Shinin’ through the dark and dismal night.
Curwen caught himself humming the tune and spat out teeth.
He’d watched The Tonight Show to get a look at his nemesis in motion.
He’d studied so many photographs he’d come to think of the Woman of Bronze as an unmoving idol—implacable, stern, strong, ancient. Hester provided sheaves of cuttings and pictures. Magazine covers, newsreel freeze-frames, glossies, candids, press photos.
Nefertiti Bronze with Martin Luther King and Malcom X . . . with Huey Newton—whose nose she broke in a difference of opinion about the place of women in the black liberation movement—and Angela Davis . . . with Berry Gordy and Diana Ross. Nefertiti Bronze with Jim “Slaughter” Brown and Fred “The Hammer” Williamson . . . standing over an insensible Bill Cosby, having switched drinks with him . . . with James Baldwin and Dizzy Gillespie . . . with Derek Flint and Muhammad Ali . . . with Andy Warhol and Bobby Kennedy . . . winning medals at the Olympics . . . facing down armored white cops in Mississippi, Chicago, and Berkeley . . . at nightclub openings, happenings, and street vigils . . . guesting on The Mod Squad, 60 Minutes, and Soul Train.
Tuning in to Carson, Curwen hoped to find that she was just a colored woman, a poor specimen of a meager race of humanity. Black and beautiful, but breakable and beatable.
She wasn’t in the studio. The couch guests were F. Lee Bailey, Peter Fonda, Jonathan Winters, and Candice Bergen. The star turn was saved for the end. After Johnny made an announcement, the camera cut to a black room.
White smoke. Shadows.
. . . And her face, looming up as if in a crystal ball. Enormous, smiling, hard-eyed. Three red stripes on each cheek—an African declaration of war. Her turquoise halter-top gown resolved into a moiré pattern, defeating the color television cameras. Male dancers with bare black chests and Baron Samedi top hats jived behind her. Her voice came from deep inside . . . not the voice of an angel, but of something with wings . . . an ebony sphinx or the loa Erzulie Freda . . . the pipes of Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, and Marian Anderson commingled . . . the eyes of Euryale, most beautiful of the gorgon sisters, and the body of Pam Grier . . . the mercilessness of Kali, mother of murder, and the sexual charge of Oshun, goddess of the river.
Special Agent Gauge was right. Curwen should be afraid.
Her song resounded in his skull like a personal challenge. His ears bled from it.
After the performance, the show cut back to Carson and then ran credits.
Two days later, the tune was still in his head. A voodoo beat and a bruja melody.
The fingers of his left hand wouldn’t make a fist. Two stuck out at wrong angles. Under his suit, elasticated bandages were plastered on new and old sores. His skin wept pus. Walker Phillip Ward was close to being used up.
Which of the possibles should he move into?
Would a younger body be free of the song?
“That’s not just a soul track, you know,” said Zann. “That’s a spell.”
Curwen had figured that out.
“Supernatural Soul Sister” was inescapable. All over the city, it issued from transistor radios, portable record players, 8-track tapes, and the mouths of the ensorcelled. There were cover versions in styles from country and western to an a cappella Mass. Cher and Nancy Sinatra competed to be the first white artist to record it. On their shows, Andy Williams and Dean Martin delivered elevator music renditions, somehow as weird as the authentic original.
Curwen wouldn’t have expected Randy Zann to be last man standing—the only captain left between her and him. He was the least of them, or had been. An inexperienced minstrel. But the warriors and wizards had failed. A Martense dead on the doorstep of his ancestors. A Marsh slain in her element. Perhaps it was fitting. Part of the ritual. A testing and a winnowing.
They hadn’t seen the Woman of Bronze coming.
But Zann might be the Man.
He was right. This was his battlefield—this city, this year, this vibe, this groove.
He gave the boy permission.
Hester watched Zann with something like interest. Murderous, but real.
Curwen wondered if he should worry about them.
No. He was safe.
He had his seeds. He could be young, if he wanted to be. Garry “Grok” Curwen, one of his possibles, was, he understood, a fair guitar player and had hair down to his ass. As the Grokster, Curwen could thrive in this age. Another vessel, Lucy-Linda Carnby, was a track star, scientifically medicated to actualize her potential. Then there was the Zoot Ward, a kid who drew underground comics: Ubbo-Sathla Funnies and The Weird Wrinkly Walter Worm Weekly. His four-color psychedelic revelations of the Great Old Ones were peddled in head shops from San Francisco to Chelsea. And the war hero, Lieutenant Ambrose Gordon Ward, awarded a star for walking alone out of the jungle that had swallowed his platoon. He was the sole survivor because he couldn’t stop killing—VC, villagers, his own men—until there was no one left to kill.
Thanks to his Yithian powers, Curwen could choose to be any of these—or all of them.
Experimentally, Curwen had been spending time in their bodies, when they were asleep or stoned. Free from infirmities, with clearer vision, stronger limbs, more powerful appetites.
When Walker Phillip Ward gave up the ghost, it had places to go, opportunities to take. The possibles were primed. Hester kept track of them for Curwen. There were fallbacks and long shots. His family was prolific.
Any one of his seeds would be a match for Nefertiti Bronze, he was sure.
But, for now, his best hope was Randy Zann.
“Don’t talk about it,” he said. “Do it.”
“All riiiiight,” said Zann, raising his fist in salute.
VII
This was a Randy Zann solo gig. No backing band required. Just Rudi the Roadie—gofer, getter, fetcher, fixer, and Opener of the Way. Rudi wore Miskatonic Maulers colors and dog shit–stained jeans, but had up and left bike buds and motorcycle mamas to follow the music. Now, his vocation was to make sure Randolph Maxwell Zann had every little thing he needed.
Rudi dropped a hippie hat on the sidewalk. The leather chapeau had belonged to a critic for Rolling Stone who penned a philistine review of R’lyeh R’lyeh Gone, the group’s sophomore album. Mysteriously chained to a sickle, the scribe got himself dragged along seven miles of ill-maintained rural road. After that, his inner eye opened so he could better appreciate fine sounds. His outer ass got torn up a bit too. Zann didn’t figure anyone would toss spare change into the lid, but the busking bit was part of the act.
This pitch was his by right of conquest and occupation. It was outside the Shrine of the One Solid Funkster. Formerly the Temple of the Seven Golden Fists, it was under new management. The kung phooeys were in the wind. Those were some sorry Shaolins. Can’t boot what you can’t see.
Rudi unfolded a director’s chair and brushed invisible crumbs from the canvas.
It was early evening. There were strollers on Pell Street, though the Shrine was shunned. Yellow police streamers still flapped from lampposts. White-tape body outlines were stuck on the ground up and down the block, like the human shadows left on walls and streets by an A-bomb blast.
Zann sat and waited for Rudi to fetch his instrument. A few noticed him now. The hipper types knew who he was. Those in the groove, the loop, and the know. When word got around that the front man of the Three-Eyed Burning Lobe was doing a free open-air concert in Chinatown, there’d be throngs. The other Families tried to cow the fearful into worship—but Zann had fans. They would pay to bow to the Great Old Ones. His apocalypse would be platinum. His was the Horror Happening. The Freak-In to End all Things.
The old jive of the G.O.O. wasn’t grooving so well.
The magus Curwen was a back number. Blindsided by the Supernatural Soul Sister. The Elder Gods waited for millennia, then their main man turned out to be woefully out of tune with the present day. No resonance, no harmony, no beat. Four corners, and nowhe
re on the street.
Crying shame, but the man was to blame.
Rudi laid the case at Zann’s feet. It was covered with Day-Glo decals. KEEP ON FHTAGNIN’! ALL THE WAY FROM ARKHAM. MUST BE THE SEASON OF THE WEEEETCH.
He took out the instrument. It was warm to the touch, as if the wood were still alive. Some had gone mad contemplating its strange curves, seeing eyelike gleams in the varnished surface. Hack fiddlers who touched the instrument produced once-in-a-lifetime masterpieces. Geniuses who laid a bow across its strings went insane.
Originally, it was a violoncello, made from flamed maple by Andrea Guanari in 1692. Zann’s great-great-uncle Erich’s prize possession. Added to by successive owners, carved with symbols and sigils, studded with gadgets and gizmos, hooked up for juice, soaked in the blood of sacrifice, restrung over and over. Zann’s old man—a folk singer who trudged his sandals through the barrens collecting the old, old songs of the weirdoes of the woods—stretched human vocal cords on the pegs, but the sound was poor and the material snapped too easily. These strings were pulled from the guts of arctic tigers.
“In the pines, in the pines,” his old man sang, “where the sun never shines.”
Cousin Alfreda had notched the rim like the stock of a gunslinger’s pistol. She’d used music to kill people—not in offering to the G.O.O. but just for kicks. Like the Texas Tower sniper, but with tunes. Like Charlie, she dug the Beatles. “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was her pop pick. Bang, bang. One out of sight chick, even by the standards of the Zann Clan. Zann had covered the sacrilegious scars with Zoot Ward stickers. Claude Cthulhu and Hippy Hastur, the squid bums from Ubbo-Sathla Funnies. Alfreda returned the instrument, case balanced on her stumps, after her hands were severed by a falling girder at Altamont. A bill had come due and been paid.
Zann played with talon pickers, not a bow—accompanied by ululations of his own making. He’d studied with Mongolian throat singers, and learned the secrets of a criminally insane ventriloquist who talked only in the personae of his dummies. When Zann was in sync with higher harmonics, he could simultaneously produce six distinct voices.
He quoted the riff of his biggest hit—a protest song . . .
“All you need to be a freedom fighter is a fiddle and a bow and a cigarette lighter!”
A crowd gathered on the street. Eager faces.
He plucked his first notes.
. . . He was freewheelin’ an answer song.
It was a Tin Pan Alley tradition. If Neil Sedaka sang “Oh Carol,” Carole King warbled “Oh Neil” back at him. Responding to Barry Mann’s question, Frankie Lyman claimed full responsibility for putting the Bomp (in the Bomp, bomp, bomp). When Barry McGuire hit with “Eve of Destruction,” the Spokesman coughed up “Dawn of Correction.” Close harmony singers told the Shirelles that not only would they not love them tomorrow they weren’t all that sold on them tonight. Kenny Rogers whined “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” so Dodie Stevens wailed “Billy, I Just Need Some Company.”
This was Zann’s riposte to “Supernatural Soul Sister”:
“Extradimensional Bad Brother
. . . from a higher plain . . .
Multiple mandala Mean Mother
. . . squirmin’ in your braaaaiiinn!”
It was calculatedly commercial.
If Billboard wasn’t shredded into cosmic chaos, it’d chart.
As music poured out of him like hallucinogenic sweat, his extra eyes opened. He had a view into dimensions beyond human perception. In the overlap of the spheres, fiery fingers danced over the heads of Bring-Down Bogeys. He could spot agents of the Army of Bronze sent to queer his pitch, quash his scene, and quell his sound.
Three of them. Two brothers and a broad.
He coughed commands, emphasized by string-plunks out of the range of human hearing.
The fingers became darts and struck down, through bone and into brain.
The spies died.
The rest of the crowd, caught by the sounds, didn’t care about bodies under their feet. They swayed in unison. They added their voices to his.
He sang about shedding the skin of reality . . .
“She sloughs you . . . Iä! Iä! Iä!”
Alfreda would like that bit.
The crowd chanted. Even the dead ones.
Rips appeared in the fabric of the universe.
Sky-eels rippled through the rents, lamprey-mouths bristling with teeth, purple fins tipped with poison barbs. A lamplighter pike with a centipede body zeroed in on a cop’s ear and corkscrewed into his head, curling out of the other ear, empurpled by gobbled dreams. The officer drew his weapon and tried to clean wraith-wake out of his brain with a shot. The continuum dilated, so the report stretched for long seconds. The bullet fragmented like time-lapse film of a sprouting bud. A fire-egg hatched inside the pig’s skull. His helmet flew off as his head became a wet red supernova. People around were spattered. They kept swaying to the music.
Zann played on. His callused fingers pressed strings.
His talons tore impossible notes from the instrument.
His throat-choir chorused hymns to the beings beyond.
His tapping foot cracked the sidewalk. Molten tar oozed through.
Nefertiti’s voodoo melody was tic-tac-toe and this was four-dimensional chess . . . higher mathematics and higher music.
He was rewriting and overwriting reality.
The sky-eels and pike-wraiths would be all over the city.
First, they’d just touch people at random. Some—straights, mostly—would react like the cop. They couldn’t handle it, so they’d cut their ears off and eat them. Others, who had been altering their brain chemistry with new drugs, were more open to new experience. Into them, the visitors would burrow—nestling in congenial ribcages. When their cilia vibrated with echoes of Nefertiti’s song, the summoned would hunt her down. Once brought to this plane and turned loose, they could not be stopped. They were the undefeatable earworms. The turned-on would be sniffer dogs for the hunters of the dark.
He had as good as won already.
. . . Then the drum section came in.
Zann looked sideways.
Two black dudes—in striped, flared trousers, with dandelion clock afros and garlands of love beads—were either side of him, lotused around bongos they slapped with bare hands. A sky-eel nipped at the Kirlian aura of the left-hand drummer, and recoiled like a rat gnawing on a live cable. The spade had protection.
“Too loud, man, too loud,” muttered Zann. “The drums, man, the drums—can it with the can-can, beat it with the bongos. I’m doing my thing, man, and you’re compromisin’ my harmonizin’, comprende? Hands off my baby ghoul . . . don’t step on my blue suede feet . . . get off my clawed cloud.”
He aimed riffs at the drummers.
Nothing.
They should be dead like the bossa nova.
He scattered shrill implorations among the crowd. A few wiped away tears of blood, but most jittered to the drumbeat. Switched on to soul.
Where was Rudi the Roadie? He looked around.
His faithful retainer was felled—broken-necked from a karate chop. Someone had ripped off his MM colors. There’d be wailing Mauler mamas on the Miskatonic when word got back.
The pike-wraiths from beyond came apart.
This was not cool . . . this was jive . . .
This was not hip . . . this was bogus.
A tall woman shouldered through the crowd.
Nefertiti Bronze!
She wore a maxi-length black leather trench coat with the collar turned up. Scarlet plastic go-go boots. Mirror shades and airport-issue orange ear protectors. On her back was slung a shabby acoustic guitar.
The dancers parted for her. The drums grew frenzied.
She unslung her axe and showed it to him.
A Gibson L-1 flat top. The same model Robert Johnson posed with in his studio portrait . . .
The woman smiled as Zann realized this wasn’t just the same model.
<
br /> With his altered eyes, he saw hellfire burning in the Gibson’s belly, crackling around its strings. This was the guitar Johnson took to the crossroads at midnight when he bartered his soul for the secret of the blues. The Devil, in the form of a giant black man, walked out of the night and tuned the guitar—infecting Johnson with unparalleled genius . . . until the debt came due and the bluesman died of poison, his soul fetched from his cooling corpse by the hellhound that had been on his tail.
Zann wasn’t sure who the Devil was . . .
. . . Where did Old Scratch sit in a cosmos with Tsathoggua, Nyarlathotep, and Cthulhu? Howling in a void of nonexistence . . . or just another dead godling to be fed to the insatiable Yog-Sothoth? That great devourer consumed entire pantheons for breakfast, and picked his teeth with All-Fathers and Earth Mothers.
The G.O.O. were extraterrestrial, extradimensional, extracontinual entities.
The Devil was something else . . . supernatural.
Zann didn’t believe in imps and spooks. Except as distant, dim, misinterpreted traces of the beings he worshipped. He favored science fiction over fantasy. Asimov, not Tolkien. Lovecraft, not Machen. Music was a form of mathematics. He could open up folds of space and time with algebra. It was not magic—know-how, not voodoo.
But the instrument Nefertiti brought to the battle was an object of power.
Zann believed it had been tuned by hands not human.
She began to play her own song—a slow and sinister rendition, not upbeat like the single version. This must be the album cut.
“Supernatural Soul Sister
Groovin’ on the street
Supernatural Soul Sister
Got no fear of any ghoul you’d meet . . .”
The crowd swayed to her tune now.
Zann kept playing. If it was hard to be heard over the drums, it was impossible to drown out Johnson’s blues box. Zann’s music was twisted, torn from him even as he played. The fissures between the dimensions healed. Cut off from their alien ether, sky-eels expired . . . turned to scum stuck to shoes.
His own instrument fought him, and his voices died in his throat.
“She’s got a funky plan . . .
The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming Page 32