An Augmented Fourth

by Tony McMillen

  The transmission, the signal, whatever it was, felt like someone forcing their dream through my skull. Trepanning its thoughts and visions in and relieving the pressure of my own consciousness. A pressure I never knew existed because it was how I experienced the world. But with it gone, with me gone, I was finally free. There was an emptiness there that was truly holy. What replaced or imbued me was a waterfall of roaring personality. I saw some bodiless, maybe boundless intelligence scattered in pieces along a dark sea of stars. Not sure if it was lost or hiding, only knowing that it roamed. It roamed but it was also everywhere all at the same time. Scattered and trapped. I saw a ferocious intelligence searching for form. And it searched for something more too.

  I saw it walking on many worlds, all at the same time, in the same breath. Swimming through the murk of consciousness, blind from the flood of sights. But it wasn’t deaf. The one thing it followed was sound. Music. Distant but audible, verging on discernible. I could hear it now too. I would say it was unlike any music I’d ever heard but that wouldn’t be quite right. I had heard things which sounded like pale imitations before. A shoddily built simulacra of this exquisite sound. My music, for instance, the music of Frivolous Black… that was an imitation of this finer, higher sound. In this sound I could make out the distinct, hackle raising of the diabolus in musica, the devil’s chord; the augmented fourth. I knew what this sound was. It was what we’d been chasing from our first song on once we started making doomy music. This was that sound. And this thing, it wanted it too. Needed it. I wanted to stay here, following the sound with this presence. To never return to the husk that was my body and mind, but something happened, a judgment passed, or a test failed, and the burden of my own awareness returned and I was cast out. And the pain in my head I’d been feeling since I woke up in my hotel room came flooding back.

  “Fall back,” Marcus said like he was back in Vietnam. “We need to get back to the kitchen.” I came back to the world and everything was a screaming mess. The shimmering shadow behind the witch had turned away its burning eyes and was now advancing on us. The witch’s weird puppeteer was still spinning the web from her mouth, but the shadow had separated from her and left her standing alone in the middle of the lobby. The others had already started to run so I turned tail and went after them. But just as I was leaving the lobby I caught something laying on the reception desk next to the cigarette machine where I first met the kid, something I could use. I watched the group disappear into the hall as I ran over and grabbed the axe as fast as I could. Behind me I could still hear the witch spinning her web. And I could still hear the shadow moving around, either chasing me or maybe just shifting around and getting comfortable. Maybe it’s just growing. I didn’t trust myself to turn around and give it a last look. Because I knew it’d be just that. So I kept moving and followed the others.

  Hidden Forest

  We made it back to the kitchen and slammed the door shut with no interruptions. We came back into a raining room. The heat must have set off the water sprinklers. “Smoke alarm is working, I thought you said the power was out?” Rikki snapped.

  “It’s not the smoke alarm,” Marcus told her. “It’s the sprinkler system and it doesn’t run on electricity. Places like this already have water in the pipes, there’s a bulb in there too, and if the room gets too hot it bursts and the water comes down.” I didn’t have to see Rikki rolling her eyes.

  “It’s actually not all water,” the kid said. “Some of it is Halon from the fire suppression system, not the sprinklers; Halon is better for grease fires. See, water and oil—”

  “Who asked you to fucking talk?” Rikki said.

  “We need to barricade this door now,” Marcus told us.

  The water, the Halon, the wet shit from the pipes above, whatever it was, had already started to dissipate and I could see the charred still-smoking pile of what used to be Frankie Gideon lying there on the floor. The pile didn’t stir, the blackened colony of limbs didn’t twitch, the multitude of mouths didn’t moan, and for all that I was thankful. Either it was dead or at least taking a good long snooze, so barricading ourselves in with it seemed like a bostin’ idea. At least the thing in here might be dead; those two out in the lobby, the witch and the whatever, were definitely still alive. I looked at the kid. “We need to get some light in here, find candles or something.” He went off and I put my axe down and walked over to one of the ovens. Then I pulled off a piece of the metal frame where some pans were being hung above and used it to bar the door with Marcus. Marcus ran over to one of the long metal prep tables and I followed him knowing what he had in mind. We almost ran into the kid who was carrying two plastic jugs in his arms. “I said light, kid, candles. I want fire, not water.” He ignored me and then I returned the gesture and focused on the task at hand as Marcus and I dragged our prep table across the floor. It made a terrible racket before we put it in place in front of the door. I was about to go grab another piece to continue the build when a wash of white light swelled into the room. My first thought was that Frankie wasn’t dead and he wanted to show us more of his wonderful dripping colors, but it wasn’t Frankie, it was the kid. Next to him on one of the tables was one of the plastic jugs he had been carrying, only now it was glowing and producing a white light.

  The kid was grinning. “Pretty cool, right? It’s just a flashlight propped up against a water jug full of water. Learned that shit going camping.”

  “That’s nice, son. Real nice,” Marcus told him. “Here, take my flashlight and go make another one of those lanterns over on the other side of the room.” The kid nodded, then started on it, and I felt a little regret that I hadn’t been the one to give him the compliment. I wanted to be useful so when Rikki started trying to move another prep table I came over to help her. The second water jug lantern was set up and it gave the kitchen a dull glow like a TV set left on at night after everyone’s gone to bed. “Is there any other way in here?” Marcus asked the kid.

  “Just that door,” he said.

  “Wish we had a hammer, some nails,” Marcus said.

  “Do you think this will really keep it from getting in here?” Rikki asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said.

  “It might… for a while.” Marcus held his hands on his hips, gave me a look like he was trying to convince me of it. We waited in the silence next to our barricade for maybe ten minutes. Without the rush of frantic activity, the necessity of survival jacking my heart rate up, I had time to finally register how fucking mad everything had just become. Frankie Gideon had reinvented himself for the last time and turned into some sort of light-spewing art rock chimera. In addition, outside in the lobby there were two creatures waiting for us: one resembled the witch off the cover of the first Frivolous Black album and the other looked like… well, like nothing I’d ever seen before. And yet, those burning dots for eyes…

  The smell of charred glam rocker stained the air. It actually didn’t smell as bad as I thought burning flesh was supposed to. I remembered talking to Marcus once about Vietnam and about burning bodies. He brought up the smell then. How it sunk into your lungs and weighed them down. How the blood in the victims’ bodies gave off that burning copper smell. And underneath that, the flesh smelled like burning pork. Said it made him swear off barbeque when he got back to the states. Said it broke his mother’s North Carolina heart but he couldn’t eat that anymore. But Frankie didn’t really smell like that, like a human being was supposed to. He still stunk, but it was different. His smell reminded me of something deep, dark, swampy…

  Everyone had backed off to the far end of the kitchen near the freezers. No one was saying anything, just waiting for that witch, or whatever it was that controlled her, to come crashing through our barricade. Quiet terror becomes boring quicker than you’d think. Thank Christ we had cigarettes.

  “This is a kitchen then, knives, right?” Rikki said.

  “Right,” I said. We were kids in a candy store, only the candy was sharp shit that could k
ill someone. We armed ourselves with anything with a point, grabbed as many as we could hold. Having had some success with them already, I found myself two more good-sized butcher’s knives as well as a smaller wok that looked like it could break faces. I decided then that butcher knives were the basses of culinary killing implements. I felt a kinship right away. Besides, Rikki had already helped herself to my axe. We also found some butane lighters, the kind used as crème brûlée torches. Those could be useful. Then we waited. Staring at the door, expecting something unimaginable to come bursting through any minute. “What does… it, they, want? Do they just want to eat us?” I asked the room.

  “I don’t think it’s that simple,” Rikki said.

  “What is it then?”

  “To make us like Frankie, to take us over?”

  “If that ever was Frankie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How do we know Frankie wasn’t always like that? How do we know he was ever, you know… normal?”

  “What, so he was always…” She put her hand up in front of her mouth and made like it was a spider on a treadmill.

  “Well, it would go a great distance in explaining a few things about that weird fucking fucker, wouldn’t it?” I said. It looked like she almost smiled from that. Humor’s funny like that. Some of the best laughs I ever got were at funerals. Not cause it’s terribly funny, the joke or the situation. It’s just unexpected. Everything’s funnier when you’re not supposed to laugh. My dad taught me that when we buried my mom.

  “I knew the man,” Marcus said. “I spent more time with him than I ever spent with my brother growing up. If he had been a monster I would have known it.”

  “Poor Frankie,” I said.

  “He was the master shapeshifter of rock, and now…” Rikki said.

  I nodded. “I suppose he lived the way he died.”

  “What?” Marcus gave me a look.

  “Oh, what I meant is actually… wait, he lived the way he died, is that actually accidentally profound?”

  “No,” Rikki answered immediately. “It isn’t.” I remained somewhat unconvinced.

  “So Frankie was turned into that thing, he was infected, and now one of those three things want to turn us too.” Rikki snuffed out her cigarette on the floor.

  “Right, three…” I said. “The witch from the album cover, the thing behind it, and the tall man in the lift you saw.” Even though her story about Frankie and the lift checked out I still didn’t trust her. Her, Marcus or the kid. Each of their reasons for being here seemed a little flimsy. Right now the only other person in the room I trusted one hundred percent was Frankie because Frankie was dead. But regardless of her alibi for being stuck in this hotel, Rikki raised an interesting point: What if these things did want to turn us? Change us like they did Frankie? What if one of the people here in this room with me had already been changed? There was no guarantee despite what Marcus said that Frankie was ever human. Half of his bleeding concept records are about him being an alien from Venus or some shit; maybe that’s what he actually was. Maybe Marcus was in cahoots with him. Maybe Frankie had already gotten to him a long time ago.

  “I think they want you.” The kid was staring right at me, pointing his finger nearly in my chest. In his other hand, a long cutlery knife.

  “Come again?”

  “They’ve come to collect, right? Like, on your soul. Like Robert Johnson and the fucking crossroads and all that old shit.”

  Not this shit. Not now. “Kid, are you fucking serious?” I told him. Marcus and Rikki had turned now and given the two of us their attention. “Let me spell it out for you… Heavy metal is bullshit. There is no devil, there are no crossroads, no pact was signed. I play scary music for pimple-faced high school dropouts like you because it’s easy and it sells… least it used to.” I gave Rikki an eye.

  The kid stepped back. “I’m not saying we hand you over to it. I’m just saying you can level with us and tell us that you know what this thing is already.”

  “How much of that shit weed did you smoke before you found me in the lobby?”

  “Tell them about the encounter that inspired the song ‘Frivolous Black.’ You were visited by this entity a long time ago. It gave you your talent and now it wants its payment for it.”

  “Wait,” Marcus said. “Your band Frivolous Black has a song called ‘Frivolous Black’ too?”

  “Guess what the name of the album was,” Rikki said.

  “The album too?” Marcus shook his head. “Sorry, Codger, that’s just lazy writing.”

  “How is this news to you? It was our first song on our first fucking record.”

  “Look, I work in rock and roll, doesn’t mean I listen to all of it. All that heavy shit is just noise to me. I’d rather listen to the Doobies or Stevie or Sly. Even Cream was all right. You guys are just too… sludgy.” I nodded my head and smoked my cigarette. Man wasn’t wrong.

  “Come on, dude. ‘Frivolous Black,’” the kid said. “Track one, debut album, ‘Black form hovering above my bed. Black shape swirling into my head. I mustn’t but it does insist, come forth, the black here is frivolous.’”

  “Please don’t recite my early work back to me,” I told him. “It’s incredibly hurtful.” Rikki actually did smile at that. “They’re just lyrics, man. The band and the song are called Frivolous Black. Frivolous, we’re taking a piss. Why do you Americans have to take everything so seriously?” The ache in my brain dulled as I raised my voice. “Little fucking conspiracy creeps like you are the ones who end up killing people like John Lennon. Little American shits who can’t separate their fantasy from their day to day. Nothing happened, there was no encounter. No black shape with ‘burning eyes like bleeding skies’ or any of that shite. They’re just words that rhymed and fit a melody that Sully was singing.”

  The kid’s face looked like it was about to break apart. Not break apart like Frankie, break apart in the regular way. He seemed to become aware of how he looked and put his knife on a prep table to our left. He dropped his hands to his sides. “I was just thinking that if the song was true maybe you’d know how we could stop it.” Jesus, he really was sixteen.

  “…I’m sorry, kid. I’m just a drug addict who can play the bass. I don’t know how to stop from pissing myself most nights.” I looked away but could feel the kid looking at me. I didn’t like it.

  Marcus stepped between us. I noticed him casually placing his hand on the prep table next to the kid’s cutlery knife. Military training, or just being around enough stupid motherfuckers with knives in the vicinity to know when to be cautious. He looked over at me. “What the kid—”

  “John.”

  “What John here is saying is pretty far out, but then again we’re in a pretty far out situation, so…”

  “So?” I said.

  “So, is there anything to this? You ever seen any shit then like you’ve seen now?”

  Yanks. Half-soaked, every single one. “I don’t know… have you?”

  “Come again?”

  “Mister U.S. Air Force, mister Frankie’s bodyguard, what have you seen before that you’re not telling us?”

  “So he was in the military, big hairy deal,” Rikki said. “What, you think these are space men or something?”

  “I don’t know, Marcus, are they? What’s ‘earworm’?” I said it and Marcus’ face dropped.

  Rikki shook her head. “You really buy into all that cosmic shite you put into those songs of yours, don’t you?”

  “Of course he does, Frivolous Black is the truth, lady,” the kid joined in.

  I looked at the kid. “No, it’s not.” I turned to Rikki. “And I’m not saying anything, I’m asking stars and stripes here.”

  Marcus smiled tight-lipped. “You want me to be square with you?”

  “Yeah, I figure we all might be dead any moment now so we might as well try and go out with a little honesty.”

  He laughed, that stage laugh of his. “Then how about you start. The kid
was asking you about your song, ‘Frivolous Black,’ first track on an album of the same name by a band who either had a real shortage of ideas or really had a hard-on for those two words. You say the song’s bullshit, some phantom encounter, deal with the devil, hoodoo shit that never happened. Then we see the witchy ass broad off the LP sleeve down in the lobby, only now she’s got some sort of nightmare growing out the back of her. So, you want to be honest in what might be our final moments? Please, by all means, proceed.”

  I looked across the kitchen at the wet charred bones that used to be Frankie Gideon. “So Jim Morrison dies mysteriously in Paris back in ’71 and now you set your latest client on fire. I’m starting to suspect you’re actually a shit bodyguard after all.” I did my own stage laugh. “Just how many rock stars are you planning to let die on your watch?”

  “Always thought three was a nice round number. Besides, there’s precedent.” Jimi, Janis, and his old pal, Jim.

  “If this is the kind of bodyguard you are, I hate to see how you fared as a soldier. How many of your boys never made it back with you?” I knew from the start of the sentence that I had gone too far. Marcus’ eyes had bulged. He wasn’t even trying to conceal the rage, almost waved it to me as a warning, do not proceed. But I did.

  “What would you know about combat, about fighting in a war, especially ’Nam, Englishman?” He got so close our noses touched. “If this was any other situation other than our current I’d have made myself a nice pair of warm wet red gloves explaining to you exactly why you shouldn’t talk about things you know nothing about, especially the men I fought with who did not make it back here to the world…” He took in a deep breath and it took every bit of nerve I had in order for me not to break his stare. “But here we are, in that situation, so I’m gonna just tell you, don’t let me hear you mention my men again.” I realized I wasn’t breathing. Marcus leaned back on the prep table, out of my personal space, but his hand was practically wrapped around that cutlery knife and I exhaled.