Sandy was very wet, very cold, very afraid. He took Ananda’s hand. It felt cold and slimy in the rain, the edge of callus hard and sharp.
Oh, what vast image comes troubling my night?
HE’S COMING!
Ananda’s face was lost, her eyes alive with music and unseen visions, her lips parted as if in rapture. Beyond her, Edan Morse slumped with his eyes closed. His bandaged hands rested on his knees, the bandages turned a pale pinkish red. The rain was washing thin sheets of blood down his legs. His cotton shirt was plastered to his skin by the downpour, and over his heart the gauze had turned pink. As Sandy watched, the spot darkened and grew.
A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun!
Above the stage, it seemed as though some vast shape were forming among the clouds, a huge black face with glowing eyes, lightning flashing in its open mouth.
HE’S COMING!
HE’S COMING!!!
YEAH, HE’S COMING!!!
Chanting. Clapping. Rain pouring down. Lightning all around. Thunder and drumming. Chanting. Clapping. Patrick Henry Hobbins sang verse after verse, his words filling the park and booming off the mountains. When he asked the last question, the lights went down, and there came an ear-piercing boom from the sky above. A long lightning strike slashed the far horizon, and the crowd—and Sandy too—fell deadly silent for a moment as all the lights in Denver went out.
In the dark, someone had given Hobbins a candle. He lit it in the rain, held it under his chin, grinned. The sound system crackled back to life. “I’m coming,” he told them. “Hell, I’m almost here.” Denver blinked, went out again, and lit back up in welcome.
Hysteria that went on and on.
Just when Sandy thought it was never going to end, the Nazgûl struck up the music once more, and slid into “Prelude to Madness.” The number was full of chaotic instrumentals, full of feedback and echo, full of discords that rattled the fillings in your mouth, yet after the frenzy of “What Rough Beast,” it seemed almost soothing.
Right is wrong, black is white,
Who the fuck’s got the justice tonight?
Sandy heard Edan Morse gasp and cry aloud. He looked over. Morse was holding up his hands. “No,” he screeched. “This isn’t right, no, no.” He turned to Ananda, plucked at her arm, smeared blood on her rain-drenched sleeve. “Help me,” he cried. His shirt was soaked through with blood, his voice thin with fear. People were staring.
I hear laughter in all the wrong places
See color in all the white spaces
Morse staggered to his feet, shrieking, waving his bloody hands. Ananda rose with him, arms on his shoulders, trying to keep him calm. Rain ran down their faces. Gort saw the struggle and began to fight his way through the dancers who swarmed before the stage.
Queens beat aces every time, yeah!
Dead man’s hand, dead man’s hand!
And Charlie is the joker in the deck!
Sandy was trying to make his way to Ananda’s side, to help with Morse, but they had moved away from him and the crowd was getting wild. He shoved into someone, muttered an apology, staggered back as the man spun and swung on him. Someone else hit him from the side. The music went on and on.
“I’m bleeding!” Morse screamed shrilly, his voice loud enough to be heard even above the music. “What’s happening to me?” Sandy glimpsed him taking a wild swing at Ananda. His hand connected with a soft wet sound, and left a smear of blood on her cheek. The rain washed it away. And then Gort was there, looming above the crowd. He swept people aside with his massive arms, cradled Morse protectively. Morse shouted something up at him, and Gort caught him under the arms, lifted, hoisted him to a wide, broad shoulder. He began to fight his way out, bulling through the crowd on sheer size and muscle, Morse on his back. The dancers eddied around him, oblivious.
Sandy reached Ananda. She’d been knocked down in the struggle. He gave her a hand, pulled her to her feet. “You all right?” he asked.
Maggio played a long, wavery, insane riff that prickled at the nerve endings; Faxon’s bass sounded way way down, almost at the threshold of hearing. Hobbins sang the final chorus.
Queens beat aces every time, yeah!
Dead man’s hand, dead man’s hand!
And Charlie is the joker in the deck!
Her knee was bloody, the pants leg torn, but she dismissed it. “Just a scrape,” she said.
Sandy tried to shout a question at her, but it was no good. Gopher John was playing the final drum solo of “Prelude to Madness,” and right in the middle of it, it slowed and shuddered and changed into something else, into the opening of another song.
The crowd screamed.
Thunder rumbled dimly, way off, as if the storm were passing.
Hobbins looked at them all with his red, red eyes, smiled knowingly, and sang.
This is the land all causes lead to,
This is the land where the mushrooms grow.
And in the sky behind him, above the lights of Denver, you could see them growing; towering ghostly images, blue and purple and poisonous below, and above as white-hot and brilliant as the sun, flowering and spreading their seed, so more sprouted all around them, mushroom after mushroom, horizon to horizon. The dancers froze in step, gasped, held their breaths. The world was silent and waiting. Even the storm stilled, while the Nazgûl sang.
To the battleground I’m coming,
Oh, don’t you hear the drumming?
They’re playing the armageddon rag, oh!
Playin’ the armageddon rag!
And the drumming was there, the bass drum sounding deep in the blood, the toms whispering in a slow-building martial rhythm that called out, inflamed, conjured. Gopher John scowled and looked down and his big hands moved faster and faster, and each lick was a bullet, each rim shot a rattling artillery shell.
This is the day we all arrive at,
This is the day we choose.
Hobbins had started the song in a sad, almost gentle voice, but with each word his anger seemed to build, and around him the storm was gathering force again. Another distant lightning strike shattered the brief stillness, and as the thunder died the Nazgûl were singing:
Well, I’m here to make things right,
To fight the last good fight,
And they’re playing the armageddon rag, oh!
Playin’ the armageddon rag!
Bare-chested, wet, ravaged, sneering, Rick Maggio let his fingers fly across the strings of his Fender, and the music blasted out of the amps in a sizzling barrage, and Faxon and Hobbins fired back, in a jam turned firefight, each of them grimacing, moving with small wary steps to face one another, lines blistering back and forth for long minutes until Maggio knifed it dead with a long, anguished scream of feedback. The bass drum pounded, the bottom was a solid living viscous thing, the beat moved faster and faster still, and the crowd began to clap in time. Hobbins took charge again.
This is the day of SOULSTORM, baby!
The day all debts come due!
Remember the things you done to me,
while I’m doing ’em to YOU!
He made a fist, jammed it in the air. A thousand other fists echoed the gesture. Others were clapping, clapping, clapping, thirty thousand pairs of hands slamming together in noisy unison. Sandy was clapping, too. Hobbins sang ice and fire and deliverance, Maggio’s guitar turned rabid and demonic, Faxon’s bass was a steady fatal cannonfire, Gopher John was lost in a holocaust of drumming, and the sky was a deep bruised purple-black, alive with flashing fire. All the old ghosts rose up like mists, mocking. Faceless men swarmed from elevators, swinging bloody clubs. Daley’s ugly jowls twisted with hate, Nixon squirmed and lied, Butcher Byrne brought down that shotgun once more. The clouds were full of bayonets and flowers gone to war. Churning armies swirled and fought with rifles that spat lightning and cracked like thunder. The dead rose up to fight again. Distortion. Death. Feedback. Blood. Echoes. Ghosts. Lyrics. Screams. Old times old wounds old enemies they�
�ve done us wrong all we wanted was peace old bitterness fixed convention unhearing ears blindness stupidity greed don’t believe in killing got no choice war for peace kill for love kill kill kill kill KILL.
The song reached a howling crescendo, instruments all keening to a fine razor edge, holding it, searing, driving, and Hobbins sang:
Kill your brother, YEAH!
That sucker done you wrong.
Kill your friend, goddamned traitor
Just listen to the song
They’re playing the armageddon rag!
Kill your brother, kill your friend, kill yourself!
Cause you’re a killer too
All the dead look just like you
When they’re playin’ the armageddon rag!
YEAH! They’re playin’ that armageddon rag!
He delivered the line looking straight at Sandy, his eyes scarlet and sardonic, and Sandy remembered what Hobbins had said to him during the break. The Nazgûl flew through the long bridge, soaring, singing, slowing bit by bit until they hit the opening bar of the “Resurrection” verses, and Hobbins turned away from Sandy at last and sang:
This is the day we’ve dreamed about,
This is the land where the flowers grow.
But there were no flowers in the sky above him, only darkness and lightning, and the rain was still coming down steadily, and the furor was dying little by little, and suddenly Sandy felt very cold. He turned to Ananda. In her face he saw something that frightened him, but he turned her toward him anyway. “On armageddon day,” Sandy said, “both armies will think they fight for good. And both of them will be wrong.” But the music was still too loud, and she could not hear him, and her eyes, like all the eyes around him, were hard and shiny as black ice.
TWENTY-FIVE
She was practiced at the art of deception/
Well, I could tell by her blood-stained hands
Sandy woke from an exhausted, nightmare-ridden sleep in early afternoon the third or fourth time that the maid came knocking on the door of his room at the Hilton. “Come back later!” he screamed at her through the chained door, his voice full of irrational fury. He tried but could not get back to sleep, so instead he phoned down to room service.
The coffee tasted too bitter, the orange juice too acidic, but it was probably his mood, not the liquids themselves. He forced himself to eat the pancakes and sausages, and turned on a reading lamp to study the Denver papers. Ananda was still asleep, so he kept the curtains shut.
ROCK RIOT AT RED ROCKS! the Rocky Mountain News proclaimed alliteratively; ROCK FANS RAVAGE PARK, said the Denver Post in big bright red banner-headline type. Page one in both papers, with plenty of photographs.
Sandy swallowed some coffee and leafed through the stories, wincing at some of the pictures. Cold dead campfires dotted the face of the park like sores, mountains of beer cans and cigarette butts and broken bottles had been left behind, and even the red rocks themselves bore scarred witness to the passing of an army. The News had three pages of photos of the spray-can graffiti. Peace symbols everywhere, large and small. Slogans old and new. And, ominously, in a dozen different colors, in letters ten inches and ten feet high, lines from the songs themselves. “Ragin’!” scrawled blood red in a wavering, jagged hand, and underlined three times. “He’s coming!” sprayed a hundred times; “He’s here” just once or twice. “Oh, can’t you hear the drumming?” one person had asked, while another—in great black letters on the seats of the amphitheater itself—said, “Dance to the Rag!”
The newspaper text was even grimmer, concentrating on the mob scene that followed the end of the performance. Massive traffic tie-ups, more than forty minor accidents, two major ones. Scuffles between fans and nearby homeowners, between fans and police, between police and Morse’s security force. A cop car stoned, its windshield broken. A stalled Mercedes overturned and spray-painted in psychedelic colors. Fistfights, singing, drinking, broken windows, broken bones, broken teeth, a dozen miscellaneous arrests. And six deaths. Three dead in a fiery automobile collision, one woman killed when she fell almost a hundred feet while climbing on the rocks, one youth struck by lightning in a sound tower, and one man killed in a fight. LeRoi J. King, thirty-nine, an unemployed short-order cook from Los Angeles, had died instantly when someone broke his nose and the blow sent a sliver of bone sliding up into his brain.
Sandy folded back the newspaper and looked at Ananda, her dark hair tangled on the pillow beneath her, her face wide and innocent in sleep. He reached over and turned off the lamp just as the phone rang.
He started for it, but Ananda was right there, and she got it first. “What?” she said into the receiver blearily. The answer seemed to wake her up. She pulled herself to a sitting position, rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, and nodded as she listened. “All right. Yes. He’s awake already. We’ll be right up. Yes. Right away.” She hung up and turned to Sandy. “Get dressed. That was Gort. Edan wants to see us.”
“How is he?”
“Don’t ask,” Ananda snapped en route to the bathroom.
In less than ten minutes, they were up on Morse’s floor. Gort admitted them to the suite and ushered them to the bedroom. The curtains were tightly closed, the room dark. Morse was propped up against his pillows, covered by blankets, an indistinct figure in the dimness. “Come on,” he said impatiently. He sounded as though speech was an effort. Ananda reached for the light switch, but Gort stopped her and shook his head. They seated themselves in the shadows, shadows that grew even blacker when Gort shut the door to the connecting room.
“The morning news,” Morse said weakly. “You hear?”
“We’ve been asleep,” Ananda said.
“It was on…” he coughed, raised a pale bandaged hand to his mouth “…the news,” he repeated. “Albuquerque. They’re banning the concert. They’re afraid. Already…already there’s forty, fifty thousand on hand. Camping. Waiting. More pouring in every day. They banned us.”
“So?” Ananda said sharply. “You’ve seen this coming all along, right? In the visions? They can’t stop us now. There are too many of us. We’ll have Sandy announce that the Nazgûl are going to play anyway, play for the people, for free, and fuck the fascist authorities. Let’s see them try and evict a hundred thousand people, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand. We’ll fight back this time. We’ll burn their fucking city to the ground and dance in the ashes.”
“No,” Edan Morse said hoarsely. “Sandy, I want… want a press conference. Tell them.”
“Tell them what?” Sandy asked.
“We’re canceling,” Morse said. “Canceling West Mesa.”
“No!” Ananda said. Her voice was soft steel. “What’s wrong with you, Edan? It’s going down just the way you said it would. The way it was shown to you, right? What is this shit? We can’t sell out when we’re so fucking close!”
“What’s wrong with me?” Morse said in a high, hysterical voice. He laughed, but the laughter turned into a fit of coughing that doubled him over. When he recovered, he said, “It’s out of control, ’Nanda. It’s not right. Not right! It was supposed to…it was supposed to stop.”
“What?” Ananda demanded.
“Blood,” Morse muttered.
“You’re sick, Edan. Sick and scared, right?”
Morse laughed again, shrilly. “Gort,” he said. “The light.”
“You sure?” the big man asked.
“The light,” Morse repeated.
Gort turned on the light.
Edan Morse was drenched in a sweat of his own blood. It seemed to be oozing from every pore, crawling down his flesh, soaking through bandages, bedclothes, blankets. Twin rivulets ran from his nostrils. The sheets beneath him bore the stains of his bleeding, the pillows behind him were smeared and reddish, and dried brown blood was crusted in his beard. It cracked when he opened his mouth. The whites of his eyes had gone crimson, and his pupils looked small and frightened. Even his gums were bleeding; his smile was raw and red and
wet.
Ananda gasped. Sandy felt sick. “Jesus H. Christ,” he muttered. He started to rise. “You got to get to a hospital,” he said. But Gort caught him by a shoulder, pushed him back into the chair.
“No time,” Morse said with surprising firmness. “And it wouldn’t help. There’s no…no reason for this. Unnatural. Doctors couldn’t do shit.” He lifted his left hand wearily. “My blood,” he said. “Part of the price. But not so much. Didn’t think it would be so much.”
“I’m sorry for you, Edan,” Ananda said in a hard, flat voice. “But it doesn’t make any difference. Stay behind. I hope you pull through. But if you don’t it will still be worth it. The revolution is more important than your life, or mine.”
Edan Morse closed his red, pained eyes briefly, and then forced them open again. His hand dropped back to the blanket. “You don’t… don’t understand. Not just me. The promises… shit… father of lies. It’s not right!”
Ananda stood up, defiant. “What the fuck are you saying, man?”
Morse forced his left hand up again, reached over with his right and held it up. “The price was blood!” he said with all the force he could muster. “I paid it, bled myself, yeah. Quick cuts, deep, painful. Only they closed, ’Nanda! They healed. And afterward, scar tissue… stronger than uncut flesh, you know, stronger, harder. It was supposed to be like… like that. A short, clean struggle, and then we heal. Better. Stronger. Harder.” He released his hand, grinned a hideous bloody grin, thin lines of red between his white teeth. “Not like this. Don’t you understand, you bloody bitch? The bleeding won’t stop! The fucking bleeding will never stop!” He screamed the last words at her.
Ananda was unmoved. “You were always too squeamish, Edan. You wanted to use the power of the music—but you wanted to control it. Well, you can’t, sucker. It makes its own demands. You can’t give only a little, you’ve got to give everything.” She frowned, glanced at Gort and then at Sandy, hesitated a moment, then shook her head and plunged ahead. “You can’t make the fucking omelette without breaking a few goddamned eggs, right? Only you’d rather sit around and wait for the eggs to break themselves mystically. The music can’t do it all by itself—it needs us to make it come true. You want to pretend it’s all sweetness and light. Well, it’s not. It’s ugly out there, and you can’t fucking fight it without getting ugly yourself. You really think a few damned drops of blood from your hand was enough to pay the price? Do you?” She laughed scornfully.
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