Deep Blue

by David Niall Wilson

  DEEP BLUE

  By David Niall Wilson

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2013 David Niall Wilson

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  David Niall Wilson has been writing and publishing horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction since the mid-eighties. An ordained minister, once President of the Horror Writer 's Association and multiple recipient of the Bram Stoker Award. He lives outside Hertford, NC with the love of his life, Patricia Lee Macomber, His children Zane and Katie, occasionally their older siblings, Stephanie, who is in college, and Bill and Zach who are in the Navy, and an ever-changing assortment of pets.

  David can be found at:

  http://www.davidniallwilson.com

  Or Connect on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/David.Niall.Wilson

  David is CEO and founder of Crossroad Press, a cutting edge digital publishing company specializing in electronic novels, collections, and nonfiction, as well as unabridged audiobooks and print titles.

  OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY DAVID NIALL WILSON:

  Novels:

  Nevermore, a Novel of Love, Loss, & Edgar Allan Poe

  Ancient Eyes

  Deep Blue

  Sins of the Flash

  The Orffyreus Wheel

  Darkness Falling

  The Mote in Andrea's Eye

  On the Third Day

  The Second Veil

  The Parting – An O.C.L.T. Novel

  Stargate Atlantis – SGA-15 – Brimstone (With Patricia Lee Macomber)

  The DeChance Chronicles:

  Heart of a Dragon

  Vintage Soul

  My Soul to Keep – The Origin of Donovan DeChance

  Kali's Tale

  Novellas:

  Roll Them Bones

  The Preacher's Marsh

  The Not Quite Right Reverend Cletus J. Diggs & The Currently Accepted Habits of Nature

  'Scuse Me, While I Kiss the Sky

  Cockroach Suckers

  Collections:

  The Fall of the House of Escher & Other Illusions

  Defining Moments

  A Taste of Blood & Roses

  Spinning Webs & Telling Lies

  The Whirling Man& Other Tales of Pain, Blood, and Madness

  Etched Deep & Other Dark Impressions

  The Call of Distant Shores

  Intermusings

  Non Fiction: American Pies – Baking With Dave the Pie Guy

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  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank, first and foremost, the love of my life, Trish, for standing by me during one of the hardest periods of my career and helping to make this book possible. I’d also like to thank Lisa Snelling, whose artwork inspired the anthology where DEEP BLUE first took root, an unknown sax player in the Washington DC subway, the people who created the Holocaust Museum in DC for helping to make sure we never forget the horrors of the past, the movie PI, and Vince and Leslie Harper of Bereshith Books, all ingredients in the birth of the novel. This book is dedicated to all the blues men from Robert Johnson to Jimmy Page who gave me the music, and to my brother Bill – enjoy it, bro. Last but not least, I'd like to thank Neil Jackson of Ghost Writer Publications for the brilliant new cover art for the digital edition.

  Introduction

  The novel Deep Blue originated from the novelette by the same name published in an anthology titled Strange Attraction. In Strange Attraction, all the stories were inspired by the “Kinetic” Art of Lisa Snelling, each author choosing one of the characters on an intricately detailed Ferris wheel sculpture. I chose a harlequin, hanging by a noose from the bottom of one of the Ferris wheels seats. I took the image, made it the wallpaper on my computer, printed it out and carried it around with me, and let it sink in. I could have written any number of stories that would have sufficed, but somehow I knew there would be more to this work, and so I waited.

  The publishers of the anthology, Vince and Leslie Harper, invited me to have dinner with them one night when my job took me to Washington DC. We met for Mexican food and went together to see the movie Pi which, at the time, was newly released. On the way to meet the Harpers, I walked down into a shadowed subway, and I was assaulted by some of the most haunting saxophone music I’ve ever heard. It bordered the blues, walked down old jazz roads, and I never saw the musician. That set the mood for what was to come.

  I reached the restaurant without further incident, and we spent a pleasant hour scalding mouths and stomachs with jalapeños and washing them down with beer. Then came the movie. I won’t go into detail about Pi, but I’ll say it’s a black and white film, very surreal, filled with symbolism, and it left me visually and emotionally stunned. I parted company with Vince and his wife, found my way back to the subway and my hotel, and called it a night.

  The next day, a friend of mine and I set out to visit the Holocaust Museum. I have always wanted to see it, but I was not prepared for the intensity of the images, the displays, and the words I would find in that short hour visit. I purchased a book of poetry written by the victims, and left with so much bottled up inside from those two days that I thought it would be the end of my sanity.

  That night, I started to write. I started to write about The Blues, and how deep they might really get. I wrote about pain, not my pain, but the pain bottled up inside the world, as the pain had been bottled up inside me, and I wrote a way out. That was Brandt, his guitar, and his blues. The story, like the pain, refused to be bottled up in just the few lines of that novelette, and so I released it into the novel you now hold.

  Everyone comes to their crossroads eventually – the defining moment of life. As Old Wally, one of the novel’s main characters tells us – “Crossroads, or the crosshairs.” Forward or back, but you can’t stay stagnant – that way lies madness. I give you . . . Deep Blue.

  ONE: The Fool

  The lights flickered on. The stage, moments before a dark world of surreal sound and chord-soaked images, became a snarl of patched cables, scuffed speaker cabinets, and half-assembled equipment. No one spoke to Brandt as he passed, white makeup blurred with dark lines from the black that lined his eyes and lips, a melting harlequin image of angst and insecurity. He had his guitar case in one hand and his escort for the night, Jose Cuervo, clutched tightly in the other. The doors would close in thirty minutes. No leeway. Sid paid well enough, and he did right by the band, but at closing time he wanted everyone, and everything, out the door.

  One of the waitresses, Katrina, let Brandt out the door, leaning to whisper as her enamel-tipped fingers worked the ponderous deadbolt. “You look like a fucking dead clown.”

  Brandt brushed past her, his shoulder sliding against her breast as he slipped into the night and turned down the road toward his apartment. He walked away slowly, not even thinking about looking for his car. No way he was driving. The guitar case slapped comfortably against his leg as he walked, taking his mind off the last set. Too much tequila. Too much apathy. Summed up in two words: too much. He’d forgotten the words to a song he’d written himself, repeated the previous verse and mixed that
up with the chorus. No one had noticed. He thought maybe Shaver had caught it, just before launching into the solo, but he couldn’t be sure. The audience didn’t give a fuck what they played. Shaver only lived for the solo. Hard facts, but true.

  Brandt thought about that for a long moment. He tipped the tequila bottle up, took a slug, and capped it again, moving off down the street. “Fuck them,” he said out loud. “Fuck them all.”

  The streets were empty. The soft glow of street lamps pooled on the deserted roads, making each intersection a glowing oasis, and Brandt walked from one to the next, the tequila forgotten, words and music swimming through his mind. He hated nights like this. He hated the empty, nothing feeling of leaving a bar after a show where no one, not even the band, had cared. Nothing. Empty. He hated being alone and drunk. He hated the thought of his cave-like, nowhere apartment with the fading paint on the walls and electricity that only worked half the time. It reminded him too much of his father’s home, and his father’s life. It reminded him that no matter how many dreams he’d had, he was living in the image of his creator, minus the beer gut and the attitude.

  His last private moment with a woman had been the landlady screaming about rent he wouldn’t earn at all unless the nights got better than this one. More of the family scrapbook tossed in his face as the old bitch’s features had melted to his mother’s, the voice growing yet another octave more shrill, piercing his heart and his gut. Different voice, same message. Loser. Nobody. No future. Another swig of tequila, and he turned the corner to his block.

  His building was one of many. Too many, all the same, layer upon layer of box apartments with doors only different because they bore separate numbers. Tiny worlds, each bleak and lonely, cut off from the others by walls too thin to block sound and too crumbled to hold paintings or coat hooks.

  Brandt stumbled up the stairs, nearly fell, then recovered his balance just in time to keep from banging the guitar case on the dirty steps. The tequila bottle struck concrete with a loud clink and he cursed. Lurching up the final three steps, he leaned into the door and reached into his pocket for his keys. Nothing. He patted the tight denim, cursed, and shifted, letting the guitar come to rest at his feet and trading the Cuervo to his opposite hand. The other pocket was empty as well.

  “Fuck!” he said, leaning hard into the door, his head cracking painfully into the wood and leaving a dirty white smudge. He leaned there, eyes closed tightly, blinking against the sudden attack of vertigo that assaulted his senses. The car. The keys had to be in the fucking car that he was too fucking drunk to drive, or even find. No keys, no door, and he wasn’t about to wake that old bitch and tell her. She’d leave him on the street. She was ready to put him there anyway.

  Brandt leaned for a moment longer, breathing slowly. Sometime in the soft void of that moment, sometime between thought and darkness and thought again, the sound started. It was hypnotic, dragging at his heart first and tugging his ears into service for the translation.

  Music. It was the crisp, clear voice of a harmonica, floating to him through the stillness of the late-night streets.

  He listened, then pushed off from the wall, trying to orient himself. Shaking his head, he considered taking another swig of tequila, thought better of it, and turned. He couldn’t get in, and he couldn’t stay on the stairs, either. Might as well find out where that music was coming from.

  Brandt hit the street once more, turning the opposite of the way he’d come. The music seeped out from the darker depths of the city. Not safe there, he knew. Not safe walking back for his car and chancing his alcohol-soaked mind to the streets, or the police, either. He stumbled ahead, letting the music lead him and blanking out everything else. It was beautiful, but sad beyond anything he could remember hearing, or experiencing. Tears welled in the corners of his eyes and he brushed at them, smacking himself painfully in the head with the tequila bottle and cursing softly.

  He didn’t recognize the tune, but it was blues, pure and sweet, blues so soul-deep that the voice of the instrument spoke in the place of a man’s lips. The way it was supposed to be. The way he wanted to feel when he played. The way he felt when he kicked back, closed his eyes, and listened to T. Bone Walker, or Robert Johnson, or Billie Holliday. The way the blues had not been played in so long they seemed banished to some fantasy realm that never was, the recordings elaborate hoaxes, mocking him with things beyond his reach. Hot tears welled suddenly in the corners of his eyes. He ignored them. He knew they would run down, trickling trails through his ruined makeup, but he didn’t care.

  Brandt hummed the melody, trying to commit it to memory. He knew the classics. He knew the old masters. He did not know this song. It was intricate, dripping with simplicity that was belied by quarter-tones and shivering trills of sound that walked the tightrope between notes, hinted of notes that were missing, between the C Sharps and D Minors.

  Ahead an alley opened to his left. He knew the place. It had once been a packing dock for a shipping company, long since gone to ruin. Brandt stopped. He did not want to think about that alley, had thought far too much about it already. A shiver transited his spine and he blinked once, unscrewing the lid of the tequila bottle and taking a long swallow.

  The homeless gathered in that alley. He saw the flicker of trashcan firelight winking and shimmering from the darkened entrance. The music drew him, but his fears held him back. Stalemate. Brandt could see himself in that alley. He could see the downward spiral of his life spinning him into it like a giant drain.

  As he slowly screwed the lid onto the tequila, he noticed for the first time that there was a huddled figure seated at the entrance. He tried to pierce the gloom and make out details, but he was still too far away, nearly a block. Breathing deeply, he stepped forward again, gripping both guitar and tequila as if they were talismans of protection.

  It was a woman, old and cloaked in layer upon layer of tattered clothing. Spread out on the ground before her was a semi-circle of cards. Tarot. Brandt knew little of the brightly colored images, but he’d seen them often enough to know what they were. As he entered the mouth of the alley, he glanced down, and she suddenly raised her gaze to hold his, trapping him in the depths of yellowed, rheumy eyes. The music was louder now, captivating. The tune had changed, sweeping up and down minor scales, each note lingering, blurring into the next.

  The woman did not speak, but held out the deck to Brandt, her mouth opening slowly in a toothless grin. He stared at her for a long time, not noticing the cards. He stared until he realized what he was doing, then turned, embarrassed, face flushed with tequila and shame, and staggered into the alley.

  “Crazy old bitch,” he muttered.

  The alley was a chiaroscuro wash of shadows, contrasted against the backdrop of trashcan fires, their dancing flames too dim to clarify those gathered around them. Brandt studied the darkened doorways and alcoves, but there was no sign of the musician. Brandt cocked his head to one side, listening. The notes were no less clear, but neither did they help him to narrow his search. The tequila wasn’t helping either. He narrowed his eyes, swept his gaze over the alley a final time, and lurched toward the wall of a nearby building.

  There were no fires too near, no future-of-the-nowhere-musician wraiths to beg or harass him. He spun, leaned against the dirty brick, and slid down to the ground with a soft thud. Somehow he managed to hold the bottle up so it didn’t smash on the ground, and the guitar case so his instrument wouldn’t crack or break. His ass was less fortunate, but the Cuervo numbed the pain.

  Without hesitation, he slid the guitar case to his side, unhooked the clasps, and opened the lid. The polished wood glowed dimly in the flickering orange light. Brandt stared at the instrument for a long time. He wanted to play. He wanted to play so badly his fingers itched and his mind whirled. The whirling was too much tequila and not enough inspiration. Then he heard the harmonica again, really heard it, and his hand slipped down to grip the neck of the guitar. He pulled it free of the case, letting it r
est gently and comfortably on his leg, and listened carefully to the melody of the lone harpist. Brandt might not be able to find the man, but he could hear. He could feel.

  He remembered the barmaid’s words: You look like a dead clown. He thought of Shaver’s comment on his newest version of the makeup he’d worn since his first performance. It set him apart, erected a wall between Brandt and the band. They did not join the “show,” or condone it. He could play, write, and sing, so they let him be.

  “It’s all such a drama to you,” Shaver had said, watching him apply the white-face and the rouge, the exaggerated eyes, lined in pain and outlined in deeper black than the shadowy depths of the bar’s corners. “That shit went out with KISS.”

  Brandt reached up gently, slowly tracing a nail through the smeared makeup. Drama. Shaver had no idea. Brandt’s fingers slid to the strings gently. His eyes closed. He let his mind slide as well, let it slip to darkness, to thoughts of his bills, his landlady, anything to bring him down to those notes. He felt his fingers twitch, reaching for the strings. He held them back. So deep.

  He wanted to blend with that sound, to feel the notes flow up and through him. He couldn’t bring himself to try. Though the desire to play was a physical ache so powerful it nearly doubled him over, something even the tequila had failed to do, he held his fingers still. Heart thudding a dull rhythm in his chest, he stared into the darkness, listening, as the tears flooded his eyes and washed down his cheeks again. He couldn’t fucking play.

  The sound took him back, months back. The band had been on a rare road trip to the edge of town, opening for some skin-head local noise-mongers with a following and an attitude. The set ended early. Synthia had been drunker than Brandt himself, for a change, and had not been ready to call it a night. Somehow her wobbly enthusiasm and half a hit of acid had brought them further still from the center of the city, to the fringes of a small carnival. The Ferris wheel had been so short it seemed a toy, and the booths were lined with the seediest of the seedy. Lost men and women, boys and girls, eyes vacant of humanity and burning with a hunger that only the laughter, money, and dreams of the uninitiated could sate.