“You’re killing me, man,” Chris mumbled.
Alex smiled and nodded. “Now how did I know you were going to say that?”
‡ ‡
Author’s note
Rock and Roll is a recurrent theme in many of Stephen King’s stories. In his short, You Know They Got a Hell of a Band, he sends us to a place where the dead legends of rock music gather to serenade the hapless tourists trapped in the town with the paradoxical moniker Rock and Roll Heaven. It’s a fun little story.
In my own homage to rock, Raise the Dead, the main character’s mother expresses the opinion that Chris’s music will do precisely that. Little does she know how close to the truth that sentiment actually is. But it’s not just Chris’s playing that does the dirty deed. He gets a little help from bassist Alex Alger.
It’s easy enough to connect Alex with Alger Alexander, but what many people won’t know is that Alger Alexander was a real man. A musician known as “Texas” Alexander, he is considered an important and influential contributor to blues music of the 1920s to mid-1950s. Born in Texas, Alexander journeyed to New York City in the mid-1920s, where he recorded for Okeh Records with the King Oliver Band.
His version of The House of the Rising Sun (also known as Rising Sun Blues) is the oldest known recording in existence, predating by some forty seven years the famous 1964 recording by The Animals. As claimed by Alan Price, The Animals’ keyboardist, the song was originally a sixteenth-century English folk song about a Soho brothel. English emigrants later brought the tune to America, where it was adapted to its New Orleans setting.
In 1940, “Texas” Alexander was convicted of murdering his wife and was sentenced to serve at the Texas State Penitentiary. He died in obscurity in 1954. Although his grave is located in Longstreet Cemetery, Montgomery County, Texas, I have taken the liberty of relocating his remains to Edgemont for this story. I hope his ghost forgives me this small bit of literary and poetic license.
‡
THE SACRIFICES WE MAKE
They say the gods require a blood sacrifice, a virgin here, a still beating heart ripped fresh from the chest there. But not all gods are quite so selfish. The gods I worship ask for no such sacrifices. They satisfy themselves with much more modest gifts: eyes, fingers, lips, an occasional ear or tongue. They prefer the very young, for the morsels are tenderest and tastiest. I give them what I can.
The rest, they let me keep.
For David Southeby, the holidays were the best time of year, even though he hated the cold and snow and, especially, sleet. Sleet was wet. It was sloppy. It tracked wetness and mud and seeped into his shoes and froze his feet. Yes, he hated the cold with a passion.
He’d always had grandiose plans to move somewhere warmer and drier. Southern California, perhaps. Or Texas. Not Florida, though. No, definitely not Florida. There were way too many old people there, retirees. Too many old people and not enough young.
Despite his disdain for the cold, he liked the holidays. It wasn’t for any personal reason; he had no family with whom he exchanged gifts. He found the practice both amusing and infuriating. And he had no friends to convince him otherwise.
He was a businessman, which is why the holidays so pleased him. It was his most productive time of year. Halloween, in particular, but Christmas, too. And not just the day, but the whole season leading up to it, beginning with the day after Thanksgiving (he looked forward to the chaos of Black Friday crowds with barely restrained excitement) and extending well into January with mall returns. Only when school resumed after the break did his productivity drop off.
In truth, the rest of winter wasn’t so bad. At least there were business opportunities, if one kept a keen eye out for them. Weekends. The hour or so after school.
It was just so damn cold all the time.
“Next year,” he promised himself. “San Diego, maybe.” They still had the holidays, and it wasn’t cold. He wondered why he’d never given it much serious consideration before.
Maybe it was because this town had been so accommodating.
For reasons he could not understand—refused to understand—kids loved being outdoors in the winter, in all that cold. They loved snow. They would spend hours upon hours out playing in it, even beyond the point where their cheeks grew numb and their fingertips ached and little snot icicles dangled from the tips of their pudgy little frostbitten noses. And the sun would always set so abruptly—there one minute, a pale colorless orb in the drab colorless sky, gone the next. And it was usually long before dinnertime, before parents even returned home from their jobs, so why waste those precious hours going home? It would grow dark, and yet there was still playtime left to burn, just no daylight to burn it with.
The anonymous snowsuits and the scarf-wrapped faces and the darkness made snatching them that much easier, muffled their panicked cries.
He was careful not to leave tracks in the snow.
Chloroform was an important part of his kit. He always had an ample stock of it on hand, bottles of it in the shed, industrial grade from the chemical supply warehouse in St. Louis. He paid for it by bogus credit card and had it shipped to a man named Peter Greeley at an address in town where he was himself employed, ostensibly to care for a shut-in, an elderly man who’d suffered from severe diabetes the second half of his miserable life. That man’s name was not Peter. Peter Greeley didn’t exist—or, at least, not at that address. In fact, the man who owned the house hadn’t needed any assistance in over six months now, but David still collected his checks and made every pretense that the man was still alive and not wrapped in plastic and stuffed into a several paint containers in the basement of his house. After all, how else was he going to get his chloroform?
Then there were the offerings to consider. They had to be prepared a special way—the gods expected it. A bit of the child’s clothing, soaked in tears, usually ripe with the stench of three days of sweat, often tinged with the musk of early starvation. Some hair from the child’s head. A letter, written in the child’s handwriting.
The letter contained words of contrition, always coerced. It, too, was to be stained with the child’s tears.
Finally, the offering itself.
David would place these items in a clay bowl and set the entire thing in a bath of water. He would sprinkle oil over the surface in a circle around the sacrifice. Then he would set the oil on fire.
If the gods were dissatisfied, they would sink the offering, and David would have to try again, perhaps with the same child, but more often a different one. He didn’t like upsetting the gods.
But if they found the offering sufficient, the bowl and its contents would be consumed by the fire.
After lighting the oil, he would leave the room, closing the door quietly behind him, and go out into the darkened house to wait until morning to discover whether the gods had been satisfied.
He didn’t mind the dark, but he absolutely hated the cold.
Which is why he was already in a bad mood the day he picked up the boy.
It was a Thursday. The next day was an assembly day, so the kids would be staying out later than usual for a weekday, as there was no homework. Their parents would still be home late. Late dinner, late bedtime, no homework.
David stood on the uphill sidewalk adjacent to the school and watched as the children began to pour from the building. The sky above him was a solid pewter gray, and though it was only a few minutes past three o’clock, a deep, frigid twilight had settled over the land.
Fresh snow had fallen the night before and into the late morning hours, and but for the plowed roads and shoveled sidewalks, it now lay over everything like a harsh unwelcome blanket draped over a couch. Unwelcome to him, but not for the kids. They would find it irresistible. He knew that many of them would abandon their usual after-school routines to trudge up Carleton Avenue to the top where the old church still stood, all for the pleasure of sliding down the hill behind on their makeshift sleds. The trees lining each side of the hill were litter
ed with discarded pieces of cardboard and the remnants of plastic sleds torn apart in earlier thrill rides down the steep slope.
At the bottom was the park, and separating the two tracts was a walkway that was plowed whenever the groundskeeper got around to it, which, to David’s mind, wasn’t nearly often enough. The result was a slight berm at the very base of the hill, which the kids used as a makeshift ramp.
They called it Suicide Run.
David stood and watched as some of the kids filtered away from the main group and boarded the buses. The rest splintered off to go their various ways. He watched as these further fragmented into smaller groupings, some becoming singulars or doublets.
A group of four were making their way up Carleton, their body language so indicative of their intentions: the stiff-arm march, neither running, but not walking either; the excited giggles; their blindness to him as he stood there, stepping to one side, waving them past. Three girls and a boy. Young, all of them. Two of the girls were too thin, but the other two children would do. He memorized the details for later recall: Red jacket with a ruffed hood; green jacket and orange scarf.
They hurried away, and he lifted his eyes to the skies in hope of more snow to ease his work and cover his tracks, even as he shivered beneath his own parka and cursed the cold.
More children passed. He watched and inventoried. He memorized yet more details. And smiled with his lips but not his eyes if any of them noticed him or waved or said hello. So many options. He smiled and pulled his hands up to his face and blew into his palms and stamped his feet to bring the circulation back into them.
“All set, Dave.”
Mister Thurmon, the school’s principal was standing behind him, his hand extended.
“That’s the last of them. The buses have gone.”
David—he disliked being called Dave, though he didn’t mention this to Thurmon—stripped off his bright orange crossing guard vest and handed it over.
“See you tomorrow.”
David nodded.
The principal lingered, watching the thinning crowd of children as they made their way from the school. David studied the man’s face and found it lacking, the weak chin, the high cheekbones and pasty skin, the graying, balding hair. He wore a drab, gray wool sweater—no parka—and dark slacks tucked into green galoshes.
“I wish it would either snow or clear up,” he said, turning back to David. This constant dreariness is really beginning to depress me.”
He smiled weakly and David smiled back, nodding.
“Appreciate your help. Got to keep the children safe, right?” He patted David on the shoulder and walked away.
Out on the road, an SUV skidded while exiting the parking. Someone honked. The SUV sped away, belching its putrid exhaust.
David turned and entered the park before heading in the direction of the lot where his car was sitting. A Thermos of hot chocolate awaited him. He didn’t drink the stuff, disliked the grittiness on his tongue. It was for the kids who would pass him when they were finished with their suicide runs, their muscles stiff from the cold and the abuse of the hard-packed snow. The chocolate was laced with a potent knockout drug. Another benefit of caring for the no-longer-breathing Peter Greeley.
From where he sat in the car, he could see the kids. His windows were tinted, and he was nearly invisible to everyone outside unless they happened to be standing directly in front of him. But he had nosed the car right up against the snow that had been pushed away from the split-rail fence, and between it and the hill there was nothing but unbroken snow covering the soccer field.
There were nine children today. Two he immediately eliminated for being too old. Their height and mode of dress made it apparent they were already in their teens, and that was much too old for his purposes.
He also ruled out four other children for being too small; their offerings would be insufficient to satisfy the gods.
That left three, all of them boys, at least as far as he could tell. Sometimes he was wrong. Not often.
He smiled, and this time the smile reached his eyes.
It actually didn’t matter to the gods whether the offering came from a boy or a girl—they had never shown any preference, nor made such restrictions—but if one were to ask David, he would have said boys were preferable, at least for him. Boys were easier. Girls fought harder and they fought dirty. They cried and wailed and bit and scratched. They were uncontrolled fury. Boys punched and kicked, and it was all so systematic that David had gotten very good at neutralizing them. And boys almost never screamed.
He was watching the one in the dark blue parka and jeans, the only one who seemed to be alone.
He was the one.
† † †
The boy—his name was Andrew, Andrew Gardner—had seen the man walk past the bottom of the hill. It was the crossing guard at his sister’s school, the one the kids called Mister Dave whenever he waved them across the intersection and they waved back. The one they called Creepy Dave when he was out of earshot. The man had a look about him, shiny and fake, like plastic, and when he smiled and his lips parted showing a set of stained teeth, the smile never seemed to reach his eyes.
Andrew hadn’t paid him much attention. So what if the man was a little scary-looking? He seemed okay. Besides, if anyone was creepy, it was his tennis coach.
He’d seen the man get into his car, the rusted lime green hatchback with the dark windows, and promptly forgot about him.
He stopped at the top of the hill to catch his breath and to look see if his friends, Eric and JB, had arrived yet, but the other boys still hadn’t shown up.
“Half an hour,” he mumbled to himself. He’d wait another half hour before leaving, but he told himself maybe forty five minutes. He was really hoping JB would come after his swim practice. He’d promised Andrew that he’d ask his mother drop him off with a sled.
In the meantime, Andrew wasn’t going to just sit around. It was too cold for that, and by the looks of the sky, it was going to start snowing at any moment. The wind was already beginning to pick up.
Andrew rewrapped the scarf he’d thrown on before leaving the house this morning. He wasn’t normally a scarf-wearer, but he’d read in the paper this morning that a storm was going to be blowing in by late afternoon with the potential to drop a foot of snow by midnight, he’d grabbed it. Now he was glad. The wind was biting cold.
But when the hell was it going to start snowing? The stuff that had fallen last night on the hill was already frozen into a crust after the mid-afternoon thaw. Ice was good for speed, but it was hell on the ass, especially if you were using a piece of cardboard for a sled.
“Come on, guys,” he mumbled, aligning himself with the path he hoped to take down the hill. He waited for the younger kids to clear out before pushing himself off.
As he gained speed, he gritted his teeth. Snow and ice thrown up by the cardboard sprayed into his face, coated the lined hood of his parka. Wind threatened to tear it off his head, but he’d tied the drawstring tight until only his eyes and nose showed.
He hit a bump, landed crooked but managed to straighten up again, skidded, hit another. He was airborne!
This time he landed on his side and the cardboard twisted, ripped from his hands and skittered away. He tumbled down the rest of the hill on his jeans and jacket until he came to thudding stop a few feet shy of the mound of plowed snow, and there he lay, out of breath, staring at the silver sky above him.
The first of the day’s snowflakes were beginning to fall. They spiraled down from the clouds, as if appearing out of nowhere, like ash falling from a burning building, down around him. One landed on his eyelash and made him blink. Another landed on his nose and stung. Within minutes, the fall had gotten a lot heavier. Now he could hear it, the soft scrapes of the flakes as they landed on his hood and skittered away to join the rest on the ground.
Still he didn’t move. He opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue.
“Andy, I’m cold.”
He closed his mouth but didn’t move.
Her footsteps grew louder, the crunching of the snow beneath her boots as she approached. Then she appeared, a giant standing over him, her own hooded head nearly touching the clouds.
“I’m cold,” she repeated.
“Come on, Sarah.”
“I wanna go home.”
“Climb all the way to the top of the hill and you’ll be warm,” he said.
“I don’t wanna.”
“Don’t want to? Or too scared?”
She didn’t answer.
“Just a few more minutes. JB’s bringing a real sled. It’ll be more fun.”
He could see the quiver in her lip, the blueness there and the rouge on her cheeks. He was cold too, but he wasn’t ready to leave yet.
He pushed himself up and then stood and wiped the packed snow from the back of his pants. He could feel the wetness leaking through to his underwear.
He wasn’t much taller than his sister, even though she was five years younger than he was. He’d stopped growing when he turned twelve, and now that he was nearly sixteen, his parents were hoping it wasn’t too late to get him into hormone replacement therapy. If it wasn’t for the other kids in his grade bugging him about his size—not to mention the kids several grades below him—he’d just as soon not have the shots at all. The teasing had always been bad, but since he started his junior year that past fall, it had become almost intolerable.
“Hey, Andy, stand up! Oh, you already are.”
“Hey, Andy. Disney just called. They’re missing a dwarf!”
There were the usual jokes about stepladders and pygmies.
And the ultimate insult:
“Are those your sister’s hand-me-downs, Andeee?”
He would’ve loved to play sports like his friends did, but he’d ended up being too small for just about everything he tried out for. The only reason he’d made the tennis team was because of Coach Bob, and it wasn’t because people liked him.
Insomnia: Paranormal Tales, Science Fiction, & Horror Page 20