“Our father who, who, who, who art in heaven hallowed be thy name, thy, thy, thy SHIT!!”
Eyes popping open, Daddy saw that the bullet was less than two feet away now. So close, Daddy could see the serial number on its collar. He tried to swallow, but his spit was long gone. Throat like a lime pit. Piss spurting out of him. He didn’t deserve this kind of hellish fate. A simple hillbilly, never got an education, never meant no harm, he just didn’t deserve this. He began to cry. “GET IT OVER WITH! JUST DO IT! FINISH IT!!” His voice was like old metal tearing apart. “GET IT OVER WITH!!”
Twelve inches to go.
Another vision bloomed from the metal jacket. Veins of electric lightning threading out in all directions, coalescing into images, stormy images, apocalyptic images bombarding Daddy Norbert —
( — the snap of a belt on a woman’s thick rear end, across the backs of her arms, drawing red streaks and welts... the red rain falling on parched ground, the locusts and the seven wax seals peeling away in the wind... the strangled cries of his wife, begging for mercy, mercy, no mercy —)
— until he shook the memories off like gasoline on his face and cried so hard his snot ran across his lips in salty stringers. He prayed, and he bawled, and he begged God to come deliver him from this terrible trick.
Six inches now.
Daddy watched the bullet inching toward his forehead, his body convulsing with the fear and the tears and the shaking. The tape held him steady, the leather braced his head. Five inches. Four. Three.
“Our-father-who-art-in-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-heaven hallllllhahhahhhh!”
The sudden flare of blinding light strangled off his voice.
He slammed his eyes shut and jerked backward with the force of the vision.
This time, the image was brutally clear.
(— Daddy was naked, hunched in a thicket of weeds in the forest, breathing hard, trapped…he could smell his own spoor, the warmth of his fur and the timpani of his heart…his hooves were split and bleeding in the leaves…his antlers ached, and he could see the glint of something shiny through the trees across from him, the barrel of a well seasoned Roberts rifle sticking out of the brush... then the flash of a .219 calibre shell exploding —)
At that moment, in the harsh light of the lonely tool shed, the cool metal tip of the bullet softly kissed Daddy Norbert’s forehead just above the left eye...
... and kept coming...
... beginning Daddy Norbert’s official, albeit long overdue, education.
BLACK CELEBRATION
Parker Pivok knew there was something wrong the moment he plugged in.
“What the fuck was that?!” Tim the bass player was over by the ancient boiler, aghast, his eyes widening.
“I don’t know – Jesus — I don’t know.” Parker jerked the quarter-inch plug out of the jack, and the yammering feedback halted. Parker stood up and regarded the Marshall amp. The low humming of the tubes put a fine dusting of chill-bumps along his arms. “The stack never sounded like that,” Parker said, threading fingers through his unruly mane of sandy hair.
“Give it a second,” Angela suggested, tightening her snare. The cadaverous blonde girl was perched on a ratty stool behind a second hand set of roto toms that had seen better days. “Sometimes moisture gets in the coils, fucks with the signal.”
Parker glanced around the cellar, nodding, “‘Nuff moisture in this Godforsaken shithole to make fucking mud pies.”
The subterranean rehearsal space was the best Parker could manage at the last minute. Three days earlier, the band had been kicked out of the loft space above the music building, ostensibly for shaking the second floor ceiling joists and creating intermittent snow storms of asbestos down upon the chamber music lesson-carrels. But Parker knew that real reason they had been given the boot was because the old farts in Miskatonic’s music department loathed any musical form invented after the hey days of Gregorian chants.
Parker had scoured Miskatonic’s campus for a practice room. He’d tried Armitage Hall, the language studies building on the east edge of the quad; but that was a wash due to a recent incident involving a mysterious explosion and the deaths of two faculty members. He’d tried the scabrous old ivy-eaten buildings on the north side; but renovations were still going on in the Herbert West Wing due to unexplained moisture seeping up from the water table. He’d even tried the cavernous greenhouse adjacent to the Akeley Agricultural Center, but was told that fragments of meteorite that had fallen upstate in the Spring of ‘33 were still being analyzed on a daily basis there. Fucking school was a major pain in the ass.
Parker was ultimately forced to settle on the basement of Lapham Hall, the campus’ music building. The same venerable building within which Parker’s late father, Heironymous Pivok had taught archaic tonalities for so many years. The same professor Heironymous Pivok that had secretly taken out his life-long sexual frustrations and pent up rage on his only son for so many years, employing every manner of torture from metal wires across Parker’s bare 12-year old bottom to repeated cigarette burns on his nipples. It was no wonder that Parker had rebelled at such an early age, covering the scars with tattoos, turning inward, writing nihilistic punk poetry and starting a hard core power trio. It was equally unsurprising that Parker had celebrated his father’s mysterious and violent demise in the late Eighties. Something about an obsession with the lost madrigal scores of R’lyeh. Something about forbidden recordings made for some shadowy consortium of Satanists. Parker cared nothing of the circumstances; he was just happy dear old dad was dead. As a matter of fact, the old fuck’s death had inspired the name of Parker’s punk band — Black Celebration — an evocative phrase pilfered from an old Depeche Mode album.
“This place is like off-the-scale depressing,” the skinny bassist was commenting as he plugged his Fender Jazzman into a monolithic rig of speakers and power gear.
“Yeah, you could say that.” Parker was tapping his finger on the pick guard of his dented Gibson S-G, gazing around the moldering cellar, feeling the shriveled, malignant spirit of his father in the crumbling walls, the moist stone floor, the barnacled, exposed piping overhead. A few minutes ago, Angela had unfurled a tattered Oriental rug and placed a few shaded lamps here and there in a feeble attempt to cheer the place up, but the resulting effect had been akin to putting ribbons in a corpse’s hair.
“Try it again, Park,” Angela urged, popping a rim-shot.
Parker made sure the volume was eased back, and then plugged the cable back into the jack.
The sound leapt out at him, enormous, wet, surging waves like a monstrous heart monitor, vibrating Parker’s teeth, eldritch overtones reverberating painfully in his mid-brain.
“FUCK—! Take it out!” Angela’s angry cry was drowned by the sound, and Parker wouldn’t have heard her anyway; he was becoming transfixed, feeling compelled to reach out to the speaker grill, feel the shape of the sound, taste it’s spoor.
“Parker — for Chrissake!”
Parker touched the speaker.
The sound flowed into him.
Then, several things happened at once, the impossible colors pouring into Parker’s mind, the sensations of levitating out of his Doc Martens, the neuro-chemical smell of darkness, abyssal darkness, death and decay, and a vast cruel field of pain, and the sudden bracing pinch of Tim’s vice-grip on Parker’s shoulder, yanking him back, yanking him back to planet earth, back to the final cork-pop halting of the hideous feedback.
Parker fell on his ass.
The silence crashed like a mortar blast.
“Jesus Christ, what the fuck is going on?” Angela was agape behind the drum kit.
“I don’t —”
Parker froze.
Glancing down at the guitar, he noticed his capo was misaligned on one of the frets. A tiny band of metal with an elastic strap, the capo was meant to automatically raise a guitar’s key; but Parker’s capo was half-way between the 2nd and 3rd frets, producing a sour, esoteric open note, a note tha
t was evidently conjuring the hellish feedback— the squealing, sputtering noise resulting from an instrument or microphone being too close to its own speaker. But this was feedback like none other. This was feedback from another dimension. And worse, Parker saw something else at that moment that made his scalp crawl, and he was starting to say something about it when the bass player barked angrily at his band mates.
“Fuck sake, kids —! We gonna play or not!?”
“Yeah, uh, right,” Parker stammered.
“Let’s do it,” Angela nodded, and then counted off the first jam of the evening — one, two, three, four —
They launched into a jack-hammer riff.
The tommy-gun drums cracked the air open, bouncing off stone, and it was good, finally it was good, and it was loud, and Parker started sawing power chords, fast and hard, and trying to forget, trying to clear his mind.
But it was no use. Not even the wall of sound could distract Parker from the terrible realization that his index finger was discolored ever so slightly, discolored and changing at the spot where he had touched the surging sound.
The next night, in the darkness of Cotoaahd Dormitory, Parker dreamt he was a pack horse, a beast of burden, and his dead father was on his back, riding him down a narrow, treacherous trail into an ancient gorge, a vast primordial city spreading out across the dry river bed, pre-Aztec, prehistoric, pre-earthly, with alien Byzantine architecture rising along the fluorescent pink horizon, and the old man’s spurs jabbing into Parker’s ribs, drawing blood, sodomizing him, the blood flowing down Parker’s legs dripping out across the limestone ledges, puddling, droplets forming words on the stone, cryptic, gnostic words, words with horrible, obscene, subtextual portents —
Parker snapped awake with a jerk, slipping off the bottom bunk and landing on the cool floor.
“Fucking faggot,” the voice belched from the top bunk: Flannagan, the thick-necked rugby player. Parker hated the Neanderthal.
“Sorry,” Parker grunted and struggled to his feet. He went into the meager little bathroom, snapped the pull chain and squinted at the glare, his eyes focusing on the face in the mirror. He looked paler than usual, his fair Polish complexion the color of spackling compound, his sandy hair greasy and stringy. The sensation in his hand was worse. The purplish bruise on his fingertip had spread, his metacarpal swelling, tiny filaments of blood blisters snaking up his wrist. He opened the cabinet, found a pair of manicure scissors, and opened them so that the blades were nearly straight across.
Then he went about the business of carving up his hand and arm.
Sid Vicious had done it; Johnny Rotten, Iggy Pop, Kurt Cobain, even that mad man from Providence, GG Allin. They all had mutilated themselves for the sake of art and anarchy. And as Parker made the tiny incisions along the flesh of his knuckles and wrist, he realized he was doing more than flirting with suicide, or playing the role of punk martyr, or decorating his body for rock and roll. He was disguising the changes, disguising the hideous map-like marks that were radiating out from the point at which his finger had come into contact with the squealing feedback.
He finished the mutilation, mopped up the excess blood, cleaned himself, and went back into the dark dorm room. He got dressed and left in a hurry, slamming the door loud enough to wake the Neanderthal.
He crept across the dark campus like a restless ghost, past the Pickman laboratory, past the medieval spires of Hoyt tower, and past the rows of diseased oaks, their branches shivering in the night breezes like palsied elders. The air was heavy with river smells, mixed with the burnt-fuse metallic tang of Pickman’s vent stacks. Parker arrived at Lapham Hall at precisely 1:00 A.M., and he used a skeleton key that he had stolen from his father years earlier to get inside the service door.
The inner corridor was as dark and silent as a morgue.
Parker slipped through the janitor’s closet and descended the cellar steps on sheer memory. It was pitch dark, but Parker knew every knot hole, every creak, every warp. Heironymous had taken young Parker down here numerous times for punishments, for certain unmentionable lessons, for secret hideous intimacies. And when Parker reached the base of the steps, he knew precisely where to reach for the light switch.
The light bloomed yellow, illuminating the dungeon.
Their equipment was just as they had left it. The drum kit was overturned from one of Angela’s patented musical tantrums. The bass stack was shoved against the scabrous, porcine boiler. And Parker’s rig was still in the far corner, covered with empty beer bottles and overflowing ash trays.
The amplifier’s light was on.
Parker’s mouth went dry, not only because he distinctly remembered turning the amp off, but also because he knew the amp was on as an invitation meant only for him. “I’m coming,” Parker murmured without even knowing that he had made a sound, and he went over and kneeled before the Marshall like a supplicant, his newly scarred arm prickling hotly, burning with the change. He turned the volume dial to ten and plugged in the guitar and slammed his fist down on the capo.
The sound was immense, and the sound was irresistible.
Parker pressed his nose to the speaker.
Backstage in the assembly hall at Campbell Student Center was like a Chinese fire drill. Techies were shuffling road cases through fog banks of Marlboro haze and patchouli oil, while 60-cycle noise hummed incessantly.
“What the fuck is the deal with Parker?” Angela was crouched by her kick drum, futzing with the hardware, resting her skinny derriere on the upturned heels of her Timberland boot.
They were about to kick off an opening set for some cockamamie benefit organized by Miskatonic’s Coalition for the Study of Paranormal Phenomena, and Angela had had just about enough of Parker’s crap. It had been nearly two weeks since the morose guitarist had tapped into the feedback routine, and each day he seemed to be veering closer and closer to bug-fuck city. Angela was getting tired of accompanying nothing but arrhythmic waves of dissonant feedback.
“Just ignore it,” Tim muttered absently, staring down at his tuner, tweaking his E-string. “It’s just some Eddie Vedder thing he’s going through — it’ll pass.”
“What’s with the fucking war paint?” Angela took a seat behind the tom toms.
“Those are tattoos, darling.”
“Get outta here!”
“I’m serious; brand new ones,” Tim nodded, rolling his eyes, and he was about to say something else, but stopped himself when he saw Parker pushing his way through the tattered stage curtains beyond the PA stack. “Here comes the illustrated man now.”
Parker swished through the black duvoteen and scooped up his guitar. In the low magenta load-in light Parker resembled a punkified Cleopatra. Face filigreed with purplish water marks, neck and arms etched in Byzantine vectors that vanished down the sleeves of his Butthole Surfers t-shirt, Parker was a walking canvas. His eyes were blood-shot and hot, and his expression was oddly beatific.
He was in a major zone.
Parker plugged in his guitar and glanced up at Tim. “We’re going to make the walls bleed tonight,” the young guitarist intoned, his eyes milky as he focused on a place far outside the Arkham area code.
“How ‘bout some actual tunes?” Angela was standing behind the kit, hands on her hips.
“Yeah,” Parker smiled drunkenly.
Tim and Angela exchanged a glance.
Five minutes later, the stage lights flamed on.
The crowd howled.
Parker pegged his dials and began assaulting the Gibson six-string, lashing Townsend windmills across the fat-wound strings, the amplifiers peaking, and the sound erupting. It came off the stage like a tsunami. Crashed against the scattered audience of slackers, grad-students, and townies. It was palpable. It was bright magnesium blue and day glo pink, and it weedled into auditory canals and infected nervous systems. It was so loud, it was positively viral.
The display went on for a little under thirty minutes. Toward the end, Parker was the only musici
an left on stage, stoking the inferno of feedback like a zealous Maori warrior oblivious to the dwindling audience, or the fact that his band had already disbanded, or the fact that his capo had fused to the neck of his guitar in its strange, tilted position, doomed to forever conjure the mysterious nether-key.
A couple of junior rent-a-cops from Miskatonic’s Department of Public Safety had to ultimately pull the plug and wrestle Parker off the stage. The struggle got a little ugly, too, with Parker spitting and spewing inarticulate threats — polysyllabic epithets that sounded to the DPS guys like the ravings of a lunatic Gihad terrorist. Unfortunately the cops were too busy barking and cursing and shoving Parker out the loading dock door to see the subtle physical manifestations, the changes, the way the tattoos were incubating, teeming across the last square inches of unmarked skin on Parkers shoulders, neck and back. And more importantly, the rent-a-cops were too distracted to notice that the tattoos were not tattoos at all.
They were messages, blood-blister scrawl originating under Parker’s skin.
“I don’t care about Parker anymore,” Angela announced as she strode across the matrix of sidewalks crisscrossing the quad. It was an overcast afternoon, and the day was fast succumbing to the dank New England twilight. Angela cradled a stack of anthropology texts across her boyish chest.
“C’mon, Angie,” Tim ambled alongside her as only Tim could amble, like a gangly stick figure with dry rot. “He’s on some kind of freaky metaphysical-Jim Morrison-schizo-altered-states trip, man, and I’m scared for him.”
“Let it go, Timothy.”
“No, Angie, listen, I’m serious, it’s not the band. Fuck the band. It’s that fucking practice space.”
Angela paused and looked at her friend. “The practice space?”
“Yeah,” Tim looked off across the horizon, across ancient sky so laden with secrets it seemed to slump. “This fuckin’ place, man, sometimes it gets so fuckin’ weird around here I can’t even tell what’s what.”
The Sleep Police Page 28