WE ARE TOTEN HERZEN
C HARRISON
Alien Noise Corporation
Published by Alien Noise Corporation
copyright 2013 C Harrison
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This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, locations and incidents are invented and are used fictitiously. Similarity to real people, living, dead or undead is purely coincidental.
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For more information on Toten Herzen, their music and additional material visit the website:
TOTENUNIVERSE.COM
FREE DOWNLOAD
In Prague, Helen Siebert receives secret plans of a new parliament building. In England, investigative journalist Jay Marshall attends the York Storytellers Festival searching for clues to the assassination of the British prime minister. The two women cross paths, but as Jay closes in on the truth she starts to question the identity of Helen, or even if she exists at all.
Bizarre storytellers and demonic marionettes combine to create a strange world of corruption, hidden identities and literary puzzles.
Subscribe to the newsletter to download The Excitement of Solitude and gain access to more exclusive material.
Begin the journey here: TotenUniverse.com
TOTEN HERZEN ARE:
Susan Bekker - Lead guitar
Born, Susan Johanna Bekker, Rotterdam, 1951
Dee Vincent - Vocals, rhythm guitar
Born, Denise Leslie Vincent, Lincoln, 1953
Elaine Daley - Bass guitar
Born, Elaine Daley, Lincoln, 1950
Rene V - Drums
Born, Rene van Voors, Rotterdam, 1952
Peter Miles - Rhythm guitar (disputed)
Born, Peter Miles, Ipswich, 1953 - 1973
ALBUMS
Pass on By 1973
We Are Toten Herzen 1974
Nocturn 1975
Black Rose 1976
Dead Hearts Live 1976
Staying Alive (unfinished) 1977
FORMATION, DESTRUCTION AND RETURN
Toten Herzen were formed in 1973 when Suffolk based rock promoter and scrap metal merchant Micky Redwall put the band together following a gig at Hooly Goolys in Ipswich. Bekker and van Voors' original band was After Sunset from Holland, whilst Vincent and Daley came from the British band Cat's Cradle.
Between 1973 and 1976 Toten Herzen sold over eight million albums, but their success was cut short on the night of March 21st 1977 when all four members were murdered by Lenny Harper. Harper was never charged and the band disappeared for thirty years until they were found by Rob Wallet, a British music journalist, and persuaded to make a comeback.
This is the first part of the story of their comeback.
PART 1: SALVATION
1 (April) 2013
"What about Toten Herzen making a comeback?"
"What?"
"A friend of a friend knows Rob Wallet-"
"Knows who?"
"Rob Wallet.”
"What about him?"
"The Toten Herzen reunion?"
"Oh, them. They'd be about two million years old, wouldn't they?"
"Hasn't stopped the Rolling Stones."
RavensWish - decided to change my life gonna travel until I meet @TotenHerzen desire to be a vampire stronger than ever #liberated is what I want to feel
2 (April)
When the third bang on the wall knocked Dee Vincent off her feet she knew something was seriously wrong. One bang was probably an accident, two bangs would be a temper tantrum, but three bangs. Three was bad. Three meant a pattern was emerging. Dee sat on the floor of her hotel room staring at the wall and waiting, waiting for the next impact, the next statement of intent. But it didn't happen. In the lull she checked her smartphone again and saw another tweet, a continuation of the chat she had been reading out loud just before it all kicked off in the room next to hers.
"He's just said Susan Bekker's Flying V would look better if she wore it over her face. Hashtag, metal sucks, Toten Herzen fuck off and die, old hags. Charming."
A cry came back from the room next door. "Will you shut the fuck up!" Dee grinned just as the fourth bang shook the wall and a heavy sheet of stainless steel burst through the florid wallpaper, lodging itself in the masonry several feet up.
"What's that?" Dee said to herself. She stood up to inspect it and tasted some of the blood dripping off one corner of the reflective metal. It was fragrant, imbued with Susan's perfume and as dark as her anger. "Are you upset because of me?" Dee asked, but there was no reply. She looked around her own room and saw the stainless steel mini bar built into a cabinet. "What?" She spoke again to the wall. "They're only tweets, don't take it like this. Listen. Flying V, er . . . f-f-s, whatever that means, maybe that's her pet name for her, hashtag, minge. God, I haven't heard that word since 1987."
The mini bar door was yanked back into Susan's room with a savagery that took part of the brickwork with it. An unholy crashing sound continued for several raucous minutes before Dee looked through the hole in the wall and saw her friend covered in blood and standing rigid on a carpet of shattered mirrors.
Dee travelled through the wall. "Is it safe to speak?" No reply. Susan was recharging, taking ever deeper breaths until she let out a howl that vibrated the hotel's fixtures and fittings. When the din had subsided Dee wiped her eyes and turned her phone back on. "Do you know everything switches off when you do that." Car alarms outside were crying for their owners.
Susan slowly acknowledged the devastation around her and the increasing noise of footsteps and panic out in the corridor. Dee stroked the hair back from Susan's face and brushed away the remaining few crumbs of glass still embedded in her skin. "I feel better now."
"Do you? You don't look it."
Susan's eyes were reddening. "Don't I? How would I know? This world of walls is driving me fucking mad. Just once, just one fucking time I'd like to see my face in a mirror; check my hair, brush my teeth, just once do it and decide for myself that I look okay."
"Well I'm sorry, but you can't," said Dee playing with her phone. "I've told you, go over there, introduce yourself. Let him see he's wrong." She looked up. "Then rip his face off."
"Who is that fucker anyway?"
Dee studied her phone. "Mike Gannon. Ah, look, his username. The greatmickeygee. He has seven hundred and thirty five followers. More than you."
"You think this is funny?"
"Sort of. You gotta laugh. He called me a geriatric goblin, am I ripping up my hotel suite? Am I studding my waxen face with bits of glass? No, I'm dealing with it and so should you."
"I'm not dealing with it. I don't want to deal with it." She froze again. "I want to do something about it. There's no point to any of
this, the comeback, reunion, whatever you wanna call it, if we just let the same things happen all over again." She snatched her jacket off a chair.
"Do you want me to come?"
"No."
"I could film it." Dee waved her phone.
"What? Why?"
"That's what everyone does these days. Don't they? Film the victim. Capture the moment, share it with your friends. Upload it to the cloud! In a hundred years time you'll have a memento of this evening to share with your grandchildren."
"You're sick." Susan vanished.
"Get some Werther's Originals on your way back." Dee texted Rene and Elaine: 'watch yourselves bekkers upset!!'
-
Mike Gannon's flat was in darkness, but as Susan travelled from one room to another she caught sight of him now and then in the glow of his open fridge or the fluorescence of his laptop screen. As she explored his sanctuary she could hear him laughing, giggling, sniffing, tapping his caustic messages on the keys of his smartphone. She could smell the beer he was swigging. The leftover vegetables of an earlier salad covered in olive oil were already in the first stages of decay. The bathroom reeked of lemon bleach. She drifted alongside him and spied on his messages: 'not backing out phone suddenly went off but its back on now'. He shivered and gulped another mouthful of beer as he waited for the response then continued wandering round his flat in a state of bored lethargy, unaware of his stalker, unaware of the attention.
She heard him mumble. "Yeah, my pleasure. Twat." He threw his phone into a chair, took another swig from his bottle and turned off the laptop.
Now was the time. She would have his exclusive attention. First stop was the kitchen and the mirror on the wall next to the extractor fan. She dropped it into the sink on top of a mound of cups. Second stop was the hallway and the mirror facing the door. She headbutted it and threw it into the lounge. Alerted by the noises, Gannon was racing from room to room, shouting out at the unseen intruder, his late night poltergeist. In the bedroom Susan picked up the long mirror standing in the corner and threw it down again onto the wood flooring. Seconds later Gannon barged up to the bedroom door and put his hand to the light switch. Hesitation. Susan could smell a flourish of sweat as Gannon paused, desperate to make sense of what was going on. He glanced at the window. It was unbroken; no one had come through there. Vicious fragments of glass were waiting for his bare feet to slice across them, but he remained in the doorway, breathing rapidly, his heartbeat audible, echoing inside his chest cavity.
The devilry had stopped, but Susan wasn't finished just yet. She was stood behind Gannon with an eight inch shard of glass in her right hand. "Hey," she breathed just loud enough not to startle him. He turned his head and she rammed the shard deep into his right eye. The scream filled the apartment as the blood painted a demented arc across the wall. Gannon bent double unable to touch the shard, unable to stem the bleeding. He stumbled towards the lounge, his left eye still open, but before he could reach the chair and the discarded phone Susan stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.
"Mirror mirror on the wall. . . ." she whispered. Leaning her head against his cheek she could see his eye bulging and looking at the reflective shard cantilevered out of his skull. He could see her in his peripheral vision, looming over his shoulder, but there was nothing in the mirror. "I'm looking at you looking at me," she said. "Do I look like an old hag now, Michael? Explain this to your followers, all seven hundred and thirty five of them." Susan figured he had seconds to go before passing out so she propped his flaccid body upright and sank her teeth into his flesh down to the collarbone. Their bodies danced awkwardly for a few more seconds before she found herself biting into a lifeless carcass. It dropped with a thud and settled into a pathetic foetal position.
Susan licked the blood off her upper lip, tasting the olive oil molecules and iron! She grinned and tapped the back of his head with the toe of her boot. "Thought you didn't like metal. See, we all have our little secrets, Michael. Even you."
-
Dee was prone on her settee when Elaine Daley appeared in the room shortly after six am. "Quiet?" said Dee.
Elaine nodded. Her attention was caught by the hole in the wall. As she stepped towards it Rene van Voor's face peered between the bricks.
"Have you seen this place?" he said.
Elaine stood surrounded by the debris in Susan's room. Rene was walking round, hands on hips, studying the mini bar and its missing door. "She must have been fucking thirsty," said Elaine. Pushing bits of broken mirror around with her foot she ran a finger along the top of the television screen, wiping away the glass. "At least she didn't throw this out the window. What a cliche that would have been."
3 (April)
No one spoke on the fourth floor of Gillard House in south London. Staff at the headquarters of Gillard Publishing were in shock at the news of one of their own, music critic Mike Gannon, being brutally murdered four days earlier. Gannon's editor Chris Sparios from Pucker Up magazine was in a crisis meeting with several members of the board of directors. They wanted to know, just to be clear on things, (investors were asking) if Gannon had brought on the attack by his own conduct.
"You mean shouldn't he have kept his mouth shut?" said Sparios.
"He criticised the band in no uncertain terms and we want your opinion on whether he went beyond what is, let's say, responsible journalism. People are getting more sensitive to these things, Chris."
"Mike was always outspoken," said Sparios. "That's what made him a popular critic. That's why you hired him. His work was syndicated all over Europe. You can't expect to muzzle someone like that. He didn't libel anyone. And you know the rules: if you can't take the stick don't join a rock band. You wanted him and his provocative style so long as none of it poisoned your own reputation."
"Not exactly the sort of people you'd want to upset though." The finance director read from a memo: "Band members suspected of killing their own manager, suspected of killing the head of their own record label, suspected of killing the person suspected of killing them!"
"It's all a load of bollocks," laughed Sparios. "It's publicity. For Christ's sake they were a wild rock band who are now a bunch of sixty year olds wanting to make a comeback. For all we know Mike's probably sitting in the bar of a five star hotel in Hampshire while we sit here fretting about his alleged brutal murder."
The finance director placed his memo carefully on the table. "Mike Gannon is lying in a mortuary in south London. Mike Gannon is dead, Chris, and Toten Herzen's long blood-soaked history has just added another victim. And can I just add," he repositioned himself in his chair, "that Gillard Publishing can consider itself collateral damage in all this."
"Advertisers pulling out?" said Sparios.
"On the contrary, we think revenues might actually increase in the short term, but in the longer term we don't want clients advertising in our magazines who specialise in chainsaws and body bags."
-
A wall mounted screen in the reception area was streaming a live feed from the BBC. The calm of Cromwell Road in Hounslow had been interrupted by a mass of camera wielding bodies fighting for space as a solitary figure was led from his flat to a police van. In the pushing and shoving strobe flashes lit up the evening, but none of them caught the features of the man under arrest. Fifteen minutes later he was in a secure room at an undisclosed police location.
BBC News 24
"Police have arrested a man in connection with the murder of music critic Mike Gannon. The Metropolitan Police refused to name the suspect, but did say a 46 year old man was helping them with their enquiries. The man is believed to be Rob Wallet, the publicist of the rock band Toten Herzen who recently announced plans for a comeback. Rob Wallet is also wanted under a European arrest warrant as a suspect in the murder of a British man, Leonard Harper, who was found dead in Germany in March earlier this year."
4 (April)
Back in 1977, not long after Toten Herzen had been murdered, a young boy sat in the off
ice of his school's deputy headmistress. He wasn't expecting the cane, but he wasn't in line for an award either. Having loosened the tops of fifteen vinegar bottles he was in deep shit for ruining over a dozen school meals, including a plate of roast pork and chips about to be eaten by a maths teacher. The boy was summoned, made to wait, admonished by Mrs Baxter and her magnificent bouffant hairstyle and given detention. The tampering of the bottles didn't quite go down in the folklore of the school, but for several days the boy was a hero amongst his closest mates.
Not so now. Rob Wallet looked back on that innocent time and felt a slight feeling of regret that he didn't appreciate it more. For as long as he could remember Wallet had told anyone born after 1979 that the seventies were the lost years of civilisation; the decade was a social and cultural black hole swallowing anything that might one day be considered enlightening. There was no avoiding the smothering sepias and ochres, and when their time was up they were replaced by the even more soul destroying magnolia. It was a time of FA Cup confrontations across windswept mud baths and brainwashed teenagers in tank tops dancing to Living Next Door to Alice on Top of the Pops. After the power cuts the lights would come back on and the carnage of another IRA atrocity made itself apparent. The Sweeney always got their villain, usually because the villains were trying to escape in cars made by British Leyland.
We Are Toten Herzen (TotenUniverse Book 1) Page 1