We Are Toten Herzen (TotenUniverse Book 1)

by Chris Harrison

  Scavinio entered the room. The suite was vast, palatial in size as well as decor. He expected to find it a mess with the usual rock detritus of abandoned clothes, empty bottles, suspicious packages and under age girls. Instead there were books . . . just books. And a calm that hung like incense. Dee Vincent appeared.

  "I called by," said Scavinio. "I need to know if you're all okay." Dee looked half asleep.

  "Fine. Why, what's the problem?"

  "The problem? Three people dead, at least one of them decapitated."

  "Yeah, so?"

  Elaine joined them. The band members were emerging from different rooms off the main sitting area. Scavinio felt surrounded.

  "A lot of people would be traumatised to be at the centre of something like this."

  "But we're not at the centre," said Susan.

  "Your songwriting partners have been murdered tonight; it affects you. You might be next."

  "I doubt it," Susan said.

  "Yeah, I doubt it too, what am I saying? Can I ask you guys a favour," Scavinio said. His hands were still in his pockets. "Can we meet tomorrow, casually, over coffee. Just to discuss where we all stand. Say mid-day?"

  "No," said Susan smiling. "We're vampires. We can't go anywhere during the day."

  "Right," said Scavinio. "We're sticking to that line are we? Okay, well I'll see what the company is gonna do to replace the writing team, but don't expect a quick decision. Try to make time for us all to talk."

  "What's wrong with now?" said Rene.

  "I've been walking around and I'm a little tired. I'd also like to get home now."

  "Sure." Susan followed him to the door and out into the hallway. "Is there something you want to say, Tom? Something in particular that's bothering you?"

  "No. Not yet. But you might at least try to pretend that you're concerned by what's going on."

  Susan shook her head. "We never pretend."

  Terence Pearl: Blog post

  Glory to the new gods

  Extract from my forthcoming book 'In League with Nosferatu: the Record Industry’s Secret Vampire Conspiracy' by Terence Pearl

  If there is one thing Toten Herzen deserve credit for it's their honesty. They are accused of being vampires and they don't deny it. They got away with their crimes for so long it just seemed like another eccentric display of extreme narcissistic behaviour. How so? Because the industry they are part of is just like them.

  It plays on a kind of disinformation known as 'false mimicry.' False mimicry is a term first used by Professor Liam Shoelinsky from the Department of Societal Linguistics at the Caspard Institute in Liege. Professor Shoelinsky has described how any community, social, business, religious, can present a mythological facade which then reinforces people's preconceived expectations of how that community might behave. So, if an industry presents itself as self serving, greedy and dishonest, when it's members behave in such a way, rather than causing outrage and opposition the behaviour instils a reserved acceptance that unwittingly causes the observer to ultimately walk away. There is only opposition and a negative reaction when that community reacts differently to how it presents itself.

  In the case of the record industry, the promotion of anti-social behaviour, excessive behaviour, questioning taboos and law breaking is central to its business model, and when individuals carry on this way, the public is satisfied, reassured and rewarded. It's what they have been forced to expect and are only happy when the expectation is fed.

  Thus, a band openly proclaiming themselves to be vampires and involved in a string of killings and abuse are accepted by the public as if it's the most normal thing in the world. However, we should take note of the observations of Heather Moorehouse, a leading anthropologist who has studied anti-social behaviour for over thirty years. Toten Herzen have so far embodied certain typical messianic features: they have attracted an audience, their messages are accepted without question by their followers, they suffered death early on in their lives, the following continued long after their deaths, they were resurrected.

  Toten Herzen far from being vampires are more like gods and it's no coincidence that the word god often goes hand in hand with the word rock. A recent survey suggested that a staggering seventy eight point four per cent of Toten Herzen's followers were prepared to die for the band. Not only are these four individuals gods, they are the figureheads of a suicide cult. I wish I could say that they were merely humans and that their excessive behaviour is simply a product of the record industry's false mimicry, but this is a double false mimicry. It is the band using the industry as a cover, not vice versa. In the next chapter of my ebook I'll examine the mathematical patterns which prove that Toten Herzen's first reunion concert will be the signal for a worldwide suicide pact that could lead to the deaths of millions.

  21 (June)

  "Okay who said this: 'The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television - you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television.'" Rene looked up from his laptop as Dee came out of the bathroom towel drying her hair.

  "Wyatt Earp!"

  "There were no televisions when Wyatt Earp was alive. Andy Warhol. Wikipedia page has everything about him. He had a studio on Madison Avenue. Mind you, Madison Avenue is almost as long as the Netherlands so that doesn't really help."

  Susan was all ready to go and was having trouble avoiding Wallet who was moving at a snail's pace. "What's up with you?"

  "I can't fly."

  "Neither can a tuna fish, so what?"

  "Well, you're all going round New York by insta-travel and I'll have to take a taxi."

  "You've taken taxis before, haven't you," said Dee flicking her towel at him.

  "For fuck's sake. Will someone volunteer to hold Worker B's hand," said Susan gathering phone, purse, jacket.

  Elaine stepped out of nowhere with a huge toothy grin and a dreadful look of impending violence. "My pleasure," she said.

  "No, not her," said Wallet, but Elaine already had his hand in a crushing grip. "I still feel a slight sense of pain, you know."

  The five of them followed an ad hoc itinerary around the city, searching for evidence of Andy Warhol's existence, hoping for glimpses, insights, remnants of his time hanging around Lou Reed and the rest of the Velvet Underground. But every point of the trail led to a furniture store or some repossessed bit of historic real estate. The frustration and disappointment grew until the band and Wallet, released momentarily from Elaine's cruel grip, ambled along Broadway.

  Maybe the Beacon Theatre might have treats on offer. The venue chosen by the New York Dolls for their 1975 New Year's Eve concert was now hosting the Ultimate Doo Wop Show, followed by Frampton's Guitar Circus and, for one night only . . . was that right? An Evening With Alice Cooper. Someone inside, some unseen joker with a sense of history, must have seen them coming, must have been tipped off that Toten Herzen would be passing by tonight. The coincidence wasn't lost and the band were forced to step back from real life and consider the meaning of mortality. There he was, Vincent Furnier, in familiar top hat and black eyed make up. 'All Alice, All Night' promised the poster.

  "Does that make you feel really old or really young?" asked Rene.

  "Let's go somewhere else," suggested Susan checking the time on her phone. "What time did Almer say he was around?"

  "Any time after eleven," said Dee. "Half an hour yet!"

  They all walked away from under the theatre's canopy with a near backward stepping deference to the man they almost met when they were all at the height of their shocking fame. Furnier-Cooper had taken up golf whilst Toten Herzen were taking down old enemies. There was no appetite to even discuss the divergence in career paths or even how they had once run parallel before Lenny Harper did for real with a bag of stakes and a thirty pence mallet what Alice Cooper's stagehands would do by sleight of hand, tricks on the eye
and thousands of dollars' worth of props.

  "Well you came out looking for remnants of the past," Wallet said. "Looks like you found one of them."

  And there was another one lined up. Almer. Or Alan Miller to his doctor and immediate family: ex drummer with Cat's Cradle who emigrated to the US in 1975 two years after his musical ambitions had been torn apart by Micky Redwall's grand plan. Almer clung on to the cliff face of rock music, reaching a sort of summit in 1977 when he bought a drink for someone claiming to be a roadie for the Talking Heads. Almer dined out on that experience for another ten years whilst collecting several small bars in and around Brooklyn. "What does he do before eleven?" Wallet asked. No one answered.

  "I can hear music," said Elaine trying to pinpoint the source.

  The Necronomicon, one untidy block from Broadway, turned out to be the portal of sound she could hear. Wallet was enjoying possession of his own hand again and ready to enter the club when he saw the length of the queue outside and guessed the rest. Elaine took his arm, not quite severing it just above the elbow and they were inside, unnoticed, unseen, unbothered by a crowd already bouncing about like bottle corks on a choppy sea. There was space behind the compacted audience and a better view of the stage, but as soon as she released Wallet's hand, Elaine was attracting the approaches of Cory from the Village. (The village? Branston, Potterhanworth, not Cherry Willingham?)

  "Fuckin crazy hair," he shouted. True, Elaine's hair did have the same crimson spikes that Cory was fielding, but the rest of him was uncoloured, unbranded. His vanilla skin was vanilla coloured no matter how much the acrobatic lighting changed hue. Undeterred by her Arctic curiosity of him, the boy from the Village blundered on, beer bottle in hand, stud through lower lip, black tee shirt with Lacuna Coil decoration. "So where you comin from?"

  "Lincoln."

  "Lincoln, Nebraska?"

  "England."

  "Right. So, is that Missouri."

  "Lincoln, England. Europe. Where your forefathers came from."

  "Hey, don't talk about my father. My dad's a jerk."

  "I can see the family resemblance," Elaine was starting to warm to Cory.

  "He works for JP Morgan." In the absence of any feedback from Elaine or even cognisant awareness, Cory was trying to find some physical response to spur him on: a curl of the lip, a rippling forehead, but instead the only reaction was a kaleidoscopic variation around her pupils. Whenever the light shone whitest he found himself standing face to face with someone almost transparent other than the hair and a pair of eyes like red pool balls. "You drinking?" She shook her head. Cory gave up.

  Onstage, at the steaming head of the crowd, a Gothic concoction of melodrama wrapped up in corsetry and heavy leather, navigated the tiny space with a dexterity quite at odds with the metallic chopping and grinding of the music. Behind them hung a stagewide banner (all twenty feet of it) with the roly-poly script declaring Argent Extremus. Wallet wasn't familiar with the name, but then there were probably four and twenty thousand Argent Extremuses playing New York tonight; no music journalist could be expected to follow them all. As he looked on, he wondered how their break would come. How could Argent Extremus grapple their way out of a pack of hopefuls so big no one could be sure where exactly the centre of it was? The numbers game was galactic and stacked against just about everyone trying to play it. Possibly, somewhere in the crowd would be a Jan Moencker or a young Tom Scavinio, but chances were they'd all be at home scouring social media hoping to discover who someone else had discovered. That was the chicken and egg runaround being played these days: get the break by advertising how many 'fans' you have, but by the time you had enough 'fans' why would you need a break from one of the big chequebook holders? You do the work yourself then let someone else convince you that you'll be a star if you hand it all over to them.

  Wallet mentally pinched himself as he detected the onset of another rant. To his left, Elaine standing like the club memorial, to his right Susan, ignoring the turning heads and sideways glances that he wasn't sure were on the increase or whether he was becoming more aware of. Rene was criticising the drumming. Must be a bloke thing, thought Wallet. See the faults in everything.

  "Wait for it," said Rene as Argent Extremus moved from verse to chorus, "blast drumming any bar now. . . ." On cue the drummer was playing everything on a manic four four beat: kick, snare, crash, kitchen sink. "And now he starts getting tired and slows down and they all lose rhythm." Dee was nodding, in sympathy more than disappointment.

  When the next song started and a sense of deja vu raised its head, the five of them decided they'd heard enough and headed for the exit. Cory didn't see Elaine leaving. For one night only he could have had her all to himself. All Elaine, All Night: Elaine Daley of Toten Herzen, from England, Missouri.

  Outside the club Susan noticed she had a text message. "It's off Tom," she said separating herself to call him back.

  "Well I hope Almer's bar's better than that," said Wallet. "Six months ago I'd be ready for a decent pint by now. Is he. . . .?"

  "What?" said Dee, "Gay?"

  "No, like us?"

  "Bored?"

  "Forget it."

  "Tom wants to meet up with me?" Susan slipped back into line.

  "What now?" said Rene. "It's ten to eleven."

  "Not right this minute, but he's out wandering and has some questions that won't go away." They formed a huddle in the open space of a street corner and agreed on Susan meeting Scavinio at the basement beneath Almer's bar. (He'd agreed to let them practice there, maybe even let him join in on drums for old time's sake.) Rene would keep watch whilst the rest of them were on the other side of the ceiling if anything happened.

  Almer's bar was called Bonham on 11th and in addition to being a total mouthful - according to Dee - it was also a shrine to the Led Zeppelin drummer. Almer had a long bucket list and meeting his idol was at the top: what he hadn't allowed for was Bonham dying first with no mention of meeting Almer on his own bucket list. The bar was virtually wallpapered with framed prints of every size, live photos, posed studies, monochromatic abstracts in the style of one of Warhol's tin can silk screen jobs. Amazingly, the background music wasn't permanent Led Zep with all the other instruments acoustically removed, but a confusing mixture of dubstep, drum and bass, classic rock and the occasional shriek of punk thrown in to get the last punters to fuck off home at six in the morning.

  Susan and Rene headed for the stairs to the basement. Scavinio had his instructions and was only ten minutes away on foot. Dee was the first to spot Almer, leaning against his own busy bar in discussion with a member of staff who wasn't listening. He had a pint of something amber coloured with a head of froth, so couldn't have been American beer, and was wearing a tee-shirt that was oversized even on his already oversized body. Almer's little vocalist friend squeezed into the gap between his stomach and the bar and stayed there for a whole ten seconds before he bucked away in surprise.

  "Fuckin ell, thought someone were givin me a blow job then!" Elaine grabbed him round the neck from behind. "I could have done, but you wouldn't have noticed, you fat bastard." Dee straightened up and gave him a hug from the front.

  "Wi your fuckin teeth I'd have noticed somethin. Who's this behind me? Is it Smiler?"

  Elaine kissed him, quickly, a glancing blow of the lips, but with just enough pressure to avoid falling into air kiss territory. "Susan's downstairs meeting someone, Rene's gone with her so it's just the three of us for now."

  Almer was released and he turned to see the third member of the three of them, the unfamiliar face of Rob Wallet. He offered his hand and said "Hi. You're the writer bloke aren't you?"

  "Ex-music journalist, sometime writer, full time pain in the arse to these lot now," said Wallet.

  "I know what they're like. I tried coming over here to get away from em, but they fuckin track you down in the end. You havin a drink?" Almer knew before Wallet could answer what the situation was. The hesitation, the subconscious search for an e
xplanation. "Fuckin ell, you as well. How did they convince you? Or did they go all Keith Moon on you one night?"

  "That's something I wanted to ask you," Dee interrupted, sitting herself up on the bar top and gripping her legs round Almer's midriff. "If you like John Bonham why have you got pictures of Keith Moon all over the place?"

  With the breath being squeezed out of him Almer managed to twist around to Wallet. "You'll have found out by now what a fuckin cheeky little shit she is."

  "Was she always like this?" said Wallet happy to see someone else being abused.

  "Yeah. That's why me and Grant were glad to see the back of em. Every year we sent Micky Redwall a Christmas card as a show of gratitude," the constriction was getting visibly tighter, "and then his dogs ate him." He grabbed her legs and they exchanged cruel eye contact, but it was a genuine show of affection Wallet hadn't seen before even within the band. Almer was old. With his post-eleven pm stipulation Wallet was expecting to find another twenty year old sixty year old, but the old Cradler was both excluded from the hive and in full knowledge of its existence. His spreading weight, marbled skin and grey hair, still quite full but no longer capable of the length necessary for old rocker cliche, was Almer's reward for not joining the club. In front of him was a fresh faced goblin, to his right a steel and stone imp.

  "So, you know the score?" asked Wallet.

  "Score?"

  "What they are, what I am, why we sleep during the day and refuse pints of proper bitter in bars that look like they're owned by Norman Hunter?"

  "Oh yeah. But, you know, everyone has their secrets, don't they."

  "Rob's secret is playing golf," said Elaine. She dared Wallet to respond.

  "I'm playing the long game, Almer," said Wallet. "I wind this lot up until they pay me a wedge to get lost."

  "Oh yeah," he said drumming the tops of Dee thighs, "These two don't pay for anything. Tighter than the skins on my drums, short arms and deep pockets. Never bought a round in their lives. I reckon that's the main reason they turned; so they wouldn't have to buy anyone a pint." Dee squeezed again and Almer stopped drumming.