The songs played for an hour. When it was over the speakers took to spitting out static once more. Molly couldn’t ignore the woman’s intro’.
Broadcasting from the caverns.
Trip to the end of the line.
It was too similar to her cave and train tracks vision for her to simply dismiss as a coincidence. But none of this made any sense. She was connecting the dots where there weren’t any. Even so, she couldn’t shake it out of her head.
They were eager to practice. The sounds they conjured were far beyond anything expected. Soul stirring tunes that made chests ache and heads reel. The three musicians had never produced anything as sublime as what they were now invoking.
Gavin’s disappearance quickly became a distant memory.
***
“Molly. We need to talk.” Mark nervously peeled a sliver of black polish from his thumbnail.
Molly continued to fiddle with the distortion pedal. She’d been dreading this conversation for days. “What about ?”
“Just wonderin’ if you’d picked up anything useful from my books.”
“They were interesting. So mote it be and shit.”
“I wanted to explain about the bottles.”
“You really don’t have to.” She plugged the cable jack into her guitar.
“Yeah. I do.”
“Pretty sure you don’t.”
“Please hear me out.”
“All right. All right.”
Mark sat down on the floor, slouched so low his chin touched his chest. “Look. It all started with Victorian séances. Always been obsessed with them. Mediums back then would tap into these eldritch realms. Séances. Honest to God séances. Usually run by women fighting back against a society that saw female sexuality as mysterious. Dangerous shit. Practiced their arts the only way they could.”
Molly had read her fair share on the history of the occult, even written a paper on Eusapia Palladino for her Women’s Studies class. She doubted Mark even considered the possibility she wasn’t clueless.
“Damn. I’m not explaining this right.” He straightened his spine, sat upright. “There’s this German poet. Died 1800s. Said something about music that really spoke to me. I memorized it.” He rubbed his palms together as if bracing for a grueling task.
“‘Music is a strange thing. I would almost say it is a miracle. For it stands halfway between thought and phenomenon, between spirit and matter, a sort of nebulous mediator, like and unlike each of the things it mediates—spirit that requires manifestation in time, and matter that can do without space.’”
He looked to Molly, silly grin on his face as if waiting for her acceptance before continuing.
“I might steal that from you, actually,” Molly said.
“Yeah ? Well, music, radio waves and magic are the same thing. Music waves are, are sort of, um, ectoplasm as sound. Ectoplasm is wet sound transmissions. A weird kind of substance, in between the physical and the spiritual.”
He locked his fingers together. “Bridges between the material and immaterial realms.”
“You said ectoplasm ?” The nightmare frolicked in Molly’s head.
“Yeah. Ever hear of Eliphas Levi ?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“A magician. Molded astral light into physical forms. It’s like this : science and math, all about how nature does her thing. But on the other side you have words and stories and symbols. They help explain how things work too, just in a different way than science.”
Molly didn’t mean to sound condescending, but found it difficult to keep the skepticism out of her voice. “So you’re talking ontology ?”
“Not sure what you mean.”
“How stories themselves make something exist. Words used to describe ideas make the ideas real. Why is existence the way it is. That kinda shit.”
“Holy fuck. Not just a face and kick-ass guitarist.” He tapped a long fingernail against the concrete floor in contemplation. “Look Molly. I’ll be the first to admit there’s only so much Crowley or Alice Bailey you can read before you know they’re full a shit. There’s no easy way to say this.”
“Then say it uneasily.”
“Radio 6EQU-J5 showed me where to look.”
“For what ?” Molly pushed her dark purple hair from her face.
“For the ectoplasm I stored in the bottles.”
Mark could call his sperm collection ectoplasm or whatever the hell he wanted, but it still didn’t make it magic to Molly. She wasn’t even sure what he was rambling on about. But she was reluctant to cast aspersions based on an admittedly unsettling hobby. He was actually excited about discussing something that he’d likely been mocked for previously. But that recurring nightmare and the ectoplasm. And collecting body fluids ?
No way was this healthy.
“Thanks for letting me borrow your books.”
“Anytime, Molly.”
***
Molly asked a few co-workers at the department store if they knew of a cave near abandoned train tracks in the woods nearby. A few had heard rumors but didn’t know any locations. It wasn’t until she was leaving for the day that Mr. Ormond from the electronics department mentioned he knew what she was looking for.
Ormond was a chatty old man. Widowed, children grown, grandkids probably in their teens and no longer concerned with visiting. Retired, but lonely enough to keep working at a minimum wage anti-union department store.
“Used to go walking them tracks at night. When we was kids. Trains ran lumber shipments through town up to Cottage Hollow. Them cars’d get past 60 miles per hour through these parts. No horn, goin’ so fast you don’t get that clackity clack. Hear nothin’ but metal hissin’ on metal if you’re lucky. Never knew what we was riskin’ until Danny got killed.”
“Sorry.”
“S’all right. Long time ago. We swored up and down that train didn’t come along and hit Danny until after whatever hit him did so. There he was, behind the gang, then bam ! I seen hands go up in the air and the night is fulla light and Danny be screamin’. Then the tracks start shakin’. See the train lights on the way. Jumped off the side right as it shot by. Ain’t no train tore Danny up. So’s I say anyway.”
“And you said there’s a cave out there ?”
“I did indeed, lovely lady. Place out that ways where some kids disappeared. They filled that hole in with cement some 30 years ago. It’s at the end of the tracks that used to run north. Few miles past the DR. CLARK’S LUXURIOUS LINIMENT bridge.”
“Thanks, Mr. Ormond. Appreciate it.”
“Any time, lovely lady.”
***
Molly’s shift ended just after lunch. Plenty of daylight left to go hiking into the woods, find the tracks and allow them to guide her way. Maybe she could verify whether or not 6EQU-J5 had anything to do with the cave. There was no reason to think so, though her visions were persistent and she felt she had to follow through on any possible connection. She was 10-years-old again, heading out on an adventure. Following clues to locate some mysterious transmissions being sent from a hidden radio station. She didn’t really believe anything would come of this, but the fantasy motivated her.
She walked slowly at first. She wanted to waste as much time as possible before heading back to the house. The constant harassment, the omnipresent potential for violence—it was all far beyond what she’d prepared herself for. Never felt safe renting a place with three guys in the first place, and now that it was down to two it felt even more threatening. She shouldn’t have to live with a cloud of fear hovering over her at all times.
She’d even bent over backwards to accommodate Luke’s tragedy, a childhood afflicted with domestic violence and the death of his older brother Derek. It didn’t excuse Luke’s behavior, but she’d tried to understand where his abusive personality came from.
Luke had been 14, Derek 16, when they’d decided to go deer poaching. Common enough in these parts where the cost of a hunting license was
too steep and families had hunted the land for many generations.
The brothers were oiling guns, making sure they’d sufficient ammo, when Luke jokingly pointed his .30-30 at Derek. One moment his brother was laughing and drinking beer, the next he was just a mandible on top of a neck.
Molly shuddered. At least it wasn’t hunting season. That and her bright yellow Cramps hoody diminished the chances of getting picked off by some camouflage-wearing redneck.
She arrived at the covered bridge with the DR. CLARK’S LUXURIOUS LINIMENT ad on the side. She leaned her upper body over the weathered rails, closed her eyes, thought about how cold the water would be.
Imagined her mouth engorged with mud and sodden leaves.
The sound of limbs banging against smooth river rocks.
She walked across the rickety boards, slid a finger under her sleeve, from wrist to the inside of her elbow. Instinctual, a tactile habit, like the unconscious way she held a cigarette. She wished she’d been able to slice deeper past the skin’s surface. If she’d just managed to do that much more this perpetual dance of attempted suicides would have concluded. She had to admit it was a lovely scar, smooth and shiny as a gemstone.
Flirting with suicide was just the clumsy foreplay of an adolescent’s romantic notion of dying. Time to accept adulthood with a finger on the trigger. Lips on the barrel. Move beyond this half-assed game played with ineffective pills and razors whose consequences could be stemmed by a concerned ex-boyfriend dropping her off at the emergency room.
Those maudlin teen years are long past. Stop being such a cliché.
The day was colder than expected. She sipped from her energy drink. Mr. Ormond had been right—the train tracks were less than a couple of miles into the woods. She quickened her pace along the rails. Doc Martens knocked bits of the decaying beams into the grass. The frost had stripped the color from the tree limbs. Brittle silvery-gray twigs bent down in a convoluted skein. Some touched the ice-limned ground, others contrasted against the crisp blue sky like an anatomist’s map of the circulatory system.
Molly passed a familiar paperback maple, bark peeling away in scabby segments. It couldn’t be the same one—she’d walked by another identical to it less than twenty minutes ago. She kept walking.
She sure as hell wasn’t nostalgic for her high school years. But there was still something to be said for those times when so much seemed possible. When she could’ve been a musician, or a writer, or a veterinarian. All were equally plausible. But after graduating from Cottage Hollow High the world had become uncompromisingly dull. Sure her school years were hell, but adulthood was hellish and boring.
She saw the maple again. This was impossible. The tracks couldn’t run in one massive circle.
The sun was setting. She didn’t realize how long she’d been hiking. At least four hours had passed. She stepped off the train tracks, cut into the woods back towards town.
She came out near the DR. CLARK’S LUXURIOUS LINIMENT covered bridge.
***
Molly awoke from the Mark-marionette nightmare again.
She couldn’t get back to sleep. She put her headphones on, turned on her Walkman, tuned it to 6EQU-J5. Of course it was just the usual wave of crackling and popping.
She closed her eyes and listened.
She saw the cave again. It was dark, the only things in motion were silhouettes of blades of grass. The mouth of the cave glowed with the color of something that wasn’t firelight.
A shadow passed within.
Music erupted in Molly’s ears.
The sounds invoked the crisp, damp atmosphere of a cavern. She felt the ground gritty beneath her bare feet, air sharp like breathing particles of suspended glass. Even the graffiti on the stone was visible in her mind’s eye, colors as faded as the labels on the antique beer cans littering the floor. She could smell the creosote outside on the old wood tracks and the fresh scent of the overgrowth rustling in a breeze.
The cave was a massive entity sculpted by centuries of water, the maw of something old even for the earth. A god’s orifice where extinct peoples had intruded and offered supplications.
If she tilted her head just so, squinted her eyes and allowed the sputtering noise to overwhelm her, she could see a yawning crack in the back. She sensed the recess led to deeper, darker regions of the planet.
Music came from within.
She’d been fascinated by archaeoacoustics in college after an anthropology professor gave a lecture on rhythms altering brainwaves. She’d followed up on the subject, even written an extra credit paper on the bell-like sounds conjured from stalactites and stalagmites which some Paleolithic peoples played like a lithophone. Deep, resonant chambers echoed voices, infrasonic drumming altering consciousness, reverberating throughout time.
Molly gently placed her head against the cold rock surrounding the fissure. She closed one eye, opened the other wide as if looking through a telescope. It was too dark to make out any detail but she could smell something thick and watery flowing inside.
Gorgeous forms suddenly wriggled in the black. A kaleidoscopic whorl deep within the earth. Prisoner’s cinema in all its glory. But these displays of light were tangible, coalescing fat globules careening off each other only to dart off into the blackness as greasy flaming stars.
Gavin’s voice chanted from within the chasm. Singing to music that had not been created by human hands.
It was the most beautiful music Molly had ever heard. She knew that if she ever escaped this fugue state she’d never be able to describe it.
It was all so clear now. Every attempt to understand this world was useless. Art and the scientific method were inherently limited ; neither could adequately describe anything examining existence through goggles fogged by an anthropocentric lens.
She could see how the entirety of human inquiry was irrelevant. Human creativity nothing more than a petulant whine after listening to the songs of burnt out stars, the poetry of entropy. Voices of dead throats in ancient caverns.
The cave continued to perform its numinous joy, trumpeting such transcendent notes it moved Molly to deep gasping sobs. Everything in comparison were just coprolites littering cave floors.
She knew she’d never be able to leave this town. Knew this with such devotion she simply kept the headphones on and her eyes tightly shut even after her Walkman’s batteries finally died.
***
They listened to 6EQU-J5’s static early that morning for a good two hours before the music began playing.
There was nothing melodic about the songs. A lingering void insinuated itself into every note. A whiff of rot ran beneath everything, an unctuous flow thick with infection. The pitch was off, ascending and swooping in delirious waves. The tones of something struggling its way free.
Molly stood up quickly, turned the boombox off. “I can’t do this any more.”
“The fuck ?” Luke grabbed her wrist. “Don’t touch my shit.”
“Don’t touch me, asshole. And it’s not yours. It’s Gavin’s.” Molly positioned herself to throw a punch.
Luke pushed her away. Boots left a black skid mark on the cement floor.
Mark had mellowed to a catatonic state. He stood bleary-eyed, seemingly unaware of their presence. Luke jabbed him in the chest with a finger. “You’re the one who let this cunt play guitar in our band. Put a leash on it.”
Mark struggled out of his torpor. “Gavin’s gone. Think about it—Molly does all the managing shit, bills and all that. Your uncle will kick us out without her part of the rent.”
Molly held her hands up, acknowledging defeat. “Can’t do this any more. Done carrying your sorry asses. You’re both fucking losers. I’m twice the musician either of you are, but I’m constantly shit on.”
“Shut up, bitch. You don’t know a goddam thing,” Luke said.
“I know you’re a mediocre drummer who can’t write music. Jesus, can you even talk about anything other than childish pagan white power circle-jerking bullshi
t ?”
“I’d stop while ahead. You don’t even know how stupid you sound.”
“Smart enough to know when to call it quits.”
Mark silently stared at a point on the ceiling where the light swirled in ribbons of creamy smoke.
***
Molly woke to Mark’s stereo blasting at full volume. She immediately recognized the song.
Retch on the God Flesh,
Bone dust chokes the encroaching storm,
Silt blackens the flesh of the stillborn,
—pounding through the walls from his bedroom. Caterwauling voices lurked behind the vocal track.
Choir of salt-crusted cardinals,
Chant from mouths sick with barnacles,
Praise be thrice cursed abomination.
The trees outside the window were so distorted by the wind Molly wasn’t sure if they were just leaning in towards the house or if something enormous was pacing across the front lawn. The quivering branches made the blinking red glow from the traffic light at the intersection dance on her walls. Her room ran scarlet, pulsing to the beat of the rumbling throughout the house.
Retch on the God Flesh.
She’d slept in her sweats, t-shirt and Doc Martens, just in case she had to leave quickly in the middle of the night. No reason to trust Luke, no faith in spaced-out Mark either. Her few belongings had been stuffed into a gym bag next to her guitar, both ready to go at a moment’s notice. All set to leave this shithole first thing in the morning. She threw the covers aside, opened her door.
Luke had collapsed on the living room floor near the couch. He was snoring loudly, surrounded by beer cans.
“Can’t stop. I can’t stop.” He grunted in his sleep.
A mound of clothes was heaped just outside Mark’s bedroom door.
Praise be thrice cursed abomination.
The discarded clothing retained a gamy scent. Molly thought of her grandparent’s goat farm.
A crash came from Mark’s room. He was probably high, stumbling around, banging against furniture.
The door shuddered under the quivering notes of a stringed instrument. Staccato quickly building in speed and intensity, ascending into a frenetic shriek. A peal of discordant music, rhythm undulating as if Molly were listening to a record played backwards. An odor wafted from beneath the door.
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