Savage Beasts

by John F. D. Taff

  “What’s going to happen?” Jaz asks.

  “I don’t know. Want to find out?”

  He reaches for me. I close my hand around his.

  Daniel Braum

  Musical Inspiration for “An American Ghost in Zurich”

  One of the songs that inspired this story is the song “La Faye” by the Brooklyn band School of Seven Bells. I am not exactly certain of the lyrics to the song, but the sound of it feels mysterious, technological and futuristic, yet at the same time organic with a ton of “feel.” When I listen to the song, I feel I am connecting with something strange and wonderful and intensely personal and incredibly heartfelt. The song is from the album Ghostory, which tells the story of a ghost, La Faye, who is a woman without a heart.

  In my story, Anina has also lost her heart in a way, and in the end becomes a ghost of sorts. I imagine it is the song that Anina is listening to while on the plane in the first part of the story. I dedicate the story to Benjamin Curtis of School of Seven Bells, who passed away on December 29, 2013. I like to imagine that there is a world out there where he is still alive and still making his incredible music with the band. Although it was not explored in the story, for a moment on that plane, Anina experienced that world when she interacted with that first “ghost.”

  A lot of people think Mal blew his brains out with too much acid, but I know what really happened. Shell shock. The terrifying stares, the erratic behavior, the distance. The symptoms, if you look into that sort of thing, were pretty spot-on. But who was looking for shell shock in 1967, in London, worlds apart from anywhere bombs might be falling? So everybody stood 'round and watched Mal slip further and further away, but nobody else had a clue as to what was really going on. I know because the several times that Mal went mad, I went right along with him.

  Nowadays, everybody likes to fancy themselves an expert on poor old Malcolm Marriott—the Lost Boy of London, former leader of the mighty Furry Houses, the mad genius who once had the keys to the kingdom of the psychedelic era tucked firmly into his paisley-clad trousers. Well, I spent more time with Mal than any of the so-called experts; I played with him from the very beginning of what later became the Houses, and I can tell you that, right off, Mal was crazy from the start—like a bloody fox. He knew what he had, he knew how much other people wanted it, and he knew how to give them all just enough to drive them good and mad over him. But what happened later snuffed all of that out, like a candle wick choked in its own wax.

  He was always eccentric. But that was part of his brilliance. I mean, here was a guy who never practiced his guitar, but every time he picked the thing up, a song fell out. He had this daft but appealing little sound in his head that was part rhythm-and-blues, part Gregorian chant and part nursery rhyme. The first time we ever played together he sang some of his tunes and I nearly fell off the drum stool. I had been playing in any number of second-rate beat groups, but I was Mal's most fervent disciple after that. All I could think of was to round up a few mates to fill out the band, book us some gigs, and we'll all get laid like rabbits. So we signed up David, the bass player, back before he turned himself into the towering bastard we all know today. We let Colin, who was a bit younger, piddle around on keyboard because he hung around David.

  Rehearsals began and we made quite a cacophony at first. Still, with a full band, we could stretch out Mal's clever little tunes, indulge ourselves in a little bit of the chemically-enhanced noodling that everybody was into back then. We even found ourselves a manager, Ian, with his fingers full of cheap rings and his head full of half-baked showbiz ambitions. Still, Mal seemed to be pleased with everything, and that was good enough for me.

  Sure enough, within months, we went from being another gang of spotty young things howling away in a beat club to getting a record deal and heading into the studio. The Furry Houses soon released their first single, “A Gnome There Was,” and it made it all the way into the top ten on the pop charts. Suddenly there were television appearances, closets full of Carnaby Street finery—course, I used to be a little slimmer, mind you—custom-made guitars, paisley-patterned drum kits, nights spent carousing with London's pop royalty, and more unclothed women than my poor eyes could stand. Not that I could hold a candle to Mal in that respect. He used to show up to gigs in a pair of knee-high boots, a crushed velvet suit and a cloak, usually black or purple on the outside and some searing yellow or orange on the inside; a charming Martian dandy fallen to Earth. He had the future all rolled up in an unlit joint and a merry twinkle in his eye. I don't buy anyone's suggestion that Mal was some kind of tortured artist at this point. He was having fun. Hell, we all were. Then came Annie.

  Annie Anders, or Annie Anxiety, as Mal used to call her. Yeah, just like the song on the B-side of our second single. Annie always threw a fit when they ran out of pills, so Mal used to tease her with that one. She took to calling him Mal Content, because he could be such a smug bastard sometimes.

  She and Mal got on really well at first, in spite of what a mess they made of each other later on. For a very brief period of time, their intake of exotic drugs and their naive infatuation with each other blended into a sort of hazy, lysergic fairy tale. The dashing poet and his sullen muse. She was, of course, gob-stoppingly gorgeous, as all of Mal's girlfriends were. That was the thing, though. She wasn't keen on being “one of the girls,” and that led to a series of particularly nasty spats. Mal never could be straightforward like he should've. Gave the band the runaround too, from time to time, as I'm sure you've heard. This time, though, it really came back to bite him in the arse.

  * * *

  One day we were headed to Mal's flat after practice. He told me he had something he wanted to show me. He seemed a little distracted, but in that almost giddy way that he always got when the creative juices were really starting to pump. I figured that he had maybe gotten a new toy—some expensive American guitar or record, another musical bauble to hoard and gawk at. But he wouldn't spill a word, not until we were both at his flat. He told me that he had been taking acid again—something we were all fairly fluent in at the time—but that things had been very different, very unique.

  If he'd told me that he'd gotten the stuff from Annie, I would have made for the nearest open window. Their last row had been particularly rough and embarrassingly public, not the kind of thing where you swap sweets and recreational chemicals the next week. But there are certain things, that if your mates did them, you had to do them too. Especially if it was Mal, who, not to put too fine a point on it, had led us all right into the land of milk and honey.

  We had a trip, oh boy. Not just lounging about with the room getting fuzzy at the edges, but a proper journey to someplace else entirely. In time, the room sort of faded to almost complete blackness, and it took a good while for my watery, turgid senses to recognize that we were presently sitting in a room—not Mal's room, not anymore—that was lit only by a small group of candles. There were a group of people sitting around a big table in the center of the room, holding hands and listening to one strange old bird chanting and carrying on in a language I still can't quite figure. It all sounded muffled, though, like the sound was coming from somewhere down the hall.

  After a while, the chanting stopped, and there was the sound of knuckles rapping on wood, which led to a volley of shocked gasps. I didn't know what to make of all this, as I was spending a good portion of my very limited faculties trying to figure how I was still sitting on Mal's couch, which I could no longer see.

  “Oi, can you all hear me?” Mal's voice made me nearly jump out of my skin, or at the very least seriously consider getting up off of his invisible couch. I could see him again, standing between where I sat—or floated, apparently—and the table. His hand was tapping out a rhythm on the tabletop.

  There were more gasps around the room. One lady started weeping and called out, “Arthur, Arthur!”

  “That's my gran,” said Mal, leaning over to me. The chanting began again. “Oh, don't listen to her, she's a
horrible old fraud.” Mal's voice was audible to the party, but it didn't seem likely they could make out what he was saying any better than I could understand the chanting. It was like trying to yell through a room packed full of custard. “They're having a séance. I think they're trying to talk to my grandfather.” He glanced back at me, gave me a wink. “Acoustics are a little dodgy, eh? I can't ever seem to make myself understood.” He walked right next to the table and yelled, “It’s not Arthur, it’s Mal. I’m your, well, I will be your grandson. Wrong generation, you see. Please don’t give this silly tart any more money, Gran.”

  Again, this caused another round of gasps from the table, but from the looks on their faces it was clear they couldn’t make sense of what Mal was saying. Not that I was doing too well, either.

  “Christ, Mal,” I said. “Do you mean to tell me you've seen all this before?”

  “Hmm? Oh, yeah,” said Mal, waving his hands in front of the medium's face. “Once or twice. Neat, innit? Didn't know if you'd be able to see it too or not.”

  Just about then the room began to fade. The air I was sitting on started to feel increasingly couch-like again, much to my relief.

  “G'by Gran!” called Mal, cheerfully adding, “don’t be so hard on poor Mum. You’ll drive her to drink.”

  * * *

  “Well, what do you think? Pretty wild, hmm?”

  I was still considering having a go at standing up, but Mal was already pacing around the room, smoking a freshly rolled joint.

  “Mal, that was insane. Nearly scared me half to death.” At least, that's what I wanted to say, but by the time my tongue got wind of it, it came out more like waauuugghhh.

  “I've been three times now. I think that Annie's really on to something with this stuff.” At that I felt my stomach do a few jumping jacks whilst the rest of me remained seated. “Said she got it from an old mate of hers, a regular world traveler. She said this is the kind of stuff that can really take you places. Pretty spot-on, wouldn't you say?”

  Quite so, Mal. Too bad I really couldn't say much of anything, or I'd have let him have it.

  “You know, the more I do it, the more I feel like there's something else to it. Like I could just breeze by them all next time, go further along. Really, really wild.”

  Then Mal proffered a toke on his joint, and by the time I was looking back up, he had produced an acoustic guitar from somewhere. He was already strumming and twanging along, singing a tune that seemed to loop and caper around the room like the ghostly forms that were made by the smoke. Mal sort of calmed me down like that, lifted that sense of unease and brought my head back around to something I could understand. By the time the joint was finished, he had written “I Was Late to My Own Séance,” and I mean the whole thing—lock, stock and barrel. He managed to rhyme “dactylomancy” with “passing fancy,” and he even worked in the bit about the room sounding like it was full of custard. It wasn't until much later that I wondered about how he got that, because I only ever thought it to myself.

  * * *

  The next few weeks sped by. We had gigs to play and parties to attend, not to mention an album to finish. I gradually forgot about the little episode with the acid—or whatever it was—and being on the broadcast end of a séance. I know it sounds like rubbish, but back then there were all kinds of mad things swirling around the little scene we fancied ourselves a part of.

  One day Mal showed up at the recording studio looking a little worse for the wear. Not surprising, considering the schedule we were on. There were times, mostly when Mal was going through his amphetamine phase, that I figure I'd seen him up for three days and nights in a row. That day, the only thing that was really off was that Mal seemed to be bereft of the fat, mellow joint that usually came along with him. Instead, he was smoking regular old cigs, one after another. Before he started talking, I would never have guessed he was anything more than just a little hung-over.

  “Well,” he said, “I've gone back. Been further, the last few times.”

  It took me a beat to figure him out, but when I did, I couldn't say a word. I just sort of nodded like, oh, right on mate, just a stroll through time an' space, then?

  “Come on,” he said, grinning. “I know you remember. I've been back to that room half a dozen times now, but last time I finally figured it out. They were trying to talk to my old granddad, right? An' I guess they made a sort of tunnel.”

  He took a long drag. Fidgeted a bit. Seemed like he was missing his old joint.

  “No, not a tunnel, more like a long hallway. Had lots of big heavy doors. Couldn't get any of them open the first couple of times I tried. I just walked down that hall for hours. Days, even. Then I tried a door and I managed to go through.” He tossed some ash off to the side. “Have I ever told you about my old granddad? Fought in the Great War, he did. I think I've gone back in his place. I went through that door and woke up in a trench.”

  “Come on Mal, quit talking bollocks.”

  “Oh no,” he said, grinning. “In a dreary old trench with the other sad, soggy bastards. They all talked and acted like I was Arthur. Mum always did say I was the spitting image of old granddad.”

  There was something that happened when Mal grinned like that, like somebody poured ice water in your veins.

  “So what's the news from the front, mate?” I was trying to laugh it off, and doing a piss-poor job of it.

  “Well, of course I played along. What, d'you think I'd run off?” He puffed himself up a bit, stood at mock attention. “Oh no, me lad. Then it’s the firing squad, for sure. For king and country!”

  “Oh, I see. You've been sticking it to the Hun, eh?”

  “Well, not quite. Haven't got that far yet. Been shelled, though. A bit like that last festival gig. But it's all like a vivid dream. Not any real danger.”

  “Still, Mal, maybe you ought to lay off that stuff—whatever the hell it is—that Annie's been feeding you. I mean, are you two still even...”

  “Hmm? Oh, Annie,” he said, glancing out the window. “Haven't seen her in a month. Actually, that was the thing I was going to tell you. It’s strange, but I ran out of that stuff a week ago. The last time I went through all I'd had was some plain old hash I got at a party. Weird, huh?”

  * * *

  Now, at the time, I just took this as a sign that Mal was going through another phase: first it was Tolkien and Unknown Worlds, then it was astrology and flying saucers, and then spiritualism and spooks. If the next revolution of the sun and moon going round Mal's head just happened to portend an obsession with all things mud-sodden and morbid, who was I to argue? Fact is, we were all still enjoying the ride on Mal's Day-Glo coattails, and nobody paid any mind until things ground to a halt.

  There's one other little snippet I can recall, something else that should have warned me. We were in the studio, most of us just milling about as Mal sat in the control room listening to the playback of a guitar solo that sounded like his old Fender guitar was earnestly trying to vomit up a rainbow all over the middle of the song. It nearly gave the studio engineer a heart attack, but it seemed like Mal's little nod to Beck and Hendrix. At least, that's what I thought at first. Towards the end, though, he started doing something rude with a bottleneck slide and the vibrato arm, and I suddenly had a very clear image of a something crashing down to earth with terrible violence. Struck by this, I leaned in a bit and said, “Well Mal, how are things down in the trenches? Keeping morale up for the rest of the lads?”

  He didn't turn around, he just stared at the glass partition that separated the control booth from the tracking booth, and from what I could see of his reflection there, I was well glad of it. Apparently my little joke went down in flames. He could have been gazing out on the surface of Mars just then.

  “Yeah,” he said. “They're just like you lot, they need somebody to lead them.”

  * * *

  Mal finished doing his overdubs and then promptly lost interest in the album, leaving the mixing to the rest of us.
Not long after that he stopped showing up to rehearsals, and no one else in the London scene could say they'd seen him in weeks. Without much discussion I was elected to be the poor sod in charge of dragging Mal out of his new-found state of hermitude and back into the world of doing things for the band. They sent me because we were mates from school, true-blue drug buddies, and also because I was able to “speak Mal” in a way that eluded the others.

  I headed off to his place with a slab of fresh vinyl tucked under my arm; it was a test pressing of our new LP. It was supposed to remind him what a grand old time he could be having, playing promotional gigs and being chatted up by the legions of besotted music journalists who wanted only to grovel and scrape before him. Something like that, anyway.

  Most of the times I'd been dispatched to collect Mal, I would find him at his flat in one of two predicaments: either he'd be neck-deep in a party, with a bevy of female admirers clinging to him; or else he'd be all alone with one of his guitars and a tape recorder. It was hard work getting him away in either case. Also, I thought of Annie, who hadn't been around lately, but who still seemed to float in and out of conversation amongst the rest of the band. Could they have gotten back together, gone on another legendary bender?

  When I knocked on Mal's door, there wasn't a sound from inside. Not the idle laughter of fair-weather friends, nor the plaintive strumming that heralded the imminent arrival of a new tune. Just the sound of my knock ricocheting off the walls of what sounded like a much emptier place than usual. I tried the door, which was unlocked, a not-so-curious thing given the chummy laissez-faire spirit of the time. Still, I had a vision of Mal with his brains dashed out and all his stuff stolen. Or, worse for the rest of us, thoughts of him having taken off to points unknown; packing up his guitars and brilliant tunes and leaving the rest of us standing here, looking like a bunch of twats.