by Mark All
It was weird, was what it was, and gave Jessica a brief sensation of anxiety, like a déjà vu experience with a frightening subliminal image spliced into it. She had stumbled on a movie and a game sharing an esoteric name within minutes of each other—both in the horror genre. “The graphics are impressive,” she said tonelessly. “Realistic gore.”
“It’s horror, but it’s an adventure, and you have to use your brain. You can just throw things at your enemies, but it just pisses them off.”
Jessica sighed. “I don’t have any spare brain power for gaming.”
“The Cool Hunt not going well?” Jessica had already told Charlene about the ultimatum she’d been given.
“My best band broke up—‘best’ being a relative term—and everybody else sucks,” Jessica said.
Charlene gave her a sympathetic smile. “Yeah, but you’ve just started. Hang in there for a few days, you’ll find something. Any prospects at all?”
“Bobby Sykes says the band playing the Hellfire tonight is promising. Some metal group. All I feel like I've been promised is a headache from the drums and a bellyache from them being down-tuned to a low B.”
“Kids these days,” Charlene said.
Jessica laughed. “You’re what, twenty-eight?”
“Twenty-nine,” her friend said with faux haughtiness. “And I intend to stay twenty-nine for a long time. We should go check them out. I need a good party, it’s been a while.”
“You just want to get drunk.”
“So? It’ll do you good, you need it more than I do.”
Jessica scowled. “I’m not up for it.”
“They’re the best lead you have, though, right?”
“They’re the only lead I have.”
“There you go, then. I’ll come over to your place around nine. We’ll take a cab so we can get trashed and the evening won’t be a total loss even if they bite.”
Jessica huffed. “They probably won’t go on till midnight.”
“It’s Friday,” Charlene said with a shrug. “Sleep in tomorrow. Besides, I need to meet a new guy.”
“What happened to that Jake dude?”
“Spent more time playing pickup basketball than with me. I quit calling him and he didn’t seem to notice.”
“Bummer,” Jessica said. She glanced in the direction of her boss’s office. “You know, I’m pretty sure Ben is sweet on you.”
Charlene rolled her eyes. “You noticed, too? He’s a nice guy, but pretty square for a music mogul. Besides, you know what I think about work relationships.”
“You could do worse. You have done worse.”
Charlene looked thoughtfully at Ben Westfeldt, who was typing furiously on his computer and jabbering away at the phone wedged between his shoulder and head. “Yeah, I don’t think so. He just thinks I’m cute, he doesn’t realize I’m far too frivolous for him.”
“You’re not frivolous, you’re bubbly.”
“Whatever. I want to party. Let’s go out tonight. You can check out this Eternal Hole, I can check out the guys.” Her eyes twinkled. “Maybe find one for you.”
“I don’t have time to date right now.”
“You seriously need to get laid.”
“I don’t.”
“You do need a new band though. Come on, it’ll be fun.”
Jessica gave an exasperated sigh. “Oh, hell, okay. I’m not sure how much fun a band called Black Chasm of Eternal Sorrow will be, but I suppose I do deserve a good drunk.”
Charlene punched her in the arm. “Damn straight. Now go make some more calls, I need to get back to Penum—I mean, my spreadsheets.”
Back in her office, Jessica stared moodily out the window, unwilling to return to the critical task at hand. Despite her love for seeking out talent, the thrill of discovering truly talented musicians and bringing them to the world, there didn’t seem to be anyone out there doing anything new and original, let alone good enough to turn around a dying record company.
How about someone old, then? she thought. Someone she’d checked out before and passed over, who maybe just hadn’t been ready at the time. She pulled out the large bottom drawer of her desk, which she’d filled with a collection of CD’s from bands who’d approached her looking for a record deal.
As she dug through them, she shook her head. What a bunch of crap—and these were the ones she’d kept. She fumbled a pile out and onto the desk to get at the ones on the bottom, but lost her hold on them and spilled jewel cases everywhere.
Her eyes went wide and a chill swept her when she saw the cover of the CD that landed right in front of her.
Penumbra.
“No. Fucking. Way.”
She picked it up wonderingly. She remembered this one now. Amazing she hadn’t thought of it when the movie and game of the same name popped up.
She hadn’t gotten in touch with the band after reviewing their eponymous debut CD. She vaguely recalled that they were pretty good, but not different enough. She’d liked them, but hadn’t loved them. She flipped the case over to see a picture of the band. The guitar player was hot—physically as well in terms of being an accomplished shredder, as she recalled. The keyboard player was a little scary looking, his goatee reminding her of Satan.
She remembered the album as having promise. The band’s chops were superb, but the songs just weren’t there yet. They should’ve put this one in the drawer, recorded another album, and released that instead.
Still, she was looking for a band, and three times wasn’t coincidence: it was synchronicity. She shivered. The day had taken on an eerie, surreal air. The fact that the first two occurrences of the word Penumbra were horror-oriented made her uneasy, but this was too on-the-nose to ignore. She popped the CD out of the case, inserted it into her computer’s drive, and slipped her ear buds in.
The music came back to her in all its pretentious glory. It was fairly original, but still somewhat derivative, reminding her of Dream Theater and other prog bands. The material was almost there, but not quite. Only their next release would tell if they were the real thing, or one of those bands who were really good, but not great, not exceptional enough to stand out from the crowd and achieve real popularity. In other words, whether they were a Judas Priest or an Anvil.
She found the band’s website URL on the CD case and typed it into her browser. Fairly vibrating with anticipation, she scanned the home page, looking for mention of a new CD or one in the works. She saw nothing. She clicked on the News tab.
Her face fell when the page loaded. The first heading was “In Memoriam.” Her spirits sank as she read about the accident that killed Vince Buckley, keyboard player and half of Penumbra’s song-writing team, a year ago. The band had been returning from a gig as a supporting act, promoting their first CD, when their van had gone off the road and down an embankment. No one else had been seriously injured, but the death of half the creative team seemed to have killed the band. They were evidently still selling that first album, but essentially no longer existed from what she could tell.
“Well, shit.”
She should’ve known better than to believe in miracles. Moments ago, salvation had seemed imminent. Now she was back where she started, but felt like she’d fallen farther after glimpsing delirious heights.
Sagging in her chair, she realized the damn metal band tonight might be her only option. She hoped the Black Chasm of Eternal Sorrow would live up to Bobby’s hype, and not suck her into a black hole of despair.
Chapter Five
Friday afternoon
The traffic in downtown Athens was thick and slow-moving, typical for a Friday afternoon. David glanced at the Athens Theater as he turned the corner onto East Broad, drove past the bank, and swung his Toyota pickup into the parking lot Pemberly Sound shared with a natural foods grocery. David taught guitar here to supplement his income from pickup gigs, local studio work, and the trickle of sales of Penumbra’s first CD on their website. He was running late, but he still had a few minutes before hi
s first lesson to talk with Mike Pemberly, former Penumbra drummer and owner-manager of the music store, about Vince’s discs.
He pulled into a space beside a beat-up Mustang. The old heap belonged to Freddy, Mike’s seventeen-year-old son. David stepped out of the car and headed for the entrance, the new music looping incessantly in his head. It had a hold on him he could not explain. It elevated him to some transcendental level of unearthly existence, a hyper-reality where music from beyond the grave was conceivable.
Not that he was comfortable with the idea—but he needed the new music. He’d drifted purposelessly since the wreck.
He pushed through the door in the glass storefront to the sound of strident voices. Mike and Freddy were arguing over the counter in the center of the store, Mike looking as fierce as David had ever seen him, Freddy sulking and sarcastic, but barking out a snotty comment or two between Mike’s outbursts.
This wasn’t good, especially for David’s peace of mind. He desperately needed to share his experience with Mike, and the way the family drama was playing out in front of him, he would not have that chance.
“I don’t care about your date,” Mike said as David reached the rectangular glass counter. “I’ll drive you. No, even better, her dad can drive you. The more unpleasant the consequences of what you did, the more I like it.”
Freddy scowled. “It’s our first date. You’ll ruin it.”
“Should’ve thought about that before you went cruising with your friends and a six-pack. For all I know, you were planning on parking with this girl and a bottle of wine, then wrecking your car on the way home, killing her and yourself.”
“I wasn’t drinking,” the kid whined. “The other guys were. None of the beers in the car were even open! I didn’t get busted, I still have my driver’s license, the cops—”
“You were driving erratically, jabbering with your buds instead of watching the road. Do you seriously expect me to believe you weren’t going to pop a top on a cold one when you got to Tommy’s house? This little run-in with the cops hopefully prevented you from wrapping your car around a tree at some future date when you would be drunk.”
“Just let me drive for—”
Mike pounded his fist on the glass counter, rattling a display of pick holder key chains. “No. You’ve got to suffer for your sins, that’s the whole point. So you’ll think twice next time.”
Freddy huffed, slammed his own hand down on the counter, and stalked off, leaving his keys behind. Ignoring David, he shoved the door open and was gone.
David cautiously approached the counter. “How’s he getting home?”
“Don’t give a shit,” Mike said calmly. “Walking, I hope. That’ll give him a chance to cool off, wear him out and take the fight out of him.”
“You’re taking this well. Ish.” Considering the wreck the entire band had been in that had killed their band mate.
“Yeah. The boy passed the Breathalyzer, so they let him go with a warning, after calling me. I grounded him. No driving for a month.” Mike scooped up the keys and hung them on a pegboard under the counter. “That hot rod is sitting right out there where I can see it.”
David nodded, set his guitar case down, and looked around the store. Only a couple of older guys puttered about at this time of day. He didn’t see his first student yet, and he still had a couple of minutes to talk with Mike.
“Little shit keeps forgetting his father is a heavy metal musician,” Mike went on. “Not only do I know all the tricks, I’ve seen what happens to alcoholics. Ruined lives. Assuming they make it out of their teens.”
“Yeah, people talk about drugs, but alcohol is the musician’s bane,” David replied, reflecting that his own drinking was getting out of hand. Whatever. He had a full schedule of students, he’d never catch Mike again before the end of the day. “I found something,” he said. “A key. To a safe deposit box. Vince’s.”
The drummer raised his eyebrows expectantly and waited for more.
“I argued Bob Finster into letting me get the contents. Told him it was Vince’s last wishes, but I’d lost the key until now. Vince…left some discs in the box.”
“Yeah?” Mike’s expression was hard to read.
“They’re…” He realized he’d already made the decision not to tell Mike about seeing Vince. That would brand him as a lunatic, which would be counterproductive, to say the least. More importantly, he needed to avoid any speculation about the nature of a legacy of supernatural origin. “They’re tracks of our unfinished album.”
Mike’s face darkened and he looked away, out at the parking lot. “So? You’ve got all the tracks already. Must be backups. Throw them away,” he added gruffly, blinking. They never talked about Vince or the wreck.
“I listened to them,” David said. Movement at the back of the store caught his eye. His first student and his mother stood in the hallway to the lesson rooms. They must have come in during the argument. The kid could wait a few minutes. “There are new tracks.”
“New tracks?”
“Yeah. They’re…amazing. I mean, like nothing we’ve done before. Better than anything Vince and I wrote together. So are the lyrics.”
The student’s mother had her cell to her ear, but she was giving David the eye.
Mike shook his head. “I don’t want to know, David. At best, it would be a cruel glimpse of what might have been.”
David took his arm. “You’ve got to hear it. You can’t understand unless you do.”
“I don’t want to.”
David heard a shuffling sound and glanced toward the back of the store. The kid’s mother seemed to be getting impatient. The student was leafing through a guitar magazine, but Mom was pacing slowly, stopping to thrust out a hip and cross her arms, then pace again. He realized the woman was actually pretty hot and wondered if she might be divorced. It didn’t make any difference. No woman would have him in his current bleak state of mind. Although, the new music was catching his soul afire, and might put him in a place where he could consider a relationship.
He turned back to his friend. “Mike, the songs are magic. It would be a crime, a sin, to not do something with them.”
“David,” Mike said. “I don’t want to go there again. I’ve got my wife, my kid, my little business here. No living out of hotel rooms, no going without seeing my family for months on end—especially with Freddy at this critical age. No more setting up hopes and dreams to be dashed by fate. Besides, you can’t make any money in music anymore. The business is a joke.”
David was desperate. “We don’t have to go on the road to support the album if you don’t want to. People are selling shitloads of stuff online. You just have to price it right.”
“Dude, you’re obsessing. Let’s not go there again. You get manic over music to the exclusion of everything else. You need to get out of that basement studio and connect with people. Get a girlfriend.” Mike nodded in the direction of the lesson rooms. “Go flirt with that MILF. You’re late for your lesson anyway. You fuck up the first one and you’ll run late all day.”
David glanced at the student and his mom. She was looking pointedly at him now. He had to convince Mike, but he had to do it fast. “Mike, this music is something to obsess over! Just say you’ll listen to it.”
Mike sighed. “If you want to get back into music, you should just write your own. You were better than Vince anyway. Let the dead stay buried.”
David shook his head. “You’ve got to hear this music. It will be the hit we’ve always wanted. The ticket to the top. More than that…the world has got to hear this. It’s important music.”
“Okay, you’re going over the line now. There hasn’t been any music worth worshiping for decades. Go teach your lesson, find meaning in that.”
“Not till you agree.”
Mike rolled his eyes.
“Come on,” David urged. “What can it hurt? Come over tonight, have some beers, give it a listen. If you don’t agree with me, I’ll let it go.” No way i
n the hell that would happen, but David would say anything now to get this project moving. “Don’t you miss playing?”
Mike thought that over for a few seconds. “All right, whatever. Just leave me alone and go impart your wisdom.”
David felt a rush of euphoria. “Great. Eight o’clock? My studio. Hey, bring the rest of the band.”
“We’ll see,” Mike said. “And don’t forget to flirt with the MILF.”
Chapter Six
Friday night
Jessica downed the last of her second Mojito and waved at the waitress serving drinks a few tables over. If the opening act was any indication of the style and quality of Black Chasm of Eternal Sorrow, she would have to get drunk to make it through this waste of an evening.
“Slow down, there, Party Girl,” Charlene yelled over the blast of sound from the stage and the house PA, which dominated the main room of the Hellfire Club. It pummeled Jessica’s senses with baritone guitars tuned down to B and a sub-sonic bass mercilessly thumping her gut in sync with the thundering double kick-drums. “You want to still be conscious when the main act starts.”
“Questionable,” Jessica said, bobbling her head. “I can’t see this shit getting traction with any demographics beyond teenage boys and older guitar fanatics who never grew up.”
Charlene sipped her beer. “Bitch, you’re turning geezer at twenty-eight. This shit’s big. I know you have Satellite Radio.”
Jessica waved at the waitress again, who seemed to be more interested in the three guys she’d already served than earning tips from anyone else. “Yeah, but not Big big.”
“Maybe you should sign three or four sort-of big bands and not expect to find the next Avenged Sevenfold. Realistically.”
“Realistically, I should give up and go home to my parents,” Jessica said. “I don’t do realistic. I do magic. I’m—”
“I know, you’re the Musician Whisperer. Give it a break, and maybe the mountain will come to Mohammed. You should work at being the Hot Guy Whisperer. Check those three out.” Charlene pointed at the table where the waitress still dawdled.