Ash: Return of the Beast

by Gary Tenuta

  ***

  Rodney only had one real friend in the entire world. His name was Jason Hall. Jason played rhythm guitar in the school orchestra and of course anybody who played anything in the school orchestra was automatically branded as a nerd or a geek––which, in Jason’s case, was actually a fitting description. Pimple-faced and skinny, Jason didn’t have much going for him but he did have three things that Rodney coveted: a huge collection of Batman comic books and two guitars.

  Up in Jason’s bedroom, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, Rodney finished reading one of Jason’s vintage Batman comics, carefully slid it back into its protective plastic sleeve, and picked up one of Jason’s electric guitars. He strummed the strings with his thumb. The sound was tinny and barely audible without the amplifier. He looked at his friend. “Can you teach me how to play?”

  Jason shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”

  “Cool. What do I do?”

  Jason took hold of Rodney’s left hand and helped him place his fingers in the correct positions on the neck of the instrument to form the notes for a C-chord. “Okay, strum it.”

  Rodney strummed the strings but still it was tinny and didn’t exactly sound like Stairway To Heaven.

  “Plug it in,” Jason said. Then he grinned. “It’ll probably sound just as bad, only louder.”

  Rodney plugged the cord into the amp and turned it on.

  Jason adjusted a couple of knobs and turned the volume up full. “Go ahead,” he said, handing him a plastic pick. “Let’er rip.”

  Rodney gripped the pick between his thumb and forefinger, raised his arm back as if he was about to burn a 90-mile-an-hour fastball over home plate and ripped the pick across the strings. The deafening sound slammed the air with the force of a hurricane. It rattled the windows and shook the walls.

  The sonic blast was immediately followed by the voice of Jason’s father shouting up the stairs. “Turn it down, goddamit! You wanna wake the dead?”

  Rodney looked at Jason and grinned. “Yup,” he said quietly, with a kind of prophetic confidence. “That’s exactly what I want to do.”

  ***

  There’s an old story––a true story, at least in part, and famous among guitarists––about a young black man, a guitar player named Robert Johnson. Johnson was born into poverty in the deep South in 1911. He endured a life fraught with hardship and trouble but he managed to learn the guitar. He soon gained some local recognition as a good blues guitarist but ‘good’ wasn’t good enough for Robert. One day he disappeared from the local music scene and no one knew where he’d gone. A short time later he reappeared, guitar in hand, but now “he could play the hell out o’ that thing,” as one of the locals put it. Legend has it that during his short absence he had gone to the Crossroads.

  According to the folklore of the rural South, the place where two roads cross was often thought to be a kind of evil vortex where the Devil could pop up at any moment and steal the souls of unsuspecting travelers. As the story goes, Robert Johnson took a walk to the infamous, dusty crossroads of Highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi where––in the middle of the night, under a full moon––he made a deal with the Devil. The deal was simple. Robert promised his soul to the Devil if, in exchange, the Devil would bestow upon him the ability to play blues guitar like no one had ever heard before. The Devil agreed, took the guitar from Robert, retuned it, and handed it back to him. That done, the deal was sealed and Robert walked away into the night and into the realm of legend.

  Young Rodney Duckworth didn’t know this story the first time he struck that resounding C-chord in Jason’s bedroom. Nevertheless, that very moment, on that rainy afternoon, was Rodney’s first step on his journey to the Crossroads.

  ***

  Three years later:

  Rodney Duckworth was now the lead guitar player and primary vocalist of his own death-metal band, GraveStone. The band was good but, echoing the Robert Johnson story––which, by now, Rodney had indeed heard––good wasn’t good enough.

  Rodney’s disenchantment had nothing to with the other members of the band, really. They weren’t the problem. His boyhood friend, Jason, played great rhythm guitar. Billy Cox was a monster on bass and Rick DeCarlo was arguably one of the best young drummers around. But nothing was happening. A few gigs had come their way but most of them paid so little it was hardly worth the effort. It wasn’t for lack of trying. They tried everything they could think of to promote the band. They even posted videos of two of their best live performances on the Internet and despite their efforts to promote the videos through a number of popular on-line social-networking sites, no one seemed to be taking notice. Rodney, himself, had developed into a good guitar player, a very good player, in fact. But that, he decided, was the problem. Good and very good were not going to cut it. Good guitar players––even very good guitar players––were a dime a dozen. He needed to be flat-out, mother-fucking, kick-ass great if they were going to go anywhere in the business. But how? Sell his soul to the Devil? Not likely. At least not yet. No, the only way it was going to happen was for him to do it on his own and this goal became an insane obsession.

  ***

  After several months of driving himself to the brink of exhaustion, choosing to play rather than eat, drink, or sleep, he finally made the breakthrough that his tortured––sometimes bleeding––fingers had been striving for. The litmus test for his arrival into the realm of mother-fucking-kick-ass greatness would be to slip any Eddie Van Halen CD into the player and match every blazing solo, note-for-note, the finger taps, the pull-offs, the tapping harmonics, the works. The day he broke through that barrier was the day he put the guitar down, collapsed on the bed and slept for eighteen hours straight. And somewhere near the end of that stretch of darkness he had a dream that would change the course of his life forever.

  Just a few short years earlier––in fact, just a day or so after he’d struck that first C-Chord in Jason’s bedroom at the age of 15––Rodney had been surfing the Internet for information about heavy-metal bands. It was during one of those searches that he stumbled upon a website dedicated to the infamous practitioner of the Dark Arts, Aleister Crowley. Rodney was immediately taken with the concept behind Crowley’s ideas about ritual magick. The word was always spelled with a k, as Rodney learned, to differentiate it from the parlor tricks and illusions produced by stage magicians. This was not that. This was the real thing.

  Rodney felt a strangely intimate connection with Crowley, especially resonating with Crowley’s own tortured Christian upbringing and his later rebellion against the whole idea of Christianity. For the next three years Rodney delved ever deeper into the writings and activities of the strange man whom, he learned, had once been known as The Beast, ‘the wickedest man in the world’. But there was another name Crowley had taken for himself, a name not as well known to most people. The name was Mega Therion. It was Greek for The Great Beast.

  Presently, as Rodney lay dreaming, his mind reeled with strange, surrealistic images, the shrill sounds of blazing guitar riffs, and the faces of unrecognizable people. Then he began drifting away from it all ––or it was all drifting away from him––until he found himself alone in the middle of an intersection where two dusty, deserted roads crossed. He stood there, squinting against the glare of a blazing hot sun. The air was dead still. The heavy smell of dry grass and baked earth stuffed his nostrils. Disoriented and utterly lost, he looked around for something, anything that seemed familiar. But all he could see in any direction was flat, desolate land. Soon––unnaturally soon, it seemed––the sunlight began to fade. Purple shadows crept across the baron landscape and moments later he was enveloped in an eerie darkness save for the glow of a full moon directly overhead.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the silhouette of a figure, perhaps a man, in the distance, at the far end of the road to his left. Soon another––an exact duplicate of the first––appeared at the far end of the road to his right. He spun around and saw another on th
e road behind him. He turned back and saw yet another figure down the road in front of him. From the four directions the dark figures approached, until they converged at the center of the crossroads where he watched them merge, coalescing into the single figure of a solitary man.

  “Hello Rodney. Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes, You’re the Beast.”

  “Hmm… but I have another name, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Let me hear you say it.”

  “Mega Therion.”

  “Very good. Now that, too, shall be the name of your band.”

  “The name of my band? Why?”

  “Trust me. Now, tell me your name.”

  “My name? You know my name.”

  “Let me hear you say it.”

  “Rodney.”

  “Rodney what?”

  “Rodney Duckworth.”

  “Does that sound to you like the name of the leader of a death-metal band?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Indeed not. Your name shall now be known to the world as Rye Cowl. And I do mean the world. Simple as that. Aum. Ha.”

  Rodney awoke with a start, drenched in sweat and shaking from the encounter. He looked at his watch. It was just after 2 a.m. He didn’t know what day it was. Or what night it was. He only knew he had to call Jason.

  “Jase?”

  “Rodney? What’s up, dude? You sound like you got a hangover.”

  “Listen, man. Get the guys together. We gotta meet at the garage.”

  “Dude, do you know what time it is?”

  “I don’t care. Just do it. This is important.”

  “What the fuck, man. Are you nuts? You been drinkin’?”

  “Jason! Just do it, man!”

  “All right! Jesus. I’ll call them. But they’re not gonna wanna come over. I mean, you know, like Rick, man. He’s gotta get up and go to work in the morning. And Billy. I don’t know what he’s doing. Probably doing that chick he met the other day. He definitely won’t be coming over if that’s the case. You should see her. Man, she’s––”

  “Just fucking call them, will ya? Tell them to get their asses over to your place. We’ll meet in the garage.”

  Jason’s parents owned a nice suburban home with a double-car garage separated from the house. The house and the garage were situated a considerable distance from the street, and were separated from any neighboring homes by a vacant lot on each side. It was a perfect set-up for the band’s long and hellaciously loud practice sessions. The garage had become much more than just the birthplace of Rodney’s band. In Rodney’s mind it was a holy place, his church. The guitar was his crucifix and death-metal was his religion––a religion he wore wrapped around him like a cloak. Jason, Rick and Billy were in it for the fun of it, the comradeship, something to do. Rodney was in it because he had no choice.

  “Why don’t you call them?” Jason argued. “Your phone’s not broken. And what the hell is the big deal anyway?”

  “Believe me, it is a big deal. The band’s got a new name.”

  “What?”

  “And so do I.”

  “What? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I’ll explain when I get there. I’ve got some things to do. Call the guys.”

  ***

  Rodney’s announcement about changing his name, as well as the name of the band, was met with extreme skepticism by the rest of the group that night in the garage. But eventually, reluctantly, they succumbed to Rodney’s bizarre idea. The band was going nowhere in its current incarnation so they figured it couldn’t hurt. They could never, however, in their wildest rock-star-wanna-be fantasies, have imagined the extraordinary and ultimately horrific chain of events that this decision was about to unleash.

  Rodney––who now insisted he be referred to as Rye Cowl and only Rye Cowl, despite the reluctant glances from his band mates––immediately deleted the videos of the band’s old performances from the Internet and replaced them with videos of the band––now billed as Mega Therion––performing in the sacred temple of Jason’s garage.

  The songs on these new videos were no different from those performed on the previous videos. They were, in fact, exactly the same. The response, however, was as if a spell had been cast across the entire nation. The videos went viral in no time, attracting huge amounts of attention. A Mega Therion fan base had formed seemingly overnight and requests for their CD were pouring in to their website by the hundreds. There was only one problem. They had no CD. The explosive surge in their popularity had taken them completely off guard. They knew in advance that a CD would have to be the next step but they had no idea they would need to take that step so soon. It would cost money, lots of money. Studio time was expensive, more than they could possibly dredge up in a short time. Sitting around in the garage, the boys didn’t know whether to celebrate or cry.

  Jason’s frustration was at a peak. He chucked an empty beer bottle across the garage, just missing Billy’s head. It bounced off the wall onto Rick’s snare drum. It bounced off the drum and tumbled onto a paint can where it spun a half turn before toppling onto the floor and proceeded to roll across the floor right back to Jason. Jason stuck his foot out and stopped it, dead. “Shit!”

  The moment of comic relief temporarily eased the tension they were all feeling. A chorus of laughter filled the garage. But Jason wasn’t laughing. “It ain’t funny,” he yelled. Billy snorted out a chuckle. The others stifled the temptation.

  Jason picked up the beer bottle, bored holes into it with his eyes, and considered tossing it again but it seemed pointless. “We could be getting fucking rich selling CDs like hotcakes,” he said. “But between us all we couldn’t afford studio time if our lives depended on it. And where the hell is Rodney… or Rye, or whatever the hell he’s calling himself today.”

  Just then the side door of the garage opened and Rye Cowl stepped in.

  Cowl closed the door behind him and stood quietly for a moment, looking at the others. They couldn’t quite read the look on his face but that was nothing new. It had become difficult to read him at all anymore, since the night he’d had the weird dream about changing his name and the name of the band. There was more than just a name change going on with the former Rodney Duckworth. He seemed different, almost as if someone else had crawled into his skin. He was losing weight, not that he needed to. Chubby little Rodney Duckworth had grown up to become a tall, blonde-haired, chiseled-faced young man with a slender but solid build. Now the hollows beneath his prominent cheekbones were becoming deeper, his torso thinner, his eyes darker, his long, straight, blonde hair––now past his shoulders––was dyed jet black. Rodney Duckworth had undergone a complete metamorphosis and emerged as Rye Cowl, leader of a group that was soon to become a full-fledged death-metal phenomenon. Cowl shoved his hands into the pockets of his black leather jacket and casually leaned against the wall. “Um––” he started. “You guys might want to sit down.”

  Jason rolled his eyes. “Christ. Now what?”

  Cowl shrugged and feigned a tone of nonchalance. “Oh, well, I just got a call from Rusty Howard.”

  Everyone’s jaw dropped simultaneously. The name was legendary. Rusty Howard was the owner of SubGenre Recording Studios, the once small but now highly influential independent company that launched the careers of some of Seattle’s garage bands to stardom in the ‘80s.

  It took a moment for Cowl’s words to sink in.

  Jason shot Cowl a skeptical look. “Bullshit.”

  Cowl grinned. “No bullshit. He’s been monitoring our website.”

  Rick’s eyes lit up with anticipation. “Well, c’mon! What’d he want?”

  Cowl hesitated, drawing some perverted pleasure from their agony.

  Jason pointed the beer bottle at Cowl. “Stop fuckin’ around, Rye! What’d he want?”

  “What do you think he wanted?” Cowl said. “He wants to sign us.”

  Billy jumped up, his eyes wide. “Are you shit
ting us? Is that for real?”

  Cowl opened the garage door again, stepped out, leaving Jason, Rick and Billy with confused looks on their faces. A moment later he popped back in with a case of beer. “Boys,” he said, handing a brew to each of them, “If I’m lyin’ I’m dyin’. He wants us to come down Saturday and sign on the dotted line. Two-year contract to start. We’ll begin cutting a CD in his studio on Monday. That is…” he paused and grinned, “…if you guys don’t mind.”

  The celebration that night lasted into the wee hours. Saturday the deal was made, the contract was signed and two weeks later the recording of their first CD, Rise Of The Beast, was completed and in production. By the end of the year 100,000 copies had been sold and a tour of the hottest arenas up and down the West coast had drawn countless thousands of head-banging fans. Mega Therion had become a phenomenon. The money was rolling in. Life was good. Hell, it was great. Then tragedy struck.

  At least most people would have considered it a tragedy. But the death of Rodney’s parents in a car accident––even though, ironically, it was on his own 21st birthday––seemed to barely phase the young star now known to the world as Rye Cowl. Rodney had never felt close to his parents and now, fully entrenched in his new persona, he almost felt as if he was not related to them at all. Jason, Rick and Billy couldn’t quite comprehend his callous attitude about the whole thing. Then again, understanding Rye Cowl was something they didn’t spend a lot of time trying to do anymore. As long as he kept churning out hit songs and as long as the CDs kept selling and the money continued to roll in, that was good enough for them. Nothing, it seemed, could stop Mega Therion from scorching its way across the musical landscape. It was as if the fires of Hell were blazing the trail and all the band had to do was follow in its wake.