Posting a new track was a five-minute process, top to bottom, from booting the machine to pushing the publish button. I decided to make some pleasant small talk to pass the time.
“Who the fuck was that guy whose head exploded?” I asked.
“Airee won’t tell us,” Sierra said. “She admits someone’s been stalking her but she won’t say who and she won’t say why.”
“Yeah but . . . she made that guy’s head explode!”
“I know. But to be fair, he punched out our van!”
“His head exploded! That is not fair!”
“I am not the boss of Airee Macpherson!”
We were shouting a lot. We both still had our earplugs in. I suspected we would never take them out again as long as we lived. Which wasn’t super likely to be that much longer anyway.
As soon as my laptop connected, I fired up Maxnet. The main channel was a ghost town. I DM’d William but got no response. For kicks, I DM’d Maxstacy as well, and also got no response. My feeds were showing me the national news reporting about some kind of natural disaster in Lawrence—and also in Austin, Chicago, Mexico City, Sydney, Vancouver, and Bristol. People were calling it a “natural disaster” despite dozens of iPhone videos of giant sky tentacles smashing buses and churches and any goddamn thing they felt like smashing.
Was Airee the epicenter of this apocalypse, or just one of the spokes?
Did Airee actually have any control, or was she just making sacrifices to the unknowable out of blind stupid devotion? Or worse, because she just wanted to see what the fuck might happen?
Her blog post had said that some schlub at a music conference had delivered a demo recording to her in a bar. Who the fuck was that schlub, how much did he fucking know, and where the fuck was he now?
I considered what kinds of trouble I could get into by uploading an old Neil Diamond track and claiming it was the new Beautiful Remorse track. The twins were watching closely as I composed the post. I finished uploading the new track. Normally I would add some cryptic but pithy commentary, something intriguing to entice listeners, but I no longer needed any such pretense whatsoever. Instead I simply wrote: “Here is the new Beautiful Remorse track. It’s called ‘Destroy All Unbelievers.’ I’m not in any way encouraging anyone to do any actual destroying. You probably know and love a few unbelievers yourself and I suspect they would prefer it if you did not destroy them.” I was terrified of what mayhem I had just unleashed. I swore that this would be my last act as Airee’s Herald, even if she killed me for it. I realized I wouldn’t have the guts to disobey her if she were standing here in front of me though. I was despondent.
The twins saw the post go live from over my shoulder. Satisfied, they wandered off in search of a new diversion. They shouted back to Sierra, “Don’t miss sound check!”
Suddenly Maxstacy responded to my DM.
“Holy shit you’re alive!” he said.
“So are you!” I said.
“Yeah but I’m not the one on tour with a homicidal alien-summoning cult leader!”
“It sounds so quaint when you put it like that.”
“I can’t believe you released a new track.”
“If you were here, you’d believe anything.”
“That’s my point—you must know by now what that music is doing to people!”
“Yes. Obviously. Wait, are you immune?”
“I haven’t listened to any of it. I have no idea if I’m immune and I don’t plan to find out. Are you still in Lawrence?”
“For now.”
“Are you in danger?”
“Of course I’m in danger.”
“Imminent danger?”
“Yes, if I stay here, I am going to die here.”
Maxstacy fell silent, one of those “Maxstacy is typing . . .” moments where he probably just went to the bathroom. I looked over at Sierra, who was not at all attempting to hide that she was reading the entire conversation on my screen. Impatiently I flipped over to news feeds for a moment, and found myself distraught to learn that roving bands of murderers were out in the streets of major cities around the world with boom boxes blasting Beautiful Remorse. Converting the masses, exterminating the immune. Sierra finally made eye contact with me. When this tour started, Sierra was all in, and now she was racked with guilt. Like me. For all the good it could do.
“I think you should get out of Lawrence,” Maxstacy finally said, “and come here. Do you have wheels?”
Sierra said, “Charlie’s got the key to the crew van.”
My mind reeled. I’d seen too many TV shows, or not enough. Airee could summon space tentacles by killing bass players. Could she command the state patrol to chase down her crew van? Fuck it, who cared.
“Yeah, we have wheels,” I told him. “Where are you?”
“I’m in Madison.”
Madison, Wisconsin, where Sierra and I went to school together without knowing each other, where Sierra’s band Surrealist Sound System first captured my imagination and set me on the righteous path toward music blogging, where Airee Macpherson attended the music conference that changed her life. I wanted desperately to believe this was a coincidence.
“What a coincidence,” I said.
* * *
We had to trick Charlie into giving us the key to the crew van. And by trick I mean punch. We left her tied up in somebody’s garage and took off. No one stopped us. Not sure anyone even noticed us. It’s not like this was martial law. It’s not like cameras were everywhere. It’s not like some secret police force was out hunting for us. It was simply that at any given moment giant alien tentacle beasts might descend from the sky and slaughter us.
Even that assumption was starting to wear off. The more distance I got from Airee, the more I realized that the portal in the sky and the subsequent giant alien tentacle beast were summoned as part of a ritual—one that likely involved spilling blood, and one that definitely involved performing Airee’s music. By stealing Sierra—tonight’s drummer and probable sacrifice—I was dealing Airee quite a setback to any immediate plans she might have to summon a giant alien tentacle beast. Shit, even if her new bass player was ready to go on tonight, it seemed increasingly unlikely that a new drummer could go on too.
Normally my favorite part of posting a track was watching all the responses pile up: the plays and likes and reblogs. Today the cycle was massively accelerated. I’d never seen a post go so disturbingly viral. Probably because people were discovering that the track “Destroy All Unbelievers” sounded exactly like the Monkees track “I’m a Believer.” Don’t ask me why I have Monkees tracks on my laptop. The point is the twins were too stupid to spot me switching out the track in my post.
Who knew when Airee would realize all of this, but we’d be hours away before she even had a clue which direction we’d gone.
We drove through the night to get to Madison, stopping once to get gas at a weird truck stop where we couldn’t tell if the people there were just normally this weird or if tonight was an actual change of pace. We took turns interrogating each other as we drove in silence, neither of us in the mood for any kind of traditional road trip music.
“If you’ve never met this guy, why do you trust him?” she asked me.
That was a good question. How close could you be with someone you only knew via some obscure darknet?
“I trust him as much as I trust anyone on Maxnet,” I replied. “The people I really trust are all in Portland or back home in Colorado, and nobody is answering my texts or my emails.” I hated saying that out loud. “But without Maxstacy, I never would have . . .”
Met Imogen, is what I didn’t say. But she caught on anyway.
“Were you and Imogen close?”
I said, “It hurts like we were close.”
“I guess that counts for something.”
I changed the subject. “How did you wind up in a band with a demon-summoning blood priestess?”
“She was in Madison the year after I graduated, doing some research for her doctorate. She caught one of Surrealist Sound System’s final shows and started hitting on me afterward. I guess I’m a sucker for attention.”
“Like most rock stars,” I said. “When did you realize Airee was out to destroy the world?” In my mind, that was the money question. When did Sierra give in to the dark side? And was it just pure self-interest that had snapped her out of it?
“When she played me her demos for the first time, I wanted more than anything to play that music as loud and as hard as I could, for as long as I could . . . I think I knew subconsciously right then and there that she wasn’t planning anything wholesome.”
“She believes she sent those demos to herself from the future.”
“She believes a lot of very weird shit, and a lot of it is turning out to be true.”
“Who did she get the demos from, do you know? On her blog, she said it was just some schlub.” I paused, then said, “If Maxstacy turns out to be a schlub when we meet him, let’s be prepared to get back in this fucking van immediately.”
* * *
Maxstacy turned out to be a schlub. We decided not to get back in the van immediately.
I mean the classic definition of a schlub is a little unflattering, and Airee was probably being a dick when she called him that. He was fine. He was an old dude, a professor of musicology. He lived alone in a small cottage on the edge of Madison city limits, and he seemed quite happy to have company.
Oh sure, he was not expecting Sierra. I’m pretty sure I intentionally neglected to mention she was coming with me, although there’s a chance I honestly forgot because I was busy freaking out about the whole end of the world thing. But he was gracious, and he welcomed us both in.
I never would have guessed that Maxstacy was this old professor dude, but in retrospect, his blog was always so incredibly articulate and erudite. All of us looked up to Maxstacy not simply because he was first on the scene, but because he continued to earn his place of honor with year after year of highly intelligent pop music critique. I mean we all have differences in taste, we’re all music snobs to each other about something along the way, but Maxstacy was considered the best because he truly, unabashedly loved pop music—he was never simply posing.
“Yes, she got those demo recordings from me,” he admitted without reservation as we sat around his kitchen table and shared a bottle of wine. “Begging the question, I’m sure, of where exactly did I get them originally. You may not realize—my dissertation was on the intersection of musicology and occultism. The occult is a fringe area within the humanities to be sure, but it produces historical artifacts that can and should be studied—including charts of music. Black hymns used in profane rituals, diabolic tuning systems, theosophical symphonies, that sort of rubbish. Worth studying because, as with any area of music, every now and then some genius comes along and for a brief shining moment makes that whole sliver of the musical firmament light up with unexpected beauty.
“Occultists used to collect and trade these charts, much as we collect vinyl recordings from thrift shops today. It was a tough racket—you’d see handwritten charts claiming to be old Egyptian necromantic hymns and you’d have to speculate—is this some shitty bootleg or is this the real deal? Huge fortunes were quietly spent on this stuff. Anyway, eventually a significant collection wound up in the hands of John Dee, who was Queen Elizabeth’s court alchemist and astrologer at the time. Dee himself had no particular affinity for music, beyond fancying himself a mathematician. And he didn’t trust his sight reading. His idea for establishing the provenance of the charts was to hire musicians and actually hear the music out loud. Ten specific charts were chosen for this command performance, to be played on ten successive nights by various combinations of court musicians and guest virtuosos from around the British Empire.
“I have reason to believe that John Dee did not survive the entirety of these performances. Oh, certainly someone or something using Dee’s identity survived until the early 1600s. But what occurred even as early as Dee first laying eyes on those charts was a nonconsensual communion with an extradimensional entity that used infernal music as a gateway channel into our reality. These entities need hosts to survive here. They prime human minds for their arrival using these occult charts as extradimensional tuning forks, so to speak, until the hosts are sufficiently pliant to accept them without resistance.
“I have reason to believe this because I myself am hosting one of these entities, and before the barbiturates in your wine wear off, you will each be hosting one as well.”