by Mike Allan
It’s mine.
I drive. Phillips sits shotgun. In the back seats, Nilos and Sjaak doze. The morning's just starting to peek its way through the kudzu walls.
"Thanks," I say.
Phillips' mouth twitches in the dash glow. "Don't mention it."
"Fine. Sorry you didn't get your stuff back either."
"Don't mention that, either."
I'm not annoyed with him. I get it. And I'm too elated to get pissed off. It's a struggle to not show how damn happy I am right now.
"Can I ask about these tabs, or should I not mention that too?"
He doesn't say anything for a moment. "The Alhazred Tablature." Glancing over, he sees my vacant expressions and adds, "Ancient sonomancy from the Pre-Crusades caliphate. Ritual music written for an instrument that didn't exist when Alhazred was alive. The legend is he heard the heartbeat of the Soundscape in his dreams."
"You think that's true?"
"If even a fraction of it is, the Tablature will hold an incredible amount of power."
"Enough to get your sound back?"
His shirt rasps as he shrugs.
"Well, if it's not, we'll find a way. I owe you. Whatever it takes, we'll get your sound back."
"Do you mean that?"
"Of course."
"I appreciate it. But for now all I need is for you and Nilos to keep your playing sharp. Sjaak and I will take care of acquiring the tabs."
“We've been thinking about putting a band together."
"Whatever you wish, just keep in practice."
"What do you think of Hag for the name?"
"I think you shouldn't name a band after my ex-girlfriend."
I shake my head. "I hate it when you make jokes."
10
Nilos slaps his pad onto the bar between us and jabs it with his ballpoint for emphasis. “Need bassist.” Three lines struck under it so I know he means business.
“Fuck no we don’t need a bassist,” I say. “Hag shall be a two-piece.”
Shaking his head, he scratches out, “Low end is important.”
“Low end...we’ve got fucking low-end, we’ve got three bass drums. Quit selling yourself short. You’re all the low end we need.”
He looks torn between accepting the praise or arguing with me. He flips to a fresh page. “Vocals then. We need vocals.”
“I’ll do vocals.” His eyebrow lunges up. “What? I did all the vocals for Swamp Dragger.”
“But your Dutch pronunciation sucks.”
“Fuck off.” Grinning, I elbow him lightly in the side. “Look, man, I’m with you, the power trio is in almost every case the best way to go. But the two-piece does not receive the respect it deserves. The two-piece is ascendant. The two-piece’s time is fucking nigh.”
Purd shakes her head at my bombast. Nilos puffs up his cheeks and then deflates them. “Fine.”
I tip my near empty pint glass towards him. “Once you’ve seen the two piece in action, you’ll come around.”
“Another round?” For me it’s not really a question. She dances her hands at Nilos, and he signs back a yes. Purd pulls me another beer and cracks a Coke for Nilos.
“Where you crazy kids planning on having this gig?”
“Where do you think?”
“Hope you don’t expect to make a lot. Bands get a percentage of the beer sales for the night. That way they promo it themselves and drag all their friends and families in. It’s usually a good deal, but neither of you have any friends. No offense, Nilos. You’ve got an excuse since you’re not from here. Eddie’s just an asshole.”
“Who needs friends when you’ve got a story? Hag, featuring one-third of Swamp Dragger. Hag, the band with three kick drums. We post this shit all over and run with it. I’ll get in touch with those asshole bloggers who always wanted to write about Dragger. We’ll have people flying in to see.”
Nilos scratches out a big “?”.
“Okay, maybe riding the bus in. Whatever. We don’t care if it’s big. We don’t care if we make money.”
Nilos’ pen gouges through the paper. “YES WE DO.”
“I just want to play. I want to be up there on that shitty four inch high stage, playing to a bunch of vested beards.”
She shrugs. “Like I said, you get a percentage. Do whatever you think you need to do. If you suck it up and waste my time I’m starting a blog just to tell everyone how shitty your band is. It’ll have one post about how you hit your creative peak with Swamp Dragger and now you’re just a has-been desperately grasping for relevance.”
“You say that like it’s not true.”
The shit thing about cellphones, you can’t slam them. No matter how much the fucker on the other end pisses you off, no matter how hard you stab your thumb onto the screen, all you get is a cheery “boop”.
You can still throw them though. Give it a hearty, “Fuck!” and you’ve got something like the old days.
Nilos glances up from my stained and warping lyrics notebook.
“That’s all of them. Every single blog or site or whatever that’s worth a shit. None of them want anything to do with us.” Turns out having one third of Swamp Dragger on your roster doesn’t make a great selling point, when that one third is the asshole who refused every interview request you ever gave and maybe even threatened to strangle you in the bargain. None of them even gave me a chance to tell them about the three kicks.
“Thought we didn’t care about money?” Nilos writes.
I shake my head. “I don’t, I don’t, it’s just. . ..” It’s just what? Just I’m pissed off that people don’t really miss me that much? It’s true, I don’t care much about the money, especially not with Phillips’ patronage. “I just thought I was past my days of playing to empty dives.”
“How dare you? Hour’s not a dive. ;)”
“Don’t use those fucking smiley faces. You know I hate that.”
“Emoticons. We got place. We got songs. We got words.” He taps my scummy notebook with his free hand, then underlines words. That means he likes them. The fact that he does make me feel a little better.
“We make music. Make them taste a little what we saw. Maybe not this time, but next time...?” His ellipsis butts against the edge of the sheet and plunges down to the lower margin.
“You’re right,” I say. “You’re right.”
“Got everything we need for gig except one.”
“What’s that?”
“Poster.”
Shit, he’s right. All this social media crap and we forgot the fundamentals. Luckily, I know the perfect girl.
Kendra hunches over her workbench. The miniature is a beast with a beard of wriggling tentacles and blood crusted tusks. Her brush darts in to add little cataract shines to its puke yellow eyes. On the shelf above her stands an army of paint pots ordered by name. Her files and brushes are arranged on a washcloth neatly as a dentist’s torture implements.
“What is that? Chaos?”
“Nah.” She sets her brush aside and turns the figure back and forth. “Something off some Kickstarter. People have no respect for the classics these days.” Tell me about it. Nilos has never even heard of Candlemass. She picks up the brush again, dips it onto her palette.
She and I are recovering plastic crack addicts. Well, I didn’t so much recover as quit when the price got too high and the choice came down to food and rent or another box of sweet, sweet destructrixes. Kendra turned the habit into a job. People ship her their sprue fresh virginity protection brigades and she sends them back painted up and battle ready. Her first love, though, is illustrating.
“You want what now?” Her breath fogs over her magnifying glass.
“Like, a hag. Not as ugly as a D&D type hag, but still kind of creepy looking. Like you’d want to fuck it but you feel weird about it.”
“So about how Purd feels about you?”
“Haha. You want the job or not?”
“God, yes. I need a break from these damn things.”
“Forget it.” She unclips the mini from her stand and sets it aside to dry. “I make enough painting these things. Like I said, this will be a vacation for me. So, a hag. Big tits, small tits?”
“I leave tits to your discretion.”
Her mouth quirks to the side. “I’m thinking maybe like a witchy thing. . .bubbling cauldron filled with eyeballs and ears and shit.”
I hold up my hands. “Like I said, as long as there’s a sort of screwable hag on it, I don’t care. You do your thing.”
“You guys got a logo?”
“I got somebody else working on it.” Designer I know from the Hour. And Purd says I don’t have any friends.
My logo guy’s not too reliable. Should’ve guessed that given where I met him. Two weeks till gig time, we’ve got nothing and Kendra is threatening to just smear the name in Comic Sans if we don’t give her something. Could be worse. Could be Papyrus.
Nilos and I whip something up in pencil. It looks like something a high school kid would doodle during class after getting bored replicating the Slayer logo. In a way there’s kind of a retro charm to it, an innocence. . .we’re fooling no one, it looks like crap. Even the old guy at the print-shop gives it an eyeball when he sees it on his screen.
“Hajj? You know that’s got two j’s, right?”
“It’s ‘Hag’.”
Luckily the printers been standing cold all day so he just runs off our order right there. While it hums along he tries to sell us print and print accessories. I mean just look at all this stuff, if you ever want to make flags for your band or have your name printed on one of the plastic collapsible canopies!
“Why would I want flags?” I say.
“Say you’re in a parade. . ..”
Somehow we get out of there without killing the guy.
Layers of gig posters cover the power poles. You can dig down through the strata and read the recent trends. Past the post-hardcore blackgaze crust there’s a waterlogged mantle of faded Xerox fossils of bands with names like Heimlich Maneuver, MJ-12, and Fuckwaffen. Deeper down, maybe, there’s posters all the way back to the beginning of time, 1969, when Lord Iommi spake, “Let there be doom.”
We staple our poster on top of the fossil layers. It’s so thick the metal never reaches the wood through the paper strata.
Nilos is already walking away, heading for the next flyer enveloped pole, but I’m standing there basking in the moment. I could use a cigarette. This is the time when, if this were a classy operation, we’d smash a champagne bottle onto something.
Head cocked, Nilos comes back.
“I just. . .you know. It’s real now.”
The poles go north and south down the street as far as I can see, but I don’t lose that feeling no matter how many I staple up.
11
The Hour doesn’t have a backstage, just a short hall to the emergency exit. Which is fitting, since it doesn’t have much of a stage either. You play on a four inch high creaky plywood platform barely big enough to fit a standard drum kit, let alone Nilos’ monstrosity. Sound is DIY through an eight channel mixer bolted to the brick behind the stage. For soundcheck, Nilos winds through the early afternoon crowd, jabbing his fingers up or down while I beat on the drums and fiddle with the faders. After we’re done we post up at the bar.
“Gig night. You need a beer.”
“Get one,” he writes, “after show.”
The crowd starts spilling in. Conversations hum underneath thrash playing over the house speakers. Half an hour to show time, they’re packed in spiked shoulder to spiked shoulder. A particularly thick clot near the stage renders judgment on Nilos’ unorthodox kit. I can’t hear any of them but the way they’re moving it looks split fifty-fifty between pointless gimmick and totally awesome gimmick.
Nilos flags down a beer. Then another one. My standards are so warped that it’s only when he’s on number four in fifteen minutes I realize we might have a problem.
“You all right, dude?”
Nilos stares down at his glass. His knees bounce, knocking arrhythmically against the bar
“Hey.” I nudge him.
“I’ve never played in front of people before.”
He gulps half his beer. Of all the things that could’ve gone wrong tonight, Nilos coming down with stage fright never made the list. He’s the best drummer I’ve ever met. The fastest, precise like a laser.
“Nilos, listen to me. You’re the best goddamn drummer I’ve ever met. Your fills help put a titan down.”
“Titans aren’t going to tell me I suck if I screw up.” He glances at the crowd. Sure, they’ll just kill you, but I guess a bad audience reaction is worse.
“Then look right here.” I turn around and point at the back of my head. When I turn back around he looks confused which is a hell of a lot better than afraid. “Forget about them, just put your eyes on me and remember I’m right there with you. Fuck them. We didn’t even want them, right? It’s just you and me. Hag. Sludgy, filthy doom for forty-five minutes.”
“Going to the bathroom.”
Purd slides over, watching him weave towards the bathroom. “Jitters?”
“I don’t think he realized how many people there would be. I’m kind of surprised too. Never seen the place packed like this.”
“You might’ve pissed off half the Internet but people around here still remember you. They missed you.”
“They missed me? Just they?”
“How can I miss you when you’re in my damn bar almost every day?” A berserker in a bootleg Bathory shirt flags her down at the other end.
Nilos comes back from the bathroom. He doesn’t stop at the bar, just zips right past me and squeezes through the crowd onto the stage to take his throne. After a shrug-nod from Purd that it’s cool to start early, I join him.
Nilos taps the pedals, teasing soft beats out of the drums. I strap on my guitar and hit the power on my stack. It hacks out a locust swarm buzz. Feedback slices into my skull as I face up to the mic.
“We’re Hag.” I slam on the first chord of the first riff of the first song. It’s a G5. Underneath the tolling Nilos starts in on a slow, lurching line like a caravan of drunk mammoths marching. They plod along as the chord fades. Just before it ends I shift up the neck and punch the pick down.
We built this song in less time than it takes to play. A simple riff, five chords strung end to end, but each cycle it grows faster and faster. No lyrics to distract, nothing fancy on the fretboard. Just my hands and Nilos’ feet and sticks. Not the most musically interesting thing, but when we get up to speed, when the chords crash together like a burning highway pileup and Nilos’ feet blur solid, man, it gets you going.
Most of the song I’m looking down but when we reach the last blistering measure, I look up. Heads nodding along. Hairy knuckled hands grip glasses. The stoic looks of tight concentration outnumber the big toothy grins, but the tribe isn’t an expressive one.
I let the last notes ring out a second, then drag my pick up the low e before catapulting into the second song.
Dear god it sounds glorious. Crushing as abyssal depths. My guitar sinks its teeth in and shakes till necks snap. The drums breathe fire with each beat. Bottomless blacks and clotted blood reds explode in front of my eyes. Fetid swamp rot invades my nose.
It doesn’t hit the crowd like that. When you go into the Scape, it carves hints of itself into your brain. Sound sounds different. It tastes different, smells different. But they can tell there’s something more behind the horrendous beauty Nilos and me are conjuring. The shadows on the cave wall look just a little sharper. They start to sway. Their necks loosen. Some hands emerge from pockets and become fists or horns.
Nilos grins over his rampart of rack toms. Even though his hands are flying into blurs, he looks completely relaxed. Totally unaware of the superhuman feats of beat he’s achieving right now. Any creeping worries I had burn away. Kid can handle his beer as wel
l as he handles the sticks.
I turn back around and stub my toe against a monitor as I try to take a power stance. Laughing it off, I nudge the wedge back into place behind the duct tape marker and go back to playing.
When I look down again it’s shifted a few inches to the left. It shakes, and shifts to the right like a phone on vibrate skating across a coffee table. A searing feedback whine leaps out of the monitor and latches onto my throat. Dead fish rot fills my nose and ashes coat my tongue. Flashbulbs burst at the edges of my vision. The monitor’s grill bulges upward into the shape of a face, mouth wide in a scream. The grill shatters, flinging shrapnel. My arm comes up fast enough to save my eyes, but hot metal tears through my cheeks and forearm. Real blood washes away the synesthetic flavors.
A woman leaps out of monitor’s mangled innards. Her dark hair forms a static tugged black halo. Flecks of molten speaker coil sizzle on her skin. She’s holding a cymbal-ax not much different from the one Sjaak used on the titan, only the runes look like they’re in dried blood instead of Sharpie. The handle is three mic stands zip-tied together. She whips the butt-end into my gut and I go down hard. Her knees pin my arms. The cymbal’s edge is cold against my throat. I’m afraid to swallow it feels so sharp.
Keeping the ax against my throat, she draws a pistol from the small of her back. “Don’t move.” The pistol’s slide is smoky Damascus steel. The edges of charms and sonomancy runes carved into the grips peek out from her hand. “The rest of you get out of here.” When nobody moves, she pumps a couple of shots over their heads and they stream for the exit. A few go out the emergency door to stage right, tripping a brassy alarm.
“You too.” She’s talking to Purd, frozen between taps and bar with somebody’s full pint in her hand. The woman flicks the gun towards the exit.
Purd blinks like she’s coming out of a dream. “This is my place.”
“And I’d hate to have to shoot it up. Hag and I need to have a chat. Get out.”
Nilos signs at her. Purd nods, heads for the door. She doesn’t set the beer down.