He could think of nothing more to say. He plucked his keys off the hook at the top of the banister and lumbered down the stairs. Time to go to work.
His wrist itched where Rail had scratched it.
Eighteen
There was no aspect of the album that Trevor Rail lacked a vision for, including the cover art. In his wildest fantasies, the cover would feature Billy’s autopsy photos—just imagine how that would sell—but Rail knew how to attenuate his vision for what the market would allow, and he would settle for pictures of Billy posing, in the church and winter woods, with the suicide knife.
“The setting has been a big part of Billy’s creative process,” Rail told Don Lamar on the phone. “We should carry that influence over into the artwork. Give the fans a sense of place.”
Eddie had put Rail in touch with a local photographer, Joel Eastman of nearby Woodstock, who had begun his career photographing Bob Dylan back when the bard had walked these same woods. After leafing through a coffee-table book that Eastman had donated to the studio lounge, Rail decided that the old-fashioned documentary quality of the work had just the right gothic undertones. There was something about the shadows under Robbie Robertson’s sunken eyes and the tragic aspect of how Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic clothes rendered in black and white. It was perfect. Eastman would capture Billy Moon with a realism that would make his spooky persona even more disturbing than if it were played up in a conventional way.
Lamar agreed to the shoot, but it took a little extra finesse to talk him out of sending an A&R guy to oversee the thing. Rail argued that he wanted to get pictures of Billy at work, in addition to the posed shots. Didn’t Lamar understand the concept of candid photos? An unfamiliar body in the studio would only distract Billy, make him self-conscious. It would kill the vibe.
As it happened, Joel Eastman was skilled in the art of invisibility. After warm introductions in the morning, the tall, skinny photographer in a fleece pullover and jeans (sporting an afro that made him look even taller) somehow managed to draw almost no attention to himself during several hours of overdubs, which he spent roaming the church with his Nikon, capturing Billy from odd angles: through windows and doorways and from the loft overhead with a zoom lens. After a break for lunch, which ended the recording session for the day, the focus shifted, and Billy had his hair and face done by a pair of makeup artists up from the city who worked quickly to beat the early setting December sun.
Then it was show time, with Billy posing in a long black overcoat. Eastman was up close now, the new music playing loud as they moved from one stained-glass window to another, capturing Billy in front of the purple-robed Virgin, the Stations of the Cross, standing in the arched Palladian doorway as a silhouette, or striding up the spiral staircase in an out-of-focus blur of moving hand and swirling coat.
Rail kept his distance at first, letting Eastman coax Billy out of his shell into performance mode. Once the ice was broken, he inserted himself between them with small comments and suggestions until he was directing the shoot, selecting the next background, the next pose, moving Billy outside among the trees, placing the tanto in his hand and encouraging Eastman to romance the blade with his camera.
A change of lenses brought out the details of the silver cherry blossoms on the handle and the watery grain of the folded steel blade. Billy, ever the showman, did not disappoint. Even without his heart in it—this music, this image all seemed to have lost its luster for him—he could still slip into character. Rail supposed it was a mark of pride that even when Billy was being typecast against his more authentic inclinations, as a person he no longer was, he refused to give his fans a half-hearted version.
He may only be playing a role at this point in his career—the role of his younger incarnation still beloved by legions of Rachels—but he still played it to the hilt, slipping into that dark mystique with ease and authority. Billy might secretly wish some other, older and wiser version of himself could land on the record store shelves, but if that was not to be, if it had to be the Dark Moon yet again, then at least he was committed to making sure that fellow didn’t come off as some clumsy poseur or mere caricature.
Billy Moon had arrived. There he was in the intense green eyes. There, wrapped around a wet tree branch with the blade in his teeth, exuding sex and violence. And there, pulling the waistband of Rachel’s skirt down with one hand while holding her shirt up with the knife blade in the other, exposing her Ouija board tattoo, and licking the crescent moon that was a part of it, on the underside of her left breast.
They finished the session back inside the church with a series featuring Billy naked, a dim silhouette, his own tattoos a muted blue in the fading light from the colored windows. He stood behind a mic stand in the center of the empty floor. Inserted in the clip where a mic should have been was the red silk-wrapped handle of the tanto, blade arched toward his rouged lips.
Then the light was gone, and they wrapped for the day, Jake and Ron leaving first for once while Eastman packed up his own minimal equipment. “That’s a beautiful knife,” Eastman said to Billy, his eyes on the LCD window of his camera where some detail of the hilt was magnified.
“It was a gift from Trevor,” Billy said. “He has impeccable taste in wine and weapons.”
“Ha. What’s that texture under the fabric?” Eastman asked.
“Stingray skin,” Rail answered. “The Japanese use it in much the same way Europeans use leather.”
“Fascinating,” Eastman said, slinging his camera bag over his shoulder.
Rail continued the lesson for both Eastman and Billy, who was still within earshot, buttoning his black cotton shirt with Rachel’s assistance. “A samurai would have used this knife for close combat, and it would have been presented to him on his empty dinner plate when he finished his last meal and composed his death poem, if he was called upon to commit seppuku.”
“What’s that, like hari kiri?” Eastman asked.
“Yes. Ritualized suicide to avoid shame. Leaving a legacy of honor was supremely important to the Samurai. More important than life itself. If that honor was jeopardized in any way, suicide would redeem it.”
“Huh.” Eastman looked like he found the alien practice distasteful, his enthusiasm for the artistic merits of the knife waning. He glanced at his watch.
“This blade,” Rail continued, “is an antique, refurnished with new fittings. It may once have served the very purpose we speak of.”
“Interesting. Alright. Well, pleasure working with you all. I should have a contact sheet for you tomorrow, Trevor. Then you can select some proofs.”
The four of them strolled out of the church together, Eastman in the lead cutting a brisk path to his own car, Billy and Rachel lingering on the stone steps, sharing a cigarette. Rail could hear the girl asking Billy if she was really going to be in the CD booklet. He gave a non-committal answer about how her ink very well could be. It had been a good bit of improv on Billy’s part to include her tattoo.
Maybe he did understand his audience after all. Rail wondered if the girl would want financial compensation for modeling. He doubted it. For now she seemed intoxicated with the mere possibility of her skin being immortalized in print. Billy offered to take her to the Mountain Lion for dinner to celebrate. She accepted, of course, with a joyful pirouette, and then in a small, reluctant voice, asked, “Should we ask Trevor to come along?”
Before Billy could answer, Rail spared him the anguish, saying, “No, no. You two lovebirds go and have a proper date. I have some phone calls to catch up on. But here, why don’t you take my car so you don’t have to ride with dirty laundry in some runner’s rust bucket? The walk up the hill will do me good.”
Now she was glowing. Billy caught the keys Rail tossed at him and opened the car door for her. He was almost in the driver’s seat before he remembered to dash back up the steps and lock the studio doors.
Rail felt one of his own psychological levers sliding into place as he watched Billy do this—the sati
sfaction of knowing that Billy would remember locking the church when he discovered what would be waiting for him inside upon his return. Billy was the only person outside of studio staff who had a key, because the building was also his lodging.
Rail ambled toward the road, but when the taillights vanished below the hill, he turned back and climbed the steps.
The art of lock picking came back to him easily—one of those skills rooted in muscle memory and intuition—even though he had long since moved onward and upward from the simple crimes and cons of earlier years when such tricks were practiced daily. Looking around the empty church, he was reminded of just how far he had come.
It had been a career forged from nothing but gut instinct and the sheer force of charisma. Now that he was a legitimate professional, he saw that many of his peers, producers and entertainment moguls alike, could claim to have invented themselves in similar fashion, but none with the degree of existential heft and artistic flair he had employed in using Billy Moon as a foothold. Perhaps it was akin to the intuition a brilliant stockbroker employed to make a fortune out of a volatile investment.
When Rail had discovered Billy playing scummy dives in Boston, the kid had been a fractured rung at the very bottom of the ladder he intended to climb. And that very fragility (in combination, yes, with the talent of a diamond in the rough, but those were scattered everywhere) had made him perfect—malleable. The kind of diamond that could be cracked from a shell of blackest coal, set ablaze in the heavens as a beacon to a generation of lost souls who felt the same, and then hurled to the earth in a tragic flash to live on forever as legend.
But it had been work. An honest trade would have been easier by far, but what honest venture could contend with the exhilaration he felt in this game that was more than work, this art that was more than game? His great opus: The Rise and Fall of Billy Moon.
Other men could claim to be self-made, but only one in a generation could claim to be the Prince of Lies.
He had created the persona of Trevor Rail for himself and had inhabited that form to guide Billy in the creation of another persona: a dark rock god. He had known from the start that his ultimate aim was not merely to make Billy famous but to make him immortal, like Cobain, who had reminded the world so recently that it could still happen.
Immortality could still happen, even in this transient culture, even among the legion of jaded cynics who hungered for something, anything, authentic, be it even authentic nihilism in a wasteland of calculated marketeering. Billy could be both. The suffering was real in him, the voice true, but the Life and Times, the Rise and Fall, the Final Act could be larger than life in the hands of an artist. Why leave anything to chance, when you could manufacture fate?
Looking around this beautiful room, the state of the art crucible in which he was forging that final act, Trevor Rail brimmed with pride and delight. The end was near indeed, and events were falling into place with a curious grace and symmetry. Some of these auspicious circumstances were part of his plan, but even the random elements could be tethered to his will. The unexpected arrival of the girl, solitary representative of the masses Billy spoke to, showing up at just the right time to put him back on track—that was serendipity.
Rail laughed aloud as he rounded the top of the stairs and strolled down the catwalk toward Billy’s sleeping quarters. He idly dropped his left hand into the pocket of his overcoat and felt the small device he kept there at the ready. His ring finger slipped it on with fluid, practiced ease, and for his own amusement he swept his hand from the pocket, licking up a thin sheet of nitrocellulose flash paper with his thumb as he did so. He waved his apparently empty hand through the air, admiring it, then flicked the ignition wheel of the finger-flasher and watched as a ball of fire drifted from his splayed fingers, incinerating into thin air in the gulf between the catwalk and the polished floor below.
Ah, the tools of the trade. The right clothes, the right car, a ten-dollar trick from a magic shop in Brooklyn. Satan at your service.
The primary tool in this game, though, was more difficult to manipulate. If Trevor Rail was an artist, for he felt certain that the creative fire informing his game was the self-same impulse that drove any artist, then Billy Moon was his instrument. Experience had taught him how to put that instrument through its paces: when to push it to a triumphant crescendo, when to detune it with despair and self-loathing, when to tighten the strings to near breaking with anxiety and fear, and when to play the minor key motifs of remorse and regret. Now was one of those times.
In the curtained-off bedroom, Rail found the sort of disheveled mess he had been expecting—clothes, papers and gadgets cast about at random, most of Billy’s personal effects spilling out of a suitcase beside the bed. It took some discrete digging to find the prescription bottle of Zoloft. He dropped it into his pocket, patted the black wool and said, “It’s no wonder you misplaced your medicine, Billy, living like this.”
Billy had once confided in him that he occasionally experimented with going off the antidepressants in order to feel his emotions more acutely, and as a consequence, write more songs. But these trials invariably resulted in unproductive meltdowns. The pills were a necessary evil, Billy had decided long ago.
Now that the album was ninety-percent recorded, a little meltdown would be just what the doctor ordered.
From another pocket, where he also kept the Ruger SP101 Snubnose, Rail took a pair of 3x5 photos and two votive candles. There were two small nightstands in the room, one on each side of the queen bed, each topped with a small lamp. Rail placed one photo on each table, leaning them against the lamps to stand them upright, handling them with the handkerchief they had been wrapped in. Then he took the votive candles by the wicks and set them down in front of the photos, lit them and stood back to admire his work: two faces glowed in the dark room, seeming to sway in the dancing light.
He had acquired these photos in a basement in Boston years ago, had discovered them in a cardboard box that had been packed up by Billy’s old friends and roommates after he abandoned them. Maybe Billy's friends had imagined he'd return someday. Rail had known better and saved these two photographs from the fire that would consume the house. The fire that would take three lives, including the two whose faces were preserved here: Jim Cassman and Kate Wilson.
Rail had approached Billy on a bridge. And on the night he found these photos, he had burned Billy’s bridges.
He turned to go. The pills rattled in his pocket as he walked. It was unlikely he would cross paths with anyone who would notice the sound, and almost certainly no one who would connect the small tell to Billy, but he couldn’t be sure of that. Billy might enlist a runner to try to have the prescription refilled. Small chance of that working out so far from home and without the bottle label, but if said runner remembered the rattle of pills… It was the kind of loose end he found unnerving. He had not come this far by being cavalier about such things.
He went to the little bathroom adjacent to the sleeping area. It smelled of cedar planks and Pine Sol. He took the prescription bottle out, unscrewed the cap, and dumped the little pink pills into the toilet. The empty bottle could be discretely disposed of back at the Mountain House, tucked deep in a trash bag. He flushed the toilet and stood meditating for a moment on the downward spiral. Billy’s downward spirals had always ended with him finding his level again. Slowly but surely, equilibrium had returned. Not this time.
He turned to go and heard the voice of Ron Gribbens, the idiot assistant. “Yo, Billy, came back to fetch my bag. You wanna smoke up?”
The curtain parted and the young man’s clueless grinning face emerged, framed by those ridiculous sideburns and Buddy Holly glasses. The grin flatlined instantly as their eyes met.
“Trevor,” was all the kid could think to say.
Now it was Rail’s turn to grin. “Hello, Ron. I would suggest that you learn to knock before barging in, but I suppose one can’t knock on a curtain.”
“S-sorry. I heard th
e can flush. I thought it was Billy.”
“Billy is not at home.”
Gribbens’s eyes ticked to the candle-lit photos and back to Rail, then straight down to a spot on the floor. “Sorry,” he said again, “I’ll go. I just… forgot something and came back for it, that’s all.”
“Of course, your bag of marijuana. Because we all know how vital it is to the success of a million-dollar project that the technician and record keeper be adequately stoned,” Rail said. He stepped forward, his grin widening to the point where he just might burst into giddy laughter, sharing a joke with the class clown.
Gribbens stepped backward, away from the slit in the curtain as Rail glided through it. He waved his hand in the gesture of warding off, of signaling innocence. “No, no, no,” he said, “Not on the job. Only after hours.”
Rail drove him out onto the catwalk, one slow step after another. Gribbens walked backward, his eyes fixed on Rail, his hand running over the waist-high wooden railing.
“Do you like getting high, Ron?” Rail asked, breaking his predatory stare and casting a theatrical glance over the expanse of space between the catwalk and the floor below. “Because we’re pretty high right now, wouldn’t you say?”
Gribbens’s panicked eyes darted downward and Rail used the diversion to sweep his thumb through his jacket pocket before the frightened little creature could refocus on him.
“I don’t smoke on the clock,” Ron said. “Please don’t tell Eddie I do, because I don’t.”
“It’s alright, Ron. I would be the last one to judge a man’s vices,” Rail said, dropping his voice to a low drone, barely more than a whisper, as he leaned in closer. “It’s not about that.”
Gribbens swallowed. “Is it about those pictures in Billy’s room? ‘Cause I didn’t even see them. I didn’t see you here. How about that?”
The Devil of Echo Lake Page 20