“Eddie said Billy wants to sleep here so if he gets an idea in the middle of the night, he can just come down and grab a guitar. You have the house across the road to yourself. It’s the old church rectory. Rail’s up the hill in the mountain house.”
“Well, if I’m staying right across the road, I may as well go unpack my saddle bags. Be back in a bit.”
Jake took the cordless phone with him and went upstairs to watch TV and wait for Billy.
When he came back down after an hour of back-to-back sitcoms, he found Brickhouse in one of the isolation booths using a tape-splicing razor blade to cut lines of cocaine on the metal surface of an empty tape flange. He watched as the engineer snorted up through a plastic straw, shook his head with a little shiver and glanced up at Jake through the window. Brickhouse pointed down at the little pile of coke with raised eyebrows. Jake held up his hand and silently mouthed the words, “No, thanks.”
Jake busied himself with filling in the hourly log on the work order for the day’s session, which so far didn’t entail much. He walked back into the big room to brew another pot of coffee, heard a couple of piano notes cascading down from the loft and froze in his tracks. He looked up, expecting to see no one, and instead saw a thin figure in a black T-shirt and tight black jeans hunched over the keys, face obscured by a mass of wavy black hair, cut straight at the chin. Jake let out a little plosive breath that was equal parts laugh and sigh.
He turned on his heel, went back into the control room, and dialed the mountain-house extension on the phone. “Billy Moon is here.”
Trevor Rail entered the church ten minutes later. Jake was threading a fresh tape onto the multi-track, Brickhouse was scrolling through the LCD screen of a signal processor, and Moon was still poking around with an arpeggiated chord progression on the grand piano up in the shadowy loft above the hanging lamps that cast pools of yellow light on the scratched and tape-marked wood floor of the big room.
The piano playing stopped when the double doors closed behind Rail. Jake watched through the control room glass as Billy Moon slowly floated down the spiral staircase and leaned against the banister near the bottom, staring at the producer. Jake could read the tentative body language, but not the expression on Moon’s face—there was more light in the control room than out there and Jake’s own reflection was superimposed over the reunion scene as Rail approached and then embraced his artist, cupping Billy’s head in his large hand, then looking him in the eyes with their foreheads pressed together like lovers about to kiss. Rail was saying something. Moon was nodding a little. Jake wished the talkback mic was on out there.
A moment later the pair came into the control room, and Moon gave a pat on the arm to Brickhouse, who slapped the singer’s shoulder, completing an awkward maneuver that was not quite half a hug, accompanied by a mutual, “Good to see you, man.”
Jake introduced himself with a quick handshake before withdrawing to his place at the back of the room to await instructions. Billy looked relieved. He sat down heavily into one of the ergonomically perfect swivel chairs, rolled backward, put his Doc Martens up on the cushioned lip of the console and lit a cigarette. Rail leaned against the wall beside the cedar-framed glass doors through which a stone path could be seen winding away among the moonlit dead leaves down to a rushing stream.
Rail put his hands in his pockets and crossed his legs, the tip of one oiled, snakeskin boot pointing at the floor. His voice sounded lazy and indifferent when he spoke. “So, Billy, what would you like to do?”
Billy took a slow drag on his cigarette.
“D'you have any songs you'd like to play for me? Your rig is all set up out there. Of course, if you’re tired, we can start fresh tomorrow,” Rail said.
Billy took his time stamping the butt out in the ashtray Jake had set beside him on top of a rack of vintage pre-amps, then said, “Yeah, I’ve got something I could play you. Been writing on the computer in hotels a little bit. Keep in mind, it’s just a rough sketch at this stage.”
Things started happening fast after that. Billy powered up his laptop and sat down at the workstation Jake had arranged on a red Persian carpet in the middle of the big room following a diagram Danielle Del Vecchio had faxed him. Spinning knobs on a little desktop mixer and an array of synth modules, Billy conjured up a groove—sparse at first, just a heavy, deliberate drumbeat, which gradually built in volume and intricacy as he added pulsating bass lines and scratchy bursts of sampled guitar noise.
Brickhouse quickly identified each musical element and assigned them to tracks on the tape machine. Jake wrote the names—KICK, SNARE, HAT, SYNBASS, GTR1, GTR2— with a Sharpie in neat block letters on a strip of white masking tape under the console faders. Brickhouse called out orders to Jake for various compressors and reverbs, giving him just enough time to grab a pair of cables from a hook on the wall and stab them into jacks in the matrix for each device before calling out the next configuration. “Give me that bass line through the LA-2A on insert four, and patch aux two to the 480L, pre-fader, return on channel twenty-six.”
The groove looped over and over. Eventually it stopped mutating, and Jake looked up at Billy through the glass, just in time to see him grab the cheap talkback mic from the boom stand over his keyboard and pull it closer. Brickhouse was looking down at the console when Jake reached over his shoulder and pressed a tiny button the size of a Tic Tac in the vast field of controls.
Brickhouse saw what Jake had done and completed the idea by shooting his right hand out and slapping the PLAY and RECORD keys on the multi-track remote control pad beside his chair. There was a sound of mechanical tension arms locking into place and tape began to roll just a half a beat before Billy started singing.
Do you bite your lip?
Do you twirl your hair?
Do you swing your hips?
Do you even care?
Do you raise your voice, drop your pants,
Do you even have a choice, did you ever have a chance?
In a dirty phone booth
Do you swear to tell the truth?
How do you speak the language of love?
As below, so above
As the serpent, so the dove
The world is whispering the language of love
You can hear it in the calm
In the space between the bombs
The world is whispering the language of love
Do you pierce your lip?
Do you paint your nails?
Do you start to strip
When all else fails?
Do you crack your whip, empty your clip
Sing and dance on a sinking ship
For love
Billy stopped singing and slapped the space bar on the laptop. The groove stopped short, the last beat echoing through the reverb processors in the control room. “My voice is shit tonight, but you get the idea.”
Rail pushed open the glass plate doors that separated the control room from the big room, took a long slow breath, and said, “I smell money. Simply fantastic, Billy. The ragged voice even sort of suits it. Have you been chain smoking since your father’s death?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, keep it up, mate. It adds character. What do you say we go into town for a drink? We’ll pick it up in the morning.” Without waiting for a reply, he called out, “Kevin, come have a drink with us,” and to Jake, “We’ll pick it up tomorrow at eleven sharp.”
The three men put their jackets on. Brickhouse lingered a moment in the control room before following them out to Rail’s car. “Good job catching that vocal on the fly. ’Night, Jake.”
When the sound of Rail’s car had receded into the night, Jake spun the tape off the take-up reel, packed it into its box and finished documenting the equipment settings. He picked up his black nylon bag and slung it over his shoulder as he walked through the live room toward the front door. Moon would be going upstairs to sleep when he got back from the bar, so Jake left most of the lights on, darkening only the contro
l room, which continued to sparkle and pulse with the perpetual activity of flashing LEDs.
He was halfway across the floor toward the ironbound oak doors when he heard the piano in the loft sound a solitary note. He froze in place, awash with dread, ears pricked.
It came again, like a bell.
He thought of bolting across the remaining distance to the door, but he knew that to do so would only lend credence to the notion that something real and awful was happening here. He resisted the urge. What if he was imagining the sound? It was certainly not difficult to vividly imagine a single note being struck on the instrument he had played since childhood. It wasn’t as if he were hearing a fully fleshed-out, two-handed piece of music. Surely his mind could evoke a single repetitive note in such detail that it seemed real to his tired brain.
So why not climb the stairs and see?
Would the note grow louder as he ascended to the loft? Would he see the key moving, like on a player piano, driven by some invisible hand? He felt the pressing need to urinate, but not here; it could wait until he got home.
The note rang out again. Tension iced his shoulders and he let out a short cry. He wondered if it was a black key or a white.
He looked at the other piano under its canvas cover in the kitchen area. Walking to it felt like walking through the shallow end of a pool. The solitary note from the loft resounded again as Jake lifted the cover and raised the keyboard lid. It was a high note, something in the octave above middle C.
He struck the E in that octave. As it faded, the phantom note came again, clashing horribly with the diminishing tail of the note he had played. That meant he had been very close in his guess. But the fact that a note he had actually played could vibrate with such dissonance in relation to what he wanted to believe was an aural hallucination caused the hair on his arms to rise as if lightning were about to strike nearby.
The note from above sounded again.
He struck the next key down from the E he had tried and that was it. That was the one: unison. It was D, an octave above middle C.
As if pleased with his discovery, the grand piano in the loft played four notes this time: a short melody starting on the D, moving up, then down low, then up again, like a doorbell chime.
Now there was a beat to accompany the melody. It was his heart.
Eight
Billy staggered out of Trevor Rail’s ink-black BMW and up the church steps. He dug the key the runner had given him on arrival out of his jeans pocket and unlocked the big doors. Inside, the studio was dimly lit and quiet. He found the spiral stairs and climbed them singing to himself as he went, “There’s a lady who’s sure, all that glitters is gold… hmm… hmm… hmm… hmm….”
At the top, he passed the grand piano and headed across the catwalk to the other side. The loft over here was divided into two areas, the catwalk running down the middle. Long white curtains hung from thick dowels to create private spaces, not quite separate bedrooms. The curtained-off area on the right side had two twin beds, the one on the left a queen and a closet-sized bathroom. Each room was furnished with antique dressers, night tables and lamps with handmade paper shades.
The air smelled of cedar and lemon, and it all added up to a cozy summer camp vibe that reminded Billy of a cabin he had stayed in with Evan and their parents one long-ago summer when they had been vacationing farther upstate in the western lakes region. The memory brought with it another scent—the smell of charred toast cooked on a portable propane grill. His father had called it Camp Toast. Billy pushed the memory down and focused on his surroundings.
His Martin acoustic guitar lay on an upholstered chair in the corner. He picked it up and sat at the edge of the bed, hoping that fatigue and the light buzz of alcohol might conjoin to jimmy the door between the hemispheres of his brain and let his muse slip through. But as his fingers roamed, he found nothing new forming on the fretboard, just the chords of the Zeppelin song he still had stuck in his head from Trevor’s car stereo. It was one of the first songs he had ever learned to play. He still remembered the very first.
Billy had learned the three chords that unlocked rock-and-roll’s secret language like the Rosetta Stone from his uncle the summer of his tenth birthday. Uncle Tim had dropped in for a couple of weeks that turned into a couple of months on his way to find God. The timing was auspicious because Billy had just discovered his mother’s box of Beatles records in the attic while digging out his snowsuit that winter.
By the time Uncle Tim arrived with a guitar and not much else, the last of the snow had melted, and Mom’s tulip shoots had found their way out of the dirt and into the light again, and a scratched and dusty copy of Rubber Soul had been flipped over on the record player in Billy’s room at least a hundred times, but it still had secrets to reveal. Like the sitar Uncle Tim pointed out on “Norwegian Wood.”
“Why are you going to India, Tim?” Billy asked on a sunny August afternoon as they sat on the deck, rocking gently back and forth on the big wooden swing seat, listening to the chiming sound of ice cubes knocking against the sides of their glasses of lemonade. “What’s there?”
“Yogis, young Will.”
Billy wrinkled his nose. “What’s a Yogee?”
“A very wise man. Some of them can even do miracles.”
“Like walk on water?”
Uncle Tim nodded, “Mmm hmm.”
“And fly?”
“Maybe. In a way.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That’s okay. You don’t have to. That’s why I’m going, to see for myself. I’ll let you know if it’s true.”
“What else can they do?” Billy asked, knowing that believe him or not, indulging Uncle Tim was always more entertaining than dropping a subject.
“Oh, all kinds of wondrous deeds.”
“Like?”
Uncle Tim leaned forward, turned the palm of his hand up at the sky and wagged his index finger back and forth. Billy leaned in closer.
“I saw a picture of one of these fellows balancing the weight of his entire body on the tip of his dick.”
Billy sprayed lemonade out of his nose and bounced up and down on the swing, laughing until his eyes watered. Uncle Tim raised the calloused, nicotine-stained finger in front of his mouth like the big hand of a clock pointing at midnight. Billy could see the indentation of a guitar string running a dirty gray groove across the tip of that finger.
“Don’t tell your mother I said that.”
While Billy caught his breath, Tim put his glass down on one of the wooden deck planks at their feet. Perspiration spread a dark stain through the sun-bleached wood in an instant.
Tim took his acoustic guitar from its case and strummed a chord.
“So you’ve been listening to the Beatles, kiddo?”
“You bet.”
“You know that song ‘Falling?’”
Billy shook his head.
“Sure you do. You know, ‘Falling’.” Billy’s expression turned serious, almost reverent as Tim sang the lines and struck the chords, but his eyes also lit with a measure of joy.
“That’s ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face,’” Billy said.
“Yeah, ‘Falling.’”
“You can play that?”
“Sure.”
“The whole thing?”
“Yup.”
Billy looked uncomfortable for a moment, as if searching for the words or the courage to ask his uncle for the keys to his rusted Camaro. Then he raised his eyebrow and said, “Can you teach me?”
Tim laughed, “Fuck yes, kemosabe. I mean, yeah, I can teach you, just—“
“Don’t tell my mother you said that. Got it.”
That late-summer day on the deck swing had been an unexpected awakening. His idea of what he could become instantly expanded. Through all of the chaos and trials that would follow in the years spent becoming, there would be so little of the easy clarity of that one afternoon when all of his life’s ambition was handed to him in the shape of wood
and steel. That had been the real beginning of his ‘overnight’ climb to stardom. But when had he started falling? Where was the beginning of that?
He laid the guitar back on the chair, undressed and slid into the queen bed, surprised and pleased by the softness of the sheets. He lay there for some time but sleep did not take him. Even after the long trip out of the city and into the mountains, the recording, and drinking, he felt restless. God knew he was tired and half in the bag, but despite the comforts of this place, he remained unsettled. Something was most definitely wrong. He rolled over and lay there listening to the memory of the groove they had demoed, looping round and around in his head. It was mixed with a strange droning sound that he recognized, when he focused on it, as a symphony of crickets or cicadas. He tuned into the texture of their sawing rhythm. And then he knew what was disturbing him. The insect drone was the only sound he could hear at all. No cars, no planes, no people on the other side of the wall fucking, no urban techno chatter. No voices on the street. This was the quietest place he had been in at least a year.
He rolled back over, stared up at the shadows in the high wooden beams and fell into sleep.
He was going down the spiral stairs, but now there were many more of them. He kept going down and around in the darkness. On and on. He had to get to the ground floor to answer the door. Someone was ringing a bell. It was a chime, a chime-sequence doorbell, like the one his mother had at the house where she now lived alone. Four notes, a common pattern for a doorbell but something about it was strange, a little odd, a little dissonant for a doorbell, not very welcoming. What uninvited guest did that melody herald? Down he went and around. The bell chimed.
It was dark—very late or very early. Was there a faint light growing in the stained glass windows above? He couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was moonlight. Who could be calling at this hour? He stepped down and down, his shinbones aching, and at last he came to the bottom. Behind him were the oak doors. He went to them, grasped the handle of the one on the right, clicked the catch with his thumb and pulled it open. The dark air was cool and still. Even the insects had quit for the night. There was no one there.
The Devil of Echo Lake Page 8