An Augmented Fourth

by Tony McMillen

  But there was no time. And the only instrument I could think of was whatever madness the kid was going on about while he held a knife to my throat. The room, the chamber at the top of the hotel. Some sort of music room, built by an old mad Darjmainian. It sounded like occult bollocks and besides, I had more pressing concerns. I threw the clothes on as fast as I could. The second locker I had opened was still ajar and I noticed a small boom box lying in there I must have glossed over initially. I turned it on, just trying to see if the weather had cleared up at all, or if there were any reports of strange monsters that resembled album covers eating people or whatever. Nothing. Nothing came in at all. No crackle. Not even dead air. Nothing. The Earworm, I was certain this was its doing. Like with the red light it used to control the lift back with Frankie. As I was making my way out the jug lantern’s light dipped again then finally died. The room went black and I got the sudden fear that all the dead and discarded pieces of me left on the floor were going to reassemble themselves and come for me in the dark. Take me to pieces and return me to their patchwork prison. Now was a good time to get out of there. There was a bit of light from the hole in the barricade so I followed it out of the black room.

  I crept out of the hole looking like some renegade sous chef, or maybe a rather dainty Viking. I held my axe at the ready and tried to move quickly but carefully towards the lobby. The dim light I followed was coming from the hallway towards the lobby entrance. As I moved along the song I was hearing kept moving through my mind and making me almost giddy at the prospect of creating something new. I had to strain to keep from smiling. Which was fucking yampy but the truth. I was waiting for the boogeyman to come rip my head off and I was beaming like a kid on Christmas Eve going to bed early. I continued moving through the hallway looking for any signs of a struggle and finding none. Maybe the Earworm had moved on. Maybe Rikki and Marcus had made it out with no opposition. Maybe the kid did too… Then I remembered that little nutter pulling a blade on me. And the dead man in the freezer, the real John Lopez. The light coming up from the lobby, which was still quite weak, was now just up ahead. I looked behind me, tried to steady my breathing and balance the axe in case I needed to swing it. The air felt chilly as I rounded the next corner.

  At the lobby waiting to greet me was yet another mystery. To the far left the doors leading outside were ajar and a tunnel was dug and burnt out, presumably with the little crème brûlée torches, just like Marcus had said. Snow was blowing in from the tunnel, pushed in by the wind outside which I could again hear howling. The weak light I had followed was a ring of sunlight that was coming out of the tunnel and resting on the marble floor in a halo. The mystery wasn’t any of that. That all made some sort of sense. I followed the snowflakes dancing in the air and across the marble floor of the lobby as they landed atop the mystery. A body. Face down, wearing black, lying near the entrance of one of the elevators. It didn’t look like any of the other three, and I should have been smarter but I was sick of not knowing all the angles, so I walked over to get a better look. I almost reached down and turned the body over with my hand until my brain started working again and I used the handle of my axe to poke at the body. Nothing stirred. The cold air blew against my hair and managed to part the curtains in back enough to kiss the back of my neck as I stared down to look some more at the body. I poked again, harder this time. When there was no reaction I gave it a full on jab. Still nothing. I placed my left hand on the shoulder of the body and held the axe at the ready with my right. If there was going to be any surprises I would be prepared with my own. The body was lighter than it should have been, felt more fragile too, and when I turned it over I saw that it was the witch. The mystery woman from the self-titled album cover. I could see up close she really didn’t have eyes. Just dark recesses, spooky nooks that crawled back into her skull where the eyes should have been held with muscle and tissue. She looked just like the album cover, like an exact recreation of an old photograph. Grainy, indistinct, colors saturated, unreal looking. I rested the handle of my axe on the floor and peered down to get a better look at her lack of eyes and the strange texture of her skin. The wind picked up some more and I took its advice and shot back upright, bringing the axe down right through the witch’s neck. She did not suddenly gasp when I took her head from her neck. Her arms did not raise, her fingers did not claw at me from beyond death’s cold grip. There was not even blood. She was lifeless, beyond being already dead. She wasn’t human in the slightest. From the stump of her neck and head I could see torn strands of material, yellow and grey, spilling out. It looked like the inside of a fruit that had been halved, like a melon. But not human, not even animal. She was just some sort of puppet, discarded after she failed to convince her intended audience. I wondered what became of the veined cobwebs she created earlier. I saw no remnants of them anywhere in the lobby. I had no idea how long I had been out; an hour, five, a whole day?

  No, the jug lantern was still lit up when I woke so it couldn’t have been a whole day. But if Rikki and Marcus had made it outside why hadn’t anyone come to rescue or destroy me? I kicked the witch’s head just to be sure, I was really liking these chef’s clogs, and then I turned back to the tunnel. Maybe it was best that I didn’t run into them again. How was I going to convince them I was okay again? How was I even sure I was okay? I mean, I felt great… I never feel great. I wasn’t even thinking about the bottle at all. I wasn’t myself, something had changed. I had changed. Maybe I would just transform again when I saw them. Maybe it was better to just get out and get away…

  A glow started trickling into the room from up above. Red, neon, but faint like Christmas lights dying of cancer. I tilted my head up and saw something wondrous. A map of intricate glowing rivers arranged in the shape of a human hung above me. A circulatory system floating on its own and taking its fashion cues from Las Vegas. It lowered into the room through the ceiling, passed through it like a phantom. As it got closer I could see that where its eyes should have been sat empty glowing nets and these were not aimed in my direction. It didn’t seem to notice me at all. Which was a small relief. Then it let out a moan that filled the entire room. It had that same compacted choir of a voice I had heard when I was We. Pain, pleasure, suffering, and salvation all stirred together into a thick, burning sound. It would have passed right through me I’m sure, but I stepped back out of the way and let it continue down through the floor and, I assume, eventually all the way into the earth. It moaned again once it was out of sight. I could hear the sound coming up through the ground.

  Storm Mouth

  Once I got outside I knew everything was wrong. The wind whipped the snow into a hissing fury that blinded me as I walked away from the tunnel into the wall of white. The sun was still up but you wouldn’t know it. And it wasn’t going to last much longer. I looked around, trying to shield my eyes so I could steal a glimpse of where I was going. Nothing, the wind and snow had left me completely snowblind and I could only see the faintest of dark outlines where the surrounding buildings stood. I looked down and saw two pairs of footprints in the snow. At least there was that. I followed them but already had a bad feeling. Something was off.

  Nothing felt safe. All that elation I had been granted after emerging from the undertow of the We was gone now. Fear was all I felt. Which was fine, it’d make a good compass. But I couldn’t figure out why exactly I was so afraid. I was outside, even if the city was deserted and it was a few miles to a hospital or fire station or the police; I was safer now, wasn’t I? Closer to getting there at least? I couldn’t shake it; I didn’t like it out here. Nothing felt right.

  I don’t believe in precognition, tarot or any of that yampy nonsense but I will say I usually have a good sense of when things are about to turn shit. I had a terrible feeling the day we finally decided to sack Sully, for instance. We had been trying to record our follow up to the steaming pile that had been our last record and Sully kept ducking the sessions. He showed up one week, did a small mountain range of blo
w and when we finally forced him to stand behind the mic he took out his pecker and pissed on the lyrics I had written for him to sing. I wasn’t particularly proud of the song in question but I went into the recording booth anyways and gave him a black eye before he could get his dick back in his pants. He just laughed and fell down on the wet spot on the floor. I still remember the sight of him there, lying in his own filth with those pages filled with my piss-stained words sticking to him like a blanket of newspapers sticks to a vagrant. And Sully, he just laughed and laughed.

  Still, despite that it wasn’t my decision to axe him. It was, but I wasn’t the first one to bring it up. Vinnie did. Vinnie was our leader. He set the pace. And he said plainly what we all knew: Sully was never going to start working on this record and if we didn’t make a new record soon we, as a musical entity, were dead. Punk was proving itself more than just a fad. And even in the world of heavy metal, the world that we built, we were being eclipsed. We had toured with this new American outfit that same year; they were tremendous. At least their guitarist was; he was like a new Hendrix almost. Incendiary, every night. He made the guitar sound like classical music played by a goddamn cyborg. It was unreal. It was so good people even overlooked the fact that the lead singer of this group couldn’t carry a tune if he had a forklift. Though the fucker could do the splits off the drum riser and that was genuinely impressive. Well, these goddamn Yanks, they blew us off the stage every single night. And they were supporting their debut. No one knew a fucking word of any of their songs but they’d be screaming along by the last chorus. And us? We were supporting the worst thing we as a unit ever produced. And Sully was a buffoon on stage at this point. Just a disgrace. Even our old material now sounded so half-hearted and uninspired that we might as well have lip synced and mimed it. One night this Yank band, they covered “Tetrahex,” I honestly think they meant it as a compliment. The crowd went off their head. Off to the side of the stage me and Vinnie and Sully watched them as they played. I could see the defeat on Vinnie’s face. He was thinking the same as me: Why can’t that be us anymore? And then I looked at Sully. He was banging his head along. “What’s this tune? Fucking bostin’ it is. That guitar player is flash, isn’t he?” We kicked the Yanks off the remainder of the tour two nights later.

  That’s when it first entered into my head that this thing with Sully was coming to a head. So I wasn’t the least bit surprised after the incident in the recording booth when Vinnie told me we needed to get rid of Sully. Nor was I surprised when Burt, Sully’s mate from back in primary school, agreed with Vin. Which left it up to me. And it should have been an easy decision. I loved Sully, I did, but he was self-destruction incarnate. In fact in a band full of sticks of a dynamite he was a goddamn hand grenade. But, what would we be without him? What would my words be without him to sing them? And yet there wasn’t really any choice, there was no way to work with him anymore. Even if we just toured and didn’t record anything new, became a purely nostalgic act there was no life in the live act anymore either. So I said Sully was out too. And that’s when the other two asked if I’d be the one to break it to him.

  Vinnie couldn’t do it because he was always throwing Sully out of the group and Sully was always telling Vinnie that he quit. So it wouldn’t mean anything if Vinnie cast him out again. Burt couldn’t fire him on account of the primary school history and being so close to Sully; he used that to duck the Judas card and I didn’t really blame him. I’d have done the same if I could. But no, it had to come from me. That’s what would make it real. I woke up that day knowing I’d have to do it, and my stomach was a knot. I finished a bottle of red wine by myself, snorted an entire Christmas village and then I went to Sully’s flat to go and break the news to him. His girl opened the door and told me he was at the studio waiting for us. I told her this was our day off, it was Sunday, we weren’t scheduled to record then. So she got suspicious and closed the door on me muttering to herself about what little bitch had gotten her claws into Sully this time. I got to the studio about an hour later and one of the blokes who worked there told me that sure enough Sullivan had been there but now he was gone. Said he waited around for a few hours and then said he was going to the pub.

  I went to a few of his usual haunts but never found him. So I called his flat again at the end of the night. Sully was back, miraculously, his bird was in the back admonishing him for some perceived, though quite likely extramarital transgression, and I could barely hear him so he told me to hold on and then he took the phone into the toilet. He was drunk and high, but so was I, and no more than was customary for us at the time so I decided to tell him how it was. And like a lot of things in life, the big moments, the ones that decide how everything else is going to shake out, it wasn’t dramatic at all. All the parties involved seem to know what was coming so there was really no fight. Nothing was truly a surprise. Sully got quiet and I asked him if he had heard me. And he said, “Yeah, mate. Yeah.” I asked him what he was going to do and he laughed. “Don’t worry about me, I’ve still my voice, I still got my face. What are you lot going to do?” The way he said it wasn’t exactly catty or mean-spirited; which made it worse. There was enough genuine concern for me and the remaining group that it cut me much worse than if he was just trying to get a rise out of me. Because he was right. What band had ever survived the loss of their singer? We ended the conversation cordially. He said, “Cheers, Codger. I love you.” Then he hung up.

  The next day we were in the studio and I told Vinnie and Burt and we talked about next moves. About finding a new singer. Whether or not we wanted to scrap all the material we had been working on already and start fresh. I was in favor of this. I suspected part of the reason Sully wasn’t cooperating these sessions was due to the material being so lackluster. As we talked there was a sense of loss but also excitement at what might lie ahead for us. We did a lot of blow that night. Had a lot to drink. And we spoke about how good it was to get that loose cannon Sully out of the group. He was always getting wasted, he was unreliable. We couldn’t trust him to finish anything. Of course we didn’t record anything that day ourselves, I shudder now to think how much each day in that studio cost us. As the night went on it I started to see our giddiness for our new future as more and more us trying convince ourselves that we still had one. At least from my end that’s what I think I was doing. Someone invited some birds over at some point and we had a damn going away party for Sully without him there. Eventually through the haze of it all and just as we were preparing to leave for the night to continue the celebration one of the engineers told me he had something he thought I should hear. I followed him to the control deck and he played a reel. “This is from last night.”

  “Okay, new tune, take one.” It was Sully. He was singing a take of the new song, the one with the lyric he had pissed all over the day before. And it wasn’t the best song in the world, much of that I was to blame. But he sang it well, and with conviction. He gave it his all, you could hear it on the tape. And when he was finished with his part and as the song continued on with a guitar solo that we would have eventually put a fade out on I could hear him talking to the engineer. “Sounds good, doesn’t it? Fucking love this one. Love these words. Codger blows my mind with these things, he does.” I realized then that Vinnie and Burt had joined me at some point to hear what was playing. No one said anything. We didn’t discuss giving Sully another chance but we didn’t go out with the girls and everyone else to continue the celebration as planned either. We just went home and said nothing to one another. I drank some more and passed out. Soon after was when I tried to get clean for the first time. That song, by the way, we scrapped my words and Sully’s vocal and gave it to the American imp. He renamed it “Weeping Wizard.” It sounds like “Leaping Lizard” the way he sings it. I don’t remember what it was called when Sully sang it anymore. I was too fucked up when I had written it to recall and he had, after all, pissed on my only notes.

  Outside now I kept on the trail for another five mi
nutes or so when I saw some lights in the distance. Snow plow or fire engines. My fear slunk away and I started running towards the lights. They were moving closer to me too. Two vehicles, still couldn’t tell what kind but there were two pairs of headlights heading my way. Even the wind was beginning to die down. When one of the headlights moved away from the other in its pair I told myself they must have been four-wheelers. Then one of the lights flew up into the air fifty feet or so and I stopped running. The wind died down completely and gave me a glimpse of what the lights were attached to. I started running off to the right, hoping to find something to hide behind. The lights were part of some kind of animal. Each light was a teardrop-shaped bioluminescent appendage suspended on the end of a fleshy growth that hung out and forward from each creature’s back. Like giant anglerfish, only they could fly. I don’t know if the things in the air spotted me but I was guessing my dark fridge coat made me an easy target in the middle of all this snow so I took it off. The chef’s jacket I was wearing was dirty as a dish after dinner but it was still white and not dark. I looked back to see if the things with the light were following and that’s when I caught my first real look at the city: Protruding from the earth stood cragged towers that looked like bone or tusk, there were hundreds of them, maybe more, as far as the eye could see. They were big as buildings, some dark grey but covered partially in snow, others as white as the snow itself. They stretched on with no end in sight. They sprung from the ground straight but started to curl and twist like ram’s horns as they neared their tops up in the sky. This wasn’t Boston; I wasn’t sure if it was even Earth. I had looked out at it when I had woken up in my hotel room and not given it a second thought because of the snow storm.