His smile faded.
The bullet had moved, just a tad. Matter of fact, if Daddy Norbert was any less familiar with the shape of the Zipper's casing, he might have not even noticed. But there it was, poking out of the barrel, one, maybe two additional inches of casing. Daddy swallowed air. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, op'kil illusion or whatever you call it. He studied the muzzle of the Roberts and felt his heart flip-flop in his chest.
The bullet was half way out the barrel.
"Gotta have that damn thing checked." He chuckled softly. "Ain't that a kick."
Daddy stared at the rifle. If he didn't know better, he could have sworn the bullet had moved some more. Moved with the subtle steadiness of a clock. 'Course, that was impossible. That was damn near mad hatter crazy. He took a breath and tried to rip his arms free. The rope held tight. His fingers were going numb, and he could feel the mess in his pants, burning his butt crack, stinking to high heaven.
"Wait'll I get my hands on that skinny little — !
All at once, Daddy Norbert noticed the bullet was protruding nearly all the way out of the barrel now. Defying gravity. He blinked, and he blinked, and he blinked some more, and he still saw it. With his very own watery eyes. The Zipper was sticking almost clean out of the muzzle. Daddy wondered if a strange pocket of air had gotten trapped in the muzzle behind it... or something like that. Didn't really matter though, because the bullet was going to clear the lip of the barrel any second now and fall to the floor.
Except it didn't fall.
"What the fuck?"
Daddy gawked. Damn bullet hung in midair in front of the muzzle like a moth in aspic. No visible means of support. And Daddy got to thinking all of a sudden, thinking about Lizzy and that shit she was holding in her hand a minute ago and how she had that screwy look in her eye. Something cold and hard started turning in Daddy's gut. Chills rolled up his back, and the tiny hairs stood at attention along the back of his neck. The duct tape was digging into his belly. His head throbbed against its restraint. The worst part wasn't the fact that the bullet was frozen in space, which was pretty goddamned impossible if you thought about it for a second. Wasn't even the fact that it seemed to be slowly yet steadily inching forward.
The worst part was that it was heading straight for Daddy Norbert.
He frowned. The bullet was out of the muzzle by several inches now, moving through the space between the gun and Daddy with the inexorable slowness of a sundial. It looked like a tiny grey stain in the air. Impossible. Goddamned impossible, but here it came. A two hundred calibre magic trick. Maybe six feet, seven at the most, between the bullet and Daddy. At this rate, it would take the bullet at least ten minutes to reach him. Then what?
Stupid thing would probably bump Daddy's nose and plummet to the floor like some second-rate levitation trick, like some throw-off from the Amazing El Moldo.
"Piece of shit parlor trick!" Daddy giggled again, his voice stretched thin. "Can't scare me with some cheap dime store gag!"
The bullet continued coming.
A scalding tear of sweat ran down Daddy Norbert's forehead and pooled in his eye. It burned. Daddy blinked, and cursed, and strained against the leather head restraints. He shook furiously against the tape. It was no use. Lizzy had done a bang up job on the bondage.
Daddy's cursing sputtered and died.
"This ain't possible," he uttered, his gaze glued to the bullet.
Daddy Norbert had never really believed in magic before.
Growing up dirt poor in the Ozark Mountains, he'd certainly run across his share of hokum. One old gal who lived behind the Norbert's pig farm was rumored to be a witch, but Daddy never believed it. Occasionally there'd be a gypsy clan who'd pass through the neighboring town. Some said it was gypsies that brought the drought of '49 to Pinkneyville. But Daddy never bought any of that hoodoo shit. Daddy Norbert was a simple hillbilly boy who grew up into a simple hillbilly man. Never got much of an education. Stayed out of trouble most of his adult life. Sure, he slapped his women around a little bit; he wasn't proud of it. But Jesus God, did he deserve this?
The bullet kept coming, crossing the half way mark now, hanging in the air just as horrible as you please.
Something snapped inside Daddy Norbert, as sure as a guillotine in his brain. Fear. It stole his breath and flowed cool through his veins. Stung his eyes. Made his fists clench up like vices until blood started soaking the ropes.
He'd been up against many a rough scrape in his day. Tangled with the Mueller boys down to Quincy. Got caught cheating at Anaconda on a river boat casino. Fought three cops on the side of the road once, got away with a single broken rib and a chipped tooth. But this was different, way over the edge; because all of a sudden Daddy realized this was what his own daddy used to call bad juju.
The bullet crept closer.
"Okay, okay, okay, okay" Daddy started breathing deeply, trying to settle down, trying to convince himself it was all a trick, and that everything was going to be okay... but there was that shiny grey stain in the air coming right at him. And the leather binding holding his head in place. And the terrible certainty that Lizzy and her colored buck had planned this thing especially for Daddy. And that the bullet's destination was somewhere in the vicinity of Daddy Norbert's forehead, just above his left eye. "Okay, okay, okay, okay, calm down, okay, get it together, calm down, calm down."
Daddy Norbert blinked.
Something sparked around the armature of the bullet. Sudden veins of light, erupting outward like the afterimage of a photographer's bulb. Faint lines mapping the darkness. A ghostly image curling around the zipper like a heat ray mirage cured in whiskey misted eyes —
(— years ago, drooling drunk, his rough hands on pale flesh, wedging himself inside a young girl's thighs, forcing himself into her, again and again, the sound of her smothered cries —)
"Wwwwhhha?!"
Daddy slammed his eyes closed.
The realization was like a claw hammer to his forehead.
Visions. He remembered his grand-mammy having visions of the end of the world, talking to Jesus in her sleep, and all of a sudden Daddy Norbert realized this was one of those kinds of visions. Daddy Norbert was having a vision of the end of the world. He was a sinner, he had done wretched things and now this was his very own reckoning day.
"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 hi
s 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 that 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 coo
l 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.
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