Elsewhere We were lost in the storm that shifts between worlds.
Elsewhere We were roaming through familiar cityscapes and old haunts.
Elsewhere We were passing across blood-red deserts with strange stone cities populated with creatures who had as little knowledge of us as We them.
Elsewhere We were involved in innumerable other melees. Our fractured, mingled form viewed as a cancerous intrusion on reality itself by the different people and life forms unlucky enough to stand witness to our arrival. How they tried to destroy or run from us, to defend the narrow confines of what they had deemed reality. How each of these beings thought themselves master of this. What and what wasn’t real. And how We stripped that mastery away from each and every one…
Elsewhere We were everywhere in one shared instant. And We were scattered into pieces. And We screamed and screamed and screamed with our countless throats. And this music was to be our only true company.
Back in the kitchen the boy finally touched our snout which hung above him and We opened the burning black mouth of our beast face. His arm disintegrated away inside our jaw clean. Only a small trickle of blood and the rest burnt down, cauterized just past his elbow leaving a bright blue stump. He flipped backward in a half cartwheel and landed painfully to the floor. His agony was high-pitched, hysterical. But his agony was nothing compared to our own. Our burning beast face consumed his charred limb. We could all taste the ash of his flesh and bone. On our other side Marcus and Rikki both had given up trying to fight us and had returned together to removing the barricade. We crawled toward them. Rikki looked back, eyes wide at the sight of us. She said something to us, trying to plead with the Codger Burton she knew but it made no difference. Each step for us was misery, each movement a punishing feat. Trying to get enough of us to focus on one place, on one world in the myriad we inhabited simultaneously, and on one concerted effort in that world; it was excruciating. Rikki kept talking. Only now her words were slightly clearer. They felt more impacting. Almost hypnotizing. From out of some of our eyes harsh yellow light began to pour upward. Building a structure for communication, a threat and an invitation. Rikki kept talking, she had stopped trying to move the table. Marcus, now flummoxed, reached over and slapped her across the face thinking she had gone mad. She punched him square in the balls in response and then began screaming what she was saying before to us. She never looked away from us even as the yellow lights and the cathedral it was constructing started to grow closer and closer to her head. Even as We pulled forward until We were right on top of her. She never looked away from us. She never looked away from…. me.
And then like a drill boring into my brain I could hear her. Every word. “Bathe yourself in darkness, rinse with night. For the sun has made you dirty with its light.” Every last word. She wasn’t saying anything. She was singing. And every word, every stupid fucking word was my own. She was singing my song to me.
And then in a breath We were no more and there was only me.
There was a crushing return of pressure, I remember Rikki, Marcus, and the kid all screaming, and then some sort of light, or maybe fire.
Then things went dark.
They stayed that way for quite some time.
Beyond This Sleepless Dream
June 8th, 1969, the night before I walked into band practice with a story that, along with the new guitar sound Vinnie came up with, changed all of our lives, and I thought I was asleep having a very vivid nightmare.
I’ve always thought it was just a nightmare. But now I could see it was no dream.
The story everyone knew was that I was reading a Crowley book, I fell asleep and then woke up to see some sort of black apparition. The “Frivolous Black,” I called it ’cause it seemed to dance around, almost playfully, enticingly. Black because that’s what it was: black, a living shadow. Vaguely in the shape of a person. Only its eyes showed any sort of color. And all they did was burn. The story goes I saw this thing in my room, I screamed, and then it disappeared. I went to band practice, told the others about the story, they laughed it off and then it was Sully who suggested I write some lyrics about the encounter for this new piece of music Vinnie showed us. This really scary sounding number built around an augmented version of the tritone from Gustav Holst’s piece called “Mars.” I had played it for Vinnie only the day before. I was getting into some classical stuff, not a lot, but some of it was all right.
Vinnie heard that part, the tritone, and it must have gave him ideas. The tritone was an augmented fourth. I remember trying to impress Vinnie with some music theory shit I had picked up from reading books about it. I told him, “Hear that real dark sounding bit that’s playing, that’s the augmented fourth. It’s a dissonant interval.” I had no idea at the time what that meant. “Lower numbers produce consonant harmonies and the higher the numbers, the more you get dissonance. So like the further you go away from one, the more you get away from harmony and the closer you get to the dissonance.” He looked at me like I was speaking Martian. Which I was, I suppose, given the name of the song we were discussing. But really he could just tell I was full of shit. Just repeating what I had heard out of a book.
“It makes me want to shit in my shoes,” Vinnie said. We laughed. He was right. It was an unsettling sound.
“The churches used to ban this tritone, called it ‘The Devil’s Chord.’” Vinnie just ran a hand through his goatee, sat there and let me bullshit him for a little bit longer.
That’s the story everybody knew. It wasn’t the truth but it sounded good. Paired with the lyrics detailing an encounter with a dark seductive shadow that offered some sort of Faustian bargain, it inferred to our audience that maybe this had really happened to me. Or to Sully, I suppose. Most of our crowd still thought he wrote all the words he was singing. What I had thought had actually happened was much simpler but also a fair bit more involved.
Simpler because it had all been a dream. I never woke up to watch my visitor vanish.
I just woke up hours later in the morning with the sun shining and all was well. More involved because it wasn’t just a simple stare down with some fire-eyed demon and poof, he disappeared leaving me with a bostin’ idea for a new song. No, it also wasn’t like it was in the song. Nothing offered me any of my deepest desires in exchange for my immortal soul or any of that tripe. In my dream I woke and the shadow was hovering above me. Filling the room was a sort of buzz, a hum like a swarm of hornets. The visitor hunched over me and its eyes weren’t eyes at all, just burning windows, portals into its head. And inside its head there was only burning. Like the inside of a sun, it was violent, radiant, a churning burning ocean. And within that ocean a broken melody more rapturous and heartbreaking than the secret name of god itself played in broken pieces on and off. Always being drowned out by the fire. I had never seen or heard anything so full of beauty and I couldn’t turn away from it. The shadow had me. It didn’t speak. There was no need. All was understood. There was no bargain. It would simply give me what I needed in order to find that song. To finish that music. To make it heard. I would do anything for this. It gave my life purpose. It gave my identity meaning. So the shadow produced a long thin arm and pointed sort of hand.
Resting in its palm was a large black seed. The shadow withdrew its hand and the seed remained in the air above me. My hands at my sides, I had risen to my knees on the bed waiting for the exchange. For my gift to be given. The seed moved through the air and entered my navel and then burrowed its way inside me.
I could feel long black branches growing inside me. Could sense the seed deep inside my center, and from deep inside it a strong thick trunk from which more branches would stretch out. I could feel their sharp tips and twigs scratching tenderly behind my eyes and their dark red leaves budding, wrapping and then enfolding over my brain.
Now, December 12th, 1980, I knew that was no dream. That visitor was the same as the creature I’d seen in the hotel lobby… The Earworm. I don’t care what Marcus said, it was a
fitting name. The story, the lie I had been telling all these years, had been closer to the truth than my actual memory. But now I remembered the truth. Not that it would do me much good. I was lost. I did not know where I was anymore or even if I was anymore but something told me that the tree planted inside me all those years ago had died. And that I was supposed to have had died with it.
Antigonish Stares
I woke up to find my own dead face staring right back at me. Nose to nose, right on top of me. Its eyes wide but listless, mouth agape like some dead animal hit by a lorry. This wasn’t a mirror but an actual physically manifested reflection. A double. Or perhaps something worse; I went to feel my own face, to see if I had been skinned and whatever sick creature who did the carving had thought it a laugh to show me its handiwork, but I couldn’t move my arms. The panic spread swiftly. Trapped, that one word my only thought. I struggled some more but I was wedged into something and it wasn’t budging. I tried to calm myself. Was I really face to face with my own corpse? Yes, the moustache was a dead giveaway; second best in the band. But I was still failing to put it all together. Didn’t matter, not yet, all that was important was that I get out of this. But I felt buried; I could wiggle my toes and fingers but to actually move my limbs seemed difficult. I wasn’t bound, not exactly, but I was surrounded. It was hot in there, miserable hot like a fucking jungle. And the smell was unbearable. I used to work at an abattoir. This stunk like an abattoir that had a clam chowder soup kitchen in the middle of it. All around me I could feel soft and sometimes brittle lukewarm material, some of it sticky or wet. But I couldn’t turn my head to investigate further. I was in the middle of something, felt like it was the thickest of treacle and my only view was my own dead face. This was rather confusing. I did, however, finally grasp that there was no way I had been skinned; my doppelganger above me was staring down at me. Which meant he had his eyes, which meant he didn’t have mine because I was staring at him. This was incredibly comforting despite it making things infinitesimally even more perplexing.
I looked up at my own worn away face with its empty stare. I wasn’t going to die here. Not like him. I put all of my strength in my right shoulder and my left leg and finally managed to lurch myself free. Then I started digging, which felt more like swimming. The only way to go was up so I had to push into my handsome friend hanging above me. When we brushed foreheads our lips met and before I could laugh or scream about it a generous amount of saliva poured out of his jostled jaw and into mine. I coughed and cursed and spat as I pushed on past him. I decided I needed to quit smoking on top of the booze and coke too. Everything in my twin’s mouth tasted of ash and ranch dressing. No wonder my wife left me. Once I got past my own dead face I found that’s all it was: Just my head. No attached body. As I squeezed past him I looked down and saw him turned around now looking back up at me. One eye shut, a wink for my nudge. Now that all my limbs had become liberated I started thrashing them upward full force. I had to get out. Had to breathe. I pushed myself up on my hands and forced my way through a crack in the surface of whatever I was stuck in. Fresh air, at least fresher air, filled my nostrils and my mouth and I saw the familiar glow from off one of the jug lanterns. The fucker still hadn’t died. I was still in that kitchen. And I was alone. I popped my left shoulder up through the opening then worked the arm out too. I finally got my last foot free and slid down the skin I was now laying on top of. I wasn’t alone, not really. I still hadn’t escaped the We it seemed…
There it was, my prison, the hot trap I had burrowed out of like some desperate hairless gopher. A pile of dead mes. At least most of them looked like me, the ones that looked human at all. All of them were incomplete, many were just parts. All of them were jammed together, compressed down into one sort of being. A composite corpse. Arms sprang from torsos or heads, tongues sagged down out of eye cavities or around necks like scarves. There was one back that looked more like rhinoceros skin and along its thick grey surface rippled hundreds of small white spikes. I looked closer and saw that they were all upside down human teeth, the big four-pronged fuckers in the back of the mouth and the thinner canines and front teeth which always looked like great big white corn kernels to me. They had all grown out of this skin upside down, completely useless but sort of beautiful if you went for that sort of thing. There were also some other limbs I had no accounting for. Mandibles, claws, tails, horns, or maybe just protruding ribcages. Nestled throughout this pile were my own faces. Some looked just like the bloke who greeted me in the bathroom mirror every morning and some looked a bit different. Fatter, skinnier, some with no moustaches—these were easily the most wretched of the lot. There were a few other human faces that weren’t me but I still felt a sort of kinship to them for some reason. And the same sort of, for lack of a better word, embarrassment, of seeing them or myself like this. Some of them were women. One even looked remarkably like my own mom in the photos I’d seen when she’d been younger. It was odd—obviously it was odd, it was a pile of eviscerated mes and monster mes, that’s fucking abnormal—but what was really odd was the feeling I got looking at all of them. Must have had at least seventeen or twenty faces in there, god knows how many different limbs and other parts. I looked at them and got that feeling you get when you see a photo of yourself or hear your voice on a recording and you hated it. Just loathed it outright.
Why? Not just because you looked fatter than you thought you looked, or your voice was squeakier or more annoying sounding than you thought… You hated these reflections of you because they did not seem like you. Like the way you thought of yourself. They were at odds with the delusion you’d made of yourself. We forget that everything we experience is tainted by our viewpoint, especially the way we experience ourselves. I looked at the gallery of my own dead faces, that was what I really was or could be and I didn’t like it one bit.
Because now I was me again and from this seat I had no use for the dead truth piled up in front of me.
I was also naked. And for some reason I felt a little shy having all those mes staring at my equipment. Even if some of them were monsters mes and all of them were dead mes. I was not comforted either by the idea that these other mes probably had similar equipment to my own back when they were alive and still attached to said equipment. It still felt like sharing too much. I didn’t want to consider what the monster mes had been hiding in their trousers before we got compacted in together. Then again maybe what they were packing was lying in the pile too. I suppose I just didn’t recognize monster genitalia when I saw it. Who would? One thing I did notice was that most of the bodies in the pile looked dried up, like husks. Like something had drained them, stole the life right out of them. I felt great conversely. Now that I was out from under all that dead weight I felt like my old self again. Like my old old self. I felt like I used to back in the good old days. Back when the band was young and playing music was still a good time and not an actual job. And the pressure I had felt before become part of whatever I had become part of, that pressure was back but I welcomed it. It didn’t feel so much like a burden now, more like a helpful tether or a welcome weight that kept me from slipping away.
But there was no one to share these revelations with. The kitchen was deserted. Where the kid had been, where he had reached out and I, or We, had burnt off his arm, there was only a bit of blood on the floor. The barricade had been moved, just enough to let Rikki and Marcus squeeze out. Presumably while I folded in on my multiple selves, or imploded, or whatever the hell had occurred. I still didn’t remember it all. It was there in my mind but so was a sort of block. I could feel it weakening the longer I was conscious. But it still hadn’t fallen away entirely. I put it on the backburner and decided to focus on more important things. Namely, that if Rikki and Marcus were still out there I had to find them.
Tell them I was feeling better now, that I was sorry for monstering out before and all that, and I really wanted to be wearing pants when I did this. That was, of course, if they were still alive and the
Earworm hadn’t gotten to them first. I still wasn’t sure what exactly it wanted from me. The most logical answer was what the kid had said all along; it wanted to come back and collect. Pick up that seed it put into me. But I couldn’t shake that this didn’t feel right. There was something more, something I was still missing.
Swinging an axe naked with my balls slapping around this way and that is possibly the manliest I’d ever felt as well as the most terrified. I chose not to think this coincidence. The axe was left by Rikki, I’m guessing she and Marcus left in quite the hurry whilst I was doing my origami routine. I swung the axe again and broke off another of the locks. I was going through the staff lockers in a backroom of the kitchen. Hoping to find someone’s change of clothes that I could use. The first two lockers left me with a chef’s coat and a pair of chef clogs that’d fit okay. But I’d still like some sort of pants if I was going to face certain death, it just seemed the proper way to go about things. Locker three was the jackpot. A pair of blue jeans that would work well enough and a big thick fridge coat with an attached hood.
For the first time since I woke up things were looking likewise. It hit me then how up I was feeling in general. Almost like I’d just done a small mountain of snow white up my nose and the girls were waiting in the wings after a show telling me they’d another beautiful place for me to shove my face. I had been feeling this spark since I crawled my way out of the pile of husks and their viscera. And I had music in my head too. Not exactly like I was hearing it, but whispers of it, sketches of what it should be. It was the old feeling, back when Friv used to go down to the room and work on our material. We all had ideas, most of which weren’t even really half-formed but we had this trust, this faith, this certainty that the minute we plugged in, the rest would just come pouring out of us as natural as the sun coming up in the morning. The minute Vinnie would drop his riff we’d be right there locked in with our own parts. I’d asked Vinnie a few times if he wrote those riffs on his own before band practice. And he always said some variation of, “Yeah, but not really.” Or, “I do but it all changes, gets turned around or just completely rearranged when we’re all together making it into a proper Frivolous tune.” That was the feeling I had. I needed to get my instrument, I needed to get a pad of paper. I had words, I had sounds, music practically screaming to be released from me.
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