An Augmented Fourth

by Tony McMillen

  “Codger, is there anything to any of this?” Rikki said. “I don’t think I’m quite ready to swallow aliens from outer space but I have seen a bit of shit, haven’t I? And it is strange that it took the form of the woman off the cover of the album.”

  “Are you secretly my biggest fan, Miss Spectre?”

  She lit two smokes, walked over and wedged herself between Marcus and me, then handed me one of them. “I thought ‘Suffer a Witch’ was the single best song ever written except for ‘Cosmic Dancer’ by Bolan.” I grinned like an illustrated definition of the word idiot. She smiled back. “Then I turned thirteen and realized what a sexist wanker song it actually was.”

  “Sexist? The song goes, ‘I’d gladly suffer a witch.’ It’s all on the up and up.”

  “…Right. And the next line is ‘if she’ll lend me her stitch.’” …So she had a small point.

  “Fuck her, that song rocks,” the kid said.

  “Fuck yourself, you little ruddy cunt.”

  “…Old lady.”

  I think I actually snorted.

  “What the hell does that mean? I’m not even thirty.”

  “Come on, man. Stop stalling,” Marcus said. “All those years ago did you see something or not?”

  I could still see those eyes. It was 1969 and I was living in a rinky-dink apartment in Birmingham, eating biscuits and thinking about a girl. There’s a half-read copy of Aleister Crowley’s Book of Lies face down beside me and I fell asleep after smoking a tiny joint full of worse shit than the kid gave me earlier. When I woke up I found I was still dreaming and I was no longer alone. I could still remember those embers floating above me then. Eyes of fire that weren’t really eyes at all. Merely windows carved into some place that never stopped burning. Burning dots like I saw in that shimmering shadow in the lobby. But back in Birmingham I came out of it, woke up fully. And I was all alone again.

  “It’s all bullshit,” is what I told them. “I had a scary dream, told Sully about it, and the next day Vinnie and I were listening to the ‘Mars’ part of Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets Suite’ and Vinnie got the bright idea to nick the tritone, the augmented fourth part of it. That’s it, that’s the story. I had a dream. Just a bad dream. And then I had a career.” Of course I was lying. There was more to it. But even I didn’t actually know how much more. Not yet at least.

  Blossom of Corruption

  “We need a plan,” Marcus offered up.

  “How about: not get eaten,” Rikki said.

  “They don’t want to eat us, you said so yourself.” Marcus walked away from us and the freezer and toward the open wet floor by the entrance. The water jug lanterns which showed his path were actually quite relaxing in defiance of the circumstance. But then I started worrying about how long the batteries on the flashlights would last us. We’d been in there under an hour, the things outside hadn’t bothered us yet, but how long could that last? In fact, them not coming after us right away made me even more nervous. Because that might have meant there was no need to come get us, because one of us was already one of them. But that line of thinking only begged another question: If one of them was already in the room with us, what the hell were they waiting for? “Don’t get me wrong,” Marcus said. “I know what you mean. But how are we going to stay alive? How are we going to beat these things?”

  “Apparently they’re allergic to fire,” I said and started walking behind him. I turned back to see if I was alone, but Rikki and the kid didn’t budge. “So anyway, about this earworm business?”

  Marcus didn’t turn around when he said, “How about I show you?” He picked up one of the flashlights and the water jug next to it and he walked over to where Frankie’s scorched body lay. He put the flashlight back up against the jug on the floor, recreating the lantern effect. Only now the light was cast all over Frankie’s remains. What was left there on the kitchen floor looked like an angel that had burned up upon reentry. All the new limbs, the stalks, fleshy and scaly looking branches and barbs that Frankie had grown, were now charred down and splayed out in wide wing-like arcs. Frankie’s split-apart head, those two horns of plenty spilling out with trussed-together faces, were now tattered and burnt into strange shards that looked like stretched caramel, not flesh. They stared up at us with a look of utter perverse delight. Each half grin, a meter apart, looked like some cracked Cheshire. If any of this bothered Marcus he didn’t show it; he crouched down to look closer at his former paycheck.

  “Jesus, Marcus,” Rikki shouted from across the kitchen. “You really think it’s wise to be getting so close to it?” My entire back had locked in tension and my headache seemed to bare down on me like an incoming train. Rikki had a perfectly reasonable reaction to watching Marcus do this. I was having it too. But she also seemed to miss the point of Marcus’ behavior: If he was taking such an obvious and stupid risk, maybe it was because he knew what he was doing?

  “I think he’s done this before, am I right?” I said.

  Marcus took his long chef’s knife and gently dipped its edge into the right half of one of Frankie’s more human-looking faces. It felt like time stopped. My hand gripped down on my butcher knife so tightly I thought the handle was going to break into my skin. I was expecting at any moment Frankie’s light blue eye to spin back around and the teeth in his half grin to start rolling about their tracks like dancing piano hammers. But this never happened. Something only slightly less strange did. Instead of piercing Frankie’s flesh, the tip of his blade seemed to slip into it without showing any sign of injury. The skin of his face coated the surface of the blade like a thick malt coats a striped straw. My hackle was still raised; faces don’t usually coat the blades that push into them, usually they break and bleed, but no further activity happened and I breathed a bit easier. But even though the eye on this face of Frankie’s was still a dull marble frozen in death, I peered down at it, knife gripped, waiting for it to blink. “To answer your question: No, I’ve never done this before. I’ve never had the opportunity to.” Marcus pressed his knife in a little deeper and the blade penetrated and came out the other end, causing the skin to curl up over the blade almost to the hilt. He pulled the knife back and the flesh receded like the tide. “The last time I saw something like this we had the common sense to burn it then get the hell away.”

  “Vietnam?”

  “No, I killed human beings in ’Nam.”

  “Fuck man, I didn’t mean tha—”

  “After my tour… I got home to the world and I started bodyguarding and I saw some things no one had many answers for. After… after Jim and what happened in Paris, Uncle Sam brought me in, told me they could kill me or I could help them keep an eye on other potential situations.”

  “So you were in Paris with Morrison.”

  “I went to check up on him.”

  “Mister secret fucking agent.”

  “No, just an errand boy again, only now I had a new errand.”

  “‘Potential situations’ like Frankie?” Rikki had found her way to where we were. The kid followed close behind.

  Marcus rested his knife on his knee and looked back at us. “Yeah, like Frankie. Like Keith, like Janis, like all the rest I’ve guarded, kept an eye on.”

  “Did they know what you were doing?” Rikki asked.

  “Shit, of course not. If I’d started blabbing about some unknown force that turns rock stars into monsters they’d have either fired me, laughed in my face, or made some unbearable concept album about it. Seriously, you don’t tell a musician anything unless you want to hear about it on the radio in about a year.”

  “Wait, Keith? But he isn’t dead,” I said.

  “Nothing can kill that man,” Marcus said, then Marcus turned back to the body.

  Instinctually I followed his cue. “Project Earworm was a project to monitor these… visitations. Different artists, musicians throughout recorded history have been approached by whatever this thing or things are. The U.S. Government only started really paying attention b
ack in the ’20s.”

  “The blues guys…” the kid said.

  “Yeah, that’s right. No one really put much stock in any of the stories, or if they did they didn’t give a shit, not ’til some white hillbillies started dying too, in the ’40s and ’50s. Blues gave way to rock and roll and whatever this thing was followed it, or shaped it. We don’t know.”

  “What does it want?” I asked.

  “The only thing we can think is it wants music.”

  “What do you mean it wants music?” Rikki said.

  “It seems to inspire or direct certain musicians throughout history who then in turn change the course of popular music.” He said this with a perfectly straight face. “The early accounts are basically impossible to verify or separate from the usual weird shit that every fucking peasant or clergyman claiming to have been visited by angels or demons says they’ve seen; but if you look for it, it’s there. Again and again, it’s there. Steering things in one direction. Least that’s how it looks. Later on in history you get all these great composers, Mozart, Beethoven, then Wagner, all these stories, myths of them being divinely or demonically inspired. Then the folk songs and the blues, then rock and roll, then…”

  “Heavy metal?” the kid wondered.

  “Punk rock,” Rikki said with a certainty that I wanted to crush from her. Because I supposed it made sense. “But if it wants the music why the hell is it killing musicians?” she asked.

  “Keith, Janis, Frankie…” I said it aloud not thinking I was going anywhere with the words. Then, “They’re all washed up now or dead. They’re done.”

  Marcus turned back again at me but didn’t say anything.

  “Wait, Frankie’s last record was…” Rikki trailed off. “Fine, it was bollocks. His last three have been pretty hard to swallow if I’m being honest. And I love Gideon’s work. It just seemed uninspired lately, right?”

  “So,” I said. “What, it gives rock stars their talent and then it takes it away and they either become monsters like Frankie here or just old and shitty like the Stones? Fuck… that’s terrifying, I don’t want to become like the Stones.” Rikki shook her head in agreement. Marcus used his knife to poke at the beak-like growth that had erupted from inside Frankie’s neck. It didn’t have any unusual reaction, it was just dead bone or something like it. “What’s the point of all this?” I asked.

  “Point is, I’ve never had a chance to examine one of these things close up, and since we’re stuck in here like pigs I figure now’s as good a time as any to get to know our enemy. I learned what happens when you don’t back in the jungle. My men learned it too.”

  “The hard way?” I asked.

  “Better believe.” He turned to Rikki who seemed to be looming over me as I knelt down. “I think I see something, you mind letting me use that axe real quick?”

  “Sure, I’ll just stand here with my thumbs on the ready to jam out someone’s eye with.”

  I turned my butcher’s knife around and offered her the handle. She hesitated, then took it and gave Marcus the axe. He flipped it around and took the blade to the middle of Frankie’s exposed ribcage. He sunk the blade in like a crowbar underneath the bone and started to jimmy open Frankie’s chest. It took a couple of good hard presses but then there was a wet crack and a smell like garbage left out in the rain hit our noses. Inside there was no heart, no lungs, none of the usual things you’d expect in any organism, even some glam rocker turned monster. What there were… were arms. Lots and lots of arms. They formed a sort of nautilus spiral, with the shoulder mounds growing from the center and the fingertips and hands lining the outside. Perfectly normal, human-looking arms. Growing out of the inside of this thing’s ribcage for some goddamn reason.

  “So you can explain this then?” I asked Marcus.

  He shook his head. “No fucking idea, man.” He took the axe handle and started moving one of the arms out of position. I wasn’t sure why until he repositioned it so it no longer rested on the shoulder of the arm below it. On that arm there was a dark smudge and when I focused on it I saw that it was a tattoo. It read, Herbert Malford II. Marcus stopped leaning over and held his head up, shaking it slightly.

  “Whose name is that?” I asked.

  “That’s his actual name,” Marcus answered.

  “I can see why he went by Frankie… Herbert. Stuffy isn’t it? Rhymes with pervert…”

  “He’s a junior then?” Rikki asked.

  “Yeah, he loved his father,” Marcus told us. “I tell you, unlike our boy Frankie, the name Herbert fit a guy like his father well.”

  “…Pervert?”

  “What? No, man. Just British as shit. Stuffy, rigid, wore a suit every day of his life until they buried him in one.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Codger, you idiot,” Rikki said.

  “I was just asking for clarification.”

  “Fucking Brummie,” she said.

  “Frankie loved his old man, looked up to him,” Marcus said. “He told me after he started getting way out with the makeup and wearing dresses and shit, telling the press that he was into dudes as well as broads, that his father shut him out.”

  “Big surprise,” Rikki said.

  “Yeah. But it still cut Frankie. His father loomed large in his life, they never reconciled, and Frankie was out touring when the old man died.”

  “So he got the tattoo in tribute? Remind himself where he came from, make it right with the old man in some way?” I asked.

  “No,” Marcus said. “Frankie didn’t have any tattoos.”

  “Yeah, he didn’t,” Rikki said. Marcus and I both looked at her. “Not that I studied him or anything, but I know, unless he got it since his last appearance on Whistle Test when he wore that brilliant green fishnet tank top and the eyepatch, he didn’t have any tattoos on his arm.”

  “No, he didn’t.” Marcus laughed. This time it sounded authentic but it also didn’t sound like it was because anything was particularly funny.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “He didn’t have any tattoos but he wanted one,” he explained. “This one. This exact tattoo. Last year, after his pops died, we were in California touring. He had me take him down to a tattoo shop. Frankie was convinced he wanted this. I kept trying to talk him out of it. Told him it wasn’t really his thing, doing anything permanent. He was more of a chameleon guy, you know? Besides, fuck his dad if he didn’t like how Frankie did his thing. Last minute, before we were going to do the tattoo, Frankie disappears to the head. Ten, fifteen minutes pass, I go and check on him, he’s passed out, and his blow is all over the ground and in the toilet.”

  “O.D.?” the kid asked.

  “Shit, no. He was just exhausted. Frankie had been up two days straight, now he just had a moment of peace and quiet to himself in that bathroom. He probably felt himself crashing and he went to do something about it and ended up clocking out before he could get any more up into his nose. The guy at the shop was cool about it, told me to come back the next day when Frankie was feeling up to it. We left, next day Frankie didn’t even mention it. He had moved on. It was just one of those things. He was a capricious kind of guy. Always getting really dead set on something then last minute totally not into it anymore.”

  I stared at the little tattoo on a perfectly human-looking arm resting in a circle of other perfectly human-looking arms that were growing out of a monster. “What are these things, aliens? Demons? Science experiment?”

  Marcus turned away, rested on the handle of the axe like an old prospector after a long day of panning for gold. “It could be all of those things honestly. I mean, nothing’s off the table. Fucking people’s faces are splitting open and their backs are shooting out light. Shit, maybe it is the devil? Or something else that actually inspired man’s concept of the devil.”

  “How can it… how can Frankie… how could Frankie walk around without any vital organs? A bunch of arms can’t pump blood, you need a heart for that,” I said.

&
nbsp; “How about two or three of them?” Rikki had walked around the corpse and was near the barricade looking at it from a different angle. Marcus and I walked around with her and then I saw it. The light from the jug lantern bounced off the metal of a prep table and shined right into the top of the carcass. Sprouted like mushrooms on a log along two of the larger purple stalks that had grown out of Frankie’s back were what appeared to be human hearts. Like the stalks they grew off of, they had been charred black and purple as beets by the fire, but it was clear what they were. Or at least what they were supposed to look like.

  “Do you think it was trying to multiply itself?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Marcus said. “But it was doing a piss poor job of recreating a working human being if that was the case.”

  “We were talking about a plan before you started on this dissection thing,” the kid said. I looked over at him, apart from the group, keeping his distance from the thing.

  Probably scared out of his mind, which I couldn’t blame him for. I was feeling a bit more myself now, my headache was almost completely gone. I had that blessed second wind you get after surfacing from a day-long hangover, when you felt born again. Baptized and absolved from the sins previous and the night before. Still hungry as hell despite the charred monster at my feet. I was feeling better and I took a good look at the kid now with clearer eyes. Jesus, he was young. He kept his distance, looking like he didn’t want his toes to get too close to Frankie’s phalanges and other spread tendrils. But his face didn’t look scared exactly. More nervous or exhausted. It looked like he was about to crack.

  “Right now what we need to do is figure out a way to get past whatever it is out in the lobby—”

  “The Earworm,” I added.

  “That was the name of the project, not the being itself,” Marcus corrected.

  “Well it’s as good a name as any other for that thing that was behind the witch off of the album cover.”