“They’re back and I keep seeing more and more. They’re all around me! They’re all around you!” Her eyes were wild and terrifying until she looked up at me with a deep and hateful loathing. Before I knew it, her hands were around my throat. I somehow managed to get her off of me and ran to call the police but she fled before they could arrive.
Deciding to calm things down, I closed the office and took a little vacation. I had been talking about going away for a bit but business had been good and I hated to miss out on sales while word of mouth was at its peak, but my head had been killing me for some time and I needed the break.
When I got back, I felt refreshed. More importantly there was no sign of Miss Maple. My inbox was crammed with requests for help and so I went back to it.
I didn’t know about the first murder until two years later. I hadn’t heard from the client, who was overdue for a recharge by quite some time, and I wanted to make sure I had all the correct contact information. After I hung up the phone in shock at the news, I quickly put it from my head, discounting it as bad luck for the fellow, and erased his file.
News of the next murder, and the one after that, followed much more quickly. By this point, I couldn’t deny that this was more than mere coincidence. It couldn’t have been the devices malfunctioning somehow, I reasoned, as the victims were all brutally stabbed to death and their units smashed to pieces.
When the fifth case came to my attention, I shut down the office and began to dismantle everything. No police had contacted me yet but I knew it would only be a matter of time.
Looking at what was left of the Machine hidden beneath the chair, I had a flash of my grandmother’s disapproval. Instead of taking it completely apart, I disconnected the sinister thing from its power sources and let it sit, inert and harmless in a snug box, before dropping it off with the older components back in my storage locker. Everything else was completely done away with—all the Deresonators and the trappings of my office. I even got rid of the lab coat. The money had all been transferred in pieces through various channels, so all I had to do was close out the main accounts and I was free.
Given how thorough I had been, how careful to conceal my tracks from clients and investigators alike, I have no earthly idea how she found me, but she did.
I was sitting on the deck of my newly purchased lakefront home, listening to herons call out as the numbing warmth of nearly half a magnum of red did its duty when she walked out of the evening gloom, knife in hand.
Falling out of my chair, I stumbled towards the railing, the phone half a house away. Miss Maple was barely recognizable and the stench roiling off of her was almost comically offensive. She didn’t lunge right away for me but instead just stood there, the dirty knife held firmly and unmoving in her hand. Her eyes wouldn’t focus on me as they darted all around. What little of her face I could see beyond the curtain of her matted hair turned a livid purple.
“They’re all around you,” she hissed before finally slashing out at me. I didn’t so much dodge as trip and she slammed into the railing, wheeling around and searching for me, batting away at the air and flailing her knife in seemingly erratic patterns.
“Please!” I begged in cowardice. “Whatever you want. Just please!” I had no idea what I was offering or what she wanted, save for my blood which I wasn’t quite ready to part with. Our clumsy dance continued for a few seconds before she was on top of me, the tip of the blade mere inches from my face.
“It doesn’t work!” she hissed. “It draws them near! Moths to a flame!”
I exhaled and the knife slid that much closer to me. In panic, my knee arched up and hit the softness of her stomach and there followed a mad tussle which I was convinced would mean the end of me. I shuddered at her hot breath against my cheek and then felt warm wetness between us. I hadn’t felt the sting of the blade despite anticipating it since the moment she appeared.
More seconds passed and there was no pain, save for the bruises where I had injured myself during the struggle. I dared to look up into her eyes and saw her features had shifted, eased. Pushing her away, I could see that the knife had indeed found a home, but not in me. She fell back against the railing, slumped and staring at me, as if for the first time.
“Moths…flittering, fluttering, flitter…” and then her face began to contort, and when it froze, finally, I looked upon the most terrible grimace I’ve seen on a human being. Miss Maple continued to bleed out, dripping red down onto the sands below. She bled out for some time.
The police and the ambulance came and went, statements were made, lies were easily told. I’m sure somewhere, someone was happy to close her file, but it wasn’t over for me.
You see, I can’t get those words out of my head. What did she mean by “moths?” She had to mean whatever it was the Machine made visible, but she was also clearly insane. Delusional, and not in the profitable way. She had killed all those people, all those clients of mine.
The very idea that my Deresonators somehow could draw the things closer... well it’s just the ravings of a broken woman, no? A woman terribly sick from long before I ever met her.
I haven’t been back to see the box with the dismantled Machine, not since I locked it all up. I can’t bring myself to discover if there is an ounce of truth in what that madwoman said. I can’t believe it because if she was right, then I have damned myself and who knows how many others. I attempt to comfort myself with the idea that she was just a miserable wretch, lost in her own head, a slave to her own madness. Anyone would agree.
But then, why won’t I turn my unit off and see for myself? Answer me that. Why am I so afraid that the battery will run out and I won’t have the backup ready in time? Why, when I close my eyes, do I see, not the comfort of darkness, but the brief shadows of something fluttering?
RESONATOR SUPERSTAR!
Anya Martin
“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,
just look at the surface of my paintings and films
and me, there I am. There’s nothing behind it”
Andy Warhol (1968)
Curt clicked the keypad on the Macbook.
“Here goes nothing.”
Red strobe flash.
Blue strobe flash.
Rapid bursts of white light. DiDi felt the heat from the strobes on her back.
The music cut in. A steady drone in a single repeated chord.
In the original performances of Andy Warhol’s infamous Exploding Plastic Inevitable, aka EPI, human hands would have had to switch on and off and maneuver each of the multiple lights, adjust the sound levels, run the 16mm projectors, but thanks to 21st century technology, Curt had developed a software program that executed it all with just one laptop tap, except for a live performance by the Velvet Underground, of course.
“Nothing comes of nothing, but you’ve really done something,” DiDi whispered as Curt leaned back and right towards her. Their chairs close already, he touched her hand, did that twisty thing with the thrift store ring he gave her last week. It wasn’t an engagement ring, but after six months since they first met in a Sergei Eisenstein class, and then bonded over a mutual appreciation of Brakhage, the usual dance of we’re-fucking-but-are-we-a-couple-or-not, to her, it represented a powerful symbol. Punctuated by Curt slipping his hand down to her knee, sliding it slowly underneath the hem of her black leather miniskirt. She liked that, too.
Blue strobe blinks. Yellow strobe flash.
The first projector flickered on, fade from black to grainy black and white close-up: pale hair in a ponytail, pussycat black eyeliner, full pouty lips. She looked down but then she smiled, maybe.
“You can really see in Nico’s face why they loved her and hated her,” DiDi whispered in Curt’s ear. But he put a finger to his lips. Why did she have to try so hard to be clever to impress him? She hated the times when she dared to do so spontaneously and he shut her down. Got to remember—less is more. Let him do the talking, listen, girl.
Yet, this ti
me Curt might just be protecting her from derision. Every one of the fifty seats was occupied, but no one was speaking, not even whispers. Not like the cineplex. More like a Catholic congregation, except its members bridged jaded aging once-punks-now-art-scenesters with self-consciously-attired hipsters not born until a decade or more after the original shows took place. The on-screen diva was their Madonna, years before another pop star actually pretended to that name. Guttural deep bass line and cacophonous guitar jangle, intentionally uninspired drum beat, as camera focused on her profile—pensive, speaking, sighing. Fade to black and back. Out of focus, in focus, out, in. Panned out enough to see she was banging a tambourine with a maraca—keeping the dull beat but an untrained monkey could do that—perhaps that’s why she needed to dress like a Euro-Spy in black jumper and tight pants like she just stepped off the set of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. And finally the pan-out to the entire band, concentration, all serious intent on their instruments. The prophets of punk to come, the artists of anti-pop orchestrated by the King of Pop Art. At Nico’s feet, a blonde toddler rubbed his eyes, sleepy, then shaking another maraca with a randomness only a child can accomplish amidst the wall of sound surrounding him.
More fades to black, pans, shaky cam and the window into the Factory expanded and contracted. Intimate, not intimate. Rehearsal not performance. Performance not rehearsal. Shake, rattle, machine.
Lou’s ear peek-a-boo, his baby-cheek, DiDi wanted to stroke it—you could think he was just a cute-as-hell guitar player if not for the jarring metallica. Camera jerked from close-up to full rehearsal panorama. Sterling, she wanted to run her fingers through his hair. Why can’t the lens ever focus on Cale, who had become her favorite as she found out more and more about his forays into film? They looked almost just boys, so young—even Mo Tucker, in her pixie cut and striped shirt, could have stepped out of a Peanuts cartoon. Everyone but Nico in dark sunglasses, eyelessness. Always back to her maraca banging on the tambourine. The beat blondtastique. Mother but not a nurturer, radiating discipline, that maraca could come down on a wrist. What she said to Iggy: “Poison is the essence of the performer.”
A screech of feedback overwhelmed the incessant beat, scraped sonic burn over DiDi’s eardrums.
“Look carefully at Nico’s forehead,” Curt whispered in DiDi’s ear. It was OK when he wanted to share something. “How the camera technique makes it seem like her brow is vibrating as if something wanted to emerge from inside.”
“Her super-ego?” DiDi asks; surely his initiation of dialogue was an invitation for some humor.
“No, Andy was fascinated with the pineal gland—it’s kind of an evolutionary throwback but has been linked in rodent studies to the secretion of sexual hormones. It’s stimulated by darkness but light dampens the effect. It’s another thing Charley Tillinghast turned him onto.”
DiDi wanted to roll her eyes. Charley Tillinghast again. In all her reading about Warhol, all the interviews she’d watched on YouTube and DVD with Curt as he researched his thesis, nobody ever mentioned a Charley Tillinghast. Yet after meeting some roadie out in San Francisco, Curt seemed obsessed with him, like he was Andy’s right-hand man. Right hand jacking off man, maybe.
“So despite the implied sexuality of bondage and blowjobs in Andy’s films, the EPI is an antisexual experience?” DiDi posed, unable to hide her skepticism.
“No, baby, you don’t get it. It’s all about turning off the sex drive and turning it back on again, except super-fast. The ultimate frustration. Like me touching you and then removing my hand rapidly.”
He reached deep under her skirt now, touching her and then pulling out again, three times. Four.
“Stop it, or I’ll have to take you back to the loft now,” she said, giggling, forgiving him again.
“Point proven. Now shh, back to the movie,” he said.
Mirror shard sparkles swept across the screen. Disco wasn’t even a thing then—what would they have called the ball in the ‘60s? Just mirror ball? Didn’t matter. Pineal gland, sexual stimulation—Andy was all about the spectacle and the manipulation of his entourage. Sounded like typical Warhol BS. But Curt’s playful prods stimulated anticipation of later tonight, a post-performance performance—his success transforming into her pleasure. She lifted fingers to play with his blonde spiky hair. He looked to his side again, threw her a wink. Mission accomplished.
Two more projectors flickered on. When? That was the beauty of multimedia—the eyes, brain could not process it all, forced to make choices. On the left screen: the familiar images of Vinyl, which she’d viewed even in class. Gerard Malanga—all beatnik James Dean in white T—chest thrusting, elbows shaking, the punctuation of the crack of the whip, that guy in the suit laughing. Edie—big dark Boop eyes in tight little black dress—alternating between fashionably bored, puffing cigarette, and go-going without standing, like it was all just another hazy lazy day at The Factory.
Right screen: Beat incessant as Blowjob cuts in, head enraptured in receiving head and yet banal in its detachment from the act of pleasure looped over a half-hour. Curt had told DiDi that Andy varied which of his films showed up in the EPI like a mixtape which also included Bitch, Restaurant, Eat, etc., all his vignettes of the everyday human act or emotion stripped to monotone.
Green strobe—triple flash. Purple strobe—swam slow across the screens and flashed out.
“Lou used to wear sunglasses so he wouldn’t be blinded by the strobes,” Curt whispered in DiDi’s ear.
She didn’t quip back this time, remembering his last hush—repeating to herself, “less is more.” She lamented that when it came to the EPI, at least a half-hour more. She loved the Velvets, but compared to sex later, or maybe he was right about the repetitive display stimulating her pineal gland. Whatever the cause, the whole production now chafed her eyes and ears like fingernails on a chalkboard.
A shadow of a girl dancing now projected high across Malanga’s rattling body and above the screen onto the white wall behind. DiDi never saw the girl up until then nor saw anyone stand up from the crowd. Not even to slip out the back to the restroom.
At first she was just a wavy shape in a glossy sleeveless aluminum minidress, skinny but curvy at the same time—pale spidery arms and spellbound hands, twisting hips nurtured on Fats Domino down long model legs to shiny white boots of leather with solid heels—were there any other kind of boots in the ‘60s? She could have been part of the film except for the shadow she cast across Gerard Malanga, shifting the remaining light of the projector to Edie’s perfunctory chair dancing.
Edie. The girl looked like Edie. Not just looked. Could have been her long lost twin, up to her blonde bob, her darkly lined eyes, the eyebrows so smooth they seemed like lipstick.
Curt withdrew his hand fully from DiDi’s leg, leaned in.
DiDi dropped her hand from his hair.
“Who’s that? You didn’t tell me you’d hired a go-go dancer. Good job though, spittin’ image hair, eyes, clothes, she could be Edie’s twin.”
“I didn’t hire anyone.”
Gerard Malanga cracked whip onscreen behind proto-Edie.
“Well, she looks great, but I thought you didn’t want any performers for this first run.”
“If I pull her offstage, it’ll disrupt the show. She’s really good, obviously practiced on real footage. Makes it more like the real thing.”
DiDi thought of Coca-Cola. Hadn’t Andy painted Coke bottles like he did soup cans? Still, she didn’t like the way Curt was watching the girl. The abrupt shift from affection to distance. What audacity to just jump up and start dancing, and yet exactly in synch with the exhibitionism that Andy had encouraged among his Factory groupies, feeding his and their addiction to fame. Still, DiDi had to admit the gal was good, especially since the footage was so damned obscure. One had to do some serious googling to put together any concept of the EPI and none of the YouTube footage was in any way really evocative given the light displays and the multiple streams of film that combined sp
ontaneously for each performance, the fact that there were relatively few shows to begin with. This was one dedicated fangirl.
As the projector and strobe lights hit cosplay-Edie’s body, which she grooved almost gear-like now from screen to screen, the dress glowed in different colors and DiDi thought she saw images, too, as film hit fabric—weird damage to the footage that wasn’t visible on the screens. Squiggly lines and x’s—marks the spot, marks no spot—letters she didn’t recognize, Runic symbols perhaps. Then a man’s face, each lens of a pair of dark glasses reflected on a breast, thick long hair spreading out into her arms—must be some mirage caused by the fabric itself or was this face sewn into her dress? She wanted to ask Curt if he saw a face in the dress. His eyes were still locked on the dancing girl, no, transfixed—had he taken some drug before the show and not told her? No, its success was too important to him—the culmination of his master’s thesis, three years of intense research.
DiDi tried to turn Curt’s head slightly with one hand, but he shrugged her off, shook his head.
Looking back at the dancer, DiDi almost jumped in her chair. Two red glows through the glasses right where her nipples should be. Eyes. Just above and perfectly centered was a third eye or at least a flesh-colored oval that resembled an eye inside a three-fingered hand. She thought back to Curt’s description of the pineal gland. Was that it?
She shut her eyes, reopened. Just a girl in a silver dress go-go dancing. Was the effect of the EPI not just hypnotic, but hallucinatory? She recalled a previous animated speech Curt had given her about the EPI being able to induce a trancelike state, that Warhol took part of his inspiration from Heliczer’s Rites of the Dream Weapon which sought to reduce the audience to lab-rats. Had she fallen for the experiment or maybe just fallen asleep, perchance to dream?
The center VU rehearsal film closed with the no longer unexpected arrival of the police responding to a sound complaint. One could empathize with a Factory neighbor, DiDi thought. Eventually the earworm would be too much. One might even long for an out-of-tune clarinet for variety. The two other reels pattered off into silence, the strobes continued to blink for a few minutes, a trickle out of the incessant sound and then quiet.
Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond Page 16