The robed creature approached. I stood motionless upon the sand, rooted in place by a fear I had never known before, and a cautious curiosity. What were these things? And was this really happening? If I turned back, would I find myself fast asleep in the control room? Part of me wanted to look back, to turn away from this gargantuan beast and the writhing things that moved behind its mask, but my curiosity got the better of me.
An oily, guttural voice rose from behind the creature’s mask, choking out the words, “Do you know the Yellow Sign?”
In that moment I realized where I’d seen the symbol. The statue in Camilla’s apartment, with its fingers poised and frozen at the point of mutilation. Hastur. The true Yellow King.
“I do,” I whispered, my voice barely present, the sound of sandpaper grit against stone. “Will you take off your mask?”
“As you wish,” it said, raising a slender claw to its face. The red-robed thing pulled off its mask with a sickening wet sound. What I saw lurking, slithering, nesting in the vacuous hole of its face sent my mind spiraling into a maddened panic. The scream worked its way up my throat and across my quivering tongue, infecting the billowing fabric of reality, and alerting the other members of that blasphemous congregation.
I screamed until my insides were hot and raw, my vocal cords withering in a flame of my own kindling, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not take my eyes off the festering gray worms writhing and feeding within the thing’s fleshy wound of a face.
The last thing I recall before Johnny woke me was the dry hiss of the congregation speaking as one: “Coronate the usurper in the waters of Hali.”
Moments later I was back in the control room, thrashing my arms and legs wildly against Johnny’s restraint. A red haze clouded my vision, and for a time I thought I’d jumped from one nightmare to the next. My senses returned to me slowly as though they were a series of switches flipped on in succession, and I realized that awful noise filling my ears was my own pained shrieks.
“Aidan! Christ, dude, get a hold of yourself.”
I sucked in air and held my breath to steady my racing heart. I counted to twenty, exhaled, and blinked. My vision remained hazy and dark. “Why . . . why can’t I see?”
Johnny placed a tissue in my hand. “Because your eyes are bleeding.”
***
Later, after I’d cleaned the blood from my face, I learned I wasn’t the only one to suffer an ‘episode’ like that. Reggie, Hank, and Bobby had all experienced similar things, only they weren’t foolish enough to wander down the shore toward the city. That was my own stupidity.
We sat in the control room for what might have been hours, each of us suffering from what I can only describe as the worst hangover imaginable. Withdrawals, maybe. Hank’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and I heard Bobby crying at one point. Reggie stared off into space, mumbling incoherently to himself.
Camilla wandered through the room with a knowing smile. Watching her traipse through filled me with a quiet rage. I wanted to rise from my seat, grab her by the shoulders, and shake her. “How dare you?” I wanted to scream. “How dare you mock us?”
She knew what we’d seen, where we’d been. Somehow this was her doing, even if it was our music that unlocked the gate into that other place. She may not have put the instruments in our hands or told us what notes to play, but—
My rage faltered. But what, exactly? The anger drained from me, leaving me weak and drenched in a film of sweat. Camilla had everything to do with this and nothing at all. She was Johnny’s inspiration for the greatest thing we’d ever done, and a cancer that was slowly devouring us one day at a time. Looking at her from across the room, a word crawled up out of my memory of Carcosa’s distant shoreline: usurper. That’s what she was. A usurper, not of a throne, but of our lives, upheaving everything we knew and cared about, twisting this journey of ours into something straight out of her own sickly twisted fantasies.
Somehow she’d imposed her will upon us without lifting a finger. Just as she’d bent our will in the hotel room that night, or made her eyes change color, or levitated off the ground. Was it the weird esoteric shit back at her apartment? Was it all that dark ritual magic bullshit? Or was it something else?
That moment, Mr. Hargrove, was when I began to suspect she wasn’t who she said she was. I know you’re probably wondering why it never occurred to me before, but in all honesty, until that moment I didn’t give it a second thought because she didn’t matter to me. Not really. She was just a groupie. A gypsy we’d met on the road who was into some really freaky, kinky shit.
I think we’d all underestimated her until that day in the recording studio. That day we glimpsed her true intentions, and however puzzling they were at the time, they were equally horrifying.
Me, Hank, Bobby, and especially Reggie, we all got it. I’m afraid I couldn’t say the same about Johnny. He saw things a little differently.
“What the fuck were you guys doing, anyway?”
Hank raised his head and frowned. “What do you mean? We were giving Reggie a taste of what we’ve been working on.”
Johnny shook his head. “That’s not what I mean, dipshit. I mean what the fuck were you doing here without me? None of you told me you were meeting with Reggie today.”
“You weren’t invited.” Bobby leaned forward in his seat and stared daggers at our frontman. Johnny took off his shades and brushed the hair out of his face.
“Not invited?” He looked at Reggie. “I’m still a part of this band. I’m still under contract. I’m still the motherfucker responsible for carrying your asses through this process. And I’m still entitled to a percentage. Why the fuck was I not invited to this meeting?”
He’d balled his hands into fists, clenching them so tight that this arms shook. His cheeks darkened with a shade of bruise. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.
“Carrying our asses?” Hank shot to his feet. “Fuck that noise. We aren’t the ones letting Yoko here make our decisions for us.”
Finally, Reggie had heard enough. He climbed to his feet—shakily, I might add—and stepped between them.
“Johnny, for God’s sake, calm down. It wasn’t like that at all.” Reggie put a hand on Hank’s shoulder and shooed him back to his seat. “Aidan called and asked to meet up for breakfast. It was early, you were with your lady, and we didn’t want to interrupt your quality time together. That’s all. No big deal.”
Johnny shot a glance at me. “Oh really?”
“Yeah,” I said, “really. Just breakfast, Johnny. We got to talking about the recording and Reggie asked to come back here for a listen.”
“Right,” Reggie said, “and I love what I’ve heard so far.”
“Isn’t that lovely?” For the first time since we’d been roused from our hallucination, Camilla insinuated herself into the conversation. She stepped away from her corner of the room and cleared her throat. “I think you’re lying, Reggie.”
Our manager’s face flushed red. “Lying? You can believe whatever you want to believe, lady. I don’t have to prove shit to you.”
“You don’t have to, Reg. I can smell it on you like bad cologne. And you are wearing very bad cologne. It’s called Eau de Fear.” Camilla leaned in close to his chin and inhaled deeply through her nose. “It suits you.”
Reggie opened his mouth to speak but stopped. He looked at me, then Johnny, then Hank and Bobby. Then he turned back to her and smirked. “Do you mind if we speak in private?”
Camilla’s eyes lit up. They were different colors that day. Blue and green. She grinned and said, “Sure, Reggie.”
The four of us watched him follow her out of the control room. Just before the door swung shut, I heard Reggie speak in his Scary Business Guy voice. I’d only ever heard him use that voice a couple of times before when we were on tour. It was a loud, deep, commanding voice that he used to straighten out uncooperative venue promoters.
“Let me explain to you how this is going to work, Camilla
. . . ”
The door swung shut. We didn’t see what happened afterward, but we heard it. Camilla didn’t like his explanation very much.
***
There were two sides to the story of what happened after that door closed.
According to Camilla, Reggie shoved her against the wall and slapped her so hard that her nose bled. She said he told her that if she didn’t leave town, he’d call some of his friends down in the valley. Friends who were connected, if she got his drift. Friends who’d hold her down and let him have his way with her again just like that night in the hotel. Friends who wouldn’t think twice about putting a bullet in her pretty little head. Friends who knew the best places to hide a body, places where no one would think to look for a no-name star-fucking whore like her.
Later, after we’d bailed him out of jail, Reggie told us that wasn’t true at all.
“Well,” he admitted, “except for calling her a no-name star-fucking whore. That part’s true.”
What really happened was, after the door closed, Reggie told her that she needed to back off and let us finish our job. “I told her I was sure she had a family somewhere that missed her terribly. I even offered her fucking bus fare to wherever she needed to go. She told me she lived here in LA—or Carcosa, as she called it—and I said, ‘Whatever. Go home, then. You aren’t welcome here.’ And that’s when she started hurting herself.”
To hear Reggie tell it, Camilla flung herself back against the hallway wall, spun around, and cracked her face into the white cinderblock. He said she hit herself so hard he could hear the pop of her nose against the brick. I’ll never forget that. The thought that a nose could simply go ‘pop’, like a burst balloon.
“She stood there for a moment, and when she turned around her eyes weren’t different colors anymore. They were gold. Blood was gushing out of her nose, over her lips, staining her teeth as she smiled at me. And then she fucking winked, guys. She winked. And that’s when the screaming started.”
We heard her screams, and Johnny bolted out of the room to her aid. He found her exactly as she wanted him to, crumpled on the floor, sobbing incoherently as blood streamed down her face. Reggie was standing there, frozen in shock, all color drained from his cheeks.
And the rest, well, you can imagine how it went. Johnny freaked out, called the cops, screamed that he wasn’t just going to fire Reggie, but press charges and sue his ass into oblivion.
Had we not been so close to wrapping up the album, I think we would’ve called it quits there. But even after all the drama, after Reggie left us for the day to go meet with his attorney, we still went back to that goddamn studio to finish our music.
All we had left were some vocal tracks to put down. Johnny went into the booth, leaving the rest of us to listen in the control room. And Camilla, too, who sat on the floor in her corner, blood drying on her upper lip and chin, giggling quietly to herself.
-TRACK 7-
BEHIND PALLID MASQUES
Camilla dropped the charges on the condition that Reggie keep his distance from her. In truth, it was her way of keeping him away from Johnny and the rest of us. Reggie was a wildcard in the scheme of things, the only real opposing force that could present any threat to whatever she was up to. That much is obvious to me now, but back then, we were so tired and scared and drunk on the hope of wrapping up the album that we didn’t give it much thought. We were just sick of the drama and wanted to be done with it.
I can understand why some bands implode, and I can understand why some take years between records. You work with the same people long enough, they become family, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get tired of seeing them day in and day out. Sometimes you just get sick of their shit. Sometimes you need a break to recharge, and sometimes that takes years to do.
We wrapped up recording the album with Joe a few days after the incident with Reggie. Me, Hank, and Bobby had agreed to take some time off after we were finished. Time to think about our future, whether we wanted to continue with the band or call it quits after the album’s release. I remember having a long talk with Bobby one night at the hotel, about whether or not we’d be willing to walk away and leave everything to Johnny. We’d continue earning royalties for the record sales, but Johnny had rights to the band name, and he’d be free to record future albums under the moniker.
And you know, we were fine with that. After that last month of hell, and after we understood that Camilla wasn’t going away, we were fine with walking away from it all. Let Johnny continue his slow descent into madness. Let Camilla suck out whatever soul was left inside that dried-up husk of his body.
We finished the album, but we never got that break. Camilla had other plans.
***
Two things happened the morning I’d planned to fly back home. The first was a call from Johnny, wanting to know how I felt about playing a secret show there in LA to build hype for the album. The second: I made a decision to leave the band.
I remember that morning clearly. I was awake before dawn, pulled from sleep by nightmares of the dark shoreline outside the golden city. Those faceless things in red robes were there, asking me about yellow signs, and finally—mercifully—I’d awakened in a cold sweat. I couldn’t get back to sleep, nor did I want to. I rose from bed and looked out the window at the city in those pre-dawn hours. I remember thinking everything looked so insignificant, miniscule. Out there was a world of people with problems of their own, and not a single one of them mattered. The people or their problems. This depressed me something awful, and I stepped away to clean myself up.
After I showered, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and stared at my face, noting the lines and circles around my eyes. I’d lost weight, at least twenty pounds, and my eyes were swollen and bloodshot from sleep loss. When I stepped back, I could count my ribs. Growing up, I was a scrawny kid, but I filled out when I reached my twenties. Looking at myself that morning, I was startled to see that I’d regressed into a withered state. My body looked haggard, aged, like driftwood washed up on the shore.
I thought about something Camilla said that night in the van. God, it felt like such a long time ago, when in reality it had only been something like a month? Six weeks? Doesn’t matter. She’d said, “I want to help you take off your mask.”
My whole face looked like a mask. Like I was wearing someone else’s face, like the person I used to be was still underneath there somewhere.
And then I remembered my hallucination. The voice drifting across the sand. Take off your mask. At the time I hadn’t yet decided if what I’d experienced during my hallucinatory episodes was real or not. I wasn’t questioning if there was something waiting beyond the fabric of time and space. Carcosa was just a dream to me. A nightmare, something introduced to me by Johnny’s Yellow Queen.
I traced my fingertip across my forehead—like this—and then around my face. For one real agonizing moment, I actually thought about tearing into my flesh to see what was hiding underneath. I was possessed with the notion that I was still in there somewhere, and the only reason I didn’t do it is because I remembered what those red-robed things looked like underneath their masks. I was terrified that I wouldn’t be me underneath my face. Afraid all that lurked beneath this façade of humanity was a dark gaping hole filled with bulbous, gray coffin worms, writhing and feasting on the rot.
When I snapped out of the trance, I saw I’d cut myself along my temple. A tributary of blood had formed along the ridge of my jawline, seeping into the edge of my beard. The sight of my own blood startled me and was enough to help me make the decision to leave.
For as great as it was, the band and the music we made together wasn’t worth the cost of my sanity.
I’d resolved to call a meeting with the band when my phone rang. Johnny was on the other end.
“Aidan,” he said, “listen, I have an idea . . . ”
***
Two hours later I was sitting in the lobby. Hank and Bobby were with me, each of us nursing a
steaming cup of horrible hotel coffee. Johnny and Camilla were late.
We sat in silence. We’d done that a lot lately. None of us wanted to discuss the things we had to talk about, none more so than me. I chose to keep my decision silent until Johnny arrived and explained his plan in detail. I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t want to break the news to any of them; I’d also be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in hearing more about this show. Either way, I was teetering between divorcing myself from the band and going out on another tour to ‘get away from it all’.
I replayed the phone conversation in my head: “I have an idea,” Johnny had said. “I was thinking about how we’re going to present this music to our fans, and you know how a lot of these bands are going on nostalgia tours, playing whole albums live? What if we did that before the album drops? We can keep it a secret, make it a big mysterious thing for the fans. Camilla knows a promoter at a club downtown . . . ”
And that’s when I’d tuned out. It wasn’t really a conversation at all. Johnny had always bounced his ideas off me, but when he mentioned her name, I knew in my heart that this wasn’t his idea at all. It was hers. Johnny hated marketing anything. When we went on tour for the Jesters in Our Court EP, he didn’t even want to deal with having a merch booth. Marketing was someone else’s job, he reasoned. Besides, it took time away from his ‘art’.
Hearing him talk about hype and fans just felt wrong somehow. I thought back to my earlier moments staring into the mirror, wondering if I was still me underneath my mask, and shivered. What had she done to him? What had she done to us all? And why?
Ah, yes. “Why?” Never underestimate man’s desire for closure. Even now, I question if my need to understand was driven out of some sick sense of duty to the band, or if it was to satisfy my own fearful curiosity. Part of me wanted to know that all the hell we’d suffered in the last several weeks had been for something; the other part just wanted to grasp her intentions. Intentions that, like the coveted brass ring, were always just a few inches beyond our reach of understanding.
The Final Reconciliation Page 6