“No.”
“Was it far from the warehouse?”
“It was close. Within a couple blocks.”
“A couple meaning two?”
She paused, thinking. “Maybe three.”
“You were riding, right? Did Quicksilver step in front of you? Force you to stop?”
“Yes.”
“Did you brake hard? Leave a skid?”
“Yes. I lost control, crashed to the pavement.”
I picked up the apartment’s landline, dialed my cell phone number, and hung up. “Hit redial if you need me,” I said. “I’m going to go look for your jacket. Then I’ll drop by the warehouse, see if there’s anyone there who’ll talk to me.”
“Why?”
“They might be able to help. I’m thinking that might have been all they were trying to do when you ran away. If Quicksilver’s hiding behind their music, there’s a good chance they’re no more complicit than I am.”
“But what if they are?”
“Then maybe they’ll give that away when I talk to them, and that’ll be all right too. It’ll tell us a little more about where we stand, what we’re dealing with.” I started toward the door, paused, looked back at her. “It’s not that I don’t believe you, Ariana. It’s just . . . I need to do this.”
She stared at me. “All right.” Her voice was thin and full of pain, but something in her eyes told me she approved. We couldn’t just huddle together in my apartment. We had to take action, even if it was only revisiting the scene, gathering information, assessing our losses.
The rain that had been threatening earlier in the evening had come and gone, leaving behind a heavy fog that muted the streetlights, stilled the air. I felt alone, uncommonly afraid, and more willing than ever to believe Ariana’s crazy stories. Yet one thing gnawed at me. If Quicksilver was a monster, what was the agenda? What harm could Quicksilver possibly do by helping musicians find one another, celebrate their talents, and bring joy to an increasingly joyless world? It seemed more like the work of an angel than a demon.
I drove east on Smallman until I reached the now-familiar side street. From there I headed back to the dark, boarded-up warehouse. The cars and people were gone, only the graffiti announcing Quicksilver’s performance remained. I did a U-turn and drove the route again, making two circuits before noticing a streak of burned rubber on the pavement two blocks from the warehouse. I parked and got out, studied the concrete and found some shards of broken taillight. Nearby, an alley ran deep and shadowed between close-set walls. About fifty feet back, something lay sprawled beside a sewer grate. I walked to it, picked it up, studied it in the glare of my flashlight. It was a jacket, or had been. It was now a mass of shredded leather and ripped lining. Only one of the pockets remained. Nothing in it. I knelt beside the sewer, shined my light through the grate . . .
Something moved beside me. I swung the beam to my left.
There it was, twenty feet away, looking at first like a large dog. But then it stood, raising its arms in a gesture that recalled Quicksilver’s appearance on the warehouse stage. This time it didn’t sing. It just stared with eyes the color of mucus set in skin so pale it revealed the tendons and veins of its tapered face.
I drew my pistol, braced it on my flashlight hand, took aim.
“Easy now.” Its voice was low and rough, like the growl of an animal. No music in it now. “I’m not threatening you. Just watching.” It lowered its arms. They were muscular and long, extending nearly to its knees. “I saw you shining that light, figured you were looking for something. Did she send you?”
I kept the light centered on the creature, drawing down on its chest. Hideous as it was, its basic physiology seemed human. No doubt it had a heart. If necessary, I was prepared to find out.
“I want her things.”
“Things?” Its long mouth seemed to chew the word. “Is this one of them?” It opened a hand, revealing Ariana’s driver’s license, her face smiling through the glare on the plastic.
“Where’s the rest of it?” I said.
“Don’t have it on me.”
“Let’s go get it then.”
“No. I can’t take you there. Not yet. But look. I have this too.” It opened its other hand, revealing my business card, the edges slightly bent. “See? I know both of you—who you are, where you live.”
“Put them on the ground and back away.”
“I don’t think so.” It balled its fists, hiding the cards again. “How about I bring them to you . . . not now, though. At your place, sometime late, maybe when you’re sleeping. I could sing for you.”
“I want them now.”
“Was nice meeting you, Lorcan.”
“On the ground! Now!”
It stood there a second longer, staring at me. Then it vanished, but not into thin air. It was too corporeal for that. Instead it leaped backward, moving so quickly that an unskilled observer might have claimed it disappeared. But I heard the slap of its taloned feet scrabbling away in the darkness. I panned my light, caught the streak of its second leap, and then it was gone.
I stayed up all night, standing watch in my living room while Ariana slept on the couch. She got up late the next morning, alert but looking worse: the side of her face clearly infected. I changed the dressing, then crashed on the couch while she monitored the Quicksilver forum for word of a second weekend event.
I wasn’t sure I could sleep, but I did, falling into dreams that swirled with images of ordinary people dancing and singing, forgetting the bad luck and wrong turns that had stifled their lives. But the people in my dreams were not Silverheads. At first they were the disenfranchised youth at Golden Gate Park in 1966, drawn together by The Grateful Dead and a desire to end the war in Viet Nam. They were the people of Czechoslovakia in 1989, defying Soviet oppression by attending Prague’s first appearance by The Rolling Stones. They were Hindu kids in 2008, rocking to the power chords of a Pakistani band that defied decades of blood-feuding politics to play live in Kashmir. I knew of these events. I was a student of music and politics, of rock and war. My life may have gravitated toward the latter, but I had not forgotten my roots . . . nor my disillusioned hope that rock ’n’ roll might one day save the world from the politics of hate and division. I had believed that once. But I was older now, too disillusioned not to wonder what might happen when the music stopped and the thing called Quicksilver revealed its true agenda.
“Lorcan!”
I woke. Afternoon light spilled through my windows, illuminating a hovering silhouette. A bandaged hand grabbed my shoulder, shook me hard.
“Lorcan. It’s in central West Virginia!”
I sat up.
Ariana turned, her face catching the light. She looked tired, but there was no pain in her eyes. “I mapped it, Lorcan. It’s a hundred fifty miles south, show goes live in two hours.”
“Too far,” I said. “Not enough time. We’ll have to wait for the next—”
“No! If we leave now—”
“We’ll have to speed the whole way, do eighty . . . eighty-five through those mountains.”
“Right. Like I said. We can do it!”
I packed my gear.
The site was a derelict foundry, dead smokestacks and yard houses standing dark behind chain-links, razor wire, and no-trespassing signs. The Silverheads had cut the fence. Inside, the mill’s yard had filled with cars.
I parked on an access road outside the lot, then got out and started toward the crowd as it made its way toward a cavern of concrete and iron beams.
Ariana waited in the car. This was a one-man mission.
I didn’t enter the building with the Silverheads, but made my way to a rusted ladder that led to a catwalk one hundred feet back from the band’s stage. Here I unpacked my rifle, assembled the pieces, plugged my ears, and watched the crowd converge.
There was no sign of Quicksilver. But he’s here! I felt his presence in the air, in the pulse of the people, the shadows they cast in the spotligh
t as they took the stage.
Electricity came from a line running in through a broken window. It connected to a box on a wooden pole. The setup looked improvised, a patchwork of spliced wires. I could only imagine what the other end looked like, the side that connected to a power company box somewhere beyond the derelict site. But from what I could see the work looked functional—the improvisations of skilled tradesmen who had learned to make do with what they had. It made me wonder again, as I had while dreaming on the couch, at the things such people could accomplish when they set their sights on bigger goals, when music shifted to political action. But such concerns weren’t my reason for being here. My motivations were personal. I couldn’t spend my life waiting for the thing that called itself Bobbie Quicksilver to come for me. I needed to be preemptive, stop the monster before it stopped me. If my actions served a larger good, so be it—all the better to justify the deed.
Tonight the stage featured an even more eclectic mix of instruments than it had the night before. Here, amid the drum kit, keyboards, turntables, bass, and guitars were a fiddle, dulcimer, Dobro, and a washtub bass—all affixed with pickups and jacked in to the main system. The musicians were mostly men, but it was a dreadlocked woman at the turntables who addressed the crowd through an ear-clip microphone. “How we feeling tonight?”
The crowd answered: cheers, clapping, a whistle from somewhere in the back. I heard it all clearly through my earplugs. The little foam cones were designed to suppress high-powered ballistics. They did not block sound. The woman’s voice came through clear but muted.
“You ready to bring out Bobbie?”
More cheers.
“All right, then! Let’s do it with this.” The LED lamp on her headband cut a streak in the air as she looked around. Then she dropped a needle onto a rhythm track, a slice of vintage rock ’n’ roll with a driving backbeat. One bar, and the band joined in, laying the foundation for Quicksilver’s arrival.
Holding my position, I felt the bass in the trembling catwalk. And there was something else, fainter but undeniable. I felt Quicksilver. He was close.
I braced myself, resisted the music’s power, trying not to get caught up in the pulsing mix. I admired it but remained detached, locked in position, focused on my craft until a new sound welled beneath the rhythm.
It came on first as a swirling chant beneath the music, rising between the punching riffs. Suddenly he was crouching in the lights, grinning at the crowd. He wore the same silver-white clothes he’d had on the night before, spotless and glowing, cutting tracers in the air as he leaped into a dervish spin. And all the while he sang, improvising over the band’s foundation, taking the jam to a place so perfect that I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been planned.
The crowed danced, and in my mind—despite my efforts to remain aloof—I danced with them. My body remained as before, but my emotions soared.
Unlike the roar of the band, Quicksilver’s words passed undimmed through my earplugs . . . or maybe they weren’t passing through my ears at all. Maybe they were from someplace deeper, from inside me—as if his thoughts were singing directly into mine. The words were simple, but within them lay a coded story—an allegory of opposing entities: one intent on bringing people together, the other set on driving them apart. They weren’t metaphysical forces, though they were often depicted that way. Instead, they were physical—living things that hid in plain sight. One worked by twisting perceptions through the power of sound. The other was a shape shifter, constantly altering its form but never its intentions.
Quicksilver looked up, eyes catching the light. For a moment I thought he was looking at me, but then his focus veered back to the crowd.
Shape shifter!
My mind flashed to the previous night, to details that hadn’t quite fit together. But they did now. Now I understood.
I knew what I had to do.
I fired.
The music stopped.
I ran.
She stood outside the car, first looking toward the mill and the growing murmmer of the crowd, then toward me as I raced along the access road. “You did it!” Her voice sounded stronger than before. “I feel safer already.”
I opened the trunk, tore down the rifle, closed the case.
She took my arm. Her touch felt warm, somehow alluring. Suddenly, in the valley below us, the music started again.
She turned, momentarily confused.
I could imagine what she was thinking. If I had shot Quicksilver, stopped his song, and left his true form lying in the spotlight—why would the band be playing again, picking up right where it had left off?
“Lorcan?”
I froze, suddenly certain I had made the wrong choice. But then Quicksilver’s voice came welling from the valley, filling me with the conviction I had felt while lying on the catwalk.
“The power line,” I said, watching her face. “I shot the power line.”
Her face paled in the moonlight.
“I cut their power, but those people . . . they’re good with their hands. They must have spliced it back together.”
The color bled from her face, and with it went the wounds and swelling. Something new emerged, sharp and pale. Her grip moved from my shoulder to my neck, but my hand was already on my knife. I pulled it out and brought it up hard, driving it under her ribs, into the heart that I hoped lay slightly to the left of center.
She gasped.
The moonlight shifted, giving way to clouds, darkening her face. Her wounds returned, and with them her dark and frightened eyes. “Lorcan?” She stared, accusingly, and then her color changed again, becoming almost luminescent. “Lorcan!” She grabbed my hand, squeezing until my fingers felt ready to break against the knife’s handle. Then she pulled the blade free and shoved me away, leaving me holding the weapon, its edge bright with silver blood. “Lorcan!” She growled my name, the sound deep in her throat, bubbling through the wound in her chest. “He got to you!”
“No. The choice was mine.”
“Really?” And then she leaped away, but more slowly than last night when she had followed me from my apartment to reveal herself in the alley. She had planted that tire skid on the street, placed those bits of taillight on the pavement, and left the shredded jacket by the sewer. Then she had waited for me to find her . . . just as she had waited for me to find her in that line of traffic before the Quicksilver show. Each time, she had lured me, manipulated me, drawn me into position. I wasn’t sure how she had done it the first time, but one fact remained: “I never get lost!” I shouted as she vanished into the darkness. “Never!”
But I wasn’t convinced.
Even then, after all that I had seen and heard, doubts lingered.
I drove until Quicksilver’s song gave way to the rush of traffic and the access road’s darkness became the ebb and flow of passing headlights.
I came to a bridge, drove partway across, then parked in the emergency lane and got out to stand against the rail. I was shaking, too unmanned to drive.
The river below me caught the lights from the bridge, drawing them into long shimmers against the black water, and not for the first time in my life I felt caught between things vast and unknowable.
Or maybe they were not completely unknowable, for on one level the creatures that had called themselves Quicksilver and Ariana had one distinctly human trait.
They get others to settle their differences. Keeps them from having to take out their own kind.
I got back into my car, dialed in a classic rock station, and for a long time I just drove, going nowhere, riding the rhythms, trying to lose myself in the pulsing darkness.
Lawrence C. Connolly’s music projects include Veins: The Soundtrack, an ambient-rock CD featuring soundscapes inspired by his novel Veins (2008); and Songs of the Horror Writer, a one man show that he performed for Reggie Oliver’s Gaslight Music Hall at World Horror in 2010. His collections Visions (2009), This Way to Egress (2010), and Voices (2011) collect his best stories from Amazing,
Borderlands, Cemetery Dance, F&SF, Twilight Zone, Year’s Best Horror, and other sf/f/h magazines and anthologies. Voices was nominated for a 2011 Bram Stoker Award. Connolly blogs about storytelling, performance, and music at LawrenceCConnolly.com.
The Erl-King
Elizabeth Hand
The kinkajou had been missing for two days now. Haley feared it was dead, killed by one of the neighborhood dogs or by a fox or wildcat in the woods. Linette was certain it was alive; she even knew where it was.
“Kingdom Come,” she announced, pointing a long lazy hand in the direction of the neighboring estate. She dropped her hand and sipped at a mug of tepid tea, twisting so she wouldn’t spill it as she rocked back and forth. It was Linette’s turn to lie in the hammock. She did so with feckless grace, legs tangled in her long peasant skin, dark hair spilled across the faded canvas. She had more practice at it than Haley, this being Linette’s house and Linette’s overgrown yard bordering the woods of spindly young pines and birches that separated them from Kingdom Come. Haley frowned, leaned against the oak tree, and pushed her friend desultorily with one foot.
“Then why doesn’t your mother call them or something?” Haley loved the kinkajou and justifiably feared the worst. With her friend exotic pets came and went, just as did odd visitors to the tumbledown cottage where Linette lived with her mother, Aurora. Most of the animals were presents from Linette’s father, an elderly Broadway producer whose successes paid for the rented cottage and Linette’s occasional artistic endeavors (flute lessons, sitar lessons, an incomplete course in airbrushing) as well as the bottles of Tanqueray that lined Aurora’s bedroom. And, of course, the animals. An iguana whose skin peeled like mildewed wallpaper, finally lost (and never found) in the drafty dark basement where the girls held annual Hallowe’en seances. An intimidatingly large Moluccan cockatoo that escaped into the trees, terrorizing Kingdom Come’s previous owner and his garden-party guests by shrieking at them in Gaelic from the wisteria. Finches and fire weavers small enough to hold in your fist. A quartet of tiny goats, Haley’s favorites until the kinkajou.
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