by James Wade
“The music?” I exclaimed. “That’s what made you a star.”
“I know, but it still scares me. When I’m on stage I can’t tell where half the sound is coming from. It’s not from those crazy boxes with grids and neon tubes on them; they’re mostly dummies, or just far-out decorations on ordinary electronic instruments. That roaring, moaning noise from offstage is what really gets me. I swear to God I’ve searched every square inch back there—there’s not that much space. Unless somebody took the trouble to build a set of speakers into a solid brick wall, and conceal the outlet some way, there’s just no source for such sounds. And why should anyone do that? It doesn’t even make sense as a publicity stunt, since Tommy won’t let anybody even talk about it.”
I thought of what one hi-fi nut in the audience told me: He’d tried to tape the show with a hidden transistor set, but could never pick up the offstage sounds.
Erika finished off a martini on the rocks that was mostly water by now, and went on, “I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone before. After Dad died I found a box of letters from his father, Erich Zann, addressed to my grandmother and dated Paris, mostly 1924 and 1925. I can read a little German because we used to speak it around the house.
“The letters tell about experiences the old man had playing his violin all alone at night in an old loft where he lived. He seems to be hinting that something was after him, and only the sound of his playing kept it away.
“There’s one letter that mentions the guilt he felt about ‘prying into things better left alone.’ It doesn’t sound so corny in German. And one paragraph that I translated with a dictionary talks about him looking out the window at midnight and seeing 'shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning.’
“Crazy, huh? He must have been really strung out. But I found another letter in the box, a report from the Paris police saying that Erich Zann had disappeared and could not be located. It must have been an answer to a missing-persons inquiry Grandma Zann sent from Stuttgart.”
Pete Muzio materialized behind her through clouds of pot smoke, like some stage devil making his big entrance. “All set, Erika? Time for the last set.” His wolfish grin seemed mocking, though I don’t see how he could have heard anything.
As I sat waiting for the music to start, it occurred to me that although it was hard to tell at this remove whether old Erich Zann had been crazy or not, the parallels hinted at by his freaky granddaughter were wild enough to get her committed, if she talked to many people this way. But at the same time I could see how these apparent parallels might push someone, who was nervy and uptight to begin with, all the way over the edge.
I started trying to figure out ways for Erika to get away from The Purple Blob, maybe on the excuse of a vacation, and then later for good. But it was a dilemma: Here was where the group’s success was building, and Pete Muzio, bless his pointed fangs, had them trapped in an airtight contract. For some reason the leader, Tommy, refused to cut records or say why not, though he’d turned down offers that could have led to the real big time.
Tommy, with his Jesus hairdo and half-blind, inward-peering eyes, seemed to be stoned all the time now, and if he was too far around the bend to look after his own best interests, how could anyone expect him to worry about Erika’s?
Things went on but didn’t get any better. Erika seemed thinner and tenser all the time, and the sets the combo played behind her got wilder and wilder, as she wailed and coloraturaed above the slamming beat and the ugly toneless roaring that seemed to press in on the stage from everywhere and nowhere.
The novelty was wearing off, and business—though fairly good—was largely down to the hard-core fans, or addicts, for whom an evening with Erika’s symbolic struggle on the stage seemed the equivalent of some sort of emotionally cathartic trip. The reporters and the record company A&R scouts had drifted away, looking for other kinky groups that would cooperate in being exploited.
On that final evening, though, there was a standing-room crowd, because it was Friday (not the thirteenth, but a Black Friday nevertheless). I had drifted in rather late, and glimpsed Erika down front just before the last set was due to start. As I shoved my way through the crowd and approached her, I was shocked at the ravaged look on her face, and the unfocused glare of those purple eyes above a tight pucker of mouth.
I thought for a moment that she must have flipped, but she seemed to recognize me, and while the organist was winding up his polytonal calypso, I took her arm and led her off to the side.
“Erika, you look sick,” I blurted, too disturbed to be polite. “Beg off and let’s get out of here. You must have saved enough to buy out of your contract, with Tommy or Pete or both. You shouldn’t be doing this; it’s killing you by inches. I’ll help—you know I like you,” I added, the only declaration of my feelings toward her I ever made.
She twitched me a grateful smile, the only response to them she ever made, but her voice was a hoarse croak: the fumes of gin rode with it. “I’m afraid, not sick. It’s getting louder and louder, and I can’t sing over it. It’s coming after me, nearer all the time. I think I know what it wants, and I’m afraid!”
“Then come away!”
“After tonight, maybe. My voice is giving out, that’s no lie, but I’ve got to do it right, get a doctor’s opinion. That way no trouble, not like last time ...”
The organist wound up with a splatter of scales trapped inside pinwheeling discords, as the strobes flared with machine-gun rapidity, turning the world into stop-motion photographs. Erika pulled away from me and walked stiffly, jerkily to the stage, a parody of some surreal silent-movie sequence.
The curtain went up on The Electric Commode, and the lights all over the room exploded in mad random patterns, like a night bombing raid in World War II. The brain-blasting strangle-scream of the combo cut in, a shriek of nerve-frazzling terror, and I knew the set would be no ordinary one, even for this group.
Erika was off and running with an up-tempo scat-vocal skimming lightly over spiky chords that sounded like Kenton’s borrowings from Stravinsky in the forties. Almost immediately the deep, almost subaural roar pressed in from outside, louder than I had ever heard it before—soulless, ravening, implacable.
A hippie with fright-wig hair, the acid glow bright in his eyes, was standing beside me shouting something unintelligible. I leaned toward him and caught a few fragmentary phrases: “Blackness... blackness of space illimitable! ...Unimagined space alive with motion and music... no semblance of anything on Earth...”
Erika was struggling to ride the tide, to crest the waves of sound. Faster and faster, higher and higher her voice mounted, but the surge of noise swept past her, curled into breakers ahead of her, piled in swift suspended combers on either side of her. The lights dimmed to a kind of crepitating underwater green, lanced by livid streaks of scarlet, magenta, and violet.
No one could stand such strain, I knew. I pushed my way back to the bar where Pete Muzio skulked in a dark corner with his knife-like smile. Grabbing his shoulder, I pressed my face close to his and shouted amid the din: “Shut off that noise! That hyped-up speaker set or whatever you’ve stashed back there—you must have an amp control up front here somewhere. Shut it off! It’ll kill her!”
Pete wasn’t smiling now; he was sweating and scared, and for once in his life, he was yelling to be heard.
“There’s no tape, no speakers. I swear to God I don’t know what it is! I thought at first the band was doing it, and they thought I was. Then the new guy warned me to mind my business if I wanted to keep any—”
I shoved him aside and wheeled toward the stage. The sonic outrage had mounted to an ear-splitting shriek; the players in the combo dropped their instruments in consternation. Even the lighting display flickered out aghast, leaving a single baby spot playing over Erika, reflecting from the metallic sequins of her gown, glinting from the huge, hunted eyes.
She stood feet
apart and braced, arms outstretched, head tilted back, alien bellow of sound writhing about her like a visible nimbus. She drew in a breath, contorted her lips, and bore down, squeezing for the last tortured top note of her hysterical cadenza.
Nothing.
Not a sound, not a squeak, not even a groan came from the stretched square of mouth. The voice, her protection from the unknown stalker, had broken at last.
Exultantly, the all-pervading roar seemed to pounce on her and she staggered back, stumbling over Tommy’s discarded guitar, blundering from there into the big super-amp that charged all the electrified instruments and speakers.
There was an eruption of sparks, and I saw her hand go out to arrest her fall, grasping at one of the strange new instruments that stood like a sinister robot chorus surveying the scene.
Instantly the entire charge of current grounded itself, sizzling lethally through the metal sequins of her gown. The burning and ozone cut through the reek of marijuana.
The stage curtains bloomed into flame as the band members fled—except for Tommy, who never made it—and the audience floundered in drugged bewilderment toward the exits. The cheap streamers and psychedelic decorations of crepe paper and cheesecloth channeled fire into every corner of The Purple Blob, lighting up the nightmare riot garishly when the fuses abruptly blew.
I was near the exit, and though I knew that Erika never had a chance, I tried to force my way toward the stage against the pressure of the crowd. The gesture was as pointless as it was futile—I was carried by the surge of the mob toward a safety I neither coveted nor valued.
It wasn’t too spectacular as far as fires in crowded places of entertainment go. Besides Erika and Tommy, whose bodies were badly burned, only Pete Muzio died that night. He wasn’t found till next day, crouched behind the bar near the entrance. Not a mark was on him, and it was assumed he had had a heart attack. They say his face still held the habitual broken-toothed grimace he had always mistaken for a smile.
No one was badly hurt in that stampede of zonked-out hippies, which shows that—as the squares say—God takes care of fools and children. The interior of The Purple Blob was completely gutted, but firemen had little trouble controlling the flames. Later, though, it was judged that the structure was unsound, and the shell of the building was pulled down.
I’m glad it’s gone, though I can never forget it; nor will I forget the things that happened there, or the people they happened to. Least of all will I forget—though I have a notion that as time goes on, I shall more and more wish I could forget—the silence of Erika Zann.