FAREWELL GHOST

by Larry Caldwell

  Don’t do it! Clay almost shouted at the screen. It’s a fake gun, don’t give in!

  Except it would have been as useless as yelling at the teenage girl in the slasher movie, the plot preordained, the scene shot long ago, and there was simply no altering what was about to happen.

  Boyle stroked Deidre’s jet-black hair, comforting her, and at the same time, encouraging her to sit. Positioning himself between her and the gun, Boyle sat too. The room was deathly quiet as he unzipped the bag. Everyone had forgotten about the camera running across the room. Or maybe Boyle only hoped Karney wouldn’t see it. Deidre folded her arms over her breasts, shuddering visibly. Her face was miserable at the sight of the two syringes. “Finest China White in the west,” Karney promised them. “I’ve already prepared it. All you gotta do is tie on and poke.”

  Boyle wrapped the rubber tourniquet angrily around his bicep, then the other around Deidre’s. “Forcin’ us to do it doesn’t change who we are,” he growled. That was the extent of his protest though. The candlelight was showing something else on his face—another Boyle fighting his way up from the murk, the one who had leered out of photos from the time he was cutting the Watch It Burn! and All Goes Dark albums, the junkie fiend who’d always been there.

  Sinking the needle into his unmarked flesh, Boyle pressed down on the plunger to draw the smack into his arm. A burst of blood appeared in the barrel of the syringe, and his fist opened and closed as the drug flowed swiftly through his veins. Then he shut his eyes, loosened the tourniquet, and dropped his head against the couch.

  Beside him, Deidre watched Boyle fall into his haze and she started to cry. Her hair hung around her face; her fists shook with rage. She fumbled the syringe, stuck herself at the bend in her elbow, missed the vein. She cursed, withdrew; tried again and failed, unable to strike the sweet spot. Until Boyle reached over and inserted the needle himself, knowing her veins as well as his own. The next morning—Clay recalled from the news reports—investigators would observe the puncture wounds on Deidre’s arm and attribute them to her desperation for a fix.

  As she fell into a stupor, her ribs moved slowly up and down. She rested her head on Boyle’s collarbone. “Happy now?” Boyle groaned.

  “Not at all,” Karney told him. “This is only half of what I’m expected to do.” He dragged a wooden chair into the center of the room and stood upon it. Confused, Boyle and Deidre watched him play with the metal loop that held the chandelier to the ceiling fixture. The crystal adornments clanged musically as Karney unsnapped the loop. And for the first time, Clay realized that the onscreen Karney was wearing latex gloves. “What did this chandelier run you, Roc? Ten, twenty thousand? And you neglect it for a few cheap-ass candles?” Karney heaved the chandelier across the room, where it smashed to pieces in the dark. Then he hopped off the chair and stuck a coldblooded smile into the faces of his captives. “You both just injected heroin cut with fentanyl. Gray Death. Things will start going very badly for you now.”

  Boyle fought himself out of his slouch. His typically muscular body looked flabby and useless. “Have you lost your goddamn mind? Why would you kill me if you want my business?”

  “I don’t want your business. I quit selling dope the day you swore it off. It’s on to bigger, better things, Roc.”

  Boyle was perched on the edge of the couch, his face a blank. “This is good product,” he said. “I forgot how focused it makes you. Like, right now, I can distill the entire universe down to your sneakers. Look at that shitty knot you tied in them. It tells me you were nervous, worried things would go south during whatever game you’re playin’. And your eyes? What they’re sayin’—”

  Boyle bolted upward, knocking the smaller man back, and at the same time snatching Karney’s arm and wrenching the gun away. Deidre gave a triumphant cry and staggered to her feet. “Wait, wait,” Karney said, but Boyle was done playing. His finger found the trigger and he fired point-blank into Karney’s face.

  When the tiny flame emerged, Boyle expelled his breath and Karney, despite having lost control, laughed heartily.

  And that was when the fire at the end of the gun erupted in a six-foot tower of flame. The candles on the tables around them did the same. And suddenly the room was filled with pillars of fire, as if someone had shot several streams of lighter fluid vertically at the ceiling. A moment later the gun went out and the candles regressed to tiny pricks of light—but not before Clay spotted the hunkering, solitary figure in the far corner of the room.

  Savy saw it too. “Someone else is there,” she gasped, bringing Clay back to the present.

  Vaguely Clay was aware that he and Savy were holding each other, like Hansel and Gretel in the witch’s house. “And those candles. What just happened to them?”

  Karney rocked anxiously in his recliner. “Here comes The Man.”

  It seemed Boyle had caught sight of his other guest too, and in the reinstated shadows, the heroin numbness deserted him and he was cold-sober again. “I should have known.”

  “Yes, you should have,” a voice boomed back. And it sounded like a sudden, unexpected crash of thunder. A bloodthirsty narrator, full of conviction. Even Boyle’s famous growl paled in comparison. “You should have honored our agreement.”

  Frightened as he was, Boyle made no move to run. It was unclear whether the figure in the corner was armed—although it seemed the voice was plenty enough to paralyze anyone. “I gave you fame when you were no one. I bestowed everything, when you had nothing. I asked for so little—and you insist on treachery.”

  “Baby?” Deidre asked, cringing from the thunder boom. “Who is that?”

  “That’s The Hailmaker,” Karney told her. “The Man.”

  “You’ve made millions off me,” Boyle told the darkness. “And you promised I could leave when I wanted. Well, I wanted.”

  “Leaving me meant leaving the stage too. You knew that, but you couldn’t help yourself. Now you betray my kindness with your songs of”—the voice spit the word out like the vilest clump of phlegm—“hope!”

  “I sold so many records ’cause I’ve always been honest in my songs. Those dark, early hits were how I felt then; this is how I feel now. I see the world clearly. I see the fight we’re all in. Find someone else to spew your hate.”

  “No,” the voice boomed on. “There is no replacing you, Rocco Boyle. Your kind comes once in a mortal generation. Either you deliver what’s expected or you lose everything tonight.”

  Boyle didn’t flinch; he stood tall, as if he’d known this night was coming for a long, long time. “You already knew my answer. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have sent Rooster to murder me.”

  The figure’s laughter thundered from the darkness, so intensely loud it made the camera mic vibrate—and in turn, Karney’s surround sound. “No one’s here to murder you. That, you’ll do yourself.”

  Something flew into the candle glow, striking Karney/Rooster in the chest. The dealer gasped and fell back a step. He lifted the thing that had fallen at his feet—a length of rope with a hangman’s noose looped on one end.

  With a glance toward the unseen figure, Karney remounted the chair and fastened the rope to the chain dangling from the chandelier fixture.

  “You owe me,” the voice decided. “And you’ll repay your debt—to save her. There’s time. Do as you’re told and she might live on.”

  By then, the drugs had taken noticeable effect on Deidre. Her breathing was labored and she had collapsed onto the arm of the couch. Boyle turned to her, and though the camera revealed only half his face, his decision was obvious. “No,” Deidre cried. “Run, baby. Let them have me. You’re the important one.”

  “It wasn’t you who made the deal. Get to the house, call an ambulance.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “Deidre, don’t let me die thinkin’ I killed you too. Please.”

  “No, goddammit, I won’t leave!” She swung around to Karney, murder in her voice: “And you—you can suck The Man’s dick!”


  And Clay saw her lipstick writing on Peter’s wall, a taunt he hadn’t yet understood.

  Then Deidre was yelping at the pain in her scalp as Boyle grabbed a fistful of her hair. Her arms slapped madly at his guiding wrist. “I told you to get out!” he growled, dragging her toward the door. “Get the fuck out and don’t come back. For once in your life, listen to me!”

  They wrestled in the shadows—in eerily the same fashion as at the start of the video. They fought all the way to the threshold before Deidre’s knees gave out. “I’m dead anyway, baby,” she groaned. “My legs can barely go. Let them do to me what they’re going to do to you.”

  “Crawl if you’ve got to,” Boyle begged her, “but get to a phone and call for help!”

  Deidre mumbled something in reply, something hopeless and heartbroken, before Boyle kissed her on the mouth and pushed her from the Generator, slamming the door between them.

  “Mortal love,” the voice mocked. “So foolish and fleeting.”

  Boyle returned to the circle of candles, to where Karney waited with his arms crossed. “You’re afraid of it,” Boyle shot back. “Love’s the one thing you have no power over.”

  “It’s turned so many men to my favor,” the voice replied.

  Boyle stared up at the dangling noose. “Alright. Enough mind-fuckery. I signed the Hailmaker’s contract. I understand the Hailmaker’s price. But I won’t make the kind of empty, soul-gouging music you want me to. So let’s move it the fuck along.”

  He stepped onto the chair and drew the rope around his neck like an act of defiance. “Get the hell out, Rooster. He doesn’t need your help with this part, believe me.”

  Karney nevertheless reached up and tightened the noose around Boyle’s throat. “I have to,” he confessed. “He won’t give me what I want till I give him what he wants.”

  Boyle spit in Karney’s face, spattering his eyes in a buckshot of saliva. “He came to me when I was broke and homeless and offered the whole world. See how it ends. Sooner or later the same’ll happen to you.”

  “Maybe,” Karney said. “But I’d rather my life be short and famous than long and worthless. Besides—you’re wrong. You weren’t telling the truth on The Disharmonic. You sound like an asshole, singing a lot of asshole nonsense. There’s no point giving the world hope. The only honesty is the brutal kind. If you can’t accept that, step off the chair, make it easy on everyone.”

  “Fuck you. Kick it out.”

  “Don’t you want to save Deidre? Step off the chair, you high-horse prick.”

  “No. Murder me. See if you can live with yourself if…”

  Boyle trailed off as the figure, The Hailmaker, The Man, drew into the candlelight.

  Clay leaned closer to the screen, unable to see its eyes, only a mane of salt-and-pepper hair and the side profile of a large face that didn’t match proportionally with its drastically thin body. A suit hung on its frame like it might have on bare branches, leaving the unsettling impression that there was nothing beneath the cloth but the barest bric-a-brac of anatomy.

  And Clay knew who this was. Oh, yes. The evidence wasn’t there onscreen, but rather in a certain contortion of his gut, in a fear he had felt only one other time in his life. Despite the change in gender, Clay had met this terrible creature before. In Philadelphia. He observed its long spindly fingers, the very ones that had caressed him under the door—Claaaaaaay Haaarrrrper—and he shivered hard against Savy.

  Onscreen the figure’s shadow fell over Boyle’s face like a death cowl.

  A profound silence presided over both rooms—the kerosene-soaked one Clay and Savy were trapped in and the Generator on that terrible night years before.

  “This will only make me a martyr,” Boyle assured him. “My music will live on.”

  “Even rock-n-roll doesn’t last forever,” The Hailmaker mocked. “In your world, a bad death is a dime a dozen.”

  Boyle spit at the figure, sneering at the bull’s-eye he scored. Except The Hailmaker only wiped it off with a bony finger and flung the glob effortlessly back into Boyle’s face. “You hold love in such high regard—but it’s anger that drives your soul.” The figure moved closer, indifferent to the height advantage of Boyle on the chair. “For instance, what do you feel more strongly when I tell you that, after you die, I’m going to send Rooster to bash your lady’s brain in? Is it love for her or anger at me?”

  Anger blossomed on Boyle’s features, proving the point. Though there was something else in his eyes too, a sadness as naked as his own flesh. “Both,” Boyle retorted stubbornly. “Both at once. Our souls run deeper than you give us credit for.” He stared back at the unseen face without blinking, without flinching, without fearing. “She’s got nothing to do with us. You gave me your word she’d go free.”

  “My word, yes,” the figure said. “As you did.”

  And what happened next happened fast. The Hailmaker must have kicked the chair because it flew out from under Boyle and went soaring at the camera, one whirling leg missing the lens by inches, or less.

  Boyle’s body dropped and the force of the noose snagging his weight should have been enough to tear the fixture from the ceiling. Except the fixture held and Boyle writhed, his hands flailing at the rope, legs thrashing just above the floor. His throat made an awful gagging moan. His neck stretched. His entire body stretched.

  A world away, Savy buried her face in Clay’s collar.

  “Is love what you feel now?” The Hailmaker mocked. “Is it glorious, Rocco Boyle?”

  “I don’t really have to kill Deidre, do I?” Karney/Rooster said.

  The Hailmaker pressed his fingers to one of the candlewicks, leaving a thin jet of rising smoke. “It doesn’t seem like you’ve snuffed him yet, does it?”

  Indeed Boyle was fighting strangulation with everything he had, lifting both hands over his head and tugging at the rope to bring the fixture down. When this failed, he managed to lift himself enough to breathe in short, choked gasps.

  The Hailmaker applauded the effort. “See? He’s able to do that not out of love, but fury. If he gets loose now, he’ll tear you to tiny pieces.” The fingers doused a second candle, indifferent to the scorch of the flame. “Before that happens, you’ll want to help him along.”

  “Can’t we let him get tired? He can’t resist forever.”

  “You’re beginning to bore me,” The Hailmaker told him.

  Karney lifted his hands. “I’ll torch the property, alright? They’ll both die and—”

  “If you want his life, take it, you little fucking pussy. Kill for it! Make it yours!”

  Karney’s face was whiter than ever, but he gathered his courage and moved to Boyle’s flailing body. And he seemed to hesitate forever. The figure went about his business, and for the briefest of moments before he—she, it—snuffed the third candle, Clay saw the face clearly. Savy was still burrowed in his shirt, but she felt the sharpness of Clay’s inhalation as he witnessed the impossibly wide mouth, the bulging forehead, the harsh bone structure. The Hailmaker had the features of an eight-foot giant, even if the body it was perched on was scarcely six feet tall. It took less than a second for the flame that revealed the face to be snuffed, but the sight left a permanent mark in the ever-softening pavement of Clay’s psyche.

  “Don’t look anymore,” Savy whispered. “Whatever it is, don’t—”

  “Rocco’s losing his grip,” Clay told her.

  The desperation on Boyle’s face was fading toward a grim acceptance, even a desire, for death to do its work. One hand lost hold of the rope, then the other, finger by slow guitar-strong finger. Until he finally fell, and his gagging and writhing started again.

  Davis Karney managed to capture the kicking legs, just as Boyle’s bladder released, showering him in urine. “Do it!” The Hailmaker boomed. “Do it or lose everything you’ve asked for!”

  And Clay wanted to heed Savy’s advice, wanted to shut his eyes against what was coming, but he was as helpless to stare at
the television as Savy was to stare at him, watching—he would later believe—Boyle’s final moments reflected in Clay’s own glassy eyes.

  Karney jerked Boyle down with all his weight, just as the last candle went out.

  And in the sudden darkness there was a sickeningly sharp crack.

  Then, nothing, save for Karney/Rooster’s sobbing in the dark, and that overpowering voice one last time: “Good. Good boy. Now go and bash the girl’s brain in.”

  15

  SLEEP NOW IN THE FIRE

  Karney killed the video and the television reverted to blue screen, lighting Clay and Savy in its stricken glow. “Not much else to see or hear,” he informed them, and coughed. “Huk! Just the creak of Rocco swinging back and forth, and me coming to collect the camera later on. You never hear The Man leave. Not a peep. I’ve listened. Huk!”

  “The Man,” Clay repeated. Like Karney, his voice was scrubbed raw, little more than a croak. “How did you meet him?”

  “Hard to say. One day he was just there with his offer.” Karney snorted and shifted in his chair, the leather squealing wetly with kerosene. “Let’s state the obvious though: He’s no man.”

  “You killed them,” Savy grunted. And the hatred on her face worried Clay. He seized her wrist, afraid she would rush Karney where he sat. “Rocco, then Deidre.”

  “The Man sent me into the house, yes. I had a hammer in my sweatshirt that could’ve smashed her skull like an egg. Huk-huk-huk! But I didn’t. Deidre was still alive when I got to her. With the drugs, she should’ve been comatose on the back lawn, but that girl had crawled inside, dumped out her pocketbook—looking for her cell, I guess—then she made it all the way upstairs. She was in the bedroom, lifting the landline when I took it from her hand. She asked me, ‘Is he alive?’ And I told her, ‘Yeah. Rocco decided to live. He sent me to kill you instead.’ And do you know what she said? Looked right up at me, Huk!,and said, ‘Thank God. Do it.’”