Shadowplays

by W. D. Gagliani

  His hand hesitated, then moved toward the bell.

  II

  The woman who opened the door behind the counter and stepped into the shop wore a colorful sari tightly wrapped around her tall, angular body. The splash of color disoriented Ethan, whose eyes had adjusted to the drabness of the environment. He looked up and away from the swirling colors and found himself staring at a face both somehow familiar and startlingly exotic, like nothing he could ever remember seeing before. Framed by golden hair arranged in one perfect braid around her head, her eyes were the clearest blue he had ever seen, brilliant even from ten feet away. A long and slightly pointed nose gave her a patrician air, but the full lips below spoke of wantonness and lust. Ethan felt skewered by her gaze.

  “How may I help you?”

  Her voice matched the image perfectly - deep, for a woman, and slightly sonorous, with a barely noticeable trace of accent, perhaps East European or Mediterranean.

  Ethan felt the emotion of knowing his stalkers were so nearby, outside the door. “I’m very desperate,” he managed before having to swallow the lump of gristle in his throat. “I was told you can help me get rid of these people who follow me around all the time, stalking me and playing with me. Driving me crazy.”

  As if to emphasize his point, there was shuffling at the door, and whispers rose in volume until he thought they would become shouts. He tried, but he couldn’t hold her gaze.

  “Tell me more about your problem,” she said, as if taking a customer complaint. She appeared ready to listen, hands flat in front of her.

  Maybe I am a customer, he thought. He almost felt as if there was something she could do. Unlike the police, who had threatened to find him a cell if he didn’t stop bothering them.

  “Where should I start?” He realized how inane his question was, but it bubbled forth from his lips before he could stanch the flow.

  “Wherever you would like,” she said.

  Ethan had the incongruous thought that she already knew the details, but that - like a judge - she wanted them repeated for the record. He squinted. For some reason, she reminded Ethan of a painting he had once seen in a book, or on the Web. Impressionist? No, a surrealist painter, perhaps. He just couldn’t remember. And it wasn’t important anyway.

  He listened to the voices outside for a moment and gathered his wits, then he spoke.

  III

  I was working in my friend Brian’s progressive rock CD store that year, the year that Incubus came to town. Nobody knew where they were from, so nobody knew why they had picked Memphis as the site of their rehearsals and video shoots. They seemed to have the backing of one of the bigger indie labels, and no lack of money, but no one had ever heard anything they might have recorded. Who are these guys, was the buzz.

  And when I saw the last few seconds of their “new” video, never having seen any other before, I knew I would have to find out.

  There was no doubt in my mind that Incubus’s frontman was Rick Dawson, Memphis’s greatest MIA keyboard legend.

  Problem was, Dawson had died nearly twenty years before.

  I knew for a fact.

  Because I was the one who killed him.

  Brian was on a buying trip and his wife had the day off, so I had the counter. I was queuing up a CD for a customer whose hard earned fifteen bucks would only go toward something he liked.

  And why not? Regular, packaged music sold in the big chain stores deserves to be bought blindly by people content to follow the masses. No expectations to be either confirmed or shattered. With prog-rock, each composition is to be savored. There’s no dance beat, and there’s no high-profile image to maintain. Prog bands play complex, exciting music that takes you beyond the confines of the simple pop song. Plus, prog-rock is hardly ever played on the radio, except for some of the grandfathers of the style - ELP, Genesis, YES, Floyd, Tull. You know, bands like that. And that’s why buyers often want to listen and evaluate. It isn’t often a band breaks out of local or underground play to make videos and play mid-size venues. And even when it does happen, everyone knows it’s a small miracle.

  Which was why, as I put the classic first Anglagard album in the cd player, I had to look up. MTV2 was in the middle of its Off-the-Beaten-Path show (a showcase for neo-alternative, underground and - occasionally - prog bands), and the sounds that came from the tinny speaker were too good to be true. So I did look up, and I nearly dropped the disc I was holding.

  It can’t be him.

  Oh, God, how can it be him?

  “Hey, I might buy that,” the guy said. “Be careful with it?”

  I hit “play” and tossed a set of headphones at the guy, then thumbed up the sound on the TV and turned away to face the screen.

  The images there captivated me and for a second I lost track of where I was. Lost track of when.

  The guy fronting the band had to be Rick, or his twin brother. But Rick was an only kid, so it was no twin. The video was a pseudo-concert clip, the kind shot on a sound stage with an audience paid to look fannish and enthusiastic. This crowd really seemed to be, though. And no wonder. Rick twirled and crouched, leaped and knelt, and played to the front rows with a charisma no other prog keysman had quite managed, never missing a note on his Roland remote controller. He teased both incredible glissandos and cutting, guitar-like screams from the axe slung around his neck, hands alternately caressing the keys and the pitch bend and modulation joysticks. Then the stab of a button brought forth a majestic pipe organ patch from whatever module the axe was controlling, and Rick’s solo turned into a mad organist’s rendition of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D, culminating in a crescendo the band joined in with before crashing to a halt, audience screaming and lights blazing and the remaining wisps of stage fog dissipating.

  I squinted up at the corner of the screen to catch the name of the band and album. Incubus, and the song was “Moon of Madness,” from the album Immortality.

  I replayed Rick’s moves in my mind, and grafted them onto Incubus’s frontman. If they weren’t the same, then they were incredibly well-studied. Maybe a look-alike, a copycat found in some back-alley garage to front a new band. Maybe that was why they’d chosen Memphis as base of operations, to cash in on the connection to Dawson.

  The guy listening to the Anglagard waved at me and handed back the headphones. “I’ll take these, too.” He handed me the newest Marillion, the latest from Fish, and some ancient Triumvirat. Not the most eclectic taste in prog. Let it die already, I wanted to scream as I jotted down the label code for the Triumvirat, an ELP-clone. There’s so much new stuff to listen to.

  As I rang him up, I kept hearing the majestic ending of “Moon of Madness.” It was … well, it was impossible. My hands began to tremble. The customer gave me a strange look, paid and left with his new discs. At least he was happy.

  The phone rang, and as I reached for it I found myself glad that the store was now empty, even if we needed more business.

  “He’s back.” The voice was a husky whisper. Noise in the background. Neil was at work in his brother’s restaurant, where he tended bar. Probably he’d had VH1C on one of the screens, had seen what I’d seen, was now hunched over the phone.

  “Can’t be,” I said. “You know that.”

  “Yeah, I thought I did know. Been wondering about that band. All the secrecy and shit.”

  “And why’d they come here?”

  “Yeah.” He sighed. “Now I figure we know.”

  I looked at the receiver as if it were a snake, suddenly coiling around my forearm. “Look, this can’t be, Neil. You were there. You know what happened - what we did. What I did. And besides, why hasn’t anyone else mentioned that this guy looks like Rick?”

  There was a dry chuckle at the other end of the line. He could hear my gradual reversal, how I was trying to convince myself. And he could hear the quaver in my voice that said I was lying. “Maybe it’s part of the deal. Maybe only the people who killed you can recognize you, just before you get your revenge.
” There was a mighty crash of glassware and silverware. Somebody in the background swore. “Who knows how these things work, Ethan. Maybe it’s just that nobody fuckin’ remembers him. I gotta go. Talk later?”

  “Yeah. The usual.”

  A customer walked in and I looked up, then saw that it was Judith. Her clothing was rumpled and her hair was an unhappy mess of uncombed curls. And the look on her face told me everything I needed to know. “Did you see -”

  I cut her off. “You saw him too. It’s Rick.” Talking to Neil had made it all clear. The fear was clawing at my neck, at my guts.

  “No! I saw someone with this Incubus band who looks just like him, that’s all.”

  “It’s him, Jude. Just … different enough so people who didn’t know him won’t recognize him. But he wants us to recognize him.”

  “Do you realize what you’re saying?”

  “You saw the name of the album?”

  She nodded. There was that.

  “You wouldn’t have come if you didn’t think it was him.”

  “I knew you’d think it was Rick. That’s the only reason I’m here, Ethan. To convince you that it’s not - that it can’t be.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll have to see you later tonight, okay? Neil already called. It’s our regular, you know, night out.”

  She almost smiled, something which would have brought order to her definitely disordered demeanor, but then it turned into a grimace made worse by the dark lipstick she usually wore so well. “Says something about us, doesn’t it, that we were all watching right when …”

  But she couldn’t finish it, and I just turned away. I heard the door clang shut behind her and searched the shelf for an old Fish disc.

  I skipped to my favorite track, and he sang about seeing my life as a Shadowplay.

  *

  Rick Dawson had gone to school with Neil and me, but we’d never been in his class as musicians. Neil pounded drums with innocent abandon, an ineffective John Bonham, and I alternated between bass and guitar, managing to muff both in my attempts to copy the guitars of Howe and Hackett and the bass work of Squire and Lake. Rick was damn near a prodigy, though, his hands crawling authoritatively over a banged up Rhodes until the day he made us help him carry a sixth-hand Hammond B-3 up the stairs. Our first real instrument, and someone who could really play it. Emerson Lake and Palmer we weren’t, but it was easy to pretend after Rick put every last dime he could scrape up into a well-used MiniMoog synthesizer, and Black Trinity was born.

  From Neil’s basement we graduated to a rented garage with no heat and frequent neighbor complaints. Our musicianship increased minimally, but we were dead in the vocal department. Each of us tried to sing lead at one time or another, but our noisy tapes told the tale all too well. We needed a singer. When Rick brought in Judith, it was as if Yoko had walked into our lives. Auburn hair pony-tailed way down her back, tight bell-bottoms with strategically sewn patches, and a face right out of Vogue, circa 1979. But punk-tough, even without the spiky hair. Where he found her we didn’t know, but I was smitten as soon as I looked into her slate-colored eyes.

  And her voice. She really could sing. Our first dozen gigs, rough as they were, got us a minor reputation in the campus bars. Mostly because she sang a respectable lead, and looked great doing it. She could handle Annie Haslam, so we covered Renaissance extensively. She could out-YES Jon Anderson. And she could write, too. She was our ticket out, her singing and Rick’s keyboard work, which local writers were beginning to liken to Wakeman and Emerson, with a dollop of Elton just to mix it up a bit. Man, we thought we were riding a golden highway. Until the day we realized that Rick and I both were obsessed with her.

  I guess when Rick caught her leaving my place early one morning, something in him snapped. We knew he’d been messing around with this Aleister Crowley-like crap, but we never expected that his jealous feelings might make him shove a butcher knife down the back of his pants and come looking for us. We didn’t know he had made a sacrifice to conjure up some sort of second-level demon and fully believed he was justified to bring the creature to us as part of his revenge.

  Of course he hadn’t really done any such thing, but he believed he had grafted a creature onto his own soul, so the Rick who came looking for revenge was not quite the same Rick we had known, even if there really was no demon riding along with him. In his blind rage, it didn’t really matter. Which is why our exorcism took the turn it did. Even if you don’t believe in it, if your subject believes in it then you have no choice but to play it out - and we did indeed play it out.

  It was a chilly October night when we were faced with Rick’s growing delusion that he was magically joined with a demon of his own calling. He had performed his silly ritual - it seemed silly to us - cribbed from some book, probably LaVey’s Satanic Bible. He’d marked-up and dog-eared most of the pages in that and a dozen other books which claimed to tell the secrets of the universe. You see, at first he thought he would take us to the top - not by selling his soul to Satan, like all the other musicians did in urban legends, but by summoning the kind of demon who would possess him or ride piggy-back on his soul and increase his talent tenfold. The fact was, Rick was already a huge talent, and if we were struggling it was because punk had made our preferred form of rock about as obsolete as the horse-drawn plow. In fact, the very same bands who had inspired us and who guided our direction were also struggling with smaller audiences, lower sales, and intense critical hostility, which hurt even more - from raves to jeers in barely half a decade. Rick didn’t want to admit that this hostile wave had swept us under too, even if our gigs were reasonably well-attended. But this was Memphis - never a prog town at best. Here the blues met country, and even punk took a while to grab hold, but when it did, it was all over for bands like us whose heroes were Yes and Genesis and Jethro Tull. It was obvious that we could never move on to greater glory than the club circuit unless we forgot most of the chords we liked and started playing without finesse. Jude could have handled the angry screaming punk required, but Rick and Neil were opposed. Hell, if everybody went punk, then punk would be mainstream, and what was the point of that? It’s what happened to Alternative in the last decade - when everybody plays Alternative, what is it an alternative to?

  Anyway, we raged constantly over the band’s direction. Our rehearsals were like sparring matches and our gigs suffered because we fought viciously rather than practicing the complex songs we had so painstakingly constructed. So Rick went on his anti-religious search, eventually coming to the conclusion that forces in the universe could be harnessed to affect our lives.

  And on seeing Jude leave my place, those forces told him to kill the rest of us. Except for Jude. The demon in Rick wanted her for itself.

  He came at me with the knife, howling about his demon and the revenge from Hell and how he was going to carve me up into pieces and feed me to his Doberman. He slashed downward and across, and nicked my arm with the knife-point, sending a squirt of blood flying into Jude’s face. That was when Neil showed up, demanding to know what we were doing to our star keyboard player.

  Jude and I didn’t laugh - we were fighting for our lives.

  Rick’s wiry body carried the strength of his convictions, and his fingers had become immensely strong with the constant piano practice - occasionally he pounded a piano hard enough to snap a string, which would crackle like a whip inside the belly of the instrument and gouge the inner wood raw.

  “Rick!” I shouted. We were the only ones in our rehearsal space, a storage warehouse near the river. “What the hell you doing?” My voice echoed in the empty space. I heard Jude’s voice echoing, too, and Rick was babbling in tongues, or just words we didn’t understand.

  Neil tried to grab Rick’s arms and pin them, but Rick planted a hard elbow into his side and flipped Neil into his drums, sending them all crashing into a corner with the ringing of cymbals and hardware. Before he could turn and face us, I had tackled Rick from behind and taken him down to the cr
acked concrete floor. Jude leaped onto his arm, trying to wrest the knife from his hand, but he slashed at her and drove her back. She shouted wordlessly, her face covered in my blood like a vampire after feeding.

  Rick rolled out from under me, gathered his balance and stretched his mouth into a grimace-grin that I’ll never forget. Then he lunged for me, the point of the blade floating in the air before him. But I was ready. He howled like a wounded boar when I sidestepped his charge and bent his knife-arm back until I heard something crackle in his right shoulder and he dropped the blade. It may have taken seconds, but I remember seeing the blade flash by for what seemed like hours, streaked with Jude’s blood as she tried to help me grab his convulsing body and took a slash in the arm. We went down in a heap and he snatched up the knife with his other hand and managed to drive it straight into the side of my thigh. I screamed when the pain caught up to me, but I’d already broken his wrist. Now I rolled away and felt the blade scrape bone and muscle and I howled, grabbing the handle with both hands and stripping it out of my leg in a gush of bright redness.

  I turned to Rick and saw that none of my friend remained. He was something different, something inhuman - he gurgled and muttered, shrieked and giggled. His broken arm and wrist stuck out at grotesque angles, yet he tried to regain his balance and attack once more.

  Before a stunned Neil could stop me, before Jude could talk me out of it, and before the image of what I was about to do could somehow short-circuit my determination, I screamed with fear and frustration and swooped down on Rick’s struggling body, driving the knife deep into his chest until I felt the point chip the concrete below him. Then I withdrew the blade, ignoring the sucking sound and the gush of heart-red blood, and brought it down again and again, until the blade was blunted and the floor and I equally covered in gore. I nearly passed out on top of his stiffening body, his mouth still stretched into the shape of the last curse he had for me before dying. His eyes stared at me and would, forever.