The wind blew north over the river, bringing with it the faint smell of fish and putrescent sludge. There was an undertone of grease from the train yards, of rusted steel and burning coal and decadence.
None of the boys made any comment about any of this, though they weren’t all totally oblivious to it. Johnny suggested that they might use the metaphor of falling leaves as the bodies of soldiers in a poem he’d been wanting to write. War was on everyone’s mind lately; where the country wasn’t currently engaged in fighting, it was busy picking one. “You could turn it into a song,” he told Chris.
Chris had nodded distractedly. He was too preoccupied with trying to figure out how it might work practicing so far out of town. Would he be able to borrow the car? He tried to envision what Alex’s place might look like. Was the “empty building” just some rundown shack or something? He realized with no small amount of unease that neither he nor Johnny knew very much about their new bassist, about where he’d come from originally and who he was. All they knew was that he claimed to be nineteen, had dropped out of school years before, and was living on his own. The fact that he was scary good on bass and vocals almost made the rest of it irrelevant.
“So, who owns this building?” Chris asked.
Alex shrugged.
“You’re sure you’re allowed to be there?”
“It’s cool, man. Don’t sweat it.”
Chris knew it wasn’t an answer, but he also knew enough about Alex not to push.
Apparently Johnny didn’t. “Sweat it?” he said. Chris thought he sounded nervous. He knew that Johnny didn’t do too well outside of his comfort zone. “Sweat it? What’re you, some kind of jive-talking hep-cat, Alex?”
“What’s a hep-cat?” Chris asked, knowing where this would lead and hoping it would distract Johnny.
“How should I know,” Johnny said, obligingly. “I’m a drummer, not a linguist.”
Chris smiled, then turned back to Alex.
“And there’s electricity?”
“Don’t worry, man. I said it’s cool and I meant it.”
Chris rolled his eyes. “You’re killing me, man.”
Alex smiled and nodded. “I know.”
They walked on in silence for a few more minutes, Johnny and Alex tightrope walking the rails and Chris following along behind, fingering the first notes of a new melody on his air guitar. The song had been inspired by Johnny’s falling leaves comment. He realized how lucky he was to have the boy as a band member. The kid was as good on drums as Alex was on bass, and he had a way with words that left him slightly envious.
And Alex? Almost grudgingly, he had to admit that the new kid had already become as indispensible to their little enterprise as he and Johnny.
Once more he marveled over the circumstances that had brought them together, the random coincidences that had to occur in order for Ten-Forty to finally become real, the ease with which it had all fallen into place.
All his life he’d dreamed of forming a band, but he’d pretty much given up hope of ever realizing that dream here in Edgemont. If a single word could be used to describe the town, it would be lacking. It always seemed to Chris that whatever a person most wanted in this place, that one thing was perpetually just out of reach.
He knew he wasn’t the only one to think that way. Edgemont was like one of those lost mail collection centers, a dumping off point of broken promises, the trash bin of unrealized dreams. The effect on people was simultaneously subtle and obvious: very few of its residents ever aspired to anything beyond mediocrity.
He’d made other attempts to form a band over the years. When he was a sophomore, he and three other guys had formed a band they called Munny Penny, but it never even got off the ground. Most of the guys were just interested in sitting around and cracking jokes and farts, drinking soda and talking about girls. Music was secondary to them. They just weren’t as serious as Chris was.
As one guy said, the day Chris announced he was pulling the plug on Munny Penny, “It was pretty much dead on arrival anyway.”
It was why Johnny’s comment the day before had so irked him. The last thing he wanted to hear was Ten-Forty being D.O.A.
Now, just two weeks after Alex joined and they officially formed the band, Chris almost couldn’t believe his good fortune. He had a band, its members were scary talented, and they were all totally committed to making it work.
Ten-Forty was the police code for “dead on arrival,” which Chris only knew thanks to his mother. He’d never told Johnny and Alex its meaning, and they hadn’t asked, just accepted it. The band was Chris’s baby, after all, something they all tacitly acknowledged. Besides, it wasn’t like they couldn’t change it later if they wanted to.
Calling the band D.O.A., even in code, was Chris’s way of throwing it back in the face of fate that he wasn’t afraid of failing. He’d already done it once, and he’d keep on doing it until he succeeded.
And it sure seemed like this time he would.
He’d met Johnny back at the beginning of the school year while serving library detention. LD was reserved for minor disciplinary violations. Chris’s infraction had been not paying attention in class. The night before, he’d slept very little. The thread of a song had been bothering him, drifting through his mind like a ghost, teasing him by staying just beyond his grasp, fading quickly away every time he thought he’d gotten close to it. It haunted him all the next day, and so he’d spent every minute he could in his classes trying to recapture the tune, to put it down on paper. His math teacher had asked him twice to pay attention before finally losing his patience and writing him down for LD, much to his classmates’ amusement.
Chris had never met Johnny before, had never really noticed him, either. Johnny was one of those invisible geeky kids, good at blending in for the most part, camouflaged like the beige lockers that lined the hallways. Apparently he spent his lunch periods working in the library. “To avoid the lunchroom dynamics,” he’d told Chris, later, after they’d gotten to know each other a little better.
Somehow, that day of LD, they had gotten to talking and the conversation gravitated to music. Chris mentioned that he was guitarist. Johnny told him that he played drums and that he’d always wanted to be in a band. By then, Chris had realized his mistake, and that it was already too late to take it back. Looking at Johnny, he just knew that the kid wasn’t the rock ‘n’ roll type; more like the Disney boy-band type. If even that.
He wasn’t usually so judgmental—heck, he had his own issues trying to fit in—but Johnny practically screamed vanilla ice cream. Chris thought the boy would probably start singing ABBA. Or, worse: country.
“I play some pretty hard stuff,” he’d told Johnny.
“The harder, the better,” Johnny had countered, to Chris’s surprise and disbelief. They’d left it at that, with neither of them pushing the issue, and Chris was glad for it.
But then, over the next week or so, he suddenly started noticing the kid everywhere, and each time Johnny would gently ask if he was still looking.
How could he say no? He finally agreed to hear Johnny play.
He went over to Johnny’s house that afternoon.
“Jesus Christ,” Chris exclaimed, gaping at the rig in Johnny’s bedroom, “there must be a thousand dollars in equipment here.”
“Closer to six thousand, actually. Maybe more.”
Johnny sat down and warmed up by twirling his sticks, then tuning his set. Chris settled on his bed to listen.
He started off with a drum riff that left Chris speechless. It would’ve put professional drummers to shame. He flew between snares and cymbals and bells like a man possessed, like a demon with six arms.
“And that’s nothing,” he told Chris when he’d stopped for a breather. “Are you ready to have your socks knocked off?”
“You pretty much already did that.”
“Then your underwear.”
Chris didn’t tell him he didn’t wear any. He figured that was probably
too much information so early in a friendship.
And that’s what it turned out to be. Within a month, it was like they’d known each other their entire lives (although Chris kept the fact that he went commando to himself).
Chris played lead guitar, but he also loved composing songs. And besides drumming, Johnny turned out to be quite the poet. Now they had lead and rhythm. They could compose songs and put words to those songs. But neither of them could sing. They would, but it didn’t sound very good. And so they posted an online ad in the local Craigslist for a vocalist, preferably one who could also play bass, because they felt like they needed that, too.
Enter Alex.
Alex Alger. Six-foot-four, long dark hair, pale skin and dark eyes, skinny as a rail. He looked liked death warmed over.
The day Alex showed up at Johnny’s door to “interview,” his bass strapped to his back, Chris found himself staring at the kid’s arms, looking for the tell-tale track marks of a junkie. But it became clear soon enough that Alex was clean.
“We play mostly hardcore rock opera,” Chris warned him. He wanted to be sure Alex had the stamina to play for long periods at a time. He was tall, but he looked like a strong breeze might blow him away.
“Then you’ll definitely need a strong singer,” Alex had glibly replied.
“But can you play and sing at the same time?”
“Ain’t no Geddy Lee, but I can certainly hold my own.”
“Who’s Geddy Lee?” Johnny whispered to Chris.
“How am I supposed to know?” he answered.
“Aren’t you a guitarist?”
Chris turned to Johnny with a frown and said, “Dude, you’re killing me.”
Alex had laughed at them. Just stood there on the doorstep, shaking his head and laughing. For some reason, it had given Chris chills. But then Johnny started laughing, too, and it was all Chris could do not to join in, even though he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what was so funny.
“Look, how ‘bout I show you what I can do?” Alex drawled. “Got a cabinet I can hook into?”
Chris got Alex plugged into his own duo-amp and then settled into a lawn chair to listen.
“So, whaddya wanna hear, boys?”
“Flight of the Bumblebee,” Chris teased. Something about Alex’s demeanor irked him, made him feel jumpy.
“Surprise us,” Johnny said, as he settled onto his stool behind the drums.
“Well, it’s a bass, guys. By itself, it’s not much to listen to. Could play some Hendrix. You know, some Smoke on the Water—”
“You said you could sing, right?” Chris asked.
“Yeah.”
“Then play something and sing something, hopefully at the same time. Hopefully it’ll be something worth listening to. And no Hendrix, please.”
Alex grinned. If he noticed Chris’s sarcasm, he didn’t show it. He took a moment to tune his guitar, strummed a few chords, then lit into a song that the others thought sounded vaguely familiar. When Alex was finished, Chris felt a strange sensation running down his spine, something cold and electric.
“What the hell was that?”
“You didn’t like it?”
“Well…it’s not rock opera, nothing like our usual stuff. But…I don’t know.”
“The House of the Rising Sun,” Alex told them. “It’s an ancient folk song.”
“I wouldn’t call it ancient,” Johnny interjected. “The Animals, right?” Alex shrugged. “They were, what? Mid-nineteen sixties?”
Alex gave them a dark look and replied, “The song’s a lot older than that.”
“Well, I liked it,” Johnny said, looking over at Chris for approval. Chris had to admit that he did, too, but he wasn’t ready to commit to Alex just yet.
“So, am I in?”
“Not so fast,” Chris said. Something about the bassist’s playing and singing had felt…off. Not a lot, but enough so that he wanted to hear more before making a decision. “Play something else.”
Twenty minutes and three songs later, Chris had to admit that Alex could both sing and play bass amazingly. Still, he held back. Every one of the songs Alex had played had left him feeling agitated, almost jumpy. There was something…creepy about the way he sang. It left him feeling edgy, itchy. It had raised goose bumps on his skin and made his scalp tingle. Most disturbing of all, he’d been inexorably drawn into Alex’s music, despite it being nothing like what he wanted to play.
He pulled Johnny to one side to discuss it, though he knew there wasn’t going to be any discussion. Johnny was making oogly eyes at Alex, and if Chris hadn’t known him any better, he would thought the drummer was actually flirting. He didn’t want to lose Johnny, so he chose his words carefully.
“Do you think he’ll fit in?”
“Dude,” Johnny said, his eyes sparkling with excitement, “this guy is exactly who we need. I’m one hundred percent sure of that.”
Chris rubbed his forehead raw trying to figure out what was causing him to doubt Johnny’s assessment. Maybe it was his certainty, a certainty that he didn’t exactly share. He wondered if he was beginning to get cold feet, as if the first real possibility of true success was bringing out his inner coward.
In the end, it was that fear of letting failure define him that made up his mind. “Looks like you’re in, Alex.”
It was a quarter past four when they passed over the highway and the adjacent river on the train trestle. The sun was at their backs, frying their necks. They were all sweating, but Johnny was also beginning to puff from the exertion. The kid wasn’t built for this kind of exercise. He did much better sitting behind a set of drums.
“How much further?” Chris asked, giving Johnny a worried look.
The sounds of the cars had faded away behind them, and all they could hear now was the wind and the birds in the trees. They’d entered the outskirts of the city where never-developed tracts of land lay between areas that had once been developed but which had since been abandoned. They’d occasionally catch a glimpse of the cement or wooden stubs of old buildings poking out of the bracken, blackened from old fires and rot. Blackberries grew wild, threatening to choke the tracks.
“Nearly there,” Alex answered.
They topped a slight rise and suddenly the cemetery spread out before them, stretching to the right of the tracks, the old tombstones, a mismatched jumble of odd shapes and sizes, stretched out to beyond the trees and around the curve of a hill.
Alex stopped and indicated a square brick building half-hidden by trees and thick undergrowth. “There she is. Home.”
Chris frowned, trying to wrap his mind around the whole homeless concept. They’d never actually talked about Alex’s situation before, but it was now pretty obvious standing here in front of that abandoned building that that’s what their new bassist was: homeless.
He’d suspected it, though. In fact, he’d been expecting something like a shack in the middle of the woods, even as he’d hoped for a warehouse. The smokestack rising from the corner of the building told him this place had once been some kind of factory. He almost expected to see black smoke come belching out of it.
They came parallel to the building. Alex started rustling around at the base of the chain link fence encircling the structure.
“What are you doing?”
Alex pointed to a hole in the fence where someone had snipped the wires and pulled the edges away. “Welcome to Shangri La.”
“What’s Shangri La?” Johnny asked, looking at Chris.
“How am I supposed to know?” he retorted. “I don’t know Spanish.”
“You forgot to say you’re a guitarist,” Alex said.
Chris rolled his eyes. “Isn’t there a gate or something?”
“Yeah, but I don’t have the key for it,” Alex said. He reached down and pulled something out of his pocket, coming up with a metal key ring before the others could argue. “But I do have one for the front door.”
Johnny glanced over at Chris, who shrugg
ed. The place was looking kind of sketch, but if Alex had a key for the door, then maybe it was cool. Maybe he really did belong here. Homeless people didn’t own keys to buildings they didn’t belong in.
They followed Alex through the fence and around the side of the building to where a massive metal door stood closed.
There was thick padlock hanging from an old swing-arm latch. The latch was rusty and bent, but the lock was new. Alex inserted the key and snapped it open. A puff of frigid air rolled out at them.
“Home sweet home,” Alex said.
“Ha!” Chris laughed reflexively. The sound bounced through the darkness inside the building before he realized he was the only one laughing.
Alex walked over to the wall and flipped his wrist. The overhead fluorescent lights came on. They were weak and covered in years of spider webs and dust. Some didn’t even work. Darkness retreated further inside, shrinking into the shadows and into corners.
“Cozy,” Chris muttered.
The building was a shell, a single, large open room. The inside had been gutted. Someone had come in and torn out the internal walls, leaving only traces of the old framing. Rubbish littered the floor and was stacked high in corners and along the walls. It looked as if the building had been abandoned years back, after it had been used to store junk.
Chris looked around, trying to imagine how Alex was living in it. He supposed it was better than sleeping under a bridge, but not by much.
Near the roof, sixteen, maybe twenty feet up, a line of small, industrial windows marched across each wall. Like the light fixtures, they were covered in grime. Very little light penetrated through. Massive industrial fans had been mounted in two of the walls. Occasionally, a gust of wind would pass through them and the blades would turn, emitting a faint groan.
“What’s that?” Johnny asked, pointing to a large rectangular object off to one side. It looked like it was made out of bathroom tile.
“My bedroom,” Alex said with a laugh.
“It looks like a table.”
“It is. It’s an autopsy table.”
Insomnia: Paranormal Tales, Science Fiction, & Horror Page 17