Billy looked at Jake, eyes wide, and said, “That’s a funny melody.”
Jake raised an eyebrow.
Billy played it again, this time singing the note names as he played them. His tired voice crackled, “Dee, Eee, Aay, Dee… Dead. It spells dead.” He stood up from the bench, picked up his beer bottle and drained it into his mouth. “I’m going to bed, Jake.”
“Okay.”
Billy closed the lid on the keyboard. He walked across the catwalk, leaving Jake standing alone beside the piano, trying to find his feet.
Billy parted the canvas curtain, hesitated, then said, “You were right; it’s much more interesting in that key.”
Nine
Two weeks into the project, Billy Moon had demo versions of six new songs completed, and Trevor Rail decided it was time to start laying the foundations for master recordings with a live rhythm section. The drummer was Steve VanHausen from Cradle of Fire, the bassist Jeff Cabenieri from Diamond Head. The two had never played together before, but their bands had toured with Billy on Lollapalooza the previous summer. By the end of the first take of a song called “Black Curtain,” the chemistry in the room was palpable.
But it wasn't good enough for Trevor Rail, who might as well have been pacing the control room with a cat o' nine tails. The producer wanted to splice together the best performance of each section culled from three or four takes of each song. In the computer, the edits would have been fast and easy, but Rail insisted they be done on the analog master tape with a razor blade, resulting in a grueling series of late nights for the engineers.
After the fourth night of edits wrapping up around four in the morning, Kevin Brickhouse was starting to feel like a zombie. The mirrors on the handlebars of his Indian had told him he was looking like one too, but his assistant, Jake, wasn’t looking so hot either, and Jake didn’t use rocket powder. Brickhouse knew he looked like shit, but as long as the kid looked like shit too, he didn’t have to worry about it. It wasn’t his lifestyle that was killing him; it was just the job. Good.
He looked out of the control room window at the rectory across the field. It was just a little farmhouse with crosses cut into the doors, but damn, the bed was comfortable. The place had a country charm that made him wonder what it would be like to finally settle down someplace quiet, maybe even get married again. Probably boring as all hell. He wondered if maybe it wasn’t such a good thing that this studio had windows—in Manhattan they were as rare as truly great songs—because knowing that dawn had crept up again and being able to see the house where his bed waited was probably only making him more aware of how tired he was. Better to have no sense of place beyond the studio walls and no concept of time beyond the number of beats in the bridge.
He pressed PLAY and listened to the edit again, trying to relax and not focus on it. This time he only paid attention to his tapping foot as the music went by. If the splice was too early, it should catch his attention when his foot felt awkward. But it was smooth; he kept right on tapping into the third chorus. He looked at Jake and raised his eyebrows.
“Sounds good,” Jake said. “Undetectable.”
“Hopefully it’ll still sound good when we’re awake.”
In the gray murk outside, a slouching shadow moved past the window, toward the front door of the church.
“Here comes Gribbens to drag your sorry ass across another sunrise,” Jake said with a hint of mirth in his otherwise tired voice.
“Aw, shit.”
“Why don’t you just tell him you’re going to sleep?”
“I should. He might have something for me, though.”
Ron Gribbens was a runner who had been flirting with the transition to assistant engineer for over a year. Apparently Eddie didn’t trust him enough yet to promote him outright, but he was often assigned to help out with setup or mixdown sessions that required extra hands. Brickhouse had met him on a session he’d done in Studio A the previous winter. A low-fi indie band called Upchuck. Their producer had been stuck on the asinine idea of tracking the entire band live in the big room with stage monitor speakers instead of headphones, resulting in feedback and bleed-through problems that required extra hands to sort out.
Gribbens had done a competent job and had charmed the band enough to stay on for a few days after the extra help was justified. Then Eddie O’Reiley asked him what the fuck he was doing chalking up overtime if the monitor problem was solved and put him back on deli runs. But the band, and Kevin, had been sorry to see him go. Even if everyone knew Gribbens was something of a liability—a well-meaning kid who would probably unplug the right wire at the wrong time if allowed to hang around long enough—he more than made up for it with personality. His jokes had a way of diffusing the tension that so often arose from musicians taking themselves too seriously. Brickhouse figured if the kid’s musical timing was as good as his comedic timing, he would probably rise to engineer before some of his more technically gifted peers.
When Gribbens got wind that Brickhouse was back at Echo Lake for the Billy Moon project, he had started dropping by after sessions with a six-pack, a bottle of Stoli, or a bag of weed. At first Brickhouse had been happy to partake of these gifts, and tired as he was, he did enjoy the kid’s company. They would hang out in the little living room of the rectory watching some rare video—a bootleg of Jeff Beck at the House of Blues, or four hours of Spinal Tap outtakes—and getting drunk.
But as the late night editing sessions grew longer, the kid’s charm was thinning. The only problem was—so was Brickhouse’s personal supply of Peruvian Rocket Powder. And Ron Gribbens was probably the only person he knew in this town who could score for him.
Gribbens opened the glass doors and poked his head into the control room. “Hey, can I come in? Are you guys still working?”
“We just finished,” Brickhouse said, leaning back in the leather chair and stretching his arms until his shoulders popped. “But keep it down while the door’s open. Billy’s sleeping upstairs.”
“Right, sorry.” Gribbens closed the doors behind him and leaned in over the console, his eyes wider and brighter than they had a right to be at this hour of night, or morning, or whatever it was. Brickhouse didn’t think stimulants were responsible for that, though. Ron Gribbens always seemed to be running on a higher voltage than everyone around him.
“Hey, Kev,” Gribbens said, “how can you tell there’s a rock singer on your doorstep?” He paused. “He can’t find the key and he never knows when to come in.”
Brickhouse slammed his head into the console’s leather wrist rest three times in slow motion, then looked up and asked, “How long have you been working on that one? Do you ever stop?”
Jake sidled past Gribbens and slung his bag over his shoulder. “See you later.”
When Jake was gone, Brickhouse said, “I don’t suppose you have any coke you could loan me?”
For the briefest instant, Gribbens looked serious. He said, “No, but I may be able to get you some. Do you need it right away?”
“For tonight’s session. I’ve been awake for I don’t know how many days. Even if I catch a few hours this morning, there’s no way I’ll be able to do another session. Not without getting sloppy and making mistakes.”
Gribbens nodded and said, “Did you know that after a few days without sleep, the DMT in your brain kicks in? Are you tripping right now?”
“No.”
“Damn. Let me know if you start tripping. I always wanted to know if that’s true. I heard that you dream while you’re awake if you go long enough.”
“Listen to me, Ron. I’m not looking to trip right now, okay? I need to stay awake to work today. Can you score?”
“Pretty sure, pretty sure, man. But do you have cash? I would need cabbage up front. I know a guy.”
“Cool.” Brickhouse pulled a wallet on a chain out of his back pocket and peeked into the fold. “Shit, I used the last of my per diem for take-out. Can you front me until tonight? I have to go to bed now, but I
can hit an ATM in town before the session starts.”
“Kev, how long has it been since you held my job? You think I have coke money? Man, I practically work for free. I can’t even fix the alternator on my ride right now.”
“Sorry. How can you be a runner without a car?”
“Susan, the assistant manager’s letting me use hers for the errands in the daytime for now.”
“Oh. Well, fuck it then. I’ll go to the ATM right now.”
“Are you taking the Harley?”
“That’s my only ride, if you don’t have one.”
“Cool, can I ride on back? You can drop me at home on the way back from town.”
“I guess. But I only have one helmet.”
“So?”
“So there’s a helmet law.”
“What are you, Ralph Nader? It’s four-thirty in the morning and we’re going to get coke money. You’re worried about the helmet law?”
“I could fall asleep on the bike. Seriously, it’s not out of the question.”
“Come on, that’s lame. You’re not gonna fall asleep. Do you want to score or not?”
“Okay, but you’re wearing my helmet.”
“The Captain America Bucket? Fuck yeah, baby!”
Brickhouse picked up the helmet by the strap and tossed it at Gribbens. They walked down the front steps of the church and climbed onto the bike. Brickhouse turned the key and kicked the Indian to life. He revved the engine with the fringe-draped accelerator and felt the kid’s arms wrap around his waist.
The bike jolted out from under the trees onto the dirt road, spitting up gravel and pine needles. The sky over the field was still dark except for a few shreds of pink cotton. Even that nascent light disappeared when they left the clearing behind and wound down the hill into the thick shadows of the woods. Brickhouse switched on the headlamp. Ground mist swirled around the bike in slow churning eddies.
“Faster!” Gribbens shouted over the engine.
Brickhouse leaned over the handlebars and gave it a little more juice. Gribbens’s laughter was snatched from his mouth by the wind. Brickhouse shifted his weight and eased up on the throttle as they came around a bend in the road toward the bottom of the hill. He was about to gun it again when he saw twin points of light in the tunnel of trees up ahead, low down near the ground in the mist. His first thought was, animal eyes. He knew what the reflections of the bike’s headlamp in a pair of cat, skunk, or possum eyes looked like, but these were larger, and stacked vertically. Half a second later, they were close enough for him to understand what he was seeing: it was a buck lying in the road, head tilted at a bad angle, antlers throwing stark shadows across the ground.
What Kevin Brickhouse saw next, he would not understand for the rest of his life, which was now the length of a song.
A gray shape was draped over the carcass. Impossibly, it appeared to be a naked woman, her hips voluptuous, her face concealed by a veil of long, dark hair. Was she wrapped around the dead animal in a futile effort to help it? A crazy woman, out here naked in the freezing night? She turned her head toward him with a slow, strained resistance, and he could see she was ripping a red tangle of gut out of the deer’s belly with her teeth.
Unconcerned with the roaring machine that was now bearing down upon her, she had only turned her face toward the motorcycle to stretch the bloody cords in her mouth. Her eyes, unlike the deer’s, did not reflect the light of the bike’s headlamp. They were vacant black tunnels at first, but in the fraction of a second it took Brickhouse to register the scene, they kindled from within, emitting a dim blue phosphorescence, apparently fueled by tendrils of blue mist rising from the carcass and wafting into the woman’s nostrils.
He had time to think that it was strange how there was no blood on her face, considering what she was doing. It looked like she was trying to eat the raw flesh but was made of something too subtle to really connect with it, her only real sustenance the blue vapor.
He released the throttle, slowing as much as he could without breaking and skidding on dead leaves, but the bike was moving too fast. The woman’s face raced toward him in the shuddering beam of the headlamp, which only made the image somehow thinner. Brickhouse jerked the handlebars too sharply to the right—a reflex sparked by pure aversion, un-tempered by thought. The bike spilled, became a spinning hulk of blue chrome and black leather.
Ron Gribbens screamed. Gravel shredded his jeans and dug trenches into his thighs, the bike pinning him to the ground and dragging him forward.
Brickhouse was thrown off before the bike had completed one rotation. He landed on the buck’s antler rack, the pitted spires piercing leather and flesh, impaling him through his rib cage and the hollow of his right shoulder. Pain blasted out all of his senses like a wash of white noise, but only for an instant. He coughed out a spray of blood, and when his vision cleared, he saw the wraith woman again, now mere inches from his face. Her head floated over his broken body, as if she was smelling him, inhaling the etheric emissions of warm plasma.
The red glow of the day’s first light spilled over the ground, and the woman faded even more than she had in the glare of the headlamp. It was a small mercy. Simultaneously, his vision swarmed with red specks, the combination producing an effect not unlike a pixilated digital video image from a worn out camcorder tape. He coughed up a string of pink saliva. This is it, he thought, this is where it all ends.
Through the distorted vision, narrowing to a tunnel, his gaze settled on the last thing he would ever see: a chunk of regurgitated deer liver. He could feel his broken guts trying to vomit, but then the life force required to jettison it drained out of him.
* * *
When Eddie O’Reiley came around the bend in his dust-covered Jeep Cherokee on the way to the main building, he nearly drove off the road at the sight of Ron Gribbens pinned under a motorcycle, sobbing, the broken body of Kevin Brickhouse twisted around a deer. The stars and bars helmet that looked like the one worn by Peter Fonda in Easy Rider lay on the ground between them.
Eddie called 911 on his mobile phone. He could see that the Harley was only pinning Ron’s leg, and since the kid didn’t appear to be losing blood, he picked it up by the handlebars and pushed it over to the nearest tree he could lean it on. It was almost too heavy for him, but he managed.
“Don’t try to get up,” he said. “I called for an ambulance. Did you hit your head?”
“No. I just got dragged. I had his helmet on. Oh God… Oh fuck…”
“Who was driving?”
“He was.”
“Can you feel your toes if you try to wiggle them?”
“Ah! Yeah. But it hurts.”
“Okay, don’t move. Your leg’s probably broken, but I think you were lucky.”
“He wasn’t. Is he dead?”
Eddie looked Gribbens in the eye for a few seconds. He nodded.
“Oh God, oh man, this is so fucked. It’s my fault.”
“Was he on something?”
“No. I don’t think so. I don’t know. He just finished working. I asked him for a ride ‘cause he was going to the seven-eleven.”
“Why is it your fault?”
“I was telling him to go faster.”
“And he did?”
“Yeah.”
“Gribbens, what the hell is the matter with you? Why do you think we put signs up? It’s a winding dirt road. There are deer everywhere. Blind curves. The fucking speed limit is fifteen for a reason.”
“I’m sorry.”
“A man is dead. You’re lucky to be alive.”
Gribbens sobbed. “Eddie, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“How am I going to explain this to Lucy?”
“Isn’t she in Belize?”
“Yeah, but I’m gonna have to tell her a client died on her property. Kevin Fucking Brickhouse, no less. Fuck me. I’m not even at the office yet and this is how the day starts.”
Eddie turned his back on Gribbens and forced himself to take a closer l
ook at Brickhouse. What a mess. He couldn’t look away. He had assisted Brickhouse himself a couple of times when he was getting started in L.A. in the seventies. The man had been one of the best. By the time Eddie moved back to New York, he was considered a capable engineer himself, but he already knew he would never be in the same league as Brickhouse. He was okay with that; he had also already seen that the lifestyle came with a price.
Maybe taking the management gig at Echo Lake had saved him from driving into a tree some sleep-deprived night. Who could say? He remembered asking Brickhouse a personal question when they had worked together for the second time. Brickhouse had been married back then. Eddie had just met Irene, his future wife, and things were already starting to get serious. He had asked Brickhouse how he made his marriage work with the demands of the job. Brickhouse hadn’t even hesitated in his response. “It’s simple,” he had said, “I’m just not that into her. It’s comfortable for both of us, and I don’t think she really minds me being away. We have a great house in Hollywood. I get laid when I’m home and she’s a beautiful girl, but if I was way into her, I don’t think it would work. I’d miss her.”
Looking down at the bloody mess at his feet, Eddie reflected that Brickhouse had been a good guy and a great engineer, but after a funeral that could be mistaken for an awards show, with all of the moguls and rock stars in attendance, who would really miss him?
Eddie turned back to Gribbens. Now he could hear the faint wail of sirens through the woods. “I don’t get it. Did you kill the deer or was it already dead in the road? It looks like the birds have been at it for a while.”
“It was already dead. There was a crow eating it when we hit it. Kevin swerved to miss it and we wiped out.”
“Alright. That sounds more like an accident. I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
The ambulance came over the hill, flashing and wailing, and nearly slammed into Eddie’s Jeep, but at the last second, they cut around it, somehow missed the trees as well, and came to an abrupt stop beside the tangled corpses of deer and man. Paramedics jumped out. One opened the back doors and pulled out a stretcher, the other knelt beside Gribbens and started asking him questions about his vision and where he felt pain. More sirens sang on the morning air, police cars on the way.
The Devil of Echo Lake Page 10