FAREWELL GHOST

by Larry Caldwell

  Payton grinned. “Some problems are easier to fix than others. Have a seat.”

  The fear pressed into Clay. A lump in his throat. A sudden vertigo in the head. He knew the truth, even before his mind could process it. “No.”

  Payton’s face turned slowly. It reminded Clay of another Halloween, twelve years before, when Tim, their neighbor in Philadelphia, had come over wearing a demon mask with horns and fangs. Tim had staggered up to Clay, groaning demon-like, and Clay had only looked at him with mild curiosity. “Hey, Mr. McIlrath,” he’d said. And Tim told him, “Nooooooo, you’re mistaken. You’re being visited by the Buzzer Bub!” And Clay told him, “Sure, whatever, Mr. McIlrath.” Because even if it was a good mask, and even if Tim’s voice had dropped an octave to become Vincent Price reborn, there had been no mistaking Tim’s eyes under the mask, one hazel, the other blue. Just like there had been no mistaking the beauty under Annie Strafford’s mask, even if some asshole had destroyed it.

  And now Payton’s eyes were telling him something too. “No? What do you mean, no?” the therapist asked. “You’ve got problems, I’ve the solutions.”

  “You’re not Payton,” Clay replied, confident now. And the moment the man’s gaze met his own, Clay felt a pressure against his skull. Like a boulder leaning upon the eggshell of his mind. He glanced away, looking helplessly toward the fishtank.

  All the fish were dead in there, swirling in the filter’s current. All twelve or fifteen of them, a mass of floating, dancing corpses.

  And the thing behind Payton’s face chuckled. “Then who am I? Do tell.”

  It was Payton’s voice, and at the same time, not. From months of hanging with Rocco Boyle, Clay’s ear had grown sensitive to the tone and pitch of just about everything, and he was good enough to know his therapist from a talented imposter.

  His own voice emerged softly, verging on a friendly falsetto, and that frightened Clay too—it was not how he intended to sound. But his words were clear as he told the creature sitting before him, so calm and so friendly: “You’re the devil.”

  Payton’s lips grinned wider, the corners of his mouth stretching. “Boo,” he said.

  And the office door slammed shut on its own.

  He was falling into a La-Z-Boy before he could stop himself. Those eyes were on him, and Clay’s pulse thrummed and his skin crawled and horripilated, and yet he felt terribly removed from his own body. “You’re the Hailmaker,” he heard himself say, almost pleasantly. “The Man.”

  “I’ve been called many things,” Payton’s mouth told him. “Some more clever, some more frightening.”

  “We met once before. Back then there was someone calling you the—”

  “—Queen Bitch. Yes. You were cringing behind a door.” Payton’s lips pursed knowingly. “Memory is my forte, Clay Harper.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  The thing behind Payton’s face hardly had to think about it. “Your voice. Your dexterous hands. Your songwriting. Your determination. Your rage. Your sadness. Your passion. If King Midas had the golden touch, then what you surely have is a genuine touch.” He took a moment to let this sink in, lifting Payton’s brow exactly how Payton would have lifted it.

  Clay’s eyes fled, determined to avoid eye contact. They fell on Payton’s unbuttoned dress shirt, immaculately white, open at the throat, and he tried to gauge if the therapist’s chest was moving. Was this his body, possessed? Or was Payton at home, waylaid in bed, having woken with a mysterious stomach flu? Clay sincerely hoped it was the latter—because it did not seem like the entity before him was drawing air. “And—if I can’t deliver?” Clay willed himself. “You, what, light me on fire?”

  “You mistake my work for yours,” the Hailmaker replied. “Davis Karney did what he had to do to get on top. His first record was okay, wasn’t it? But the follow-ups? Empty pop shit. It’s just the way it is: Some bands prosper; others expire. You and I and all his fans already knew his fate. The upcoming tour was the Demons’ last before they were decommissioned. But I have put many a musician to pasture, and they’ve lived to tell. They paid their debt and may go about their lives with their hot tubs and aging strippers and never do a thing for me again. The point being—there was no need for Davis Karney to resort to histrionics.”

  Clay’s stare dropped to Payton’s desk, his Barbie fallen on her face, dropped dead of fright. In her six-inch vanity mirror, though, the Hailmaker’s features were not Payton’s, but something else—grotesque, elongated, indistinct—evidence that he presented himself one way to the human eye, another through the looking glass of the peephole, the camera lens, a shard of mirror.

  “He was convinced you had execution in mind,” Clay managed. “Since he helped execute Rocco and Deidre for you.”

  “You saw the film? Not quite up to Sundance standards, was it?” The thing laughed Payton’s jovial laugh and the tiny mirror shivered. “When I discovered Rocco Boyle, he was camping on a rooftop. A soul drifting along, waiting to die anonymously. A year later he was touring the world. A year after that he owned the world. And when he passed, The Disharmonic was still number 3 on the charts. Why, then, did he have to be dealt with?”

  Clay closed his eyes and pretended to consider the question. Meanwhile he managed to pull himself up and lean his torso forward in the chair. If he could do that much, he was confident he could stand. If he could stand, he could get his legs moving. If he could get his legs moving, he could bolt for the door. Just six bounding steps and gone—

  Except the Hailmaker’s gaze fell upon him again, and Clay was pressed, gently but insistently, back into the chair.

  “The only thing that changed between The Disharmonic and the other albums was the message,” Clay said, and he still sounded wrong in his own ears, like an imposter of himself. “It went from ‘I’m angry in a hopeless world’ to ‘I fight for the world because there’s hope.’”

  “Indeed. Rocco Boyle violated his contract—by straying from a message that was genuine. He thought he was above reproach. But no one is above reproach.”

  Clay dug his fingers into the chair until his nails screamed, jarring his mind. Again he willed himself to say what he wanted: “The Disharmonic is the most genuine album I’ve ever heard. It made me want to be a musician.”

  “Respectfully, I’ll disagree. The lyrics spoke of having faith in your fellow man, of human beings being capable of change, of love conquering all. Don’t worry, be fucking happy? As if the drug-induced ’60s hadn’t died pathetically on the vine.”

  “What Boyle was giving us was a reason to—”

  “What he was giving you was something far crueler than anything I’ve ever conjured. What’s worse, after all—to accept the truth or to flock under a false banner? To embrace your contempt for this miserable existence or wait in vain for love to save the day?”

  “You’ve obviously never been in love. Or had any hope.”

  The Hailmaker gave a mocking snort. “Go to the third world and tell that to a starving child.” And his Payton impression slipped. Just a little. For two or three syllables the voice took on a deeper, harsher tone, spewed up from some diseased larynx. “Or into the ghetto, where your friend Mo was last night—go see if there is hope in those places. Unconvinced? Then let us go into the mansions up and down the coast. Houses that would put your own to shame. Let’s witness the vane misery those souls live in.” The Hailmaker dropped Payton’s feet from the desk and rested his elbows there. “For every good and honest soul, there are a hundred flawed and corruptible ones. If humanity was my business, Clay Harper, I would have gone bankrupt centuries ago.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Clay challenged. And he didn’t know why he was engaging in a debate with the thing behind Payton’s face—it seemed tantamount to slap-boxing with a trained heavyweight fighter—but he sensed it was important to do so, very important.

  “Corruption is my business,” The Hailmaker assured him. “Rock stars, politicians, athletes, celebrities, CEO
s, clergy, billionaire philanthropists—all of the most prominent players lie and cheat and snort and sell out and betray. They disgrace and humble themselves; they go to jail and they die young. A man of the cloth surrenders to pedophilia. Leaders of the free world murder the innocent and force themselves on women their own daughter’s age. The nicest boy in school carves up his girlfriend’s face. Read the paper any day. Again and again the best of your race proves they are so weak and corruptible.”

  “Then you won’t have much trouble finding Karney’s replacement. Why press me so hard?”

  “Because it’s not Davis Karney’s replacement I want. It’s Rocco Boyle’s. You don’t seem to comprehend your talent, child. You’ve spent your life idolizing him, wanting to be ‘like him.’ Never realizing that your destiny is to surpass him.”

  Clay exhaled slow. And did his best to resist the overwhelming temptation in those words. “Your pitch is well rehearsed, I’ll give you that.”

  “We’ve been watching you for some time.” Again the Payton impression slipped a little. “Haven’t you always felt watched? And was it a coincidence you moved to L.A. at the same time the people in Boyle’s house decided to sell? What luck that they sold it to your father and not the highest bidder. And isn’t it convenient that you found a talented band looking for a frontperson at the same time you met the ghost of your fallen idol?”

  Clay was silent. He remembered that first night in the house, seeing Savy and the guys for the first time, how much their single-file procession had reminded him of a Rocket Throne album cover. What had been coincidence and what had been carefully arranged? How much power did the Queen Bitch really wield?

  “How is Rocco Boyle? Does he ever wonder why he’s still among the living?” The Hailmaker clacked Payton’s nails on the desk. “He’s here because I let him be. Because I knew he would hone your skills faster. How better to replace him, after all, than to gull him into teaching his replacement? He’s not fighting me the way he thinks. And he may think he can protect you, but where is he now?” He gestured around the room, daring Clay to search for ghosts behind his chair, in the corners, under the bonsai. “Rocco Boyle is a bit player in our greater drama. And he doesn’t know you. You’re hungry. Like he was in his youth. Only hungrier. That’s what he fails to realize—you’re not the miserable, introspective, second-guessing prick he was. You know what you want: To command a stage in front of a hundred-thousand people as their bodies writhe and the dust clouds lift. You want your guitarist to fall madly in love with you and still let you sample the groupies. You want to do everything in life worth doing, and you will.”

  “Only to spend an eternity in Hell.”

  “Hell?” Payton’s face was openly disgusted. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a disciple of Christian dogma. I’m sure you haven’t prayed since your mother died, and who could blame you? What second-rate God allows that sort of end to his own creation?”

  The Hailmaker waited for a response. Clay had none.

  “If God is the great album-maker, humanity was little more than a half-assed side project.”

  “Then why waste your time on us?”

  “Because this album”—Payton’s arms spread, as if to take the world in his embrace—“means everything to me. So it stands to reason that I will fight harder for it than He—She… It—ever will.”

  Clay swallowed. He looked again to the Barbie mirror—and the Hailmaker’s eyes were watching him there. Bald-white in the reflection, no pupils, no irises. Instantly Clay felt their gravity. If they wanted to yank him from his chair and drag him over the desk for a feast on the jugular, they could have done so with terrifying ease. For now, the Hailmaker was content to observe him. “What do you expect me to do?” Clay asked fearfully. “Hide some subliminal bomb in my music? Something that gets the cool kids shooting up their shopping mall?”

  “I’m not in the business of making anyone do anything. Where’s the fun? I simply want you to think about the awful world we live in—and the fact that, inside a century, the human race will be eradicated by its own poison heart. Then I want you to act for yourself.”

  “But why me? What does talent have to do with album sales? Why not hype a lip-syncing boy band?”

  “You know the answer better than I,” the Hailmaker replied, and his smile stretched, stretched, stressing the elasticity of Payton’s face. “That isn’t the type of music people live their lives by. But a genuine rock god? A second- and better-coming of Rocco Boyle? There are so many lost souls who will listen.”

  “I…” Clay began, but the mirror-eyes clamped down irrepressibly on his jaw.

  Payton feigned a glance at a wrist where there was no watch. “Sadly our conversation must end. William Priest will furnish you with a revised copy of the terms. Our arrangement is simple: You make music for me. You have total control over the chords, the melodies, the solos, but the lyrics—the message you deliver to the masses—will be my subject. For that, I give you the skeleton key to the world. Go anywhere, do anyone, live a life truly worth living. And when you’re ready to quit, say so.”

  A wave of nausea hit Clay and he doubled over in his chair. Not out of fear—but from a sudden unbridled excitement. Limitless possibility lay at his fingertips. More than he’d ever imagined. And for such a… fair price. ‘In the battle between ants and the stomping boots of Gods, the sidewalk is never yours,’ Roethke had told him, quoting Boyle’s own lyrics.

  And the message had been sound—there was no sense in fighting things infinitely more powerful than you were.

  Was that such a bad thing?

  Anger, melancholy, betrayal, heartache, violence, death, suicide, the darker side of the human soul had long been fodder for great songs. Was it so terrible to make a career of it? If the human race was on the brink of ruin, as the Hailmaker seemed so confident it was, what could Clay or Savy or anyone do to change that? Better to look out for your own and live while you could.

  The room was quiet, awaiting Clay’s inevitable nod. No street noise outside, no thuds or murmurs from the neighboring offices; it was as if they were miles from anything or anyone. The only sound came from the soft, almost imperceptible gurgle of the aquarium filter.

  But it was the aquarium that broke Clay’s hypnosis. Those bright florescent bodies swirling on the surface, their eyes as stone white and empty as the mirror-eyes themselves.

  Motherfucker, Clay thought. You killed those fish for fun. And what he said was, “Do you honestly think Farewell Ghost has the talent to conquer the world?”

  “All that and more. You are the real deal, if I’ve ever heard it.”

  Clay grinned and Payton grinned back. “Then one other question,” Clay replied, pleasantly, obsequiously. “What’s the best album title ever?”

  “Album title?”

  “Or the most badass song ever recorded? Is it Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”? Metallica’s “One”? Maybe something off Vulgar Display of Power?”

  The fishtank gurgled. For the first time, the Hailmaker sat silently.

  “Can you even tell me what your favorite song of mine is?”

  Now the thing behind Payton’s face understood the game and the wide, child-eating grin broadened. Only this time the face he wore had had enough. The corners of the mouth were nearly touching earlobe when the Velcro riiiiip came violently, tearing the distressed flesh like cheap paper under the chin and along the jowls. Payton’s face became a ruined dollar-store mask. No blood or muscle or bone appeared in the wounds. Only… darkness. As if that was all the Queen Bitch really was. Total darkness. And a tuneless voice.

  “Is this your way of telling me no, Clay Harper?”

  “Yes,” Clay shot back, and where he found the balls to say so, as he stared into those torn features, he never knew. “I think we’re going to pursue other options.”

  “There are none.”

  “You can’t tell me every band is famous because they signed a deal with you.”

  “No,” the Hailmaker consent
ed. “Some have gotten very lucky. But for every band that breaks big without me, there are hundreds of thousands that never make it past their garage. Every bit as talented as you—and yet they never come close to their potential.”

  “I thought you said I was special.”

  “I misjudged you. You’re not hungry after all. But what if your father was to die suddenly? What if you discovered he had changed his will and left everything to big-titted Estelle? What if you were homeless, on your own? Maybe then you’d understand the pathetic struggles of the masses. The gutter hopelessness. Savannah’s reality.”

  “What you don’t understand…” Clay tried, and his voice—the conviction he wanted to speak with—was beginning to return. He swallowed and gathered his strength. In a minute, he would either be dead or out of this nightmare and he didn’t want to be kept in suspense. “…is that music doesn’t summon the demons in people, it helps us cast them out. It gives us a way to express the hurt inside. Sometimes even overcome it. And those lost souls you’re talking about? I was one. So now I’m going to throw all the others a lifeline.” Clay stood and dared to look the devil in the eyes. “You promised to give a girl’s face back if she seduced me. When she failed, you cut her throat and threw her away. But no one’s above reproach—you said so yourself. Consider this yours, asshole.”

  Clay spun and managed three steps before an invisible fist struck his back and his body crumpled to the floor. Invisible hands grabbed his collar and belt and he was flipped over like a fish in a pan to gaze at the furious figure standing above him. “We’ve signed your mother to a contract,” the darkness under the mask bellowed, and now it discarded the Payton impression entirely using its own androgynous voice, the one that had whispered his name as it caressed his ankle under a door years before. “She’s with me, Clay Harper. Suffering hoooorrribly.”

  There was a pause in which Clay blocked out any image those words brought to mind. He shut his eyes and waited for the end.

  Waited.