Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You

by Scotto Moore

  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.”

  Track 10

  When I awoke, I was extremely groggy. At first I thought it was due to the amount of wine I’d had to drink. Then I belatedly remembered my wine had been spiked with barbiturates. In fact, I’d watched Sierra nod off before Maxstacy had even finished his little monologue and thought to myself, How odd, I never would have expected a rock-and-roll drummer to be such a lightweight, before realizing I too was feeling the effects of the wine much faster than I anticipated. And now here I was, waking up feeling groggy and realizing I’d been drugged.

  Physically, I was tied to a chair, gagged, and listening to what sounded like a gramophone recording of an ensemble of medieval musicians. Instead of a single lead singer, several male and female musicians traded lead, duet, and chorus duties. I recognized the melody but couldn’t immediately place it. Mentally, a building fury threatened to crowd my consciousness out completely, and I struggled to maintain a presence inside my own mind.

  Across the room, Sierra was also tied to a chair, growling and occasionally shrieking through her gag. She sounded feral, or insane, or both.

  “The music you’re hearing is the infamous Viereck recording of the Ten Charts,” Maxstacy said genially, making conversation as though this was all very normal to him. “We’re up to the Fifth Chart,” he continued. “Normally the process takes a bit less time, but you are well acquainted with the major themes in these charts, so I’m not surprised to see that you’ve built some resistance.”

  Resistance?

  Then it clicked. The Fifth Chart was a variation on the melody of Airee’s track five—“You’ve Been Given a Simple Choice.” Maxstacy thought he was doing something specific to me by playing these Viereck recordings. Clearly it was having an effect on Sierra—or was it? I could have sworn that when Maxstacy wasn’t looking, she stopped seizing long enough to smile and wink at me, before going back to her act.

  “The woman you know as Airee Macpherson is actually a psychopathic criminal from the future,” Maxstacy said, and I swear, when you hear someone say a thing like that with no trace of irony and you believe it almost immediately, you really do wonder about the choices you
’ve made in life. But then, of course, he had to take it to an even more fucked-up place. “She’s been expelled from her home dimension, banished hundreds of millions of years into the past, into a proto-primitive mind on a proto-primitive world where no recognizable culture could be said to exist from her perspective. A prison, in other words, where she could do no further harm to her home society, where she would live out the rest of a frail human lifetime in anguish at what she had lost and would never see again. Her consciousness will be extinguished and dispersed when the host body dies. This is a life sentence and a death sentence all rolled into one.”

  What did that make Maxstacy? A prison guard? Why would they need one? To admit new inmates, or . . . or to keep the inmates from destroying the prison.

  Like Airee Macpherson was busy doing. Shit.

  Maxstacy flipped the vinyl recording over to side B, and soon enough a sparse, haunting arrangement of the Sixth Chart—“Some Were Not Meant to Last”—began. This chart was a culling. Maxstacy could use it to eliminate those who arrived here and refused to cooperate with his orders. What was he expecting from me?

  Sierra was still choking and gagging across the room—damned convincing. I’d missed the boat on pretending to have seizures—which, let’s be clear, looked pretty exhausting anyway—but I did introduce a little twitch into my tied-up hands and feet, while I considered how to get out of this mess.

  Maxstacy finally removed my gag.

  “Now perhaps you understand my business here,” he said. “I locate the hosts and prime them with the Ten Charts. The Viereck recordings are the most famous, but many variations exist—some from the past, some from the future. Airee Macpherson managed to steal a set of recordings from me and she’s twisting them to her own purpose. I would say she must be punished for her crime, but being here is already punishment. No, she must be destroyed, like any who disregard my authority.”

  I was inclined to believe him.

  “The last individual I sent to stop Airee Macpherson broke off contact suddenly,” Maxstacy continued. “I suspect you know what happened to my weapon, yes? Go on, you can answer—I see you haven’t yet lost your human identity.”

  “She made your weapon’s head explode with her voice,” I said. “After he punched out our van.”

  Maxstacy actually seemed to be surprised by that idea. Then he regained his composure and said, “You are part of her inner circle. You could get close to her.”

  “Uh, not after spending the last ten hours getting away from her,” I said. “She’s not going to trust me now.”

  We both looked over at Sierra, who had slumped into apparent unconsciousness.

  “And I don’t think Sierra is secret-agent material,” I concluded.

  The Seventh Chart began, which I knew as the track “The Price of Adoration”—the one track that Imogen had managed to play with the band. Rehearsing it in the van all day, she’d gone over to Airee completely somehow, and I felt that same pull toward Maxstacy as I listened to this recording.

  I said, “Why are the titles of her songs in English, but her lyrics are gibberish?”

  “Airee’s using a bit of creative license with her titles,” Maxstacy replied. “Probably for SEO reasons. But the lyrics are hardly gibberish. It’s what John Dee incorrectly identified as an angelic language called Enochian. It’s actually the military patois of our race, a command-and-control language that can override sentient free will.”

  “Seems like she’s still got plenty of free will. But the versions that she’s playing and releasing don’t sound anything like this recording of yours.”

  “Yes, she’s definitely found a way off script in several ways. And her results have been quite unexpected. Hence my deep desire to find a way to bring her back into the fold.”

  The Eighth Chart, which I had never heard before, began, and I fell silent, absorbing the musical information with full concentration. This was the song Airee called “Destroy All Unbelievers,” which I had pretended to post to my blog but hadn’t actually heard. As I listened, Maxstacy’s desire to bring Airee back into the fold was magnified by my own personal desire to destroy her. She was perverting an entire system of justice, and I realized at that moment how much I absolutely hated her for what she was doing to this innocent world (which was a far cry from the typical nihilistic loathing I felt about the planet).

  I said, “How can I help you? She’s gotten so strong. Even if I managed to get close to her, she’d overpower me in a heartbeat. Plus she’s got the twins. And she can summon death tentacles from the sky!”

  He said, “Just listen. You must listen.”

  And the Ninth Chart began. I’d never heard something so unexpectedly hopeful. In the midst of such a menacing arsenal of musical compositions—music capable of bending the minds of extradimensional aliens and destroying the minds of unfortunate humans at the same time, music capable of twisting Airee Macpherson from a mixed-up musicology student into a despotic heavy-metal warlord—somehow the Ninth Chart showered me with the tiniest hints of light. If I had to give it a cheesy English title, I’d call it “You’ve Been Given a Second Chance.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said at last, clearly frustrated with me. “You should have become a host by this point in the music, but clearly you’re only susceptible to her version of this music now.”

  “Wait—maybe I don’t want to be a host!”

  “They are sending me another weapon!” he exclaimed. “A stronger one—a true warrior! One of you must be ready to accept it! But the woman you brought with you is useless, and you yourself are not much better. What will I do?”

  “Why don’t you be the fucking host?” I said. “If they’re sending a fucking weapon, why don’t you save the world?” I was really getting warmed up. “What kind of coward are you?”

  “I can’t risk myself in such a fight!” he exclaimed. “Without me, who would awaken the prisoners to their new lives?”

  “You mean, who would obliterate a bunch of innocent people by dumping extradimensional psychopaths from the future into their minds?” That’s when it hit me—if they were sending messages and prisoners back from the goddamn future, this whole thing was already a foregone conclusion, so what the fuck were we even doing here?

  The matter was resolved for us by a single massively amplified guitar chord coming from outside the cottage. Maxstacy’s eyes widened as he crossed to the window and peered out through the curtain.

  “Of course,” he murmured. “She followed you straight to me.”

  “YOU’VE GOT MY DRUMMER,” Airee’s unmistakable voice growled over whatever ridiculous sound system she’d brought with her “AND YOU’VE GOT MY HERALD. I WANT THEM BACK!”

  Sierra sat up in her chair, pulled her gag off, and smiled. Her hands were untied; that’s what she had been working on during her entire bullshit seizure routine.

  Maxstacy threw open the curtains so that we could both see clearly what was happening outside. A flatbed semitrailer was parked on the lawn, and Beautiful Remorse was set up on top of it between two towers of loudspeakers. They started vamping on an introduction as they saw Maxstacy standing in his living room. It was the twins on keys and guitar, a wobbly but competent new bass player, a staggering array of drum machines and samplers, and a defiant Airee Macpherson, somehow bathed in a spotlight.

  Oh wait—that wasn’t a spotlight, that was a portal of energy starting to open directly above her head.

  “I’M HERE TO PLAY TRACK NINE FOR YOU,” she said. “USING EVERY PROFANE TECHNIQUE I LEARNED FROM STUDYING YOUR FUCKED-UP CHARTS OF MISERY AND DOOM, TRACK NINE IS MY MASTERPIECE, THE ABSOLUTE HIGHLIGHT OF MY ALBUM. WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW WHAT IT’S CALLED?”

  Maxstacy shook his head. No ma’am, he did not want to know.

  “IT’S CALLED ‘YOU ARE ABOUT TO DIE, MOTHERFUCKER!’”

  Maxstacy didn’t respond. But I knew better what was potentially about to happen and had zero interest in my head exploding. Any vocal assault that could
take down Maxstacy was going to catch Sierra and me in its wake.

  “Sierra, we have to get out of here!” I shouted.

  “Chill the fuck out!” she shouted back.

  And then, with an immensely powerful screech, Airee Macpherson began singing her masterpiece, “You Are About to Die, Motherfucker.”

  An astounding wall of sound hit the house, and for a second I thought I was going to vomit. But as the song progressed, Maxstacy took the brunt of the punishment. His skin started to blacken and peel, and he started to glow from the inside, as though he were turning into a radioactive melon. He didn’t just stand there and take it though. He opened his mouth, took an enormous breath, and then retaliated with his own epic samurai warrior death song. I couldn’t hear it well enough to pick out a melody in what he was doing, so if he was singing the Tenth Chart, it was lost on me. But it seemed to have an effect. I heard feedback from the stage and the sound of what might have been a speaker exploding. A desperate musicological duel was underway, one that would clearly end with complete obliteration for at least one of the participants. With such a sonic maelstrom surrounding us, it was a miracle that Sierra and I survived.

  Actually, it was earplugs, which we were still wearing. Which we’d been wearing the entire time Maxstacy was trying to prime us with the Viereck recordings.

  And let me just throw in a quick shout-out for the Moldex Pura-Fit earplugs, providing the highest noise reduction rating (33 db) you can get in a disposable earplug. Some “high-fidelity” earplugs with lower NRR (let’s say 12 to 20 db) reduce noise evenly across the spectrum in a way that allows music and vocals to shine through while still providing healthy noise reduction otherwise; they’re often considered great concert earplugs for that reason. But make the jump to the 33 db earplugs, trust me. It’s the most noise reduction you can get for any reasonable amount of money short of having your ears filled with molten lead, and it’s worth it for extending the life of your hearing. And in our case, extending the life of our lives. I mean, certainly we still heard and felt Airee’s music when it was aimed our direction. Earplugs can only ever block air-conducted noise, but bone-conducted noise will always get through; there’s no body armor version of an earplug. So yeah, we definitely suffered.