, rage and pain. But they’re fading.”

“They didn’t succeed in suppressing all their emotions, then,” said Flydd.

I went carefully towards the front of the platform, since there was no rail, and looked down. And my skin crawled.

The bodies were laid out in rows. Hundreds of rows, and hundreds of columns, in the partial shade of the purple-leaved, black-trunked trees that grew nowhere but Aachan.

“Two hundred and eight rows,” said Malien in a drear voice. “And four hundred and seven columns. More than a hundred thousand Merdrun. All of them, in fact.”

“What happened to them?” I’d seen a lot of dead people in my time, and it’s never been easy, but this was different. Why were the bodies arranged so neatly? And if they were all dead, who had laid them out?

“No idea. They were busy at their allotted tasks when the weekly identification parade was held, three days ago. They appear to have committed mass suicide overnight.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“But there must have been signs,” said Flydd, leaning over the side of the platform.

“Our sentries kept their distance,” said Malien. “We promised to guard them, and we did our duty faithfully, but we had no interest in the Merdrun or what motivated them.”

“Only a hundred thousand,” he mused. “In the beginning, three times that number were imprisoned here.”

“They did not take well to servitude. Mortality has been very high.”

“Also, I’m not seeing any children among the bodies.”

“They grew up.”

“But tens of thousands must have been born here.”

“In the sixteen years of their servitude, I’m not aware that a single Merdrun woman became pregnant. There were certainly no babies born.”

“That defies belief,” said Flydd. “It’s against human nature.”

The temperature was mild down here, but I shivered. This was bad. Really bad.

“To a people who believed themselves superior to all,” said Malien, “servitude must have been unbearable. Theirs was an utterly joyless society. Tormented.”

“Well, they’re gone,” said Flydd, “and I won’t pretend I’m sorry. What do you want from me?”

“Find out what happened here, and why. My health isn’t up to it, and none of my people are willing.”

“What else do you know?”

“Nothing. They left no written records, no notes, no explanation at all.”

“Something’s wrong,” I said. “Why would a nation so single-mindedly determined decide to end itself?”

“We tried to rehabilitate them,” Malien said defensively, “but it wasn’t in them. Perhaps they felt death was better than perpetual incarceration.”

Flydd’s bony jaw was set. “I don’t think so. We’ll have to inspect the bodies.”

“What, all of them?” I said. It was bound to bring memories to the surface that I would sooner have stayed buried.

“We’ll walk the rows. We may find something.”

Malien set the hover platform down on blue-black grass, some distance from the remains.

“There’s no need for you to come,” Flydd said to her.

“They were my responsibility. I have to account for them.”

I trailed behind, bracing myself for a ghastly scene, but the bodies, men and women, young and old, showed no sign of violence, or poison. There was no indication as to what had killed them, though some of the faces were twisted in terror. However they’d died, they had suffered.

I felt a throat here and there. All were cold, dead for quite a few hours. I was looking down at a muscular, black-haired young woman when I saw that she had a slightly withered look, as if the flesh under the skin had shrunk.

The little hairs on my arms stirred. Withering would not have happened within hours of death; not in this cool shade.

The next body was a middle-aged man, his beard shadow so black it might have been painted on with my printing ink, and he too was withered. Flydd and Malien had missed the signs, but I’d seen them before. Unfortunately.

“Flydd!” I yelled.

He came running. An odd, clumsy gait, but surprisingly fast for someone his age. I pointed out the subtle signs of withering. Most of the bodies had them.

All the blood withdrew from his face, leaving the ancient scars standing out, purple against grey. He swore under his breath.

“What are we looking at?” said Malien.

I swallowed, painfully. “Someone drank the life forces of a hundred thousand Merdrun.”

“Why?” she croaked.

Flydd replied. “Drinking lives is considered shameful; and the Merdrun’s magiz, and his few dozen sus-magizes, only ever had one reason to do it: when they had no other source of magical power.”

“But was it a suicide pact, or mass murder?” I said.

“How can it be mass murder? They’re all dead.”

“Yet the life-drinking spell was cast, and powerfully,” I replied. “Where’s the adept who cast it?”

“And his or her magical focus,” said Malien. “Merdrun can’t cast spells with their bare hands. But we searched them intimately after they were imprisoned here, and destroyed every device they had.”

Flydd paled. “You must have missed one.”

“You haven’t asked the two most important questions,” I said. “Why were all those lives drunk? And what happened to all that magical power?”

“We’d better check the rest of the bodies,” said Flydd.

As we trudged along the rows, I realized that I was looking for one particular corpse. A huge Merdrun male—a former warrior captain who had become a junior sus-magiz. A hero who had subsequently betrayed the Merdrun nation and destroyed their hope of going home. He had been ritually mutilated afterwards, and I would know him instantly.

“Skald isn’t among the dead,” I said when I met Flydd at the end of the last row.

“He was here at the last roll check, three days ago,” said Malien.

“Come away,” said Flydd. He led us through a patch of forest until the dead were out of sight, then lowered his voice. “Skald was the most determined man I ever met. He once drank part of his own life to escape capture. He, almost single-handedly, made it possible for the Merdrun’s dreams to be fulfilled.”

“Until his forbidden love for a human slave, Uletta, ruined their plans,” I said. “Then, in the thrall of his life-drinking addiction, he drank the life of the woman he had been trying to save.”

“And with her dying breath, she laid an unbreakable curse on him and the Merdrun nation.”

“She cursed the whole of Santhenar. Nothing has gone right for us since.”

“You were his prisoner, and you knew him better than anyone,” said Flydd. “What are you thinking, Sulien?”

“I liked Skald at first. He was a tormented man, the son of a coward, and the magiz persecuted him mercilessly. I sensed Skald’s pain.”

“Go on.”

“He was desperate to restore his family’s tainted name. He drove himself to the limits of human endurance to do his duty.”

“And after he destroyed his people’s hopes and it led to their imprisonment here? After he became the lowest of the low?”

I felt a sickening dread. “I…I don’t think he would have changed. He would still have schemed to restore his name. And there’s only one way he could have done that.”

“By completing the Merdrun’s plan after all,” said Flydd. “He’s not dead!”

“Then where’s he gone?”

“They always build a cubic temple. Where is it, Malien?”

She took us there. It was a perfect cube built from black, volcanic rock, about forty feet square, with no doors or windows. Flydd pointed his ring finger at the wall, blasted a hole through it, and we went in. The temple was empty apart from a central stone altar, on which lay a big, ruddy body. I generously let Flydd go first.

“It’s him, but turned to stone,” he said.

“I’m sensing a magical device,” I said. “One I’ve touched before.”

I went closer. Dare I? I reached out, my stomach throbbing, and gingerly pulled aside the eye patch covering the petrified Skald’s empty eye socket. And at the very back, something glowed green.

“What’s that?” said Flydd.

“After his betrayal was exposed,” I said, squirming at the memories, “and he was ritually mutilated, his magical focus, called a rue-har, was thrust through his right eye. Part of it must have broken off, leaving that shard embedded in bone. It was missed in the search—and it’s glowing with power.”

“What is a rue-har?” said Malien.

“A fragment from the Crimson Gate that corrupted the Merdrun an eon ago. Every sus-magiz had one.”

“So,” said Flydd, looking hard at Malien, “unknown to the Aachim, and perhaps to his own people, Skald has always been able to do magic here by using this ancient, corrupt relic. And, by secretly drinking lives, he could have become very powerful.”

My throat felt as though it had closed over; it was a struggle to draw breath. “In all the time the Merdrun were lost in the void,” I said, “more than ten thousand years, they never once changed their plans. They were betrayed and cast from their home-world into the void, long ago. All they wanted was to return to Tallallame—and take revenge on every one of their enemies.” I glanced up at Flydd. “So why would they end their lives, now?”

“You’ll be on their list, Sulien,” said Malien. “You too, Xervish. And me, I dare say.”

My heart hammered, panic rising. I fought it down. We had to work this out, and quickly. “The rest of Skald’s enemies, including my family, are at the reunion back home.”

“And it can’t be a coincidence that he drank his people’s lives last night,” said Flydd.

“But are they really dead?” I said. “Or does he just want us to think so?”

“What are you saying?”

“People whose lives have been drunk look a lot more shrunken than the bodies we checked. They’re hardly withered at all. What if Skald only partly drank his people’s lives, to get the massive power he needed to escape, leaving them apparently dead but actually under a stasis spell? So they could be reawakened afterwards, to carry out their plan?”

“It wouldn’t be easy to partly drink a life. It’s addictive and, once started, it’s hard to stop. And why would they trust the man who had so betrayed them?”

“Because Skald needed the plan to work even more than they did. Besides, they had nothing more to lose—and everything to gain.”

“Was there any hint of a stasis spell on the bodies?” said Malien.

“I couldn’t tell,” said Flydd.

“When the Merdrun held me prisoner,” I said, “Skald and I were mind-linked for a time. Could he have learned about the reunion through me?”

“Perhaps,” said Flydd, idly fingering the Waystone. Then he cried, “He wants the Waystone, more than anything! If he gets it, he’ll open a portal to Tallallame and take his people home. It would erase the taint on his name—he’d be a hero again.”

“But where is he? Here, turned to stone?”

We all stared at the petrified corpse.

“No, that’s just a shell.” Flydd walked around the altar, and again. “He’s gone to Tullymool. To the reunion! To get the Waystone, and take revenge on his enemies.”

“Take us there!” snapped Malien.

I felt sick. With that much power, how could anyone resist him?

But something else was wrong here.

“Why would he leave the shard?” I said shakily. “It’s the last of their magical relics, the one thing they have left from their victorious past.”

“Maybe he couldn’t take it with him.” Flydd reached into the red eye socket and pulled it out, and his finger and thumb were smoking. “It’s bursting with power.”

“Don’t touch it with your bare skin.” Malien took it, slipped it into a little, round metal case like a pill box and handed it back. We raced out. “One last adventure,” she said. “Hurry!”

I grabbed Flydd’s wrist and Malien caught mine. Flydd touched the Waystone to his platinum ring and the portal hurled us away so violently that I felt Malien lose her grip. I tried to grab her in the darkness but she was gone.

Flydd and I emerged outside the door of my studio with a boom that shook down half a dozen loose roof slates.

“Where’s Malien?” I said frantically.

“Lost, between,” said Flydd, bowing his head. “No time for that now. Go!”

But I’d known her all my life; how could she be dead, just like that? Yet the living had to come first and if I didn’t warn them, Skald would take them from me as well. I would grieve for Malien later—if I survived.

Three-quarters of a mile away was the meadow, shaded by huge old trees, where everyone had gathered for the reunion. Almost everyone I cared about was there. Staying away now seemed foolish, childish.

I had to warn them. I ran.

“He’s back!” I shrieked as I reached the picnic area. “Get up, quick!”

“Who’s back?” said my father, Llian, raising a crystal goblet in an extravagant gesture. He looked tipsy, and no one could blame him, but this was the worst time to be witless.

I looked around wildly. “Skald!”

“Where?”

A good question. Skald had drawn a monumental amount of power from all those lives, then left his petrified body behind. Had he turned to stone because living flesh could not endure that much power? If so, what was he now?

And then I saw it. High in the air, a few hundred yards away, beyond the meandering stream, a vast presence slowly condensed out of pure power. It was roughly human shaped, though its edges blurred and wavered. A glowing green nimbus surrounded the figure and yellow rays radiated in all directions.

Was Skald a kind of being now? Whatever he was, power leaked out of him as he descended, leaving shimmering trails in the air, charring grass and bushes below him, boiling the water in a nearby duck pond, and heating everything it touched to incandescence.

His touch would kill, though I did not think Skald wanted to kill us just yet. He drifted lower, extending spider-leg projections towards the guards stationed further out and cutting them down in puffs of black smoke. The mongrel!

Everyone was on their feet now, staring up. I could sense his triumph. How Skald loved stalking his enemies. He was savoring our terror. Why would he hurry? He had waited sixteen years.

Flydd appeared beside me, panting.

“What do we do?” I gasped.

“If he’s now a being, he’ll be invulnerable to physical or magical attack. Whatever spell we use on him, he could turn it back a thousandfold…”

“Flydd?” I prompted, when he did not go on.

“Last time you beat him with an emotional attack,” he said quietly. “What are his weaknesses?”

“Umm…Skald never had a great gift for magic. Look at him—power is oozing out everywhere. And I don’t think he knows how best to use it.”

“With that much power, he doesn’t have to. What else?”

Previously, using my empath’s gift, I had sensed out and amplified the agonizing emotions and feelings of Skald’s victims, and deluged him with them. And because the Merdrun had always denied their own emotions, he had been overwhelmed.

I raised my hand to try again. The being that Skald had become drifted towards us, and smiled. The gigantic face was horribly scarred, and his right eye socket was empty.

His voice boomed like thunder, inside my head and outside at the same time, and it shook my bones. I’ve spent the past sixteen years exploring my emotions, Sulien, and learning how to defend myself against such attacks. You can’t touch me now. Give me the Waystone.

“You’re the son of a coward!” I shrieked up at him. “And you’re a coward too.”

He grimaced. Nor can you provoke me. All this time, I’ve been tormented by the most savage accuser of all—myself. The Waystone. Give it to me.

I raked my fingers through my hair, desperately trying to think of a way to attack him. My forefinger stuck to something—a clot of printing ink. I was about to wipe it off on my trews when I saw that it formed a crude letter U.

Was Skald his own most savage accuser? What about Uletta, the only person who had ever loved him? He had loved her, too, yet he had betrayed her and, as she lay dying, she had used up the last of her life laying an unbreakable curse on him and his people. Was she the answer?

“Shard!” I said out of the corner of my mouth to Flydd.

He took the cap off the little pill box. “What are you thinking?”

“You know how to raise people from the dead?”

“Yes, though it’s generally a bad idea.”

“Remember where Uletta was buried?” I nodded towards the mound, partly enclosed in a loop of the stream. “The shard will know her.”

Flydd stared at me for a minute, doubtless weighing possibilities, then held it up, wincing, his fingers smoking where they touched it. He spoke the words of the raising spell and a wraith came up through the nearest mound and drifted towards us, becoming ever more solid as she drew near. A big, strong woman, her features still twisted in the anguish of her betrayal.

“I remember you,” the risen Uletta said as she settled beside me. “You were a little girl. What do you want?”

I looked upwards. “Up there.”

She saw the being formerly known as Skald, and her face hardened.

“Sixteen years ago, you went to your grave seething with hate and bitterness,” I said, “and your dying curse has blighted the world. It’s time to put an end to it.”

Uletta took the glowing green shard. It did not burn her fingers.

Skald looked down, then froze in the air. No human face could have expressed the horror I saw in him.

Go away! he choked.

“Why do you hate me?” said Uletta. “What did I ever do to you but give you my love?”

You cursed me and my people for all time, he said, two parts rage and three parts guilt. And from that day to this, we’ve known nothing but torment.

“You cursed your people when you betrayed me. I merely put it into words.”

Skald raised a smoking fist the size of a small thundercloud, as if to smite her dead, but perhaps his nerve failed him. Or perhaps the guilt got to him.

“When I cursed you before,” said Uletta, “I was just a normal person. But now, raised from the dead and with your shard in my hand, I can have all you have.” She extended a muscular arm. “I’m taking back what is mine.”

Did she hope to regain the life he had drunk, or was it just a goad? Skald let out a desperate cry, turned the fist into a long, ethereal finger and pointed it at her as if to drink her life again. Uletta smiled and folded her arms.

The air crackled. Electric sparks jumped in my hair and stung my scalp.

“Get to shelter!” bellowed Flydd. “Now!”

We scrambled behind the largest tree and the picnickers followed: Mother, wavy gray hair streaming out behind her, my little brother, Gannion, running with a gigantic piece of cake, my dearest friend, Jassika, and a dozen of my old allies.

Dad, ordinarily a clumsy man, got there without spilling a precious drop from his goblet. I covered my face with my hands and peered around the trunk, through my fingers.

Skald cast the life-drinking spell on Uletta. I had seen him use this spell many times in the past, and it was a hideous way to die. She let out such a cry of horror that it shivered my bones. Was she reliving what it had been like last time?

But, as Skald attempted to drink Uletta’s life force, she threw back her head and laughed.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“No one brought back from the dead can have true life,” said Flydd.

A dreadful realization warped Skald’s scarred features, but too late. The power he had drawn from Uletta was the antithesis of that within a normal human life, and it began to annihilate his own life force.

He tried to reverse the spell but the power he had taken from a hundred thousand Merdrun exploded out in all directions. It seared the leaves off the trees, gouged up grass and earth, toppled copses and fences, and blasted all the water out of the stream for hundreds of yards.

And Skald, who had been nothing but power and consciousness, was obliterated.

The ground shook, and all around us charred leaves drifted down, covering the grass like black snowflakes. When it finally stopped there was no trace of the being once known as Skald.

“It’s over,” said Flydd. “He’s been unmade.”

My hands wouldn’t stop trembling I snatched the goblet from Dad’s hand and downed the contents in a gulp. “What…what about the Merdrun in the crater?”

“That cataclysm would have torn his stasis spell apart,” said Flydd, “and no one could have survived it. But they wouldn’t have known. Their torment’s over.”

Uletta squeezed the shard between her strong fingers and it melted, vaporized, and vanished. The last deadly relic of the Crimson Gate that had corrupted the tragic Merdrun long ago, and ruined their hopes and dreams, was gone.

“And I can have peace,” she said.

She drifted back towards her grave, becoming more wraithlike by the second, and plunged down through the grass into the mound.

“How about Malien?” I said quietly.

Flydd put a bony arm around my shoulders. “‘One last adventure,’ she said. She would have been happy to go that way.”

I supposed so. She had been a very old woman. But Malien had always done her best when I was in trouble, and I would miss her.

Around us, people emerged from their hiding places, and hugged and laughed and wept. Mother threw her arms around me and my father embraced us both. Suddenly I felt such a vast upwelling of hope and optimism, and the infinite possibilities of life, that for a few seconds, I was floating. The blight on Santhenar had lifted.

I looked back towards my studio, and the work I’d used as an escape all this time. “Damn the etchings!” I said. “Let’s have that reunion.”