Collected Stories (4.0)

by James Wade

  “I don’t mean only manifestations like the squeaking of the ancient floorboards I brought over and installed from the wrecked daimyo’s mansion after the Tokyo earthquake (though that is an especially unnerving instance), but also certain definite sights and emotional impressions, sounds, odors, etc. How otherwise explain the smell of blood, the feeling of horror surrounding most ancient torture instruments? It cannot be association, since the effects are felt even when the objects are hidden and unsuspected by the subjects in tests I have made.

  “These phenomena, of course, are not ‘ghosts’ in any literal or personal sense, but more like the recordings impressed on a phonographic cylinder. Still, since I am unsure whether or not such emanations can affect matter physically, there is a chance they may be more powerful, and perhaps dangerous, than mere recordings could be.” That, was all; next came another crazy dream, and nothing else in the book continued this train of thought, although there were some weird, rather theosophical speculations on spiritual life inhabiting inorganic matter.

  Still, it meant that the man who had originally assembled this jumble-sale collection had himself heard, seen, and felt things here that he couldn’t explain, except through this fanciful theorizing, over thirty years ago.

  And my guess about the Japanese origin of the Nightingale Floors was correct—an almost fantastic coincidence! (Could I myself perhaps be “psychic, whatever that may mean”?) I began to feel closer to, and sorrier for, that lonely, visionary millionaire who bequeathed this house of horrors to an indifferent community.

  Suddenly, faint in the distance, I heard the muffled sound of a piano playing. It was not a radio, not a recording, but unmistakably an echo from the drafty rotunda downstairs where reposed the fragile, ornate instrument once reputedly owned by Liszt.

  I walked downstairs as if in a dream, hardly aware of what I was doing. I knew the piece: it was Liszt’s “Campanella”; someone played it in a Hitchcock movie once, and it had stuck in my mind: fragile, elfin bells in a silver tintinnabulation of sound. As I entered the lofty rotunda the piano, deep in shadow, loomed across the room, stark Spanish cannon silhouetted incongruously against it as still deeper shadows.

  My eyes adjusted to the gloom and began to half-dis- cern what appeared to be a dark, swaying, undefined shape hovering above the keyboard, moving in the circumscribed patterns a rapt player might follow. The music still had a distant, stifled quality, and I wondered if the ancient hammers and pedals were really moving: surely the instrument would not be in tune after so many years. But what had Ehlers written? “Objects . . . associated with passionate people and events soak up and retain an aura, and may produce a tangible emanation, even sensory stimuli....”

  Suddenly the racket of the Nightingale Floors erupted around me again, louder than ever before, deafening, from all over the house, so that the spell holding me broke and I felt terror, bewilderment; and turned to run, to flee this strange museum with its entombed but living sampling of the past.

  But the only way out lay through the unlit Remington gallery, that tomb-black trap I had always distrusted. And I had left both flashlight and weapons upstairs!

  There was no other choice, and as I blundered into the room of Wild West art I sensed that it was neither entirely dark nor entirely untenanted.

  Outlined in a light that was not light, since it did not diffuse, I saw the erect, majestic form of an Indian chief in full ceremonial regalia: feathered headdress, buckskin leggings, beaded belt, with a crude bow slung across one bare, muscular shoulder. (Could an artist’s intensification of reality also entrap an image from the past, even though the painting itself had never been in the physical presence of its subject?)

  The figure of the Indian moved lithely toward the center of the chamber, but I was past it already, bounding through the archway opposite as if propelled by the crackling of the floors, now intensified to such a degree that it resembled a fireworks display.

  I staggered into the next gallery, but stopped short to locate and avoid any further unnatural phenomena there.

  This was one of the medieval rooms, and at first it seemed there was nothing unusual here except the frantic snapping of the flooring. Then my glance fell on an Elizabethan headsman’s axe mounted on the wall, faintly illuminated by one of the dim night lights several yards distant.

  Before my eyes, a wavering form shaped itself around the axe, stabilized, and came clear, lifelike: the black- hooded, swarthy figure of the executioner, both brawny fists grasping the haft of the immense, double-headed weapon, which hung at an angle as if to accommodate itself to the natural grip of the burly headsman.

  I wheeled in panic and sprinted for the front door, threw back the night latch, and half-stumbled down the stairs and across the mangy lawn under the spectral branches of the great poplars, whose dry leaves rattled and chattered as if in derisive echo of the tumultuous uproar of the floorboards in the empty building behind me.

  I phoned in my resignation to Mr. Worthington next day (since, superstitious as my attitude might seem, I never wished to enter the Ehlers Museum again) and started the long comeback path to a normality in which I could at least distinguish between the real and the illusory. Which is about all any of us can claim, at best.

  For I had seen something during those last few seconds in the museum that frightened me more than anything else I experienced that night.

  I have said that the apparition of a giant executioner gripping his axe had appeared in the medieval gallery. Well, the axe was mounted on the wall just above another quaint relic of those earlier days when our savagery was less subtle: the rough-hewn wooden headsman’s block.

  And as the figure of the executioner coalesced around his axe, so another figure—supine, hands bound, neck wedged in the gruesomely functional V-shaped depression—materialized around the block.

  The face was turned toward me, and I recognized from photos the florid, mutton-chopped visage of Frederick Ehlers, long-dead founder of the museum, staring in terror—still caught in his endless chain of nightmares, still a prisoner (but now a part) of those “tangible emanations” from the past which he had painstakingly assembled and which he had finally and forever, inescapably joined.

  The Silence of Erika Zann

  (1976)

  I still stroll over to Ashford Street sometimes and look at the vacant lot where The Purple Blob used to stand. In its heyday it had been one of the earliest and best of the psychedelic light-show clubs, and even had a mention once in Time magazine.

  But the rock-music scene changes fast, and the San Francisco skyline even faster. Last time I was over there, I was startled to see that the foundations of a new building have been started on that lot. It seemed to me that those power scoops were burying some part of my life for good—a part that was still alive and screaming wordlessly down there.

  Everybody but me seems to have forgotten The Purple Blob ever existed. But I’ll never forget the old place, with its glaring ricocheting lights and its mind-blowing music—for it was there that I experienced the most tragic and bewildering event of my life, the silence of Erika Zann.

  I’m not really into rock music and the hallucinogenic kick all that much, and I never was. I grooved on some of the zany, far-out groups, and there for a while I swallowed or smoked about anything anybody handed me—and that’s quite a variety, in San Francisco— just to see what it was like. But I’m enough over thirty, and sort of an instinctive Mr. Straight when you come right down to it, that I didn’t try to keep up with the kids who were real swingers. I didn’t even feel comfortable with the new lingo. “Groovy” and “right on" had quotation marks around them in my mouth, and I think I’ll stop using that jargon here for easy atmosphere. (If I’m going to write this right, I’ll have to dig, that’s for sure, but not in the current slang sense of the word.)

  What I actually used to do, after tending to my boring nine-to- five job, was sit around as a bemused spectator of all those new sights and sounds the Bay Area was tu
rning on to in those days—just a few years back, actually, though now it seems ages ago. The kids needed an audience more than they needed more freaks and exhibitionists. As a relative newcomer from the Midwestern hinterlands, I suppose I was lonely enough that a mostly passive part seemed to me better than no role at all in the big excitement.

  That was how I started going to the Purple Blob, and how I met the lead vocalist of their star rock band, which was called, with the usual elephantine whimsy, The Electric Commode.

  I had heard of Erika Zann before I met her. She’d made a few obscure records, farther-out stuff than the early material she used with the Commode. There was one disk devoted entirely to a Satanist mass, I remember, and Erika was involved in that, along with a really astonishing range of sound effects, plus human ululations of ecstasy, fright, and less identifiable feelings. (Later she told me she’d broken with the black-magic bunch, but she didn’t say just why, though I think she hinted that money trouble was involved.)

  Since Satanism was never my bag, that didn’t especially impress me; but just to have any recording artist in a place like The Blob in those early days was a sort of status symbol, so Erika got star billing, even though she didn’t start out winning any popularity polls. In fact, for that kind of spot, her performance at first seemed remarkably subdued and downbeat, though it didn’t stay that way for long.

  I remember ambling in one evening, nodding to the club manager, Pete Muzio, and picking up a beer at the bar. The place had been a tavern before, and still kept its liquor license, though the hippies from the Hashbury were already bringing their own kicks with them in their pill boxes and grass bags.

  A lot of those oddly dressed types in beards were sitting around at tables, more or less stoned—you don’t need me to describe the counterculture specimens at this late date—while a guitarist and bongo player up on stage noodled imitation ragas picked up secondhand on Beatles records. Not much was happening, except maybe inside the skulls of those already launched into acid orbit.

  Manager Muzio sidled over to me at the bar. If I’d been him and had all those broken teeth, I wouldn’t have grinned so wide all the time.

  “Got a new group on deck since I saw you here last,” he muttered. For the manager of a high-decibel joint, he certainly talked soft, which was often a strain on communication.

  “Who are they?” I asked, to be polite. Pete Muzio was the one fixture I didn’t especially fancy about The Purple Blob.

  “Name’s The Electric Commode. Nothing special up to now, but they’ve got a new vocalist who’s cut a few grooves. Haven’t had time yet to get her posters up, but the name’s Zann, Erika Zann. German chick, I understand.”

  After a while the group came on and Erika sang a few loud but forgettable numbers. The acid-rock arrangements were in that year, and if you’d kept up to date you could tell just where The Electric Commode was snitching its charts. The Blob was between lighting specialists just then, and Pete ran the strobes himself, which didn’t add much to the total effect.

  After the set, he brought Erika over to the bar and mumbled an introduction. Since I had a straight job and money to spend, unlike many of his regulars, Pete tried to be nice to me.

  I bought her a beer and handed her a few formal compliments. She shot back, “We’re doing pretty tame stuff now, but Tommy— that’s our lead guitar—just hired a new arranger. He’s working up some fantastic new things—really far out, with a lot more electronic effects. Wait’ll you hear ’em.”

  I sized up Erika Zann. Standard sequined gown, nice figure but too thin. A wide forehead accentuated by a bushy flare of ash-blond hairdo. Big, deep purple eyes, her only claim to beauty; she admitted the color came from contacts. Tiny pointed chin beneath a mouth that seemed too small for the voice that came out of it. Definitely nervous, maybe a twitch, like many performers on the scene.

  To make conversation, I remarked, “Pete says you’re German.” She laughed mechanically. “Not really. I was born in Europe right after the war. My folks were refugees and got to the States a few years later. I don’t even remember.”

  “Musicians?"

  “My dad’s dead now, but he was a violinist. So was my grandfather, but he’s been gone a long time. Funny thing.”

  “What is?"

  “Grandpa Erich Zann left his family in the 1920’s and settled in Paris. He played in a pit band, though Dad said he used to be good. He was a mute—not deaf, of course, but he couldn’t utter a sound. Here I’m named after a dummy, and I make my living yelling my head off."

  What else we talked about wasn’t memorable, and I certainly didn’t fall for that wiry, uptight blond at first sight.

  In fact, I didn’t come back to The Blob for a week or two after that, and when I did it was simply out of curiosity about the new sounds I’d heard were erupting over there.

  Things were different, all right. Pete was packing them in, and his craggy smile was wider than ever as he surveyed the crazy-quilt crowd surging under dim overheads, and counted the take from the gate charge he’d slapped on as soon as he thought he could get away with it. Erika’s posters were all oyer the place. When you walked in the reek of marijuana made your eyes smart; the tangled, ropy coils of smoke were thick enough to dim the lights even more. Pete Muzio must have used part of his profits to pay off the neighborhood fuzz, since the place was never busted that I know of.

  He’d used part of the take, too, in hiring a good light man, and replacing the guitar duo with a Hammond organ virtuoso. Just now they were doing things to a Bach fugue with jazz percussion added that Disney and Stokowski never dreamed of.

  If you thought that was wild, all you had to do was wait for the main event. The Electric Commode had certainly snagged a new arranger, though no one ever found out his name. (Once, when he was especially high, the lanky lead guitarist everyone called just Tommy was heard to claim that their cleffer was “a black man—not a Negro, just a black man.” I wondered what he meant by that.)

  The first thing about their new sound, it was loud, so loud that if you’d already blown your mind, this music might blast it back in again. Second, it was electric. There were half a dozen new instruments to back up the guitars and sax and trumpet and drums that no one had ever seen, or heard, anything like before, except maybe in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab on the Late Show.

  Third, there was Erika. Whether she’d always had it in her or the new gimmicks added something, wailing was no word for it. At the climaxes of those long sets, which left her drained and shaking, she’d take off into wordless stratospheric flights that reminded you of Yma Sumac, the freak Peruvian soprano of a while back.

  The total effect, while not exactly rock—or not entirely rock— was, in any event, searing. Some of the regular customers had convulsions, literally, but since they kept coming back, I guess that’s what they were there for.

  Every once in a while would come what seemed to be an offstage stereo effect, a sort of wide-range, omnidirectional growl that built and built, like someone was sprawled full length along the keyboard of a great cathedral organ. Nobody could guess what it was, and only one thing was sure: The sound didn’t come from that hyped-up little Hammond on stage. At those times the colored lights in the room would start to skitter and skim like reflections from the heart of hell, and Erika outdid herself to rise above the racket. I could almost swear the look of mingled fear and exultation on her face wasn’t a put-on.

  The audience ate it up, and The Blob became an “in” spot, naturally attracting reporters, tourists, and slummers, in that order. Pete Muzio bought out the espresso coffee shop next door and knocked down the intervening wall to get more floor space.

  I was hooked too, and kept coming back week after week, even though I realized at last that it wasn’t the music which attracted me—that began to seem vaguely disquieting, if not odious—but Erika herself.

  I’d gotten to know her a bit better by the simple expedient of buying the band drinks between sets, or passing around t
he grass. She was a strange, evasive kid, but I felt more and more certain she was at times scared blue, and so I suppose my feeling for her was deepened by a sort of pity or protective instinct.

  One night we were drinking alone at a side table and she finally started to level with me. I’d made some sort of inane remark about how she seemed nervous, which was simply my way of trying to break down her standoffishness—she always seemed nervous, actually, no more so one time than another.

  “Nervous? I suppose I am.” She took a drag on her cigarette, an ordinary one this time. “It goes with the business. Only, I used to be able to unwind with some grass, or a few fingers of gin. Now nothing seems to help.”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “Oh, lots of little things.” She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “That creepy manager isn’t leveling with us on our slice of the bread. And the drummer’s putting the make on me, or on Tommy, or maybe on both of us ... who knows?

  “Tommy’s changed, too. He won’t tell the rest of us where he’s getting the arrangements or those crazy instruments. Did you know that the new side men and the light man don't even talk about the jobs they’ve played before?”

  “Does that scare you?”

  “Maybe it should. I was in pretty deep with the devil-worships gang I told you about. That wasn’t all they were up to, either. Some of them have it in for me but good, and I thought I recognized the new man on vibes as one of that bunch, but he won’t talk, just like the rest, and I can’t be sure. The vibes man is pretty thick with Pete Muzio, and they seem to have a lot of private business together. But the worst thing is the music.”