by Mark All
“We may have to make do with Mike and Alan. I’ve got to have that voice. I’ve got to have you. Just like you’ve got to have this project.”
David began to reply but the world around him suddenly shifted, shook, and lurched, twisting itself and his guts. A bout of vertigo hit him and he closed his eyes, afraid he would puke and faint at the same time.
After a moment the nausea passed and he opened his eyes.
He was alone on a beach at night. Clouds obscured a full moon such that he could barely discern his surroundings. The landscape seemed to be of another planet; the beach swept away to his left and right, utterly featureless. Behind him stretched a vast, empty, completely smooth desert, and before him, the flat sand gently sloped to an unmoving black sea. It extended to a distant, unseen horizon that melded with the night sky, a horizon that perhaps reached infinity.
His legs moved without his volition, and he walked down the gentle slope to the water, then into the ocean, unable to halt his forward motion. Panic rose in his throat as his boots splashed into the water, hardly slowing, as if meeting no resistance. In seconds he was in up to his knees, his waist, his chest, a blind terror seizing him. Then the waters closed over his head and he was moving downward, engulfed by darkness. The gradient became steeper with every step as the bottom sank away into a vast, empty abyss that was rapidly swallowing him whole. His mind began to shut down and as his thoughts faded, he tried to scream, but the waters smothered the sound.
He shrieked into the night; his voice reverberated in the shed. He began gibbering, falling to his knees, looking around him in a panic that gradually subsided as he recognized the tools, the potting soil, the rough planks scratching the palms of his hands as he reached down to steady himself.
Vince stood before him, axe in hand, and for a moment, David was sure the dead man would raise it and bring it down on David’s head, the way David had planned to destroy the guitar. Instead Vince only sighed with a great sadness that encompassed David as well.
“That,” Vince said, “is the Great Nothingness. That is your death as you expect it. Alternatively, I can offer you life everlasting. I can offer you music, art that reshapes reality as we know it, that affects the very ground of our being.”
David was shaking, terrified of the oblivion that had almost taken him.
“Join me, David,” Vince continued. “Participate in creative destruction. You need it. The world needs it to fulfill its potential, to realize its true nature, to reveal itself as it really is.”
The music again filled David’s mind, and he hung his head, longing for it, for the assimilation into art, the convergence with the fabric of reality. Not the disappearance of his soul into nothingness. He’d do it. He’d finally find—no, create, his purpose in life. He would do the album.
He looked up to see nothing but the empty shed around him. Vince had disappeared in the blink of an eye, taking the axe with him.
Chapter Eleven
Saturday early morning
Easing the pickup into his garage, Alan Dillehay sang along with the Oblivion tunes in his head, making up new lyrics and melodies. Which was disturbing, because that music weirded him the fuck out. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. He was borderline obsessive-compulsive—the others joked about David being obsessive, but the guy was just a workaholic perfectionist. Alan hid it well, but he had low-grade OCD symptoms; music looped continually, incessantly, in what he called his Mind Radio. He was strongly addiction prone. He’d avoided cocaine after his first experience with it, when he stayed up all night and partied like Superman fueled by coke, a case of beer, and a dime bag of pot. He knew the white powder was a rabbit hole from which he’d never emerge if he went there again. With a frightening similarity, this music had grabbed ahold of him and refused to let go. Compared to it, coke was like that grainy sugar candy kids sucked from straws. When he’d left David’s place, he’d decided to steer clear of this project, because it scared him, but during the short drive home his resolve had weakened.
This pissed him off because he had not wanted to revisit Penumbra ever again. He did not want anything to do with Vince Buckley, to remember the son of a bitch’s condescending smirk. Nor did he want to relive the van swerving and rocking, then barreling down the embankment, the terror and weightlessness that ensued, or his own screams and those of his friends. The blood, the torn flesh.
Still the music played in his head. He couldn’t stop mentally reworking the parts he’d previously recorded, inventing melodies and dreaming up words for the new sections.
With the roach of a joint dangling from his mouth, he went into the house, dropped the cooler on the linoleum beside the fridge, and hollered, “Baby, I’m home!” He immediately checked his watch and realized Nancy might be asleep. A freelance web designer—she’d created and still maintained Penumbra’s site—Nancy kept her own hours, but she put in a lot of hours. She’d be working tomorrow, even though it was a Saturday, and right now it was way past her bedtime.
Alan heard the couch springs squeaking in the living room. By the time he’d loaded the remaining beers into the refrigerator, she stood in the doorway, her blond mane mussed, her eyes squinting and sleepy. She still smiled when she greeted him. “Hey, sweetie.”
Fumbling the remains of the ride-home joint from his mouth, he opened a beer, took a long pull, and set it down. “What you still doin’ up, Babe?”
He went to her and put his free hand around her slender waist. His fingers caressed her high hips, while his eyes were briefly drawn to her bare, flat belly above her cutoffs. He resisted the urge to gently squeeze her perfect, soft bottom. Boy, had he won the lottery with Nancy. She deserved better than he was able to provide for her. They’d planned to upgrade to a nicer house when the economy hit the shitter, and now were struggling to make the mortgage payments. He closed his eyes and nuzzled her, smelling the sweet feminine fragrance in the hollow of her damp throat mingled with the flowery scent of her hair.
She put a hand behind his neck, kissed him, then guided him into the living room and pulled him down beside her on the couch. “I’ve been working on my virus,” she said. Digital piracy was Nancy’s pet peeve; she was as bad as Metallica’s Lars Ulrich. She was working on a nasty little malware package that would sniff out copies of Penumbra’s songs on servers throughout the world, make a sophisticated but educated guess as to their legitimacy, and delete them if they looked illegal.
She smiled wickedly. “I think I can find ninety-eight percent of existing Penumbra files now. Still finessing the algorithms that determine whether they’re legal or not.” She made a cute pouty face. “Having some problems with the code that deletes them. Server OS’s don’t like you doing that.”
“Good thing you’re not using your powers for evil.”
“That’s right, I’m a superhero, punishing evildoers.”
“You need to be damn sure the files are illegal before you go zapping them willy-nilly.”
“I’d rather be thorough in finding them all. Shoot first, ask questions later.”
“You are a vicious bitch, girl!”
“Just looking out for your best interests.”
“You’re also brilliant. Why did you marry a painter again?”
She punched his arm. “I didn’t marry a painter, I married an artist. You are the real thing, baby. You’ve got talent.”
Alan snorted. “Good thing you didn’t think you were marrying a rock star. Now that I’m a painter.”
“A painter with your own company, and still a local rock god by night.” Her clear blue eyes watched him, alert now, filled with interest and something he couldn’t put his finger on. “Speaking of the music business, how were the recordings?”
He listened to the low hum of the air conditioner as he stroked her smooth, slender thigh. What a beauty she was. For the past five years, a fear lurked in the dark corners of his mind that she would leave him for a Good Provider. He knew she loved him, but just couldn’t shake a feeling o
f inferiority and failure. His music career had looked so promising when he was in his mid-twenties, she’d probably thought marrying him was getting in on the ground floor of the Good Life. All the more to her credit that she hadn’t already left him. He’d dated women who would have.
“The tracks were good,” he finally said, then shook his head. “They just weren’t us. There was something not right about them. When I left, I told them I wouldn’t be part of it.”
Nancy made a sympathetic noise. “It’s probably just as well, honey. After…everything that happened.”
Alan shook his head. “Now I don’t know. I can’t get that shit out of my head. I’m starting to write my parts to the new sections. I can’t stop myself.”
His spontaneous lyrics were weighing him down, not only because he didn’t want to do the music in the first place, but because they were like nothing he’d ever written before. They painted images of a misbegotten landscape, like some forgotten corner of Mordor in those hobbit movies. They bothered him. Maybe if he wrote them down, put them out into the real world, they would migrate from his brain to the paper. Give him some peace. Even though the idea of giving them a concrete existence bothered him, they were some of the best words he’d ever come up with.
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Nancy said. “I know you didn’t want to go over there, you just did it for David, but if you’re writing again? You’ve been dry so long. You’re too good not to be doing originals. The cover band’s fun and brings in extra money every week”—minus the bar tab subtracted from his pay, he thought guiltily—“but you’re a serious musician. You’ve got what it takes.”
God bless the woman, she believed in him. He couldn’t let her down. Besides, experience had taught him that Nancy was always right, and if she said he was better than just a local bar band musician, he was. Penumbra had almost made it, or, well, what passed for making it in the music business these days, and if that meant mostly validation for their true identity and maybe just enough money to spend their time doing what they wanted to do, that was still something most people didn’t have.
Alan squeezed her leg, smiled, and searched through the clutter on the coffee table for the spiral notebook he always kept there in an up-until-now forlorn hope that inspiration would strike. He found it under a pile of TV Guides and Entertainment Weekly’s. He scrabbled past some pages of false starts of generic love song lyrics, and opened it to a blank sheet. A pen—he needed a pen. He pushed his stash box back, moved Nancy’s empty wine glass, and spotted the tip of a Bic pen beneath a stack of bills.
Pulling the pen out resulted in fanning the bills out like a losing hand of cards.
Looking at the bills made him feel tired. Then a thought came to him. Fuck the bills. The music bothered him—especially the fact that so much of it was Vince’s—but he couldn’t deny that it was great music, magical music, and it would not only allow him to be himself, to fulfill his potential like he’d wanted to since he saw Judas Priest as a kid, but it might pay some fucking bills, too.
He snatched up the pen and started writing, not stopping with the lyrics he’d already come up with but continuing on. The words poured out of his soul and onto the paper like rushing waters from a breached dam.
Nancy sighed contentedly and sagged against him with her eyes closed. “This time you’re going to make it, baby,” she murmured. “Something big’s going to happen, I can feel it coming.”
Chapter Twelve
Saturday morning
David finished his first cup of coffee for the day and refilled the mug. He’d awakened clear-headed, flush with energy, and ready to start work on the album.
At least, clear-headed in the sense that he had no hangover or leftover pot-high. He was still mightily confused, verging on freaked-the-hell-out. He wanted to believe he was losing his mind after seeing the ghost of his dead friend again—however solid it looked—but knew the apparition was not a hallucination or delusion. He had a safe deposit box key and the music files to prove it.
The stunning realization had finally smacked him that there was indeed life after death. Vince was proof.
If there was indeed an afterlife, it also stood to reason that there was a God. How about the Devil, Davey, does that stand to reason, too? The Yin to the Yang? he wondered. One thing at a time. God had shown David a sign that hope was not lost, for his art or his soul. The music represented new hope in more ways than one.
Vince taking David on a supernatural journey to the Great Nothingness he’d imagined was all that lay beyond death had made him realize that oblivion was not in fact what he craved.
He was going to finish the album, even if he had to do it all himself, including the marketing and promotion. He could play on stage with a computer if he had to. He kind of needed a real singer, but he could figure that out. Some young hopeful would probably pee his pants at the chance to join Penumbra, even if the band only consisted of David.
When he was halfway to the door to the basement stairs, the phone rang.
“Shit.” Life always seemed to interrupt at the most inconvenient moments. He considered letting it go to voice mail, but it might be one of the guys reconsidering their position, vis a vis putting the band back together again.
He set his mug down and snatched up the phone. “Yeah?”
“Dude. It’s Mike.”
“Hey. What’s up?” David kept his tone level, but was impatient to get down to the basement and start coming up with guitar parts.
“I wanted to talk to you about the album,” Mike said.
“Seen the light, changed your mind?” David tried not to allow the hopeful enthusiasm seep through his question.
“Changed yours?”
Fuck. So it was going to be that way, was it? “Look man, I’ve got work to do. The studio calls.”
“Wait, wait,” Mike said.
“Yeah?”
“David, I have an uneasy feeling about this music. It just creeps me out.”
“It’s good, though,” David said. “Right?”
“Yeah, it’s good,” Mike said, although David could almost hear him shaking his head. “I still think you should write your own music. Better yet, take a break from it.”
David tapped his foot impatiently. “Take a break from it? What the hell do you think I’ve been doing the past year?”
“Drinking and moping, from what I can see,” Mike said. He sounded sympathetic, but it was still pissing David off. “You need to come over and hang with me and the wife and kid. We’ll have a barbecue. Invite the Hot Mom at that boy’s next lesson. You need to come out of your hole and experience life again.”
David’s calm evaporated in the fire of his impatience. “I am experiencing life! Vince handed me the key to a new start when he gave me the key to that safe deposit box!”
Mike fell silent. Uh-oh, David thought.
“Say what?” Mike asked. “Vince handed you the key? When? Before he died? Why did you wait—”
“I meant figuratively, dumbass. He hath posthumously bequeathed me a second chance.”
Another tense silence followed. It was like Mike mulled that answer over and didn't buy it. Wondered if Vince had given David the key before the accident, which wouldn’t make sense, then the bizarre idea occurred to him that Vince had returned from the dead with music from beyond. Then he discarded that and shelved this little anomalous item, but not too deep in the mental storeroom.
“You, too,” David said.
“What?”
“A second chance for you, too. For all of us.”
“Right,” Mike said slowly. “A second chance for Penumbra to sell a modest amount of indie-produced CDs. After that, what? When you go to write a follow up album, you’re still stuck with yourself.”
“I’ll think of something,” David said testily.
“Go ahead and think of something now! Instead of digging up the past. Let Vince stay dead and buried.”
“Don’t you understand?” David screamed.
“I’ve got to do this! There’s never been music like this before, this powerful, this…beyond the grasp of human understanding! If I never do anything else, this will be my legacy! Something to leave behind in this shitty world, and a chance to find meaning, at least while creating it!”
“There is no meaning, David!” Mike shouted back. “There’s no point in life other than what you give it! Art is bullshit! It’s self-indulgent narcissism. Life is about living. Loving. Be with your friends! Find somebody to love!”
David clutched the phone, his knuckles white and slick with sweat, panting as if he’d just run a mile in the Georgia heat and humidity. Feeling the tendons taut and standing out in his neck, he wanted to fucking kill Mike Pemberly right now. With his bare hands. Unable to do so, he tore the phone from his ear and raised it above his head, ready to smash it into the kitchen counter, break it to bits like—He stopped. What the hell was the matter with him? Violence was anathema to David. He wouldn’t even step on an insect.
That damn music. That’s what.
Bullshit. He was just frustrated that he was being fucked with when he wanted, needed to get to work, start his new life, and get on with the fresh reality that had miraculously been shown him.
“Look, Mike,” he said, forcing his voice to be steady, “if you don’t want to be part of it, that’s cool. You’ve got a family, a business, you’re over the dream. You’ve got some meaning in your life and progeny to carry your DNA on into the future. I don’t. I need this. Either get on board, or leave me the hell alone about it.”
This time the silence on the other end of the line was complete, a total absence of sound. There was no breathing, no nothing, like the background noise had been eliminated by a noise gate.
Then Mike said, “Okay.”
Fine, then. Fuck ’em all. He had work to do. “Okay. My first student’s in a couple of hours. See you then.”
“I’ll do it,” Mike said softly.