We Sold Our Souls

by Grady Hendrix

  She played for the fallen, the forgotten, the footnotes. The people with an eternal gnawing in their bellies, the ones who died hungry, the ones who wanted it so bad but never got a place at the table. She played for the people who worried about the change in their pockets, who had no crumbs on their counters or cans in their cupboards. She played for the people who believed in themselves long after everyone else wised up and moved on. The ones who died still living in hope. She played for the people who made themselves too hard to love, the ones who never read the fine print, who never listened to good advice, the ones who just wanted to play. She played for Scottie.

  She played metal. She played country. She played the blues.

  The girl kept up where she could, and listened where she couldn’t, silently mouthing half-remembered lyrics to the chords. Her pit bull dozed. Eventually the people thinned out and a cop rode up on his bike and told them they didn’t have to go home, but they couldn’t stay there. He thought he was funny.

  At the end of the day, there was $80 in the cup. Kris knew there should be $120. She knew that the girl had slipped $40 into her own pocket, but thinking about money exhausted her. The girl insisted Kris keep the $80 and take the guitar.

  “You’re better,” she said. “You deserve it more.”

  Kris took the cash but gave back the guitar.

  “Keep playing,” she said. “A girl with a guitar never has to apologize for anything.”

  She walked off down Clarke Avenue, her left ear shrilling its high tinnitus E, money in her pocket, knowing now what needed to be done. Just now, she’d conjured up $80 out of thin air, turning sound into money like magic. She had one weapon left. One they couldn’t take away.

  Back at the Witch House, she remembered Terry showing them what would become the first nu metal Koffin songs. Troglodyte was dead and these songs were scrubbed free of mythology, purged of dark hints of powerful forces shaping the world from the shadows. There was a song about trying to get his dad’s attention with a catchy funk hook (“Look, look, look at me / What, what, what do you see?). There was a metal-by-way-of-Springsteen power ballad about growing up in the shadow of the steel mills, a screamer about rejection, a thrash-pop number about being alone. She remembered thinking how small metal had gotten. If this was all they could sing about, why bother singing at all? Suddenly, in a violent rush, Scottie Rocket had snatched the pages out of Terry’s hands and ripped them in half, threw the pieces up in the air, gotten in Terry’s face.

  “Wah! Wah! Wah!” he shouted. “No one loves me! Boo hoo! Guess what? We play fucking metal! I don’t want to sing about your sad feelings! I want dragons.”

  All these years later, she finally understood what Scottie meant. She needed to sing songs about something bigger than this world. She needed to play about something more than the soulless country she saw around her. The blues were about the pain and struggle of living inside Black Iron Mountain. Metal showed you a door.

  She wasn’t famous, she wasn’t rich, she didn’t even have her own photo ID. She was just a musician. But you fought with the weapons you had, not with the ones you wished for.

  Kris couldn’t put it off any longer. She bought a ticket to Wichita, Kansas, with everything she had, and got on the bus with empty pockets and an empty stomach, riding through the Midwest to find the one person who hated Terry more than she did, the one person she could maybe still trust.

  DJ GORDON G: We’ve got Tuck Merryweather here, original bass player for Dürt Würk and close personal friend of Terry Hunt. You know, I didn’t actually listen to you guys back in the day—what did I miss?

  TUCK MERRYWEATHER: Not a lot. I was the rhythm section. Our original drummer was a guy named Jefferson Davis—

  DJ GORDON G: Aw, hell no!

  TUCK MERRYWEATHER: That was his name.

  DJ GORDON G: Did his mama not love him even a little bit?

  TUCK MERRYWEATHER: That boy was his own worst enemy. He bungee-jumped out of a tree once with bungee cords tied around his feet and broke both ankles.

  (Laughter)

  —WXKC Classy 100, “The Lo Down”

  October 29, 2010

  hen the door of the little house in Valley Center opened, Kris said, “Mrs. Davis, I’m Kris Pulaski from back in Gurner. Is JD home?”

  The old woman sighed. She had short, curly hair dyed a shade of red that does not occur in nature and wore enormous round sunglasses. The front pockets of her cardigan bulged with Kleenex and a remote control. There was an oxygen tube running from her nose to a tank at her feet.

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Kris Pulaski,” Kris repeated. “I went to Independence High with JD. I’d love to see him.”

  The woman’s expression didn’t change. “No you wouldn’t,” she said. “No one loves to see my boy. No one’s nice to him. He’s having a bad day. Come back later.”

  She started to close the door, but Kris put her foot against it.

  “I need his help,” she said.

  Mrs. Davis stopped pushing. “That’s a new one,” she said.

  She let Kris into a living room containing every home-décor idea Kris had ever seen on TV, all executed at once: ceramic figurines on the mantle, sofas overflowing with decorative pillows, paintings of unicorns and seascapes in massive frames, doilies, and animal-print throw blankets draped over everything.

  “Did my son get you pregnant? Steal your car? Did he once take a poke at your little brother?” Mrs. Davis asked.

  “I haven’t seen JD in over twenty years,” Kris said.

  “You’d be surprised at how long people hold onto grudges,” Mrs. Davis said. “Come on.”

  She led Kris down the hall and into the kitchen. The floor was shaking. It sounded like a truck was in the basement, blasting its engine, smashing into everything. It took Kris a second to realize it was someone playing super-fast double-stroke drum fills. They sacrificed expression for volume, blasting away with a machine gun made of drums.

  Mrs. Davis stood outside a flimsy wooden door, waiting for a break. The drums stopped, silence snapped into place, and she turned to Kris, one hand on the knob.

  “It is easy to be unkind to my son,” she said. “He’s never gotten much from other people except mean. I hope you’re not more of the same.”

  Before Kris could answer, Mrs. Davis pushed open the door, just as the drums started up again, and a battering ram of noise smashed into Kris. She braced herself, descended the stairs, and stepped into Metalhead Valhalla. The walls of the basement were a shrine to Viking metal: photos of Quorthon blown up to the size of religious icons, Amon Amarth posters, framed limited-edition Bathory LPs, and a series of amateur oil paintings depicting Vikings chopping priests in half with their battle axes.

  The room was dominated by an enormous drum kit in a dark corner. Behind it was the shadowy outline of a man wearing a horned helmet, pounding away on his skins. He thrashed on his toms, tickled out a final cymbal swell, then silence. He sat, motionless, watching Kris from the dark.

  “Hey, JD,” Kris said. “It’s me. Kris Pulaski. From Dürt Würk.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Look, it’s been a long time,” Kris said. “Things have been pretty crazy. But I came out here to see if you…you don’t ever hear from Terry, do you?”

  Kris’s eyes started getting used to the darkness. Beneath JD’s Viking helmet, he was made of hair. It sprouted from his cheekbones, knitted his eyebrows together, fell from his scalp in waves that splashed off his shoulders and flowed down his back. It formed a bib that hung from his face and covered his chest.

  “I came out to say I’m sorry,” Kris said. “Turns out Bill was a fucking asshole. We should have stuck with you. It was just, Bill kind of offered himself up after that show at PJ’s house and he seemed, you know, like a good guy at the time. We had to do a lot of rehearsing and you
didn’t like coming to rehearsals. And we didn’t know that Bill would grow up to run some kind of mind-control brainwashing prison camp disguised as a rehab clinic. So we made a mistake. I’m sorry. Sincerely. I offer you my full and complete apologies, and while I can’t speak for Tuck, I’m pretty sure Scottie would offer his apologies, too.”

  JD stayed silent, fixing her with a blank stare. Kris had thought through this conversation on the multiple bus trips it took to get here, but unless he started participating, she was running out of material.

  “I need your help,” she said. “Something happened, a long time ago when we all signed our contracts and it’s a little hard to talk about, so I sort of need you to tell me what page you’re on. Terry did something to us, and I think he’s doing it again but on a bigger scale at this Hellstock thing. I don’t know what your views are on that, but maybe you should tell me before we continue here.”

  “Terry didn’t ‘do something.’ ” This time his response was immediate. “Terry Hunt sold your souls.”

  That took the wind out of Kris’s sails.

  “You sell your soul to Black Iron Mountain,” JD said, “and the Special Ones come and suck it from your mouth.”

  The blood stood still inside Kris’s body as she remembered the crawling white thing, cold and greedy, looming over her, holding her down.

  “I don’t even believe in souls,” Kris said. “Never been to church once.”

  “Souls are the best part of us,” JD said from the shadows. “Our passions, our dreams. We sell them and lose our creativity, our songs, our spark. We can no longer imagine anything bigger than what’s in front of our faces, we can no longer dream of a better world than Black Iron Mountain. Tell me, Kris, you written any new songs lately? Has Terry?”

  Kris thought she could write a song if she wasn’t so tired, if she wasn’t so hungry, if she wasn’t so worried about everything all the time, but the truth was that until recently she hadn’t even played in six years.

  “It’s been going on for centuries,” JD said. “But it’s getting faster now. Terry is speeding everything up. They targeted the musicians first. The bards traveled between tribes, transforming our hopes and fears into epic sagas: Paganini, Robert Johnson, Tartini, Jimmy Page. Once they were perverted, Black Iron Mountain used them to spread their message of emptiness around the world. They couldn’t tempt us with anything important, but they could offer us things of minor value, like money and fame. We fell all over ourselves selling the one priceless thing we possessed for trinkets and glass beads.

  “Now, people sell their souls for nothing. They do it for a new iPhone or to have one night with their hot next-door neighbor. There is no fanfare, no parchment signed at midnight. Sometimes it’s just the language you click in an end-user license agreement. Most people don’t even notice, and even if they did, they wouldn’t care. They only want things. So they sell their souls, and they go to sleep, and the Special Ones crawl out of the dirty corners and lap them up.

  “They control everything, they keep us hungry, they keep us in pain, they keep us distracted. Have you noticed how soulless this world has become? How empty and prefabricated? Soulless lives are hollow. We fill the earth with soulless cities, pollute ourselves with soulless albums.

  “When the soul is removed it leaves a hole, and we try to fill that hole with so many things—the internet, and conspiracy theories, and CNN, and drugs, and food, but there is only one thing inside that hole, Kris, and that is Black Iron Mountain. It is our jailer, and this is our jail: an eternal, insane hunger that can never be satisfied, a wound that can never be healed, an unnatural desire to consume. Our hunger traps us inside a prison as big as the world. There is no escape. Black Iron Mountain comes for us all.”

  JD stood up. He took off his horned helmet and stepped into the light.

  “I bet you wish you hadn’t thrown me out of your band now.”

  He stood before her, a short, hairy potato of a man wearing a faded “Valhalla…I am coming” T-shirt, radiating intensity.

  “Jesus, JD,” Kris said, clinging to sanity by her fingertips. “I want to believe you, I really do. And if I was totally out of my fucking mind what you said would make all kinds of sense. But imagine delivering that lecture to someone outside this basement. You sound crazy and paranoid and totally insane.”

  She braced herself for JD’s reaction. Instead of flipping out, he fixed her with a calm eye.

  “Kris,” he said, “it is possible to be crazy and paranoid and totally insane and still be right. Maybe the problem with everyone is that the world has become so insane they’re not out of their minds enough to comprehend it.”

  Kris thought about the things in the basement JD had called the Special Ones. She thought about contract night.

  “You said they ate our souls?” she asked.

  “That’s what Terry offered them in exchange for fame and fortune,” JD said. “When Rob offered him a contract, he didn’t sell Black Iron Mountain his soul—he sold them all four of your souls instead. It’s worked out pretty well for him.”

  “I tried to fight,” Kris said. “I went after him.”

  “Where’d that get you?” JD asked. “Stuck in Bill’s psycho summer camp. That’s where they make their slaves. It’s standard MKUltra programming. Psychic driving techniques. Massive doses of scopolamine. The erosion of your personality. When you’re finally hollow inside, they give you a monarch tattoo, and send you out into the world until they’re ready to activate you.”

  “Where’d you get all this?” Kris asked. “How come you know more about what happened to me than I do?”

  JD sat down at the round coffee table in the middle of the room, picked up an enormous Ziploc bag of pot, and began to roll a huge joint.

  “We’re out there,” he said. “You soulless people call us crackpots and conspiracy theorists, and you make fun of us for believing in chemtrails and UFOs, and you put us on meds, and ban our YouTube channels, and send us to Bill’s little concentration camps whenever you can. But we find each other, we collect information, we listen. You’ve been living inside Black Iron Mountain for so long you’ve forgotten what it feels like to be free.”

  He lit the joint, inhaled, and blew out a long plume of resinous smoke.

  “Jesus,” Kris said, sitting down across from him, waving away his offer of the joint. “It’s like the song. You know, ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’? I can’t believe that after a lifetime of playing metal, it turns out the world is a shitty country song.”

  JD took another long toke.

  “I’m sure you figured out by now that Troglodyte is a soothsayer,” he said in a tight, strangled voice, letting out a plume of smoke. “There’s only three tracks left: ‘Sailing the Seas of Blood,’ where we go to Las Vegas, ‘In the Hall of the Blind King,’ where we find Terry, and ‘One Life, One Bullet,’ where we shoot him.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Kris said. “We’re not killing anyone.”

  “He tried to brainwash you,” JD said. “He murdered Scottie’s entire family. He needs to die.”

  “No,” Kris said. “We’re not killing anyone.”

  “Because that will make us as bad as him?” JD asked in a mocking voice.

  “No,” Kris said. “Because I’m not a murderer. Neither are you. We’re musicians.”

  “What do you suggest?” JD asked. “Because you’ve done great so far.”

  “We follow the album,” Kris said. “We go to Las Vegas, we find Terry, and then…I don’t know. But Troglodyte will tell us what to do once we’re there.”

  “Like kill him,” JD said.

  “What is your problem?” Kris asked. “You sit here, in your mom’s basement, getting stoned, banging your drums, going on about killing people like a little boy playing video games. Have you ever seen anyone die? It’s…” Kris saw Angela falling backward, Scottie Rocket�
��s tear-stained face, the woman in the cemetery. She didn’t have the words. “No one else dies, JD.”

  JD balanced the burning joint on the lip of his ashtray and leaned forward, not pissed, but earnest.

  “I have waited for so long,” he said, emotion choking his voice. “Keeping my head down so Black Iron Mountain wouldn’t spot me, wondering who would stop Terry. Did I need to find him and kill him? Was I Troglodyte? I kept trying to get my life together, but the harder I tried, the more I scared everyone away. I used to have my own apartment. I had a job. But every time I tried to explain the world to people, every time I thought I had friends, they fired me. Everyone thinks I’m crazy, Kris. You’re the first person who ever came here, who ever came to my house, and asked me for help. You are Troglodyte.”

  He raised his hairy arm and showed her a thick, twisted silver bracelet around his wrist. It met in two silver wolves’ heads, nose to nose, on the back of his wrist. He placed his right hand over the bracelet.

  “The most solemn vow a Viking can make is Odin’s Oath, and I make it now,” JD said. “I, Jefferson Davis, swear in the name of him that hung on the tree to let no harm come to you, Kris Pulaski, member of my war band and shield companion. I swear this or my life be forfeit. So be it.”

  Kris wanted to laugh. Here she was in a basement with a Viking metalhead, the two of them going up against Terry and Black Iron Mountain. It was epically stupid. But she knew better than to laugh at JD.

  Instead, she asked, “You got anything to eat?”

  * * *