by Mark All
Ben sighed deeply, as if he were agreeing to let his daughter go to the prom with a forty year-old biker. “Okay. Promote the shit out of it with social media. We’ll take out ads in the trades in a few days if the response warrants it.”
“Right—after it’s under contract. It won’t take that long, Ben.” She squeezed his shoulder and left, her face scrunched in barely suppressed—barely suppressed what, she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t glee exactly. Exultation? Passion? Schadenfreude? Whatever. She was going to save the company, and with that thought, she definitely felt a swirling ecstasy.
She had to share it. She practically skipped—or as close as she could come to skipping in heels—over to Accounting, and invaded Charlene’s cubicle.
“Girl, you won’t believe this,” she chirped as quietly as she could. “I’ve found them. I’ve found the silver bullet to save the company.”
Her friend’s eyes lit up and her perpetual smile widened. “I told you you’d do it! Didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you? Spill!”
Jessica took over Charlene’s computer even more efficiently than she had Ben’s, started the sound clip, and shoved her friend’s ear buds at her. “Listen, listen!”
Charlene put the buds in her ears and listened with rapt concentration. When the clip reached the end, she automatically clicked the Play button again. When she began to do so a second time, Jessica took her hand away from the mouse, took the woman’s head in her other hand, and turned it so she could see Charlene’s beautiful face. Wow, the chick was lost in the music. Jessica tugged the ear buds out.
“What do you think?” she asked with a sly smile.
“You so totally rock,” the blonde said in a hushed, reverent tone. “This is the best music I’ve ever heard in my life.” As if in a trance, Charlene reached for the ear buds.
“Whoa, give it a rest, you little headbanger. Get those books in order, make room for all the revenue Penumbra is going to generate for us.”
The sparkly intelligence returned to Charlene’s face. She gave Jessica a little hug and repeated her congratulations.
As Jessica left, she glanced back to see her friend replace the ear buds and click the Play button again. Jessica smiled faintly, but her brow wrinkled, just a tad.
Chapter Eighteen
Wednesday night
Nancy Dillehay shook her head, long blond hair swirling, her pretty face scrunched up. “Hunh-unh.”
She, Alan, Mike, and David sat around the mixing console in the control room of the basement studio.
Alan took her hand. “What do you mean, baby?”
“I don’t know. There’s just something wrong with it. It’s not a single, it’s not a hit. You know I can pick hits.”
That was true, David had to admit. While she’d identified four songs on their first CD for them to post on their site and push the hardest, and they’d all agreed those were the best after she’d pointed them out, there was no way to know if others might have generated more sales. Still, she bought all the big-name Pop CDs and correctly predicted each of the singles that would get radio play in the months that followed. She had an uncanny ability. Now she was saying this one was not a hit. Nancy was always right.
Except this time. David sensed that Alan’s savvy wife was wrong about “Fire It Up.” Besides, it didn’t matter now. “It’s kind of too late, Nancy,” David said. “This is the one I gave to Sage. They already posted it for free download on their site. It’s out there.”
Nancy huffed. “Free. I can’t believe you’re giving it away. I don’t like it, but it is good. You need to get paid for what you produce.”
Alan put a hand on her arm. “Baby, giveaways are how you do marketing now. The Long Tail, all that shit. Big bands have given away entire albums.”
“Please tell me you’re not going to give the whole fucking album away.”
“Of course not,” David interjected. “Just this song. To generate buzz.”
“You realize I’ve nearly finished my virus to kill any pirated versions of your songs. This giveaway sort of pisses in that pool.” She rolled her eyes. “I suppose I can write exception code into the program to ignore this song.”
David loved Nancy, but she could be exasperating with her fixation on digital piracy. He figured she was being more protective of Alan than their finances. “I know how you feel, but giving ‘Fire It Up’ away will create a demand for the album.”
She scowled at him. “What’s the rest of the album like? Is it all like this?”
“Like what?”
“Scary. That’s the word. This scares me.”
David and Mike looked at each other, and David felt again the uncomfortable recognition that there was something scary about the music, and he could tell that Mike felt it as well. He shook it off with a casual shrug. “I guess that’s a subjective judgment.”
Nancy didn’t look happy. She turned to her husband. “Alan, what about your lyrics? Are they like the ones in this song?”
Alan looked like a kid caught by his mother masturbating. “Um.”
“I thought so,” Nancy said. “This music makes me feel…somewhere between naughty and mean.” She sighed. “I thought for sure this was going to be it for you guys. The breakout album. I had such a strong feeling.”
Mike almost managed to look cheerful. “I think you’re right. Your intuitions are always on target. The material’s a bit dark, but so is the world these days. It’s nothing compared to Norwegian Black Death Metal.”
Her expression said she thought the songs were, in fact, quite a lot like Norwegian Death Metal, possibly worse, but she didn’t say anything.
“We agreed to see this through,” he said. He noted the look on Alan’s face, which indicated he’d been talked into doing the recording more than agreed to it, but went on. “Let’s do another couple of songs and see what we think then. These tunes are brilliant, even if they are edgy. Alan, think you can match up some more of your lyrics with the next song? We need to get your singing down you while you’re fresh.”
* * * *
Alan not only matched his part up with the first song, it was as if he’d written them to fit it rather than tossing them off the top of his head, as he claimed to have done. The lyrics were superb to have just popped out of him wholly formed; they painted vivid images that complemented the mood of the song and were consistent with Vince’s existing lyrics. Astonishingly, Alan got his part down in two passes, with the second take requiring only a few punch-ins to alter the melody slightly.
David had worried about Nancy. A wife as involved with the band as she was could Yoko Ono the entire project. She’d looked apprehensive when they’d first rolled, then anxious and fidgety, but oddly, had now settled into a sort of trance, her eyes closed, her body swaying like a charmed snake as she listened through headphones.
David saved the file and opened the next song as soon as they gave the vocal track a thumbs up, not wanting to lose momentum. Now warmed up, Alan did even better on the second track, nailing it in one take. With it and the following tune, his lyrics fit the music perfectly, even though the song was lengthy, with multiple sections of odd length. It was eerie.
David shivered and grinned like a kid on Christmas morning. The session was going better than he could have imagined. Mike, caught up in the vibe, was getting antsy to do his drum parts. Something was going on, something magical, and David knew they all sensed it. They’d come together almost spiritually, like a single living organism.
* * * *
Choking off the final cymbal crash of the last song, Mike slumped on the drum throne in the studio proper. “What time is it?” he asked, his voice shaky on the monitor. “God, I’m dead.”
David looked at his watch, blinked, then checked the time on the computer. “Six o’clock. Six a.m.”
“Oh, no way,” Alan said.
Nancy looked puzzled. “We’ve only been here a couple of hours.” She’d evidently been won over by the magnificence of the music, having sat transfixe
d throughout the process. She looked as if she’d just awakened from an afternoon nap or a therapeutic hypnosis session.
“We’ve been here all night?” Mike asked. “Seriously?”
David blinked. “We finished. We’re done.”
“The whole album?” Alan said thickly. “We recorded an album in one night?”
“Looks like,” David said. It had happened again, just like when he’d laid down all his guitar tracks for the album in one superhuman marathon. This time they’d recorded lead vocals and drums, parts written on the fly, in only hours, not days. It was as if the Oblivion phenomenon was building, feeding on itself and becoming more powerful. Again, he felt an icy finger of fear at the thought of one impossibility following another, from Vince coming back from the grave, to his own placid acceptance of that, to the accelerating velocity of the project, which had not only taken on a life of its own, but assimilated them all.
Terrifying. Exhilarating.
“This was meant to be,” he said. “This album is the one.”
Nancy stood up and poked Alan. “Baby, you’ve got to be at work in half an hour.”
Her husband yawned and stretched. “The crew may have to supervise themselves today.” He smiled. “Donny would make a good foreman. I have a feeling this music’s going to change our lives.”
Chapter Nineteen
Thursday early morning
Jarvis Bentley looked around his apartment, swaying on his feet. Something was off. The first rays of morning sunlight stung his eyes as he stumbled to the window and jerked the blinds shut. He scanned the room, which was tolerably dim now, the only light coming from the shaded lamp on the end table. Everything looked fine. It just didn’t feel fine.
Black Chasm of Eternal Sorrow had kicked The Tabernacle’s ass last night, bringing in a rowdy, drink-buying crowd. Blowing the doors off the Athens Theater on Saturday night would be a piece of cake.
Jarvis, Chasm’s lead singer, had partied his own ass off till the wee hours after the gig with his personal fan club, including a new chick with melon-sized boobs. At one of the kids’ apartments near Emory University, he’d done her in the bathroom while the party raged on outside the unlocked door. He suspected she was underage, which was more than fine by him. He was reaping the rewards of the rock star life. Big fish in a little pond now, about to be a big fish in an ocean, now that he had major label interest. That hottie from Sage Records last Friday at the Hellfire Club had been kind of standoffish, but she said her company was definitely interested in Chasm, despite the fact that they were all shit-faced and hadn’t played that great.
Having label interest had perked the band’s ass up, especially Jarvis. He was fueled by new hope, the prospect of another kick-ass gig in a week, and a shitload of coke. The blow had been enough to get him back to his apartment despite his drunkenness, but it was wearing off now, leaving him beyond woozy. He was actually a little freaked out, but he couldn’t put his finger on why. What was left of the coke rush was amping up the paranoia of his pot buzz.
Jarvis managed to avoid running into the threadbare couch and other worn Goodwill furniture as he wandered around the living room, looking for anything out of place, anything there that shouldn’t be, anything missing. The clutter looked the same as usual, which meant it was impossible to tell. He checked the rest of the apartment, finding nothing, but couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Way wrong. He just wasn’t sure what.
He returned to the living room to survey his close quarters with a squint, as if that might improve his visual concentration. He got dizzy and almost fell over.
“I’m just fucking wasted. That’s all. Shouldn’t have had that last Jagermeister.”
He got a goodnight beer from the fridge and was about to crash out on the couch for the day when something caught his eye at the apartment’s front door. Had something moved? On the floor, maybe? He stared for a moment at the ratty indoor-outdoor carpet in front of the door. Nothing was obvious, but something was going on. The carpet seemed to be in sluggish motion.
“What the fuck?”
Jarvis went to the door and bent to study the carpet. A dark stain was slowly spreading into the room from under the door. It smelled kind of funny, coppery, and made his stomach roll.
A loud rapping on the door startled him and he jumped back. “Jesus effin’ C,” he muttered, trying to get his breathing and pounding heartbeat under control. “Fuck off!”
Silence.
A heavy hand knocked on the door so hard it rattled the loose, worn out knob and Jarvis thought the lock would give and the door would smack him in the face. That pissed him off.
“I’m a rock star, damn it, and I’m going to take your head off, fucker!”
Holding the unopened beer like a club, he twisted the knob and whipped the door open to see a crazy man standing in the hallway, with a chilling grin and madness in his eyes. And an axe in his hands. Jarvis gaped at the apparition before him. Longhaired dude, goatee, dressed in black. Blood spattered all over his face, shining wetly red on his teeth. Instinctively, Jarvis swung the beer bottle in a roundhouse to the guy’s head. It bounced back hard into a lamp beside the door. Both the bottle and the lamp globe shattered and sprayed Jarvis with broken glass. He shrieked and looked at his hand, where shards of glass had lacerated his fingers and penetrated the muscle at the base of his thumb. Blood welled and the pain filled him with rage. “I’ll fucking kill you.”
The man laughed.
“You can’t kill me,” he said. “As long as I serve the darkness, as long as I am the bringer of chaos and destruction to the world, I am invulnerable.”
He raised the axe and planted it in Jarvis’s skull.
Chapter Twenty
Thursday morning
Jessica burst into Ben’s office so fast she had to grab the door to keep it from banging into the wall.
“It’s gone freaking viral!”
Holding his chest and looking as if he’d just swallowed a bug, Ben barked, “Damn girl, simmer down! I’ve just gone into atrial fibrillation.”
Giddy with excitement, Jessica fanned out dozens of printouts on his desk, the loose sheets of paper fluttering down to his lap and the floor. They consisted of download stats, reviews, and blog posts. “Let’s offer them a contract.”
Ben scanned the printouts. “Yeah, I’m aware that ‘Fire It Up’ is attracting attention.”
“Attracting attention? Do you know how many times it’s been downloaded from our site? Not only that, but it’s been posted to a slew of other sites, and somebody did their own video for it and put it on YouTube.”
Ben scowled. “Yeah, normally I’m not too thrilled about our product being pirated—”
“Argh,” she growled with not quite fake exasperation. What was his problem? “That was the plan. Come on, let me call David.”
Ben bobbed his head noncommittally. “Yeah, sweetie, it’s getting some attention—but not enough yet for me to commit our resources to it. We’ve got to carefully pick a winner and throw everything behind it. We can’t afford to guess wrong.”
“Aw, man.” She flounced down in a chair in front of his desk and started drumming her fingers on the armrest.
“Nice documentation,” Ben said, possibly sarcastically, waving his hand at the piles of paper she’d dumped on his desk. “That’s not the whole story, though. Have you seen CNN?”
She sat up in her chair. “CNN? Seriously?” She blinked. “A free download song with just Twitter and Facebook promo has not only gone viral overnight, but made the news on CNN, and that’s not enough?”
“I know they say there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” Ben said carefully, “but it didn’t show up on CNN entertainment, it’s in the news.”
“Okay, not following you.”
“There are several reports of what they’re calling ‘Fire Addiction.’ People are playing ‘Fire It Up’ over and over. On sound systems in sandwich shops and bars, at their desks at work. They�
�re referring to these people as ‘Loopers.’”
Jessica became excited and confused. “In less than twenty-four hours? That so rocks. Again, what’s the problem?”
“They’re becoming a nuisance,” Ben said. “The police have even been called in a few instances. They’re saying this song is more addictive than video games.”
She felt the first nagging doubt. “You don’t look happy, Ben.”
Her boss shook his head. “The phrase ‘product liability’ doesn’t come up often in the music business, but I’ve seen it on a blog.”
Irritated, Jessica snapped, “That’s ridiculous. It’s a damn song, for God’s sake.”
“I know.”
She moved into defiance. “And it’s our song. Ben, come on! We need to strike while the iron is hot. This is a good thing. We’ve never had publicity like this.”
“True.”
“So what’s the problem?”
He sighed, thought for a moment, then swiveled his computer monitor so she could see it. iTunes was open with “Fire It Up” at the top of the Playlist. “This song …” Ben looked uncomfortable, almost embarrassed. “It sort of scares me. It’s not just the news reports. It’s me. There’s something about this song, something almost magical. I’m a jazz fan, I don’t really like heavy metal, not even prog, but I’m still having to fight the urge to play it again. To loop it and just stare out the window.”
Jessica said nothing. She knew what he was talking about, having felt it herself. Yet her passion was to evangelize the work, the band. Every time she listened to the song, she was seized by a strong desire to stop the player and call somebody and tell them how great it was.
“That’s not all,” Ben said. “It’s not just that I feel this pull to listen to it over and over. It’s the feeling I get when I listen to it. A feeling of awe and majesty, a feeling of power—but also hostility. Like I’m OD’ing on steroids and testosterone.”