by David Simms
“You showed us the strength that we truly need. You’re the stronger ones.”
“Stay and he can go.”
The eyes of the Tritons bored into each of the band members. “You’re still pure, not sullied in spirit like the others had become.” They gazed up at the images on the wall.
“Not all of them got hooked on the bad stuff,” Corey said. “Some had been in accidents.”
“Yes,” one said, “accidents.”
What? No freaking way. Muddy’s mind continued to spiral.
“They all came to the River pure as a spider’s silk, but many couldn’t resist the pull and compensated when not swimming in it. There are things in there which can kill a soul.”
Muddy recalled how he nearly drowned in it. How he almost wanted to do so and leave his pain behind, but that wasn’t really him, was it?
“You haven’t been tainted. That is what we need here. We thought we had solved the puzzle with your brother, and we still might. His soul runs deeper than most. We have seen this only once or twice before. Maybe you can help him hold onto it.”
Muddy’s mind swirled in indecision. Could they? Or would they die either way?
The Tritons continued their song and the band collapsed again. How could they win? As the song from the Zack-thing grew in intensity, so did the vibrations. The floor shook and somehow Muddy knew it wasn’t just the bass notes. The entire mountain shook with the song, almost as if something lived beneath it and was fed by the song.
Muddy looked to each of his friends and saw confusion mixed with fear.
Another voice suddenly entered Muddy’s head.
Don’t give in. Those who do, agonize within them for all eternity.
Silver Eye? But how? Why? He turned to Poe then to the others and knew they’d heard it as well.
Remember how you hear a song on the radio and it always seems to play, every day, without fail? You’ll become something worse, a recording of this place—of them. We, as people will be gone, but the music in us will live on.
Definitely not!
Remember what you have within you. Don’t give in.
Muddy hung his head. “Okay, you win.
“What?” The others echoed each other.
“What are you doing?” Poe’s voice screamed as she rushed him. A force, something unseen, stopped her from reaching him.
“We’ll give you our song—I will—but they leave, all of them, with Zack.”
More laughter. “This isn’t some romance ballad, boy.” The tone of its voice shook him.
“I’m not kidding,” Muddy continued. “Take me and leave them behind.”
“You’re nothing by yourself,” said the left one. “We need you as a whole.”
The right one spoke his turn. “Yes, the music as a collective is sweeter than any one voice ever could be. Solo efforts never measure up to the collective. Think of even the greatest musicians.”
Muddy prayed the others heard the same song in their heads that he did. “You said we had a choice!”
Their eyes almost twinkled in a smile. “Did we?”
The band stood like tombstones, resigned to whatever fate befell them, but Muddy doubted any were surprised by the lies. Silver Eye had trained them, but really, he only awoke in them what he knew would already be there, which was why he allowed them to cross over. Their song was strong.
“Okay, but he lives. Our father needs him.”
The rest of the band nodded their assent. They knew.
“Come up to the stage before you begin,” said the middle one. “We need to hear it, feel it, as it flows from you.”
Muddy flashed a smile that would have made any rock star proud. “You asked for it.”
They reached for their instruments and found them missing.
“What the?” Otis cried. “Where’s my drum?”
“My guitar!”
“My sax!”
Another laugh sounded in triplicate. “In time.”
Muddy knew before they spoke.
What about Luke? He’d betrayed all of them, standing off to the side, limping away from the group. Muddy felt the dream, his hope for their lives, drop to the smooth floor and shatter.
“Why?” His sister cried, balling her fists. “Why have you turned your back on us? You’ve suffered through all of this with us. You almost died to get here. They saved you!”
He hung his head. “I still might perish,” he answered in a little voice. “They promised me that our village would be free, that we could finally enjoy our lives. I only had to guide them here.” He shrugged. “These guys were coming here, anyway. It was a small price to pay for our people.”
“You did well, boy,” said the middle Triton. “You did well.”
Lyra looked for something to beat him with, her brother or the Triton, as she glared at them. Either would do. “As long as these things are alive, we’ll never be free. You know that!”
Otis rushed at him, ready to swing. “You saved me. I saved you. That means something, doesn’t it?”
The boy said nothing. He refused to meet any of their stares.
Lyra turned to see the instruments locked up tight in a quartz box behind Zack’s machine. “You’ve just signed their death warrants. You do know that, you miserable weasel.” Her voice dripped with poison.
“I thought you’d understand. This isn’t life. Where they’re from,” Luke said as he waved at the band, “that’s life. This is nothing but a prison. We’re already dead; they just haven’t buried us yet.”
He turned to the others. “I’m sorry. I wanted the best for my people and I thought the Tritons would make you sing forever, not kill you. Honest.”
The band seethed, everyone refusing to look at him. All through their lives, betrayal had been at the forefront. Now, just when they felt they could count on these two people, one turned his back on the bond. Muddy felt a tear form. He’d failed them.
Muddy fell against the wall, blocking out the song that pained him. The gauntlet had been an elaborate set up to test them. If they died, it would have meant that they didn’t have the music in them. End of story. Or were the Tritons lying just to throw them off? Had the Tritons really won and this was just the final test?
“What’s your game?” He yelled at them. “To have us join Zack? What then? Take over our world?”
The Tritons didn’t even flinch. “No, we just want to bring music into this one and conquer one or two others for the other. It’s a vast world, parallel to yours with many kingdoms, many mountains. We want more. We want to control all of the music. We all do. It’s what this place was built for; to help those who make the music, to harness it all.”
“You keep saying ‘them’ and ‘others.’ “ His head spun as he formulated the plan he prayed would work. “Who are they?”
Wait, he thought. If they could travel to our world, they would have done so already. They can’t cross over, not without Zack’s power, but they might be able to soon.
They ignored his question, but answered another. “Haven’t you figured it out, yet? You came even though the old man warned you of what you might find here. Your brother has become the darkest muse of them all. We just helped him realize it.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Muddy looked at his brother’s eyes and saw little remaining, but still, something of his family was in there. He needed to save Zack.
“Now listen and please, take your places.” They gestured to the harnesses.
The song they played on Zack sounded like a mash-up of Bach and Mozart crossed with Def Leppard and Metallica. It was beautiful, complicated, but with the power of a thousand electric guitars though a wall of amplifiers. As the song intensified, Muddy felt it penetrate his bones.
“Think of your lives here,” said the first. “No more pain from society. None. Your song would feed nations and bring them happiness.”
One placed its spindly arm on Corey. “Boy, you came from nothing and moved into everything, but you s
till feel an emptiness nothing can fill. Until you came here.”
Another placed one of its long arms on Poe’s head. She recoiled in revulsion.
“You, dear,” said the creature, its finger-things lifting her hair. “We have sensed from your first trip here, the pain you feel, the most of all in your group. A father should be a father, not a monster.”
“So says a monster,” she said with tears in her eyes. The music from Zack was killing their resolve.
“You can escape it all here and make scores of children smile in the way your parents couldn’t.”
The third hovered over Otis. “Son, you have nothing back home.”
Although he writhed in pain, he turned his head to glare at their captors. “I have more than you ever will. I have my family and friends.”
“They will stay with you until the end of your life, but you know it’s not far off if you go back where you came from. Here you would never fade, never hurt.”
Lyra was next. She still tore her brother apart with the fire in her eyes as he sat next to the captive instruments. “Your people have never known freedom. Your village will be spared if you cooperate, but they’ll be vaporized if your brother doesn’t honor his agreement with us. We have no use for you, so please don’t stand in our way.”
Finally, they came to Muddy. “Your brother was always the golden child. You know that. Without your mother, your father and Zack have withered into themselves, leaving you, the child with needs they couldn’t address, to be neglected.”
He felt his fists curl, aching for the guitar. No. They wouldn’t rattle him, or cause him to sell out all that mattered to him.
“Here, you will never be picked on, never be the low man. Alongside your brother, if you wish, you can rule the music and be adored by many worlds.”
Again, the voice whispered in his head. You know the truth. You came here for a reason, for a task you knew you could accomplish. Now save your brother, my son.
His anger boiled over and he kicked his left leg high, right into the joint where the Triton’s knee should’ve been. Yet it didn’t flinch.
But his assault did have the effect he wished.
All three turned to laugh at the teen on the floor.
Lyra winked at Muddy and attacked Luke—hurtling herself into him, sending him towards the windows. As they tussled on the precipice in front of the window, they rolled into the pedestal which contained the band’s tools in the clear case. It shook and teetered.
“I tried!” Luke screamed, pushing her off him. “When Zack first came to the village, I warned him, told him to go back home if he wanted to live, but he didn’t listen.”
“Liar!”
“No,” he said, pinning her as she still kicked into the pedestal. “The prophecy. We’ve been told all along that someone would come to set us free. To give us the music that we see the visitors come for, and leave with, as we are left with nothing, time and time again.”
“Someone was coming. I knew it and they found me in the forest. It was either them or the village. I didn’t know them!”
“But now you do!” She rolled him into the pedestal, toppling to the floor in a shattering crash. The instruments scattered across the black floor.
“That boy, Muddy’s brother, he never had a chance. He was clouded, they said, and I saw it too. He wanted to accept their power. He wished for power, for answers and would die if he stayed his course.” Lyra skittered out of the way as the band grabbed their instruments. “But these guys stayed their course and now you’ll probably not survive because of it.”
Luke crawled toward the window and shuddered. “I just wanted to save us.”
“And kill these people? You knew you shouldn’t trust these…things!”
He cried. “I didn’t know! I did it for us.”
Silver Eye’s voice echoed again in their heads. Now! Play the music that makes the earth move!
Each slung the instrument he had given them and played the song that had been in their heads since the moment the old man’s ghost sung it to them the previous night.
This is your song, the one you played the first time we crossed over. I just helped pull it from your souls.
“It worked once before,” Muddy said, to both the band and to their mentor, thinking of the melody and rhythms they wrote for Poe to escape her father.
“Ready?” Poe cued the band.
They stood on the stage before Zack, facing off against him, just like they would back home in a Battle of the Bands. It was simple, except that this one might end in the snuffing out of someone’s life.
“You can’t!” The Tritons screamed at once. “We’re offering you what you can never have back home. Stop now and you can still live.”
“I’m through with threats,” she said and nodded to Otis, who slammed his sticks into the edge of the rim on his drum to begin the song.
Muddy hoped that their instinct was dead on, the blues rock fire opus they planned to one day win the Battle of the Bands with back in their real world. He hoped its off-beat, up-tempo blues-rock would keep the creatures off steady ground just long enough to get out of there with all of them intact. He churned out the earthy riff, something he’d come up with while listening to his buddies jamming as they waited for Poe to join them. Born of worry for her, it carried with it an emotional weight he doubted these Tritons had ever heard first hand. Otis laid down the groove under Muddy and Corey added a line that functioned as a bass before snaking into other lands.
Luke had passed on his chance to be the bassist here. Muddy didn’t need him.
The song rocked, tearing into the fabric of who they were. It embodied the songs they’d survived that day.
As the creatures roiled in confusion and terror, something nobody was expecting, Lyra rose again and gestured for Corey to move toward her. In a smooth motion, after he finished his line, they threw themselves linebacker-style into the structure of the man-instrument on either side. It shook. Zack’s eyes flittered open and his song halted in an instant.
As his music stopped, the others grew in volume. The rest of the band appeared to double their intensity and come to life as the Tritons slowed their movements.
The metal and wire structure leaned to and fro, then again, tipping more each way. The instrument in the middle struggled. Did the teen wish to get out to protect himself or to continue the song?
Muddy tried to keep himself in the song, pushing himself harder, but wished to help his brother, hoping that thing confining him didn’t crush him.
As if on cue, Lyra and Corey hit it again, harder and up a little higher. It rocked further, once, twice and on the third time, she reached onto the edge and jumped up on it.
It fell like a musical tree into the wall next to the window with a massive, discordant crash. The tones it emitted when it broke nearly halted the band, but Muddy and Otis were locked in tight. Poe was no longer of this dimension as she sung with sweet pain her lyrics and melody.
Corey stepped up and launched into his solo, giving birth to deep, rich tones that killed off the reverberations of the Zack-thing as the boy collapsed in the harness, still strung tight by the myriad strings.
He lay still while the creatures gathered around him, inching further from the band.
The band became one again and turned up the heat on the Tritons as they simultaneously lost themselves in the music.
Somewhere in Muddy’s mind, he understood Hendrix, Vaughan, Page, Lennon and the others. The feel of the music was beyond intoxicating. Nothing he could imagine would ever match the intensity of the feeling, but many tried. Some did it with more songs and playing. Others turned to booze and drugs, like Zack, adding pain to his equation.
Muddy hurt just as bad over mom’s death. Plus, he’d had to endure much more in school, and his future didn’t seem as bright as his dad’s or his brother’s, but he wouldn’t let himself wallow. He was nowhere near the strength he wished to be, but the band helped a lot.
What happened
next helped him even more.
The Tritons skittered around like roaches caught in the light. Without their song, they appeared lost and without protection. Up and down the walls and across the floor they ran, everywhere except where the music emanated. They screamed. “You can’t destroy us.” Their dissonant voices displayed fear and anything but confidence. “If you destroy our bodies, true power will find you. Those who live below the River will know.”
“What?” Muddy almost stopped until he realized they’d nearly killed his brother. It was a ruse. Keep up the song, a voice from within urged.
“We are only a conduit for those who lie beneath. They have always been here and always will.”
As Poe sung the last note and appeared to glow with power, back-to-back with Corey as Otis performed his rock star ending, Muddy held tight onto his final chord and let it ring.
“What lies beneath? Beneath what?”
“The River. We have powers you can’t imagine and live in places no beings like you could ever survive, because of them.”
“It wasn’t you,” Poe said. “It was the River who guided us. It wanted us to get here, to keep things pure.” She stood up to their towering height as they still shook from the reverberations of the song. “Not by you. It was the River.”
As the trio cowered, they appeared to shrink a little and said, “The River is power, but it doesn’t choose. It doesn’t love or hate. Our father, who lives beneath it, does and we feel his desires now. He wants you to die.”
Muddy suddenly remembered something about his father’s name. He’d changed it long ago. Right after he’d sold his first book. Why? Had he come here, too? Had he recited a poem or story at the crossroads for the door to open? He never knew his dad’s real last name, but he kind of wondered if it mattered now. He was part of this place just like his father. The River was part of their family, as it was for so many others, but if something horrible did live beneath, it was time to leave a family member behind.
“You can’t just leave,” said the trio. Were they regaining their strength so soon? “We won’t—and it won’t let you.”