Shadowplays

by W. D. Gagliani

  I heard Jude crying, and Neil stuttering some words that made no sense.

  And then I was up on my knees, and the knife was in my hand, this time like a saw, and I used my weight to saw down into his neck until the head parted and rolled, and I can tell you that it’s not as easy - or as neat - as they show in the movies. When I looked up, I saw Jude and Neil cringing as far from me as they could, cowering behind what was left of our equipment.

  “I had to,” I croaked out. “The demon. He was going to get us. He could still get us. I couldn’t -”

  Eventually, I hosed down the concrete and flushed Rick’s blood down a convenient drain. We used a tarp to take body and head out to the van, and drove to a deep flooded quarry out in Millington.

  Rick’s disappearance made little difference. To his family, who’d kicked him out years before. To other bands, who hated our style of music anyway. To anyone at all. Rick had just loaded up his van and taken off for parts unknown, and too bad ‘cause he could have been somebody, but not a true rocker ‘cause he played keyboards and it was a guitar world and a guitar town and nothing in our lives went all that well after that.

  *

  Now I stepped off Linden and into the welcoming darkness of Suds, a long and narrow bar that featured fifty-cent taps and almost total anonymity. Neil waited in our corner booth, a pitcher of ale and two glasses in the middle of the wooden table into which he had spent the last four years carving an intricate design with his pocket knife. He was digging the blade into soft wood as I slid onto the bench. The design was a winged horse, and he’d been working on the wing feathers the last three times we’d gotten together. It was a slow process, but Neil had all the time in the world. He no longer played the drums for any band, content to tend bar and shoot the shit with musicians coming out of Beale Street dives and clubs, and carving his designs into a half dozen tables in and around the center of the club circuit. He had just recently started to compose again, but he had gone all electronic, with computers driving sequences of sampled drums laid down in track after track of intricate, cacophonous rhythm - raw ethnic drums of all cultures mixed together like George Martin’s famous spliced tapes. Neil hadn’t held actual drumsticks for years, preferring the feel of the mouse and trackpad. His techno compositions - some were early Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk he’d swiped and tarted-up - were now pulsing in a dozen Memphis and Nashville clubs, and a recording deal was in the works. He’d be the first member of Black Trinity to have a real career in music.

  “Hey.” He looked up and I saw in his eyes the same haunted quality I felt. He went back to his carving. “I’ve been thinking about Rick and everything. It’s not him. There’s no way that’s possible. It’s just a freakin’ band named Incubus and this guy looks a little like Rick.”

  “Jude got to you first, didn’t she?” I said, accusingly. “She convinced you to ignore what you know.”

  “What do I know? That Rick had always wanted to call our band Incubus? So what? Nike wanted to call a fucking shoe Incubus, didn’t they? Or Reebok? Whoever the fuck. Anyway, you want dark stuff, you’re gonna come to the word Incubus sooner or later.”

  “What about the Bach arrangement? Rick wrote one -”

  “And we voted it down, I know. That means shit, Ethan. Ideas are out there, somebody’s gonna get them eventually.”

  I poured a long beer and we drank in silence. Even over the piped-in blues I could hear the scraping of Neil’s knife. There was no help there. Somehow Jude had forced him to waffle back to a neutral position. I wondered for a second if Neil was sleeping with her. But no, he and Jude had never hit it off. It was so unlikely I shook my head as I finished my beer.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, I was thinking maybe you’re right. Maybe I’ve been watching too many of those fucking Millennium movies.”

  He put the knife down and drank. “Yeah, creep anyone out. Sure. And those Incubus guys sound pretty good, so maybe we’re just jealous, you know.”

  I repositioned the mug and slid out of the booth. He didn’t look up even though I knew I’d startled him. Neil had been reconditioned. “See ya later,” I said, leaning down. He nodded and I was out of there, some blues boogie jangling in my ears.

  *

  I watched Jude as she slept. I looked at her in the glow of the candles and wondered how time seemed to have passed her by completely. I was a little thicker, and I still limped from that day, but she hadn’t changed at all. Or maybe she’d improved with age, if that was possible. She still wore the dark lipstick - smeared now from our lovemaking, the smudges a little too much like blood - and now her hair was even longer and curlier, but she had softened somewhat, in spirit if not in body.

  “Hey, you get off on watching a girl sleep, do you?” she said, suddenly opening her eyes. She fixed me with her best steely stare, the effectiveness of which was ruined somewhat by the streaked mascara around her eyes.

  “Yes,” I said. “Especially when she looks like you.”

  “The right answer,” she murmured, laying her head down again. “Now go to sleep.”

  “I can’t. I just keep seeing Rick and what we did to him. I keep dreaming about it and it doesn’t always end so badly - sometimes there isn’t so much blood.”

  I lay back and stared at the indistinct ceiling. The streetlight outside cast its orange light on us in zebra stripes. “It’s bad enough, what we did. But if he’s back, then that brings up a whole lot of stuff I don’t want to think about. Horror movie stuff we thought was bullshit when he got into it, but maybe there’s more - you know, more on heaven and earth, Horatio. And then we’re really fucked, because -”

  “Hold on, Ethan. Don’t rush there, okay, there’s no point getting freaked by something that’s probably not even true. This guy in Incubus is just a clone, a guy who idolized Rick enough to copy his moves. It’s pathetic, actually.”

  “Jude, not that many people knew Rick. Who’s gonna copy moves nobody ever saw? We saw ‘em, but we never had that much of an audience … what if Rick, you know, sold -”

  “Sold his soul for rock and roll?” Jude tittered in the spooky candle-lit darkness.

  “Funny! Yeah, it sounds lame when you say it that way. But it’s this feeling I have. Neil had it, too. It’s like we know. A gut thing.”

  “You mean a guy thing.”

  “You’re killin’ me, Jude.”

  She punched my arm, then put her loose fist down near my groin. I could just see her in the orange stripes. “Maybe we need to get your mind off these strange occurrences, and maybe I know how.” Her hair cascaded across my belly. She licked her lips slowly, meaningfully.

  “Again?” I squealed. “I don’t know if… Uh, I guess I can.”

  She said something, but I couldn’t make out the muffled words. Then I didn’t care, and as the speed of her therapy increased, I felt Rick’s ghost slip away from me.

  It was a temporary reprieve.

  *

  I watched her closely now. She was asleep. The curve of her belly led to her smooth, shaved mound. I could taste her on my tongue, and I felt her saliva cooling on me. I loved her more than ever, but - goddamn it, was she sleeping with Neil? How had he changed his mind in just a couple hours? At first he also knew that Rick could somehow have come back, but then he had waffled and shrugged it off. And not very convincingly. Then it hit me and I felt the breath go out of me in a rush. What if Jude had been sleeping with Rick back then, too? What if he had a better reason to be jealous than I thought? Had he entered her flesh as I had done then, had done now? Had she drunk from him, partaking of his very essence? Would that not make her an ally forever, someone who would await his return and make sure others would not - could not - believe?

  She sighed and rolled over. I stared at her back, from her smooth buttocks all the way up to her dark curls. I thought for the first time how easily I could kill her, then, taking hold of her neck and driving her down into the hard mattress until I could snap her spine like a twig und
er my knee.

  Sleep came, but not easily. And not before some plans solidified in my head. Next to me, Jude the traitor sighed and chuckled in her sleep. My fists unclenched only when I finally closed my eyes.

  *

  I entered the studio and side-stepped a blonde and statuesque receptionist who was busy with a FedEx delivery. She glanced at me and pursed her centerfold lips, but then the FedEx guy jabbed the electronic pen at her and she had to take it, frowning, and I was through the door marked Private. There was a hallway beyond, but you could tell where Incubus was rehearsing - the sound of guitar power chords, thudding bass, booming tom-toms, and - cutting through it all - the wail of a Hammond organ or sample. Incubus sounded like Black Sabbath with Eric Clapton guesting on guitar and Jimmy Smith burning up both Hammond manuals. Maybe a touch of both Metallica and Nirvana thrown in, for the dark imagery. In other words, they sounded like a slick Black Trinity - without the keening vocals of Jude.

  I burst into the room and it all crashed to a halt. Not because of me, but because they’d reached an impasse in the song. Or maybe the end. I didn’t give a fuck.

  I headed straight for the guy behind the organ, a real one after all. The guitarists had their backs toward me and I smelled sulphur as they lit up smokes despite the No Smoking signs.

  He was adjusting drawbars - hadn’t even seen me yet - when I reached him and put my hands on his denim shirt, pulling him off the riser platform.

  “What the fuck?” he sputtered. “Who are you, you freakin’ lunatic?” He tried to regain his balance and tear my hands off his lapels at the same time. He was more heavily muscled than Rick had been, so he succeeded, then - without waiting for my response - he wound up and decked me with a loose fist that knocked me back and rattled my teeth like castanets.

  I lashed out blindly and caught his temple hard enough to spin him around and drive him flat. The rest of the band was crowding closer by now, and I didn’t like their looks at all. I pointed the .40-caliber Glock with the laser sight at them and let the little red dot jiggle its way from chest to chest. It was Brian’s under-the-counter protection, and he wouldn’t miss it until he returned. Nobody wanted to test my aim - after all, the bullet obliterates the dot - so they stepped back as a group, their hands up like bank tellers in a robbery. It was almost comical.

  I gave the keyboard dude time to get himself to his knees, then smacked the side of his head with the Glock and sent him back to the hardwood floor. A thin splatter of blood radiated out from his golden hair.

  “Welcome to Memphis,” I said in my best Clint.

  “What the fuck do you want? What’s your problem?” This time he kept to the floor, a bloody hand on his head. His eyes were Rick’s eyes, all right. I remembered them well from all the arguments in which we’d stood inches apart, screaming our guts out. Now I knew that maybe we were screaming about something other than time signatures and chord patterns.

  “What’s your name this time, Rick?”

  “I don’t know what you’re -”

  “What’s your name?” I screamed, the red dot centered on his forehead. He didn’t have to feel it to know it was there, either.

  “Roger, Roger Tyler!”

  I don’t know what I’d expected. Maybe a clever anagram, or the same initials - R.D. - or some kind of demonic name.

  Tyler was moaning and murmuring. “You motherfucker! Fuckin’ asshole bastard! Jesus, I’m bleedin’ -”

  “Shut up!” I shouted. “I know who you are and I know why you came back. I won’t let you get Jude, and you’re sure as hell not gonna get me!”

  Running steps down the hallway made me turn my head. The receptionist burst through the door.

  “Security’s on their way! I tried -”

  She powered down when she saw the Glock and stood still as a post.

  This was not what I had really intended. I knew I couldn’t finish it here without losing everything in the end. I shut down the laser, tucked the Glock back under my red shirt, and backed toward the double crash-doors at the side of the room.

  “This isn’t over, Rick,” I said, then backed through the doors and ran down the alley. There were sirens in the background, but I wasn’t sure they were meant for me. Maybe I was lucky, but there was no way they could find me after I peeled off the loud shirt and reversed it. The inside was light blue, and I disappeared into it and onto a bus a minute later.

  This had not gone well. I hadn’t really planned what to do, and now I’d alerted him.

  By the time I returned with my old Nissan, a silver 240SX with over 140,000 miles on it, the police had gone. But the band was still there, because Tyler’s red Explorer was still parked in the VIP space in front.

  There was no sense involving Jude. As much as I loved her, it was clear she wouldn’t see reason. Hell, maybe she knew everything and was a willing participant. Her visit to Neil after Neil and I had spoken on the phone had probably taken Neil out of it too. It was just me, against whatever monster Rick had become. When Tyler came out, a white bandage stark on his bright head, I was ready. I pulled into traffic behind the Explorer and we headed up Union. Within the hour, he had pulled into the lot beside a new block of rather high-priced condos out near Chicksaw, and I’d watched to see which one he entered. Now it was just a matter of time.

  *

  I awoke stiff and cold. The October night had turned chill with a hint of rain in the air. I ran the heater and tried to unstick the glue in my eyes. The lights blazed in Tyler’s condo, but the shades were drawn, so I couldn’t tell what was happening. The Explorer still sat in its space. I let the hot air thaw me out, then climbed out and opened the hatch. I plucked out the two containers by their handles and heard the liquid sloshing inside. Moments later, I hugged the shadows and let the containers drain onto the wooden sides of the building, even splashing some of the brick facade and the lower window sills. I couldn’t see what was going on inside, but there was no stopping now. Maybe Rick’s second death would free Jude and we could still grow old together, as I’d intended. She would thank me for this, for having the courage to once again face the monster that our friend had become.

  I struck a wooden match and aimed it carefully under one of the soaked bushes. Leaping back just in time, I watched as the flames shot up and spread out, licking the paint off the empty cans and sliding up the wooden slats on either side of the front door. The pool in front of the entrance ignited as I backed away slowly, feeling the heat building up on my face and hands. But I wanted to face the demon when it burst forth from its lair.

  Screams from inside. Horrible, guttural, gut-wrenching screams. The flames, engulfing both first and second floor windows, eating their way through and bursting the glass panes one by one. The heat, consuming everything not taken by the flames, and the popping of wooden beams as they burned like logs in a gigantic fireplace. And the screams, neverending, high-pitched like a demon’s scream of pain and rage - and fear, no doubt fear as the fire set about returning the creature to the hell from which Rick had summoned it all those years ago, or perhaps recently.

  And then the wind shifted and I heard the screams separate into two, then three voices, and out of the inferno the front doorframe had become there came a human moving in slow-motion and burning rapidly - a strange combination, as if one pace were reversed on purpose - and then I saw that dark curls grew yard high flames and flayed strips of blackened skin off a suddenly bare scalp and eyelids disappeared in the conflagration and lips that had suckled me and shown me so much love were now searing off and then turning the head into a gleaming skull even as the slate colored eyes still bore into mine, accusingly, so accusingly.

  The eyes burst in a shower of gore and the body began to fold upon itself as if it were just clothes, except that now the clothing had melted into the skin and bubbled as it liquefied like butter running off a hot pan and the last scream I heard was Jude’s as her voice miraculously sounded out one last word for my ears only, one last question to burn into my s
oul and mark my entrance into hell.

  “Why?”

  The other voices were still screaming, I knew, but they hadn’t made their way outside, so they kept on screaming for a few more seconds as the condo building collapsed around them and silenced them forever. One of them, I hoped, forever.

  Spent, singed, saddened, I made my way back to the car and was hunched down, below the sloping dashboard, when the fire engines came.

  *

  Black Trinity had died a second death.

  A day later, the voices began to hound my every move. Their steps shadow my steps, moving when I move and stopping when I stop. Their shuffling follows me whenever I venture outside, and they await my return, huddled near the door or windows. Of my house, my job, and any place I go.

  Nights, I awaken, my nostrils clogged with the sweet-sour smell of melting skin, crying and shuddering without control. In an elegant rosewood case lies my father’s prized hunting pistol, a single-shot black powder Thompson/Center Contender. It’ll take the top of my head off, thus ending my suffering. Unless …

  A friend told me you could help.

  Here I am.

  IV

  She had listened without comment. No one had entered the storefront. When Ethan paused, he could hear his eternal companions outside, but while he had spoken their voices had thankfully receded. Now, having reached the most painful part of his narrative, he wondered if he could go on. The woman’s handsome face was expressionless, a plaster mask, her eyes filmy with either sympathy or disinterest. They followed his hand gestures and his slight body movements as he shifted his weight, letting the rustle of his clothing cover the shuffling from outside.

  He stopped speaking, his voice breaking up and his lips quivering from the emotion. Saying the words hurt more than thinking them, and he was nearly doubled over with the intense physical blow of missing Jude - missing her all over again. All he had to do was speak her name and her absence lanced his heart with a needle he could almost see.