Armageddon Rag

by George R. R. Martin

  He didn’t think he could handle the Nazgûl right now. He searched through his record collection, pulled out some early Beatles, and placed one disc carefully on the turntable. He set it to repeat indefinitely, and turned the volume up. Then he stretched out on the couch and cracked the first beer.

  The next morning he woke up with an awful headache, a litter of beer cans all around him, and John, Paul, George, and Ringo still singing their hearts out, over and over and over. He winced, pushed himself off the couch, killed the music. He didn’t remember falling asleep.

  He showered, made himself some strong coffee, drank two big tumblers of orange juice and ate a stale jelly doughnut that Sharon had left in the fridge. He tried not to think. Upstairs he found himself staring at the clothing in his closet. He had been wearing the same clothes repeatedly for so long, washing them in so many dingy coin Laundromats, that he’d almost forgotten that he owned anything else. It seemed a stranger’s wardrobe. Finally he chose a pair of black cords and a comfortable, faded cotton shirt with a camouflage pattern. Maggie had given him that shirt, he remembered.

  Sharon had piled all his mail on his desk in his office. Sandy rifled through it desultorily until he came to the letter from Alan Vanderbeck. It could have been a royalty check, of course, but somehow he knew that it wasn’t even before he opened it. He ripped off the end of the envelope and shook out the letter.

  Dear Sander,

  I’ve been giving a lot of thought to our association of late. In view of the directions that your literary career is now taking, I’m no longer sure that I’m the proper man to represent your interests. It might be best for both of us if

  Sandy crumpled the letter in his hand and lofted it toward his wastebasket. It missed and rolled across the floor to join a pile of discarded pages from his novel.

  Page thirty-seven was still in his typewriter. He rolled it out. The paper was permanently curled by now. Sandy flattened it ineffectually and put it in the box with the rest of the book. He took the box downstairs with him, donned his heavy blue peacoat, and headed for the subway with the novel under his arm.

  Hedgehog had its offices in the Village, just off Washington Square. Sandy paused on the stairs, looking at the door he had passed through so many times. This used to be home once. And now?

  “Can I help you?” the receptionist asked when he stepped inside. She was no one he’d known, nor did she recognize him.

  “I used to edit this rag,” Sandy said. “I want to see Jared.”

  “Who shall I say—”

  “Don’t bother,” he interrupted. “I know the way.” He went up the stairs, ignoring her protests. He ignored Jared’s personal receptionist as well, and walked right into his office.

  It had been years since Sandy had seen Jared Patterson in the flesh. There was a lot more flesh. Jared was sitting behind a big desk, looking through some layout sheets. He was wearing a navy-blue leisure suit, an open-collared pastel shirt, and three gold chains around his neck. Already the suit was too small, binding visibly under the arms. Jared had always been overweight, but now he was gross. He looked up at Sandy, startled, and then smiled. “Sandy!” he said, pushing his work aside and leaning back in his huge swivel chair. “What a treat! How long has it been?”

  “About seventy or eighty pounds,” Sandy said. He crossed the room and sat down. The receptionist came in, but Jared waved her away. “I want to talk to you about the Nazgûl story,” Sandy said. “It’s bigger than we could have imagined, Jared.”

  “You mean the Lynch story, Sandy old chum, and you’re too late. We’ve already done our thing on that. I warned you.” He leaned over and punched his intercom. “Betsy, bring in the issue before last, willya honey? You know, the one with that hinky painting on the cover, all the hobbits and shit.”

  She brought it in and gave it to Jared. Jared smirked and handed it across the desk to Sandy. “Sorry, pal,” he said, “but you can’t say I didn’t warn you. I really wanted you to do this one for us, Sandy, but you had to go and be stubborn. Like you can see, we hadda cover it without you.”

  The front page of the tabloid, under the Hog logo, had an old photo of Jamie Lynch superimposed over a garish fantasy landscape. Hobbits clustered around his feet, and overhead record albums sailed the pink skies like a flock of flying saucers. The caption read, “Who Killed Sauron?”

  The story developed that theme. The staff writer had learned that Hobbins had called Jamie Lynch “Sauron,” and he’d taken that and run with it, right into the ground. Pages of Tolkienesque bullshit. Maine became the Shire, Paul Lebeque an unlikely Frodo. Sandy was awestruck. “I can’t believe you’d run this shit,” he said.

  Jared Patterson shrugged. “Hey, when you finked out on us, we needed something fast. Don’t blame me, Sandy. It’s on your own head.”

  Sandy kept his temper with an effort. “Jared, listen to me. This moronic tripe doesn’t begin to tell the real story.”

  Jared smiled. “All right already, tell me the real story.”

  “First, Lebeque didn’t do it. I’m positive about that. I suspect the real killer was a radical goon named Gortney Lyle, but I can’t prove that yet. Whether it was Lyle or not, the killer acted at the command of one Edan Morse, of the old Alfie high command.”

  “Sounds juicy, if you got facts,” Jared admitted. “So why’d the Alfies want to kill Lynch?”

  “Not the Alfies, just Morse.” Sandy hesitated. “It’s crazy, Jared, but I believe it. God help me, but I do. It all has to do with the Nazgûl. They cut an album called Music to Wake the Dead just before West Mesa. You remember it?”

  “Platinum,” said Jared. “Sure I remember, I’m no dummy. This is my business.”

  “Morse wants to wake the dead,” Sandy said. It all came out then. He started talking about each cut on the album, and what it meant, and about tides, and about visions coming true. Jared listened with a broad smile on his face, and suddenly he could hold it in no longer. He laughed. He laughed again. He began to roar with laughter, clutching at his gut, shaking in his big swivel chair. Sandy waited it all out patiently; he had known it was coming. Finally, when Jared had subsided and was wiping a little trickle of saliva from his chin, Sandy said, “That was in the vision, too. You, laughing. Will you let me write the story?”

  “And you call our piece shit?” Jared said. “Sandy, you need a shrink. I can recommend a few good ones, if you can handle their fees.”

  “You won’t print it?” Sandy said with iron certainty.

  “Does the pope shit in the woods?” Jared said. “Fuck no, we won’t print it. This ain’t the National Enquirer, Sandy. You’re talking libel, besides. That dumb Canuck’s the killer.”

  Sandy stood up. “I knew it was hopeless before I came here, but I had to try. Funny thing about seeing the future. At first you try like hell to change what you’ve seen. And then you kind of get worn down, and you find yourself just going through the motions, tracing out the patterns. The Nazgûl are getting back together, Jared. Wait and see. The Nazgûl are getting back together and they’re going to play ‘The Armageddon Rag,’ and God help us all.” He started for the door.

  “Hey, Sandy,” Jared called after him.

  Sandy turned. “Yeah?”

  “You’ll be the first one we call when the Martians land!” Jared promised, guffawing.

  Sandy frowned and waited for him to finish. “I’m glad you’re in such a good humor,” he said finally. “Until I walked in here and saw you, I thought the blue whale was an endangered species.”

  He walked down the stairs and out into the slush. He had no stomach for the subway now, and besides, there was one penultimate gesture to make. He hailed a cab and gave his Brooklyn address.

  As they were speeding across the Brooklyn Bridge, Sandy opened the box in his lap, rolled down the window, and fed the first page of his novel to the cold wind. “Hey!” the cabbie protested.

  “Drive,” said Sandy. “If we get stopped for littering I’ll pay the f
ine and double your tip.” He let go of page two. Page three. And on and on. Page thirty-seven he hesitated over. It was still a little curled. Sandy reread the final sentence, still half complete. Then he shrugged and flipped the page out the window. As he’d expected, the wind got hold of it. Instead of skittering along the ground like the other pages, it rose and rose, higher and higher, until it vanished somewhere against the gray sky and the rooftops of Brooklyn. Sandy watched it climb through the rear window.

  “You must be a writer,” the cabbie said.

  Sandy laughed. “Yeah,” he admitted.

  “I knew it. Scattering pages to the wind and all that.”

  “Only a gesture,” Sandy said. “I have a carbon copy at home in my drawer.”

  “Oh,” said the cabbie. That seemed to stop conversation.

  Back in his office, he found a message on his answering machine. Sharon had phoned. If he was ready to behave like an adult, she was prepared to meet him to discuss the terms of their separation. Sandy erased the tape, sat down, thought for a moment, and then placed a call to Davie Parker in Maine.

  “Listen to me,” Sandy said when he got the deputy on the line. “You’re my last fucking chance. Lebeque is innocent.”

  “Notch don’t buy it, Blair,” Parker said.

  “I talked to Edan Morse,” Sandy said. “He is behind it. Believe me.”

  “I told you to stay away from Morse,” Parker replied, annoyed. “We’ve got our own investigation under way and you’re going to foul it up.”

  “Morse has an alibi for the night Lynch died, but I’ll give you odds I know who the real killer was. A man named Gortney Lyle, acting on Morse’s orders. I don’t know where you’d fly to get to Maine, but you ought to check with the airlines. Gort probably flew in from LA and rented a car. I hope he did. If he drove all the way, it’d be hell to prove. But if he flew, even under an assumed name, you’ll find people who remember him. He shaves his head and wears a gold earring and he’s got a terrible sunburn. Now maybe he was covered with hair when he killed Lynch, and maybe he didn’t put on the earring and get the sunburn until after, but that doesn’t matter. They’ll still remember him. He’s big, Parker.”

  “Lots of big men out there, Blair,” Parker said dubiously.

  “Not like Gort,” Sandy said. “We’re talking well over seven feet, and wide, too. We’re talking jumbo-sized Mean Joe Greene. Hell, we’re talking Mighty Joe Young. I bet he flew first class. I don’t think a guy his size could fit in a coach seat. If he did, the guy next to him had one goddamned memorable flight.”

  “Interesting,” Parker said. “Strong, you figure?”

  “He looks like he could arm wrestle a steam shovel.”

  “Hmmmm,” said Parker. “That would answer some questions. It isn’t easy to pull a man’s heart out of his chest. You have to get through the rib cage. Surgeons cut the ribs, I think, but our killer just smashed them. Gortney Lyle, you say?” He sighed. “Notch is going to have kittens, but I guess I better check this out.”

  “You do that little thing,” Sandy said. “After that, you’re on your own. I won’t be calling anymore. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this much, except that I made you a promise. I’ve got a thing about promises.”

  “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

  “You wouldn’t be willing to bust a guy in Denver for me, would you?” Sandy asked. “It’s a child-abuse case. The child’s about thirty-five.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I didn’t think so,” Sandy said. “Well, I’ve got a lot of thinking to do about all of this. For starts I’m going to try and figure out what side I’m on. And Parker…”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t get too attached to this decade. It may end sooner than you think.” Sandy placed the receiver carefully back in its cradle.

  SEVENTEEN

  And in my hour of darkness/

  She is standing right in front of me

  Came the snows and the freezing rains, the iron-gray months of winter, and Sandy moved through them like a sleepwalker, going through the motions, yet somehow unable to interest himself in the details of everyday living, waiting, waiting for something to happen, waiting for something he could scarcely begin to articulate.

  He moved to a rundown, roach-infested, one-bedroom apartment in the East Village, above a used-record store. That seemed strangely appropriate. The bathroom window had a long diagonal crack, and the cold winds shivered through and chilled the porcelain and the chipped tiles until they felt like ice on his bare skin. Sandy never did get around to bitching at his landlord; he just closed the bathroom door.

  Sharon kept at him, and he finally let her buy him lunch and divide up their life. She’d already drawn up papers on their brownstone; Sandy signed without reading them, and accepted her check for ten thousand dollars, folding it and jamming it down in a pocket of his jeans, where it stayed for nearly a month until he ran short of cash and remembered to deposit it. They split the bank accounts down the middle. Sandy demanded and got the stereo. Sharon insisted that he take half of the furniture as well, the older, scuffed, funky half. And so shortly his apartment was jammed with about four times as much junk as it could comfortably hold, and Sandy had to wend his way through a labyrinth of boxes and empty bookcases and bureaus piled on top of one another to reach the mattress he slept on (Sharon had wanted their bed).

  He survived the holiday in a numb gray haze, seldom leaving his apartment. It was as if the world had retreated from him, leaving him in a small bubble of solitude. Or perhaps he had retreated from the world. A few friends got his address through Sharon and came by to cheer him up, but he met their pep talks with a sullen stubbornness, and after a while they stopped coming. He kept meaning to try and get a new agent, but he never got around to it. He kept meaning to try and make a new start on his novel, but he never got around to that, either.

  Sharon brought him mail from time to time, wrinkling her nose at the state of his apartment and trying so hard to be civilized that it drove Sandy to bitter sarcasms. There was a long, funny, rambling letter from Froggy, reproaching him for skipping town before meeting Number Four and asking for a report on the Nazgûl story and Edan Morse. Bambi sent a short, warm letter, and enclosed a snapshot of herself breast-feeding her newborn daughter, Azure. And there was a telegram from Davie Parker, too. Short, brusque, and to the point. NO INDICATION THAT LYLE OR ANYONE FITTING HIS DESCRIPTION TRAVELED TO MAINE IN SEPTEMBER, it said.

  For a time, Sandy could hardly bear to read his mail, let alone answer it. He did not want to think about himself or his life, and the thought of reporting on it to his friends was too painful to consider. He did not want to think about much of anything, in fact. He found himself a connection in the neighborhood and scored a big block of hash and a couple of nickel bags of third-rate pot. Weeks passed with Sandy sitting on his mattress, getting stoned every day and watching lots of TV. He’d picked up an old black-and-white portable in a secondhand store down the block. With the money Sharon had paid him for the house, he could have afforded one of those big-screen color projection systems, but somehow the little set with its built-in rabbit-ears and its flickering picture full of snow and ghosts belonged in this apartment in a way that an expensive new set never could. Sandy grew very familiar with the plots and characters of a half-dozen daytime soap operas, and shouted out answers to the moronic contestants on the game shows, but the highlight of his day was always the Leave It to Beaver rerun. “Where have you gone, Eddie Haskell?” he muttered.

  It could not last, though. It did not last. Sandy had been a writer for too long, and the writing was too much a part of him, too deeply ingrained. Words were his defense, his addiction, the means through which he sorted and rationalized and justified his actions and experiences, the way he made sense of the world and gave his life whatever rough meaning it possessed. Ultimately, whatever might happen to him, he would try to understand it through his words. And finally the
words came, breaking through even when he was stoned and drunk, distracting him from Beaver and Wally and Lumpy Rutherford, filling him with restlessness. The words came, and there was nothing for Sandy to do but put them down on paper.

  That was in January. January was his month for writing letters. He turned off the TV for good, plugged in his typewriter, and bought a few yellow legal pads. His letters were long, discursive, confused. They were letters to himself as much as to those addressed. Some of them he wrote over and over, repeatedly, trying to get to the heart of things, never quite succeeding.

  The letter he wrote Maggie was twenty pages long, even though he knew she’d probably never answer it. It had to be long. It was full of groping, full of confusion, full of hurt.

  His letter to Froggy was even longer and more rambling. He wrote about Edan Morse and the Nazgûl and Music to Wake the Dead, trying to make sense of it by putting words on paper, but failing. He wrote about sex and love and old TV theme songs. He wrote about Alan Vanderbeck and Sharon and his writing, and he wrote a lot about his car.

  He felt driven to write to Bambi as well, feeling somehow closer to her now than he ever had before, feeling as if he had a new insight into a place that she had been once. He said so, after telling her a little about his troubles.

  He started a letter to Slum but found he had no appetite for it. He knew damn well that Butcher or Jane Dennison would screen all of Slum’s mail, and the chances of anything Sandy wrote getting through were nil, so there didn’t seem to be much point.

  Not that it really mattered. When the letters to Maggie, Froggy, and Bambi were done, he sealed each of them in an envelope, stamped them and addressed them, but never quite got to the point of mailing them. After a while, he realized that he had never intended to mail them. Mailing them wasn’t the point. Writing them was the point.

  And having written them, Sandy finally felt ready to reenter the world. He started by seeing an attorney about Slum. The man promised to look into the situation and see what could be done, but he was not very encouraging. Sandy began reading newspapers again, even the Hog, wondering how long it would be before he came across the announcement of a Nazgûl reunion, dreading the day and yet looking forward to it as well. He even cleaned up his apartment a little, getting rid of about half his furniture and taking his books out of the cardboard cartons and placing them in his bookcases.