FAREWELL GHOST

by Larry Caldwell

  Karney shook his head, a genuine sadness seeming to pass through him. “She closed her eyes, waited for my deathblow. It never came. I let her OD and The Man didn’t call me on it. I never saw him again anyway. Just his… representatives.”

  Clay’s eyes dropped to the gun lighter, Karney’s finger fiddling with the trigger. If he and Savy were going to get out alive, they would need to think of something fast.

  “Like everyone, I wanted to know that feeling all the best songs talked about,” Karney went on. “And yet, when I witnessed genuine love between Rocco and Deidre, I knew I’d never have it. I’d ruined it for them—ruined it for myself. It was the price I had to pay.” Karney gave a self-pitying sigh and cast his bloodshot eyes at the ceiling. “Rocco was dead-on about one thing: The fate I doomed him to would one day be my own. It’s always haunted me. Even on stage. I’d stare at all those bobbing heads and wonder who out there would come to unseat me.” He leveled his stare on Savy. “If you were smarter, you’d have gotten me in my sleep.”

  “The Man didn’t send us,” Clay pleaded. “We’re not here to hurt you.”

  “You’re a lousy fucking liar,” Karney shot back. “You never once, huk!, questioned what was happening in that video. You knew the whole story before you walked into my house.”

  “Everyone knows the conspiracies, man. We’re just a couple of no-names who played our first gig last night.”

  “Right. And you happened to play it opening for my band. And you happened to blow us off-the-fuck-king stage. With your—huk-huk-huk!—first gig. Then I get a call from my idiot drummer, saying you’re beating the bushes for me. No, that doesn’t sound like doom knocking.”

  Savy pulled free of Clay’s hold and took a step toward Karney, palms held out. “Let us prove you wrong, Davis. We’ll walk out of here and you’ll never see us again.”

  Karney lit the gun and held the flame close to his face, so that fiery shadows danced across his nose. “I’m offended The Man couldn’t be bothered to attend my own demise,” he said. “Guess he’s disappointed in me. My record sales are dipping. I never could fill Rocco’s shoes.”

  “Don’t do it,” Savy told him. “This isn’t how you want your story to end.”

  He looked at her, the flame quivering in his hand. “But I’m not doing this for me,” he grunted. “I’m doing it for you. ’Cause you know jack shit about the deal you’re making. About killing for it, getting pissed on for it. Living with it. It’s better this way, honey.”

  The hairs on Clay’s neck lifted. Karney had made up his mind. No words were going to penetrate his resolve. They were going to die here. “This is a mistake,” he whispered anyway.

  “No, you fucking amateur!” Karney screamed. “Huk-huk-huk-huk! This is how you make an exit!”

  “Savy, get back!”

  Karney touched the lighter to his chin and there was an audible whoosh! as flames ran up both sides of his face and ignited in his hair. Karney leapt from his recliner as if shot from a catapult, batting his pajamas, slapping at his flesh, self-preservation overriding delusion. Jumping and shrieking and coughing—and at the same time gathering oxygen for the flames.

  Clay shoved Savy at the door and she went stumbling across the kerosene-slick floor. Clay took a running step after her and slipped and went to his knees. Turning, he watched, helplessly, as the flames raced into Karney’s open mouth and down his throat, scorching the shriek away until there was nothing left but the shrill hiss of burning larynx. He won’t be singing a high note again, Clay thought wildly. And the stink was so atrocious even the incense could not contain it. Clay fought to hold his stomach down.

  Then the dancing man-sized flame fell back against the wall, and the wall, soaked in kerosene, ignited and spread fire into the central air ducts and down along the floor molding—racing shockingly quick around the room to block the single exit.

  “Run! Run!” Savy was screaming, and Clay gained his feet and sprinted, in horribly slow slow-motion. He arrived at the door too late. The kerosene caught around his feet and he yelped and jumped and rolled into the hall as Savy slammed the door shut.

  Shouting, moaning, Clay pounded at the fire melting the soles of his boots. Savy shouldered her way into the recording booth and returned with someone’s jeans jacket, swatting at his feet until the flames were out. The smell of scorched rubber and denim temporarily covered the stench of Karney on fire. “We can’t stop, Clay!”

  The door to the lounge—all that stood between them and the growing conflagration—was already smoking around its edges. Clay struggled to stand, his boots lighter, sticky under him; he stamped gooey rubber prints across the studio, but his legs kept him upright. Savy slammed into a ride cymbal, sending it crashing to the floor, and Clay tripped over it and almost went down again. Reaching the outer door, Savy grabbed for the knob and Clay dove out to swat her hand away. “Wait! Check if it’s hot!”

  She did, touching the knob and the wood simultaneously, shaking her head to indicate that both were cool. But as she twisted the knob, Clay felt a despairing certainty that it would hold, that Kiss Kiss, or someone else, had locked them in to ensure their demise.

  Only the door did open, and Savy and Clay found themselves fleeing into the sunshine pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows. In the back yard an Olympic-size pool shimmered brilliant blue, indifferent to the heat and smoke building in the house.

  “Has to be a way out there,” Clay yelled, and they hurried from room to room, finding an office, a gym, a makeshift wine cellar, storage closets. But no exterior door. And it was a wonder houses this big weren’t required to post exit signs—they were death traps for people who didn’t know their way around. For people like us.

  “Fuck this Lloyd Wright shit,” Savy shouted. “We need to climb.”

  “Davis?” Kiss Kiss was calling down, clueless. “Shit, Davis, the house is on fire!”

  Clay pounded up the staircase to the next level, Savy matching him step for step. Somewhere Queensrÿche’s “Eyes of a Stranger” was playing at killing volume, and locked to the beat were Kiss Kiss’s oncoming steps, the bombshell hurrying down the hall in a loose-fitting robe, her hair dripping. “What the fuck?”

  “We need to get out right now,” Clay told her. “Show us where.”

  “Where’s Davis?”

  “I wouldn’t go looking for him,” Savy said.

  “Did I ask your advice?” Something caught Kiss Kiss’s eye and her head tilted toward the ceiling. Clay noticed it at the same time: Smoke drifting from the air vent. And the smoke detector next to it was cracked open, its batteries conspicuously absent. Kiss Kiss blinked at Clay, her lips drawing back as she backpedaled. “You’re the ones he was scared about.”

  “No,” Clay said, “Davis started the fire. He made a mistake.” Except Kiss Kiss was already turning, her wet hair bouncing as she took off down the hall.

  “Follow her!” Savy shouted. “She’ll know the quickest way out.”

  “Stay the fuck away from me!” Kiss Kiss shouted.

  “Wait!” Clay shouted, pursuing her. Kiss Kiss reached the door at the end of the hall and threw it open. “Don’t!” Clay screamed.

  It was over in a second. Kiss Kiss was still flinching away from the scalding knob when the flames exploded through the opening. Bathing her body in fire.

  “Fuck!” Savy cried.

  Clay skidded to a stop on his half-melted boots and retreated as far as the staircase, before a blood-curdling shriek halted him. “Helllllllp! Meeeeeee!”

  And Clay looked frantically for a blanket, a curtain, something to smother the flames. “Drop and roll!” he yelled, and Kiss Kiss locked on to his voice. Ran right for him. A five-and-a-half foot tower of flame. Clay froze, watching her come, marveling at how the silicone in her breasts burned with a raging blue flame. “Helllllllllll!” she shrieked.

  I agree. Hell is very low.

  Just before the flames reached him, Savy flung a chair into Kiss Kiss’s path and K
arney’s girlfriend stumbled sideways, collided hard with the banister, spun, pitched headlong down the staircase, and made terrible thunder slamming off risers and balusters. Clunk-Clunk-clunkclunkclunk!

  Kiss Kiss ended up curled at the bottom, her body twisted and her head screwed around, so that her chin was resting between her shoulder blades. Eyes staring up at them. Eyes on fire.

  Clay was helpless in that moment to think of his mother, unable to rip his gaze from the fallen body, the sizzling face, the flayed scalp, the eyes devolving into ocular pools that looked like melted wax. When her mouth moved, Clay gasped and his hands tugged at his own hair in horror. One foot started down the stairs.

  Savy snatched him by the back of his shirt. “No!”

  “Still alive,” he cried. “Still alive!”

  “She’s not. We are, Clay. But not un-fucking-less we move!”

  The chorus of “Eyes of a Stranger” grew warped and abruptly cut out as the fire ate its way into the unseen speakers. The flames were close now, climbing the house faster than they could, the heat stifling. Everywhere wood and plastic seemed to crackle and hiss. Clay turned from Kiss Kiss and blundered down the long hall to the third-floor staircase. The air was already choked with smoke and Clay had composure enough to reach out and drag Savy to the floor. “Stay low. Keep your mouth covered.”

  Their shirts pulled over their noses, they crawled along on hands and knees. The smoke stung Clay’s eyes, slowed his breathing, dulled the importance of the messages darting between his brain and body. Just ahead was Savy’s ass and scrambling boots, moving past the Bob’s Big Boy. No exits appeared. All those exterior doors they’d seen on the way in and every one of them had vanished. Finally, Clay grabbed Savy’s foot and motioned toward the nearest room. They crawled in and Clay slammed the door. “Heat rises,” he panted. “We’ll never make it to the top.”

  “What then?” Savy tried to clear her throat. “The window?”

  They hurried to the room’s single portal, stared out at the sunshiny world outside—and the ravine that dropped straight off the edge of the property. “No way,” Clay said. “We’d fall eighty feet before we touched a thing.”

  Savy glanced around the space, a guest bedroom with a king-size bed. “We could tie sheets together, make the drop not so bad.”

  “What would we tie the sheets to?” Clay turned and saw smoke creeping under the door. “We need an exit on the other side of the house.”

  Savy didn’t argue. Holding his breath, Clay led the way back into the hell of the house, scampering low and quick. He tried a door, found it locked, took two shallow breaths inside his shirt, and advanced. Visibility was so bad now that when Clay looked back he could hardly see Savy in the haze. She was crawling slower all of a sudden, and he was afraid if he didn’t keep checking on her, she’d recede into the smoke and be gone forever. At the same time, his own eyes were fighting to close, the haze stabbing small, intensely sharp needles into their soft meat.

  Clay knocked into the suit of armor and almost brought the whole thing down on him. Another door appeared. But Clay could feel the heat on the knob before he even touched it. The fire was taking the house frighteningly fast. Of course. Karney had rigged it that way.

  Behind him Savy was coughing violently. Clay’s own head was pounding. His heart was pumping tar. His guts were tightening. How quickly the end was coming for them. How much it would be like drifting off to sleep. So easy to give in. The next doorway, and whatever lay behind it, was their last chance. Clay crawled back across the hall and inside. Savy slammed the door and lay motionless for a long moment, breathing against the floor.

  Clay slapped himself, then slapped Savy, until she flinched awake again. “Stay with me,” he croaked.

  Then his own eyes rolled up and Savy had to slap him back to life.

  Tearing off his shirt, Clay wrung it up as tightly as he could and shoved it under the door. Only then did he realize they were kneeling on grass. Savy seemed to understand this at the same time and they stared upward, hoping to witness open sky.

  Instead, they saw white ceiling, trisected with heavy beams that held several large hanging lamps. They were in the room Clay had spotted on the way down, the one with the John Deere mower. The grass was real sod that apparently grew under lamp-power—Kentucky bluegrass, or something significant to Davis Karney, because he had selected the space as his trophy room. Grammies, American Music Awards, and other kudos in various shapes and sizes, all of them in stand-alone cases that lifted from the grass like museum displays—or grave markers—in a bucolic meadow. Tour posters and gold and platinum Demons’ records lined the walls, obscured in the gathering smoke.

  Lifting herself, Savy stumbled to the trio of windows—each boasting a Karney and the Demons album cover in stained glass—and her fist knocked against one to gauge their thickness. “Break through,” she said, and they searched the room for an object heavy enough. The Grammy would have sufficed, but its case was locked down, like all the trophies. The records, however, came off the wall without the slightest resistance and Savy snatched a platinum one from Hurricane Candy, lifted it over her head, and hurled it, frame and all, at the stained glass of the corresponding album cover.

  The window held.

  Clay picked the record up and threw it again.

  This time there was a crash, but only from the glass in the record frame. I made the windows extra thick, Clay imagined Karney telling them. You can’t do it. Accept it, huk-huk-huk!You’re dead already, fucker. “Fuck you!” Clay shouted back. “You’re dead too!”

  Savy didn’t bother making sense of the outburst. She forced the record out of the frame and flung its platinum circle like a Frisbee. When that didn’t work, she used the record to hammer at the window with everything she had left. In other contexts it would have made a hilarious visual, but now it was another sign of the rope closing around their own throats. Her blood didn’t have the oxygen to maintain such a violent pace, but Savy willed herself. Desperate.

  Above them something, the roof maybe, crashed inward with a concussive boom.

  The room was filling with smoke. Savy screamed in frustration. They were going to die here. Never again would they hear another song, play another song. With an anguished moan, Clay grabbed for the record and together he and Savy rammed it into the glass with all their anger and hope and fleeting will to live.

  And they broke a pane low on the window. A single triangular shard fell loose.

  A moment passed. Then all the glass above it let go with a massive shattering crash. Clay pulled Savy away from the raining fragments, feeling one nick the back of his neck. He grabbed the discarded record frame and used it to clear the jagged pieces sticking from the window.

  Smoke wafted in through the new opening from a fire below, sandwiching them. “Ughhh,” Savy coughed and retreated. Clay fought his way forward, shoved his head into the cold air outside, trying desperately to find the ground beneath them, if there was any ground beneath them. All he got for his efforts was a lung and eye full of black smoke and he gagged hard and fell away and might have passed out then and there if not for Savy digging her nails into his arm. With her puffed, mostly shut eyes, she looked exhausted and frightened. Their time was up and they both knew it. Clay used the last of his air to tell her what she already knew: “Have to.”

  Savy nodded and forced herself back to the opening. Clay helped her perch on the sill, coughing, hacking, drowning in smoke and withering heat. She gave his hand a last sorrowful squeeze and, like that, was gone from the window.

  Clay’s legs and arms shook from the lack of oxygen. A breeze blew outside and for a moment the smoke cleared. Clay didn’t bother finding the ground. If it had gone badly for Savy, if she’d broken her neck, Clay didn’t want his last earthly vision to be the corpse of the girl he loved tumbling into the depths of the canyon. He swung his legs over the window and one single thought floated there in his mind—Pleeeeease!—as he threw himself forward and free.

>   16

  CASTLE OF GLASS

  They didn’t know where Savy was. Only that she was late for the Echoplex gig—and Savy was never late. Clay had no explanation for Fiasco or Spider, didn’t know how to start if he tried. Well, you see, she and I watched Davis Karney commit an act of self-immolation. He rigged his whole house to go up. Seriously, we had to smash his windows and jump without knowing how far the fall was. It felt like we were dropping forever—and then the ground was just there, and our asses were tumbling down the side of a ravine, down, down until the scrub caught us. And I just wanted to lay there, stare right into the sun and feel life again. Because we were dead in that house, see, as dead as you’d ever want to be. But there were sirens going down in Hollywood and that got us moving, even if we were collapse-on-your-face tired. We helped each other along a coyote path back toward the burning house. Only, to get on the property where there was no fence, we had to scale the steepest part of the hill. A real bitch, but easier than escaping certain death—just about everything is, right? Well, we made it as far as my Jeep before the back half of the mansion collapsed into the canyon. I had us through the front gate and halfway down Rising Moon before we ran into the fire trucks. Had to swerve into a driveway to avoid a head-on. Seriously, who designed those streets? A bobsled team? Imagine surviving all that madness, only to get flattened by the rescue party. Lucky for us, no one in those trucks even looked our way. We were just part of the caravan of neighbors getting the fuck out of Dodge. So we made it down to Sunset and didn’t stop till we got here to The Knickerbocker—and honestly, fellas, I haven’t seen Savy since she left the hotel.

  Not going to a hospital had been her idea. Sitting in Sunset traffic, slowed all the more by the sight of engines and ladder trucks racing in from all directions and the apocalyptic pillar of smoke roiling up from one of Hollywood’s trendiest hills, Clay’s adrenaline had plummeted and his head pounded like a kick drum. Beside him, Savy looked like she’d been shot out of a cannon, her face dirty and her clothing lacerated, her hair afoul with branches and creosote leaves. Filthy and bare-chested, Clay had suggested they make for Cedars-Sinai, come clean about where they’d been, but Savy killed the idea on the spot. “Take a left here. Don’t argue.”