by Scotto Moore
* * *
We parked in the darkest corner of the parking lot we could find. The road crew had parked here ahead of us. A few semitrucks idled in the distance, but for the most part, the rest stop we’d found was otherwise completely empty. Airee woke up the twins to make sure everyone was listening.
“We’re going to listen to the new track,” she said. “We were all wearing earplugs when we played it at the show, so this is the first time any of us will hear the live version without interference.”
Everyone but possibly Imogen understood the significance of that statement.
The van had surprisingly good speakers for a car stereo system. The board recording may have been raw and unmastered, but it sounded fantastic. The new track was a mournful song that began slowly, wistfully, hazily. I felt like I had watched the tide recede, and was now looking at the wreckage left behind—knowing full well the tide would hit much harder when it soon returned. You could feel the music testing you, probing you, examining every molecule, every emotion, every secret thought, testing your reaction, testing your commitment, testing your heart. My heart was pounding, actually, the very stereotype of a pounding, frightened heart that anyone could hear from the other side of the closet door where you were hiding from the thing that was stalking you in the darkness.
I felt Imogen’s mind brush against mine, just like when we’d listened to the second track together days ago, only much more intimate this time. She was scared too, but she was also thrilled and exhilarated. I got the impression she actually hadn’t worn earplugs last night, and was hearing this song as Airee intended it, for a second time, and she was deeply enamored of the notion that she would be playing this music onstage tonight. Her enthusiasm was infectious. I wanted to hear her play this music myself. All I really wanted was to keep hearing this music, when you got right down to it. I couldn’t remember why I’d had so many questions for Airee in the first place. She’d chosen me to announce this music to the world, and she’d chosen Imogen to play it alongside her. We were among the blessed. Imogen felt relieved beyond measure that we were truly seeing things the same way.
When I finally opened my eyes and sat up, daylight was streaming in the windows. All around me, the others’ heads lolled—they were all still in a trance, or maybe just asleep. All except Airee, who was gone.
“What’s going on?” Sierra asked, rousing almost instantly. “Where’s Airee?”
“I don’t know. We’ve got to hit the road if we’re going to make it to Lawrence in time,” I told her. My determination quickly convinced her, and she roused the twins. I shook Susie’s shoulder and tried to wake her, but she didn’t stir. I shook her a little harder, a quick sharp bolt of realization stabbing me in the stomach as I did.
Susie was clearly dead. For real this time.
Airee threw open the back doors of the van. Sunlight streamed in behind her, giving her an insanely bright halo—not the angelic kind of halo, but rather the blinding, searing halo you get from staring directly into the sun. Her eyes seemed to be glowing too, and she was smiling and vibrating like she was fully charged again.
“What’s that track called?” I asked her.
“It’s called ‘Some Were Not Meant to Last,’” Airee said. “Sierra, go get your drum rug.”
Track 07
I finally met the band’s road crew when we needed to figure out where to stash Susie Satori’s body.
Sierra introduced me to Charlie, the band’s guitar and drum tech, who seemed like she was barely out of high school; and Elsie, the band’s live audio engineer, a chain smoker and clearly a bad influence on Charlie. It had been fairly easy to extract the drum rug from the back of the equipment van. It was much less obvious how we were going to reinsert the rug, now that a body was rolled up inside of it. This was one of those “loading van Tetris” problems you just never expect to have to solve. But Charlie and Elsie were both fairly relaxed about unloading gear and reloading it to accommodate the new cargo, and their reaction was telling.
“You were all expecting this,” I said to Sierra as we walked back to the band van. “Airee knew that Susie ‘wasn’t meant to last,’ is that it?”
“Susie kept talking about what she planned to do after the tour,” Sierra replied.
“So?”
Either she pretended she didn’t hear me, or she intended her silence to be her response. I wasn’t satisfied.
“Who else isn’t meant to last?” I pressed.
“Hard to say,” she said. “You lasted longer than I thought you would.”
* * *
I released “Some Were Not Meant to Last” as soon as we got back on the road again. I actually offered it to Maxstacy first. I owed him a favor for promoting the Houston show for me. He declined the honor.
“My whole mystique is that I’m the first to discover things,” he said to me, “and this one’s clearly yours. I didn’t mind promoting the first show by ‘the Augmented 4th,’ but everyone knows you’re the one who broke this band in the first place. If I start premiering their new tracks, people will think I stole them from you, and my credibility will tank.”
So I posted the new track with my usual minimalistic critique and was about to drop off of Maxnet for the day when I saw some disturbing alerts in my news feeds. An epidemic had hit Houston overnight. Twelve people had died between 11 p.m. and early morning. No discernible cause, no overt symptoms—they simply fell asleep and didn’t wake up. Eight other people had killed themselves—blown their brains out or slit their own throats.
Didn’t take a background in epidemiology to predict that these people would all be traced back to a certain performance at the Nightingale Room. That’d happen even faster if the body of our former bass player turned up, plus the chances would then spike of connecting us sooner to the riot in Austin. So Susie had to stay with us for the time being. At least long enough for “Some Were Not Meant to Last” to start producing similar effects in people around the country, at which point things would become much more confusing from a disease vector perspective.
Yeah, I was definitely complicit at this point. I had been awakened by the undeniable presence of Airee Macpherson, and I had learned there would be consequences for veering off of her path. But I’d made a simple choice, and while some were clearly not meant to last, I wasn’t going anywhere, not now. I would see this through to its finale, no matter the cost.
Or so I believed as we raced toward our next destination. Imogen spent the trip with her bass in her lap, crowded next to Airee in the backseat, practicing with her headphones on. Sierra stayed in the driver’s seat, and for once in my life, I was relieved that she chose to leave the stereo off—ostensibly to make it easier for Imogen to practice, but the side effect was that my mind was a little more free to wander than it often had been during the stress of the past couple days.
With hours to go before we would arrive in Lawrence, I decided to find out everything I could about Airee Macpherson.
* * *
William had recognized Airee’s name when I had first mentioned it on my channel, so presumably that meant she lived in Austin. Her Tumblr was called Undeniable Presence, but she used the URL aireemacpherson.tumblr.com, which is how I’d found her. On first glance, I hadn’t really deduced much about her from skimming the surface of Undeniable Presence. That changed pretty quickly when I saw this post tucked away near the very beginning of the blog’s existence:
it’s not like you wake up in the morning and decide you want to be the world’s only living scholar in profane musicology
and by “living” i mean “surviving”
Her early posts on Undeniable Presence include a running thread where she’s trying to convince her potentially imaginary readers that music is missing a proper notation system for a specific auditory illusion that she alone seems to understand. She coins the phrase “performative notation” to describe a theoretical system that more accurately captures the actual moment of inspiration experienced by a mu
sician. She mentions in passing:
i guess some people go to their thesis adviser with ideas and actually get treated as though they are sane and full of promise
Suddenly she takes an unexpected detour off the rails completely, when she posts:
i went to a music conference in Madison, where this whole series of panels was dedicated to esoteric & mystical tuning systems, infernal chord progressions, centuries-old occult arrangements, all the weird stuff in music that they can’t publish about in mainstream journals. and some schlub overheard my drunken ranting one night in the hotel bar about impossible music. and he said, “there’s a recording you should hear.” i said, “yeah, i doubt it.” he said, “no, you should really hear it.” i realized he was one of the speakers from earlier that day. he said, “this recording is a demo of you, singing from the future, a message back to you here in the present. i staged this whole conference just to attract you here so I could deliver this recording.”
suddenly all the whiskey drained out of my veins and I stared the guy down, realizing he seriously believed what he was telling me. I said, “ok fine, let’s hear this recording.”
And then a few days later:
so let’s just imagine for argument’s sake that a future version of me sent me cryptic lyrical instructions from the future in a made-up language i’ve never heard but seem to understand regardless. am i supposed to record this very album so that it lasts long enough for future me to send it back to me? time travel doesn’t exist. if I’m so powerful in the future that I can send arcane musical recordings back into the past, why did I send them to some random schlub to deliver to me? you see now why i didn’t graduate
* * *
On Maxnet, something unexpected was happening. Ricochet had finally caved to pressure from Maxstacy, and was actually listening to all of the Beautiful Remorse/Augmented 4th tracks, in album order. He’d listened to enough snippets of earlier tracks to be convincingly snarky, but now he was taking them seriously. He was streaming his reactions live, to the relative delight of the channel.
As I watched, I received a DM from William, who was finally able to connect.
“Glad you’re okay,” he said.
“Sorry I ditched you,” I said. “It got scary and I bailed on you like a flat coward.”
“Whatever—Maxstacy says you’re on the road with them now, which is exactly the fuck where I would be if I were in your shoes, so stop worrying your pretty little head about me.”
“What happened?”
“I blacked out from the pain, and didn’t wake up until I came out of surgery, at which point I remained high on painkillers until—oh wait, I’m still high on painkillers.”
Ricochet seemed transfixed as he heard track two, “The Awakening,” for the very first time. I’d heard it dozens of times by now and I still felt transfixed, but it was exciting watching such an ardent denier become overwhelmed by it like we all had.
“Did anyone ask about us?” I finally worked up the guts to ask William.
“The split second the doc thought I was sufficiently conscious, I was grilled by a detective. But they weren’t asking about you. They were asking about the big guy who started the riot.”
“Huh?”
“The guy who elbowed you in the back, knocked you to the floor, remember that? And then I jumped in his face and tempers flared, and suddenly there was a riot?”
“But . . .”
“They saw the whole thing on security cam footage. Cop said I’m lucky I let the big guy throw me instead of punching him first, or I’d be facing some kind of felony charge right now.”
We fell silent as Ricochet moved on to track three, “Undeniable Presence.” A sense of quiet bliss overcame him. He muted the audio feed to our collective dismay, saying, “I don’t mind if you people watch, but I need to keep the music for myself right now.”
I should have said something to Ricochet about the music. But some days I really resented his snarky bullshit about all forms of music, and I thought if any music in the world could snap him out of that, this music would have to be it, right?
* * *
I took off my headphones, my ears needing a rest anyway. In the backseat, Imogen had moved on to practicing a bass line I didn’t recognize. Quickly I deduced that Airee was teaching her tonight’s new track. A chill jolted me. Even though I was only hearing one part in isolation, I was feeling slightly stunned. Imogen had her own headphones on; periodically she’d ask Airee a question or seek Airee’s approval, and Airee’s feedback was quick, concise, helpful.
“You guys won’t have much time to rehearse with Imogen when we get there,” I said to Sierra.
“We don’t rehearse,” she replied. “Airee teaches us our parts individually. The first time we play the songs together is when we’re onstage.”
“Well, that’ll be disappointing when it’s time to release the box set,” I said, cracking a silly joke to cover how inadequate I felt next to these apparently genius musicians. Or maybe all musicians in the world could and do learn music this way. I failed out of marching band in junior high because I literally could not figure out the cymbals, so it’s my issue, I fully realize.
* * *
Ricochet got up from his computer, leaving his window momentarily empty.
“So they’re not looking for us at all,” I said to William.
“Didn’t say that,” he replied. “I have no idea. They just didn’t ask me about you.”
Think. Think back to what Sierra said when she found me in the hospital the next morning. Something about splitting town before the police realized what they’d seen on the video crew’s footage? I couldn’t remember exactly, and for a brief moment, I questioned everything I’d seen and felt. It all became suspect, for one brief shimmering moment. Maybe the riot in Austin was actually the result of a bad fight that broke out among amped-up bros. I was knocked to the floor; did I ever see anything else? Maybe Airee and Sierra had never actually been questioned by the police. How would I ever know without going back to Austin and turning myself in? Maybe the people who died in Houston were actually sick with a real disease. What if patient zero just happened to be in the audience last night? Maybe Susie Satori died of the same disease, or even natural causes. How could I know without delivering her body for an autopsy? Even the suicides—the CDC investigates clumps of suicides, so it’s not unheard of.
Ricochet sat back down at his computer. He was weeping. Judging by the elapsed time, he was now most of the way through track six, “Some Were Not Meant to Last.” He put a large kitchen knife to his throat and jammed it straight through his jugular.
* * *
The band all disappeared into tonight’s venue, the Bottleneck, leaving me alone in the van again. Before she followed the others, I managed to pull Imogen aside for an actual face-to-face conversation. It was very awkward, and amounted to very little. Airee hadn’t been surprised when I told her that hundreds of people around the country were dying mysteriously or killing themselves and I thought it was because they were listening to track six. Imogen didn’t care that she would be playing the whole album tonight, including the deadly track six and the currently unpredictable track seven. I didn’t care that I’d be waiting in the getaway van again, ready as ever to release track seven onto the internet as soon as we were a safe distance from Lawrence.
I did care that Imogen might get hurt, though. I told her as much. She didn’t care.
“Ricochet killed himself,” I told her. “Didn’t make it through track six.”
I’m not sure what reaction I expected. Neither one of us knew Ricochet except as a slightly humorous, frequently annoying internet presence. But when you boiled it right down, Imogen and I didn’t know each other much better, no matter what we pretended while we were long-distance internet buddies.
“What if you don’t make it through track seven?” I asked.
“You don’t play, so you don’t understand,” she replied. “I don’t care if I make it thr
ough. Playing that music with her, even one time, is worth everything to me.”
“C’mon, ‘everything’?” I countered. “That’s a lot of things.”
“You said it yourself—she shouldn’t be able to do the things she’s doing with this music. She’s unlocked something huge, and I get to play a role in expressing it. You could live your whole life as a mediocre artist who never gets a chance to affect the world the way she is.”
“She’s arguably not having the best effect,” I said.
“Then why don’t you quit the tour? Or try to stop her?”
Quit the tour? That would be like gouging out my eardrums. No way. And trying to stop her—it sounded ridiculous just thinking about it. The damage she was doing to the world was incidental to making sure I heard the rest of the album.
I said, “What’s the new track called?”
“I’m not supposed to tell you,” she said. But after a quick pause, she said, “It’s called ‘The Price of Adoration.’”
* * *
Around 10:15 p.m., a blazing portal of energy opened directly above the venue. It seemed wide enough to swallow up the entire city block. I heard a profoundly unsettling shriek from all around me and nearly puked from sudden fear.
Moments later, I saw Airee, Sierra, and the twins sprinting toward me, screaming the whole way.
I did not see Imogen.
Track 08
Before the band reached the van, an enormous clawed appendage unfurled from the portal, descending toward the venue and smashing through the roof. It was a long barbed arm of some kind, flexible in certain ways like a tentacle, but jointed in spots where bones might lurk beneath the rotting spongy skin. My lizard brain was locked in a terror loop, unable to move, thoroughly frozen in the face of something so massive, so impossible, so ungodly.
Sierra slammed into the side of the van and threw the driver’s door open, but I couldn’t move. She shoved me and shoved me again, but I wouldn’t move.