“What, you’re scared in your own ‘hood?” Rat asked. “I thought you were different from all those Williamsburg trust funders.”
Rachel’s shoulders tensed. Rat knew how to push her buttons.
She turned, readying a 20-megaton comeback, but stopped herself.
Maybe it was crazy, but she’d see the show and shut him up. Maybe that’s what it would take to get the encounter behind her, to know Radio Man was just another Bushwick whack job. That he wasn’t some kind of apparition hanging over her.
“You’re paying, and I’ve got earplugs,” Rachel said. “What do I have to lose?”
* * *
They’d almost given up looking when they found the address stenciled in white paint on a grimy warehouse wall. The block was silent and lifeless. No cluster of hipsters huddled outside sharing smokes and small talk. No music streamed into the street.
“Doesn’t look like there’s a show,” Rachel said, examining the building’s rusted door and bricked-over windows. “Guess we head back.”
“Not after we wandered for an hour trying to find the place.”
Rat yanked the door handle. It groaned open, spilling a shaft of yellowish light across the sidewalk. He stepped inside. Rachel exhaled and followed.
A wiry man in a dingy, untucked tuxedo shirt greeted them. His eyes disappeared in deep shadows, his craggy face corpse-like under the room’s single bare bulb.
“The program begins at midnight,” he said, jerkily extending his arm toward descending stairs. A red sore oozed on his wrist.
“What’s the cover?” Rat reached for his wallet.
The man motioned again. “The program begins at midnight.”
Rat shrugged and clomped down the narrow steps. Rachel followed, sliding her hand down the worn wooden banister as they descended into a narrow hall with exposed pipes. It spilled into a dim, low-ceilinged basement.
Two-dozen people sat in folding chairs, facing a low wooden platform at the room’s far end. A sheer white curtain obscured the right side of a makeshift wooden stage. A cracked plaster wall was visible along the left.
“Seems like they’d wanna charge cover to pay for that sound system.” Rat pointed to the stacks of black speakers that towered on either side of the stage.
He sat in a folding chair and Rachel plopped down beside him. She looked over her shoulder. A handful of men in tattered clothing stood along the back wall. They looked unhealthy, unwashed, homeless. Obscured in inky shadow, she couldn’t tell if Radio Man was among them.
She elbowed Rat. “What’s up with the street people?”
“Place looks kind of like an art-squat. Maybe they let the homeless help out for a place to flop.”
A goth couple in black lipstick and velvet jackets entered and took seats near a cluster of crusty punks with rope-thick dreadlocks. An acne-scarred man in an army jacket sat up front, eyes flitting about the room, and a doughy guy in an orange polyester shirt hunched in his seat, nervously gnawing a cuticle.
“Watching the freaks who show up at these things is half the fun.” Rat nodded at the guy in the army jacket. “Check out Travis Bickle over there.”
“Yeah. And then there are the normal people like us who wander into abandoned warehouses for ‘rituals of noise and transformation.’”
“Didn’t figure you for a prude, Rach. Just like your beloved Buzzcocks sang, ‘Noise Annoys.’ It scares normal people because it controls your body, alters your consciousness.”
“Alters your consciousness?” Rachel raised an eyebrow. “You’re Deepak Chopra now?”
“You know why they play Muzak in office buildings? Something called progressive stimulation: the songs start slow then build tempo. The sound takes over people’s bodies, makes them work faster and faster like good little robots.”
“So Muzak’s the work of Satan. Tell me something I don’t know.”
Rat’s know-it-all routine was getting to her. So were the dank air and the homeless clustered in the back of the room. She needed to step outside.
“Got a smoke?” She mimed putting a cigarette to her lips.
Rat tapped two Luckies into her hand. “Extra one’s so you don’t bug me for it later.”
The lights clicked off before Rachel could rise. Nervous rustling spread through the audience. A second later, a single spotlight illuminated the stage. Rachel slunk into her chair, still clutching the cigarettes.
Three silhouettes stood behind the sheer curtain. Each appeared to be behind a keyboard stand. A few people applauded, then a deep sound throbbed from the speakers–whump–whump…whump–whump–like a whale’s heartbeat.
A beam of light cut the air above the audience’s head, and the stage curtain lit with the flickering image of an eyeball lying in a round steel pan. Rachel looked back and saw that someone had moved a movie projector into place behind the crowd. One of the homeless? Dust swam in the bulb’s light.
Onscreen, a rubber-gloved hand rotated the pan and the eye rolled around its edge, trailing a pinkish cord. The hand laid a severed human ear beside it. Rachel shifted in the folding chair. Disturbing, sure, but probably cribbed from some medical film.
A second bass frequency rumbled in her soles, creeping slowly up her legs. The vibration–something she felt more than heard–settled in her stomach for a few seconds before repeating.
An excruciatingly loud screech kicked in, wavering frantically without settling into any kind of melody. Rachel strained to see how the silhouetted figures made the sounds. The screen rendered them gray blurs.
She unzipped her backpack and pulled out her earplugs. Rat rocked, smiling, eyes shut. If he liked Metal Machine Music, this was probably like Ecstasy to him. She jammed the plugs into her ears.
The film cut to time-lapse footage of maggots burrowing through gray, hairless flesh. The meat caved in on itself as muscle and sinew disintegrated. Rachel turned her head, not wanting to think about what kind of animal they fed on.
A familiar smell, musky and sweet, wafted through the basement. Thin ropes of smoke drifted across the projector light. Incense. The same she’d smelled on Radio Man. She looked over her shoulder again, trying to spot him. The back wall sunk in darkness.
Another rumbling bass frequency dropped in. Its rhythm, jagged and sputtering like an un-tuned engine, clashed with the steady pulse of the heartbeat. More sounds crept into the mix, each more disorienting than the last. Monkeys screeched from the left speakers, a dentist’s drill whined from the right.
The volume increased, and dull pain moved into Rachel’s molars. The noise had seeped past her earplugs. Rumbling bass churned her stomach, and she looked down to see the empty chair next to her vibrate forward, inching toward the stage.
She couldn’t imagine how punishing the racket would be without hearing protection. It called for a trick she’d learned at basement shows back in high school. She snapped the filters from Rat’s cigarettes, dug out her earplugs and jammed a filter sideways into each ear canal before sinking the plugs back in place. Disgusting, sure, but effective.
The filters killed the highest frequencies and muted the volume. Rat would probably have to help dig them out later, but it served him right for dragging her to this mess. Art as a fucking endurance test.
The film dissolved into grainy black-and-white footage of a nude woman stumbling through dense woods. A man in a black robe tugged her along by a cord around her neck. Two more robed figures followed.
The camera cut to the woman’s bruised and swollen face. She looked directly into the camera, eyes hollow and drained. Rachel’s stomach churned as she realized the woman probably wasn’t an actress. The bruises weren’t makeup.
The thudding tempo quickened. Screams reverberated through the basement. Rachel wasn’t sure whether they came from the speakers or somewhere in the audience.
Onscreen, one of the robed men raised an arm, his black sleeve falling away from a curved dagger. The blade scythed down.
Rachel looked away.
Rat rocked and smiled, eyes closed. He hadn’t heard. The maelstrom had swallowed her voice.
A chair fell against Rachel’s knee. One of the punks had capsized it as he ran for the stage. The film flickered on his leather jacket as he crossed to the open stretch of wall. He tore into the plaster with his nails, clawing like a frantically digging animal. On the adjacent screen, the knife plunged in and out of the woman’s abdomen.
Rachel shoved Rat, trying to jar him from his trance. He ignored her.
Blood streaked the digging punk’s forearms. The man in the army jacket joined him, prying away plaster and wood with a lockblade knife.
The vibrations changed. The jumble of noise swirled, gelling into a single constant throb. Each slow pulse shook Rachel’s meat, as if the sound had integrated itself into her cells. Something tugged her toward the stage.
Most of the crowd had rushed forward. They ripped away chunks of wall, tearing an opening in the shape of an arched doorway: an inverted U. The woman’s screaming face filled the entire screen now. Black blood slicked her teeth.
Rachel stood, dragging Rat with her. “Let’s go,” she screamed. “Now!”
The pull toward the stage intensified.
She stumbled toward the door, dragging Rat by his sleeve. He wrenched his arm free and clamped fingers around her wrist.
Rat looked back, eyes frantic, his grip vice-like. Rachel planted her feet and tried to pry away his fingers. Her soles slid across slick concrete as he dragged her toward the stage.
The doughy man in the orange shirt cut in front of them. He’d shed his pants and held something purple and fleshy in one hand. The other gripped a bloodied Swiss Army knife. Crimson streaked his thighs.
Rachel realized she was sobbing, her pleas washed away under churning sound.
Onstage, beyond the newly opened archway, a surface glistened like the pale flesh of an unearthed grub. At first, Rachel thought it was some kind of plastic sheeting, but the rubbery mass undulated and split down the middle. Gray lips bloomed like an obscene flower.
The audience raised ruined hands and threw back their heads in celebratory howls. The man in the army jacket caressed the white flesh. A mottled gray tendril the thickness of a firehose slithered from the parted lips. It wound around his torso and yanked him into the opening.
Rat climbed onstage, hoisting Rachel up by her arm. She screamed and smacked his face with the heel of her palm. Blood exploded from his nose and he staggered, losing his grip.
She hit the floor hard, sprawled on her back. One of the goths stepped onto her stomach as he ascended the stage, dragging his date by the collar of her velvet jacket. The girl’s eyes stared straight ahead. Black lipstick smeared her cheek, and blood bubbled from a hole torn in her throat.
Rachel gagged, fighting for breath. She flipped over and scrambled away on hands and knees, looking for the stairs. Something pulled her backward, as if she swam against an undertow. She looked over her shoulder, expecting to see Rat clasping her ankle. Nothing held her. Nothing physical. The noise itself sucked her toward the stage.
Her body felt impossibly heavy, like the entire room had tilted and she climbed against gravity. She clambered in the direction of the stairwell, fighting the pull.
She threw herself forward, hooked an arm around the handrail and clung. More corpse-gray tentacles writhed from the thing onstage. Rat now stood in the middle of the fray, bloodied lips parted in a smile, a tendril circling his waist. Rachel turned her head and retched as the thing jerked him into its puckered maw.
Gagging, she dragged herself up the stairs. She tumbled into the foyer and lay gasping. The noise was loud here but not deafening. She no longer felt its tug.
Shaking, she climbed to her feet and looked for the exit.
Something snagged the collar of her t-shirt and she staggered away. Radio Man loomed into view, reaching again with a claw-like hand. Rot soured the air.
As he stepped forward, the hood of his jacket fell, revealing a row of small silver hoops that ran the entire length of his left ear. The word “Brooklyn” spidered across his neck in gothic tattoo script.
She’d found Jimmy Strauss, or what remained of him.
The homeless men Rachel had seen in the shadows joined mindless Jimmy, their filthy faces blank and emotionless. The doorman stepped from their ranks and made a clumsy grab for her.
“The program begins at midnight,” he said, repeating his mantra.
Rachel sidestepped the doorman’s advance and drove a hard kick into his knee. The man’s leg buckled, but he didn’t cry out. The look on his face as he fell was one of confusion not pain.
Jimmy shambled toward her and made an uncoordinated swing. She kicked again. Her boot connected with his groin and he staggered backward, clearing her path. Like the doorman, Jimmy didn’t seem to register pain.
Rachel hurled herself through the exit and into the street. She sprinted through silent blocks of crumbling warehouses before collapsing under the L Line’s glowing sign.
Kids in ball caps and baggy jeans stepped over her, laughing as she vomited down the steps.
* * *
Tangled in sweat-soaked sheets, Rachel awoke from another nightmare about the warehouse basement. The mosquito-like whine in her ears swelled in time with her pounding heart.
This time, the dream had been the one where she reached for Rat and felt her arm slide into something warm and wet, a numbness spreading first through her body, then her mind.
She slapped the snooze button, silencing the clock radio’s chatter. Empty beer cans and a bottle of Lortabs clattered to the floor.
Rachel rolled over and pulled the curtain, hoping sunlight would burn away her hazy hangover and the phantom noise.
A police car hissed down the street below. If only they knew.
Six months had passed and the cops hadn’t turned up a thing. No sign of Rat. No sign anything had taken place in the warehouse. The building belonged to an offshore company that developed loft apartments, and as gentrification continued its tireless march, that’s what it had become.
Isn’t it likely, one of the detectives had finally asked, that someone attacked them when they tried to score in the wrong neighborhood? Sometimes, he said, the human mind replaces a real trauma with an imagined one.
Rachel rubbed her eyes. Down on the street, a skinny, tattooed kid opened the door of his battered Honda.
An emaciated man draped in a worn leather jacket staggered around the car in jerky fits, his back to Rachel’s window. He thrust a piece of paper at the kid. Marked in white across the man’s jacket were the words “DESTROY MUSIC.”
By the time Rachel yanked on jeans and bounded down the steps barefoot, the Honda was gone. So was the man in the leather jacket.
Breathless, she leaned against a parking meter, the ringing in her ears growing louder. The faint smell of rot and sickly sweet smoke hung in the air.
Rachel looked up at an inverted “U” scrawled across the brick wall in front of her. The still-wet spray paint glistened like the skin of a shiny white grub.
She slid to the sidewalk and covered her ears, as the squall of white noise washed away the sounds of the city.
Sanford Allen, at various times, has worked as a newspaper reporter, a college journalism instructor and a touring musician. He currently divides his creative energy between writing tales of horror/sf/dark fantasy and his band Hogbitch, which wallows in the murky swamp between doom metal and space rock. His short fiction has appeared in recent anthologies including After Death… and Rayguns Over Texas. His first novel, Deadly Passage, is due out later this year from JournalStone, packaged back-to-back with Joe McKinney’s Dog Days. Find him online at www.sanfordallen.com.
-OPEN MIND NIGHT AT THE RITZ
by Shane McKenzie
The Ritz was the best pla
ce to see flesh-benders in the whole city. And Sunday was the day to go, because it was Open Mind Night. Caleb had been showing up for months, planning to show off his Talent, but could never persuade himself to actually get on stage. Especially when he’d have to follow Radical Raymond. Nobody could follow that.
Caleb’s hands were slippery and began to shake. He shoved one hand into his pocket and rolled the cube of flesh between his thumb and forefinger. It was a piece of his dead aunt’s corpse. The funeral had been a few weeks back, and Caleb had cut a perfect square from her neck; nobody noticed. He’d reached into the coffin, making like he was stricken with grief, then sliced it away, a portion under the collar of her dress, covered it back up before anyone was the wiser. He kept it in his freezer in a plastic baggie to keep it fresh, but every week, he’d fish it out and take it to the Ritz with him, the meat cube thawing out in his pocket. The smell got slightly more potent every time. But he brought it each Sunday, hoping to take it on stage and bend it for the crowd. But he couldn’t do it. And every time, as he watched the magnificent display before him by a man that was nothing short of his idol, he knew he’d have to dig deeper into himself than he’d ever had before to find the courage.
Caleb leaned against the bar with his martini in hand, staring at the stage. The condensation on the glass dripped over his fingers, so he wrapped a napkin around it and took a sip. Radical Raymond was putting on quite the show. Caleb could only dream of being as good a flesh-bender as him. He’d known he was meant to be one for a few years, but never had the guts to actually show off his Talent. Not that his Talent was anywhere near Raymond’s. None of the flesh-benders he’d seen over the years were as good as Raymond.
Caleb jammed his hand into his pocket to feel for the cube of flesh again. He knew it was there, but his obsessive compulsions guided his hand into his pocket every few minutes or so, just to get that reassurance it hadn’t fallen out or that he hadn’t been pick-pocketed. His fingers collided with the firm, cold flesh cube, and he fondled it for a moment as he downed the rest of his drink.
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