“What are you two up to, then?” asked Mick. He had a gingery buzz cut and a gap in his teeth he could whistle through, and he always splashed himself in too much Lynx aftershave, in the hope of attracting a girlfriend. “Spot of arson, is it? Never quite know with you two.”
“We’re having a bonfire,” said Dawn. “Kind of an early fireworks night.”
When she opened the door of her flat and stepped inside, Dawn sniffed. She could smell jasmine, from her Yankee Candle, but she could also smell that sour burned odor of black-faced man. She went into the bedroom with Jerry close behind her, and there it was, the wardrobe, with its door still locked. But she knew now that this wasn’t just any wardrobe. This was the wardrobe that had terrified C. S. Lewis, but also inspired him to invent a world where purity battled against evil, and the innocent were sacrificed for the greater good.
She pressed her hand flat against its polished walnut door, and said, “Narnia,” and thought of all those bedtime stories that her mother used to read to her when she was young, with the White Witch and Mr. Tumnus the faun and Aslan the lion. It gave her the strangest of feelings, both frightening and sad.
With Mick’s help, they dragged and heaved the wardrobe out of the bedroom, along the hallway, out the front door, and bumped it down the steps. They paused to rest for a moment or two and then they lifted it, grunting, into the back of Mick’s van.
Mick knew just the place. A developer was demolishing a block of 1920s flats on the Sheen Road. The site was screened off from the road with a green-painted hoarding, almost ten feet high, and there were fires burning there constantly, so one more shouldn’t attract any attention.
While Dawn and Jerry kept watch, Mick unfastened one of the wire security fences at the end of the hoarding. Cars and buses roared past, cyclists cycled past, but nobody took any notice of them. They lifted the wardrobe out of the van and carried it through the gap. The sun was going down now, and the hoarding blocked it out almost completely, so that the demolition site was chilly and filled with shadows. The ground was strewn with rubble and broken bricks, and so they had to carry the wardrobe almost to the far end of the site before they found somewhere level enough to put it down.
“Right, then, you going to burn it?” said Mick. “Should have brought some hot dogs and stuff. We could have had a barbie.”
“Sorry, Mick,” Jerry told him. “I want you to go now, and leave us alone.”
“Oh, that’s nice! I practically break my flipping back helping you carry that bleeding great wardrobe. I find you a great place to burn it, and now you won’t let me even watch!”
“There’s a good reason, Mick. Honestly. Besides, if somebody sees us and we get into trouble, you don’t want to get involved, do you?”
“All right. But you owe me five pints for this, got it?”
“Mick—whatever you want, mate, it’s yours.”
“All right. Five pints and a night with Rihanna.”
“Whatever. I promise you.”
Mick went stumbling off over the mountains of broken yellow bricks. When he had climbed back through the security fence, Jerry unscrewed the lid of the petrol container and said, “Okay, then, sweetheart. Here goes nothing.”
He circled around the wardrobe, splashing it with petrol. Then he took out a box of matches, lit one, and tossed it toward the wardrobe door. With a soft whoomppphh! the wardrobe was enveloped in rippling flames.
Dawn and Jerry stood side by side, watching it burn. The walnut veneer crackled and curled, and soon the oak underneath was being scorched black. Sparks flew up into the evening air like fireflies.
“I wonder what’s going to happen to him now?” asked Dawn.
“What do you mean?”
“Well—this wardrobe is like his only doorway to the real world, isn’t it? Now he’s going to be trapped forever in Narnia—although I don’t suppose it’s anything like Narnia in the books.”
The wardrobe was blazing furiously now, and the flames were licking nine or ten feet into the air. Dawn could see that a woman was watching them from a third-floor window in the block of flats next to the demolition site.
After five more minutes, the flames began to subside a little. Suddenly, however, there was a loud cracking noise, and then another, and then another, and the whole fiery wardrobe was violently shaken with every crack.
Dawn stepped back a few paces. “What’s that?” she said. “It’s not—”
There was yet another crack, even louder, and the wardrobe door burst open and fell flat onto the rubble. Dawn couldn’t stop herself from screaming. Out of the skeletal remains of the wardrobe, a fiery figure of a man appeared, blazing from head to foot. He was burning so fiercely that it was impossible to see his face, but she knew that it must be the black-faced man.
“Aaaaaahhhhhhh!” he roared at her, and it was a roar of rage and agony and utter desperation. He stepped out of the wardrobe and came toward her, both blazing arms raised, walking with his knees half bent as if he were almost on the verge of collapse.
“Bitch!” he bellowed, and a gout of flame rolled out of his mouth. “I’ll have you, you bitch!”
He began to stagger toward Dawn much faster. Jerry said, “Run, Dawn! For God’s sake! Run!”
Dawn hesitated, and then she started to run, jumping and scrambling over the broken bricks. When she was halfway across the demolition site, she turned, to make sure that Jerry was running too. The fiery man was still staggering after her, and he was much closer than she had realized. She saw Jerry kick out at him, trying to knock him over, but then Jerry lost his balance and fell backward, and the fiery man kept on coming toward her. His flames made a soft rushing sound as he approached, and she could feel their heat.
“Aaaaaahhhhhhh!” he roared again, but this time he sounded even more desperate.
She started to run again, but the broken bricks gave way beneath her feet in a tumbling cascade, and she had to scrabble for a handhold to stop herself from sliding backward.
The fiery man had almost reached her, and she twisted around and held up her arm to shield herself.
“I’m not Sophie!” she shrilled at him. “I’m not Sophie Stephenson!”
The fiery man stopped still.
“I’m not Sophie Stephenson,” she repeated, much more softly.
The fiery man lowered his fiery head, and began to turn away. As he did so, however, Jerry jumped on his back, even though he was blazing, and wrapped his arms around him.
“Aaaaaaaahhhhh!” roared the fiery man, and Jerry roared, too, except that Jerry’s roar came from nothing but pain, as the flames shriveled his skin and cauterized his nerve endings.
The fiery man lurched, and spun around, but he didn’t fall over. Jerry was still clinging tightly to his back, but now he had no choice because the two of them were irrevocably welded together by the heat. They went around and around, and each time they went around Dawn saw that Jerry’s face was burning scarlet, and then crimson, like a Satanic mask. His arm muscles were charring, so that his white bones began to gleam through the black.
Dawn sank to her knees, stricken with shock. There was nothing she could do but watch Jerry and the fiery man as they continued to teeter around in circles, like some terrible children’s wind-up toy. After less than two minutes they were blazing so fiercely that she couldn’t see which of them was which. Then, quite abruptly, they collapsed, and lay among the bricks, still burning.
Over on the far side of the demolition site, the back of the wardrobe fell to the ground with a clatter.
Dawn didn’t hear the sirens, but she saw the blue flashing lights, and she heard the firefighters crunching across the demolition site toward her. A firefighter laid his hand on her shoulder and leaned down to look into her face.
“Are you all right, love? What happened here?”
“You’re not Aslan, are you?” she asked him.
“No, love. Alan. Come on, let’s get you out of here.”
He reached down and pi
cked her up as easily as if she were a little girl and carried her back to reality.
Whatever
Richard Christian Matheson
Rolling Stone
Interoffice MEMO
To: Michael Blaine, Senior Editor
From: Lisa Frankel, Executive Editor
M:
Bad news. Looked over Matheson’s pages. Frankly puzzled. They’re indeed a fascination. Yet somehow elusive. Despite the horror of what actually happened, they amount to nothing more than a scrapbook. Evocative. But transient. Not surprised Esquire and The New Yorker decided to pass. My best suggestion, we do the same.
I know this writer is a friend of yours. But I feel strongly if we get into this, we make a real mistake. Bottom line: The band once mattered, but in my mind is not legend; simply forgotten. And the manuscript, while accomplished, is unpublishable. Wish I had better news.
Awaiting your thoughts.
L.
cc: M. Blaine/L. Frankel/J. Wenner
Fortress of the Dead City, Aix-en-Provence, France
AUGUST 27,1969
Flies.
Striking skin; bullets with eyes of dried blood. Clinging to smooth stone, fortress walls, sleeping in chunks of shade that creep; shadow icebergs.
Tourists. Heat.
Salty half-moons under armpits. Sandals scuffing ancient rock. Turkish cigarettes. Lovers hold humid hands.
A deserted city. Long dead. Before Christ was born. Hated. Pounded onto wood with nails; left to bleed, a slaughtered calf. Cries unanswered. Reasons unprovided.
A couple.
Young. Nineteen. Seventeen. Him. Her.
A relationship. Two months. Moods beyond control. Passion and fear.
Suffering.
Her Nikon slicing moments off time; a gently clicking scalpel. Memories for a book. An album. A cocktail-table mausoleum.
Always fighting. Driving from Paris to Monte Carlo. Stopping for iced espresso in a town. A charming village. Staring in silence; a joint burial.
He opens his guitar case. Metal strings hot under sun; branding fingers. Plays a new ballad. Sings softly. Children gather. He smiles, a barefoot saint. It’s about her. She tries not to hear. Feels her life washed away. He isn’t hers anymore. This trip was an epitaph.
She begins to cry.
He’s going back to America. To that bastard Tutt. To record; to find fame.
To Whatever.
From a Taped Conversation, Montserrat
NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1972
“I’m fuckin’ exhausted. Bad influenza.”
Jagger; straw to gimlet. Horse teeth shoving out lips; gaudy fenders. “Is that a pun? Christ…”
When he talks it looks like oral sex. He’s tanning. A lewd little boy in Spandex; the Groin Gatsby, afloat on a 150-foot bauble. Right now, he has the sniffles and a hundred temperature. His features are a water-retentive Halloween mask; not a face that should host a head cold.
The other Stones are down there somewhere, in wet slow-mo, with rented air, scoping out the coral and triggers. Scaring the specimens with horned, goateed jewelry. Scarred arms. Albino eels worth too many million to pester the math.
“Sunken cheeks amid sunken treasure,” Mick suggests. “So…what is it? You want my opinion?” He likes the idea, disaffected glee trickling. He lights an antique pipe, tokes. Answers, tucking air in lungs, sounding inside a heavy sack.
“…okay. They’re us. If we were good enough to be them.”
I jot it down. He dimples Learjet cool. Licks the edge of his perfect little glass, a pink rag sponging. Then, as suddenly, looks off into a place he wants out of, fast. A place of torrential wrongness.
“But that shit they write is intense. These guys are tormented.” He shrugs. “It’s not Woodstock anymore. Besides, like Keith says, that was just mud and bad acid.”
He blows Barnum air, yawns like the world’s richest kitty.
“But same time…I wouldn’t want to be them. The light they use inside those heads…too fuckin’ bright. You can see everything. You heard ‘Error of the Opposite’ from the first album? The songs are fuckin’ brilliant, but…where you get a light like that?”
Sunglasses reflect yachts, refrigerator magnet–sized boats sliding across his lenses. He says nothing. Sneezes. Coughs S-M Caruso guck from a throat insured by Lloyds. Groans, unhappily.
“I’d hate to see everything. That’s why they invented…what did they invent, again, mate?”
“Shadows?”
He shakes his head. No, that’s not it.
“Limits?”
He’s losing interest. You can tell when that happens to rock stars. They dive into perfect sea and soak you.
BAM Magazine
DECEMBER 9,1969
BLOOD SPATTERINGS AND FLORAL ARRANGEMENTS
Petals, a soft rock group that specialized in emotion-drenched lyrics, has broken up, and its members have left to form other groups. Founder Rikki Tutt is rumored to be working in an L.A. studio with ex-Seance member Greg Magurk, known for his acerbic lyrics and dark wordplay in such well-known songs as 1967’s top ten hit “Miss Take.” Magurk recently returned from a honeymoon in France, during which his much-publicized marriage to Bibi Rousse, a former colonic hygienist, was abruptly canceled.
Drummer Stomp McGoo, late of Louisiana funk band Pressure, is manning the sticks. Phil Zapata of folk duo Zapata and Lake is rumored to be jumping ship from the latest Z+L European tour to join. Lake has reportedly filed a lawsuit against his partner. Their Take a Guess album has been top ten for more than five weeks.
Sounds like something plenty interesting getting rolled and lighted here, kids. Keep you posted.
Lyrics from “Here Pussy” from Second Seance album
Written by Gregory Magurk
Courtesy VOICE Records
1968
When I met you,
I wasn’t good for much.
A six-pack of nowhere.
Wasn’t safe to touch.
You cooked me eggplant,
Ironed my flaws and clothes.
Now I’m just a house cat.
Don’t suffer all those lows.
Rolling Stone
Random Notes
FEBRUARY 1970
Newly formed group Whatever is currently recording, working with L.A. studio producing whiz Purdee Boots. Rumor is various Beatles and Hollies are sitting in and that the tracks, so far, are monsters. The as-yet-untitled album is due out within the year on VOICE Records.
From My Notes
Fillmore West, San Francisco
Bill Graham’s Office
JUNE 5,1970
Portion of taped interview with Whatever manager Lenny Lupo.
Q. How would you describe the band’s sound?
A. It’s the death knell of nitwit rock. Got melody. Got ideas. You know Zappa’s a fan? Wants to sit in on the next album. If it was the seventeenth century, these guys would be writing operas. Tell you, if I was Bob Dylan, I’d shoot my rhyming dictionary in the head and open a dry cleaners.
Q. You represented folk acts and surf bands in the sixties. How did you decide to manage the group?
A. I listened. I liked. Instinct.
Q. The debut album Know Means Know is rumored to be amazing.
A. Tell you something. Whatever is the American Beatles. I defy anyone to listen to their music and not be profoundly blown away.
Q. Surf is dead. The British invasion is dead. Where are the seventies going?
A. Ask me in ten years.
New York Times Music Review
“Whatever,” Bottom Line
FEBRUARY 4,1972
Whatever, a band said to have an IQ too big for its own good, escaped imperious repute last night and shook the earth.
Their first album, the exquisitely produced Know Means Know, has been enjoying the view from the top of nearly every critic’s list this year. Its exacting mosaic of song and voice, via producer Purdee Boots, is a radiant marvel. But live, the Los An
geles–based quintet is even better.
Their compositions, the work of moody, ponytailed guitarist Greg Magurk and angel-faced bass player/lead vocalist Rikki Tutt, are like small novels set to highly original scores.
However, not content with mere literate Beatle-esquery, the wordplay, observation, and heartache of Messrs. Magurk and Tutt are only part of the hat trick. Their vocals and tunesmithing are also fed by primal rhythms—a voodoo body blow. Make no mistake, this is not a vinyl meringue abloom with tender nothings. It is rock and roll that keeps its mouth open while it chews.
And it is music nearly impossible to resist.
Last night, playing to a stunned crowd that packed the Bottom Line, Whatever was a dizzying Houdini. Mr. Tutt’s vocals were choirboy-sweet and soared without effort. Mr. Magurk’s baleful arias were darker, oozing sly carnality. Wicked lyrics overflowed with estimable ironies, yet never felt like self-indulged puzzles.
While the rest of rock and roll (with few exceptions, like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan; perhaps a stray, poignant phrasing from Neil Young, Paul Simon, or Lou Reed) revels in stick drawings, Whatever is doing full figure studies.
Mouth-dropping chops from drummer Stomp McGoo gouged a groove so deep it’s amazing no one fell in and got hurt.
Keyboardist Phil Zapata, a former child prodigy, is all grown-up now; a honky-tonk Chopin who smokes Camels while sledging keyboard and wears shades so dark he takes on the appearance of some Steinway thug.
Rhythm guitarist G. G. Wall, draped in trademark fringe jacket and skintight jeans, chugged the songs into a trance state, power-plucking a Fender neck that must’ve needed a cigarette afterward.
Dark Screams: Volume Two Page 10