“It honestly has more to do with my changing than your band changing, though you did go to shit.”
“So I have women’s lib and punk rock to blame for your defection?”
“No, you have me no longer being a teenager to blame.”
“Oh.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that. The music I make, even though it’s for me, chiefly, it’s also for teenagers.”
“You’re saying that kids have changed, our records are no longer relevant to this generation?”
“Well, not your last few. But look at that kid, John, he believed you enough to want to kill you or have you save him or whatever. I don’t think there’s much a difference in the eyes of fans like that.”
“Point?”
“The point is I’m willing to bet his favorite Frivolous Black songs are the early ones, and why? Not just because they’re better but because you made them when you were closer to his age and could relate to his experience better than you can now.”
“Rock and roll can’t grow old can it?”
She looked back. “I don’t know. But I suspect if it does it can’t expect to keep speaking to the same young people. It has to grow with its audience. If I were in your band you know what I’d do?”
“Sack that Yank singer? I’m miles ahead of you.”
“I’d stop trying to sound like you used to and just embrace what you sound like now. Instead of writing for what you think this new generation wants to hear from you, write for the generation that came up with you. That’s grown up with you. Better yet, write like you used to, for yourself. Fuck everyone else’s expectations.” She said it and I could tell this was beyond just me and my mid-life crisis. It was something Rikki herself had needed to hear.
“Sounds like good advice.”
“Easier said than done and all that, right?”
I nodded. “Anyways,” I said, changing the topic back. “It’s not aliens.”
“Codger, where are we going?” I wasn’t sure if she had heard me. “And if it’s not aliens then what is it and where the hell are we? Because this is not Earth.”
I wasn’t sure how to put it. The things I had experienced in the We led me to different conclusions. “…I think it is Earth, just not our Earth.”
This got her to turn around. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“When We… when I was…” I searched for the right way to put it. Rikki put a hand in front of her mouth and flailed her fingers like a calamari monster. Bingo. I nodded. “I was not only not just myself, I was also not just in that room with you and Marcus.”
“Oh, poor fucking Marcus.”
Poor fucking Marcus indeed, but I was losing her. “I was in other worlds, all simultaneous.”
“Other worlds, exactly. Aliens.”
“No, they were other Earths. Some looked exactly like ours. I’m sure there might have been differences had I hung around and picked up a newspaper or a history book but I couldn’t do any of those things because I was in torment.” She held her hand up and did the calamari again. “Yes, exactly. There were all these parallel universes, right? And there were all these parallel mes. Only some weren’t even human, but we were still the same. Somehow we had something in common, we occupied the same space or position in our respective universes or something. And now we occupied the same actual space, we had gotten jammed up, compacted together into that ever-changing mashed-up monster you saw. And the worst part was our thoughts were smashed together too. I was lost in a choir of voices and thoughts, drowned out in some bloody collective hive mind.”
She stopped and looked back at me. “That sounds really bad, Codger, I’m sorry.”
“It was, it was misery, but…” I wasn’t sure if I should even say the next bit, didn’t want to give her an excuse to fear me or possibly fry me. “…it was also quite brilliant. It was ecstasy.”
“What’s this?”
“I was part of an ocean of minds, I wasn’t alone. You can’t understand because you’re like everybody else, you’re alone. I was too before I had a glimpse of it. I was alone before and I was burdened by the weight of my own consciousness, but when I was We… when I was with the other mes I was actually free even though I was chained to maybe an endless collection of my parallel selves.”
She didn’t say anything. Just stared at me like she was considering something important. Then, “Shit, I forgot, I’m out of smokes.”
“Rikki, what the fuck? I’m telling you I think we’re stuck on a parallel version of Earth and that I experienced a higher form of consciousness and that it was my own somehow and you—”
“I hear you, I really do.” She turned around and started walking up the stairs again. “But how is any of that helping us right now? If we’re on another Earth, one that’s covered in snow and giant tentacle bat things that tear you away up into the sky, what good is knowing that going to do us? Besides, why are we going up? Do you have a plan? I sure as hell don’t.”
“We’re going up because we’re looking for that chamber the kid mentioned.”
“That kid, the murderer? He was mental, man.” But I could hear it in her voice, a little catch. She didn’t believe it was a bad plan, not really. “But maybe he wasn’t that mental. He said there was a chamber that made music at the top of the hotel, right?”
“He said the whole hotel was one big instrument, built by some mad Darjmainian who was obsessed by the old occult guy Fludd.”
“Fludd’s the bloke who designed the celestial monochord thing that’s on the cover of that old record the Anthology of American Folk Music.”
I was impressed. “…Right? How did you know?”
“I’m a musician. Just because I don’t know how to read sheet music doesn’t mean I haven’t listened to a lot of stuff. Or done my homework.” She turned to give me a smirk. “Besides, my mother thought she was a folky. Loved all that old crackly, recorded into a horn shit. I used to stare at her old LPs for hours while she’d play them and dance arou—”
“That’s lovely but shut it for a moment.” Before she could tell me to fuck off I held a finger up to stress my seriousness. I could hear something. Something below us, like the creak of a wood floor or a door being shut delicately. Something stirred. But I couldn’t decide where it was coming from. I could tell however by the way Rikki was looking at me as well as the fact that she hadn’t called me some variation of twat in the last five seconds that she had heard the noise too. I turned around slowly trying to pinpoint the sound. But there was no sound anymore, the trail had stopped dead.
“Do you think someone’s down there?” Rikki whispered to me.
“Someone watching us?”
“Maybe? The kid?”
It wasn’t a bad theory. “You think we should go down, find out?”
She thought about it. “No, I don’t think that he’d be happy to see us, you in particular.”
“What happened after I….”
“Imploded like a supernova?”
“Oh, thank Christ, I thought you were going to say supergroup.”
“You’re asking about the kid?”
“He’s alive then I take it?”
“Oh, he’s alive. After your little laser light show there were just heaps and heaps of bodies, mostly your body, and they were sort of smoldering or glowing in a pile and Marcus said we should get moving in case you, or they I guess, weren’t dead.”
“The kid?”
“I’m getting to that! So I totally forgot about him, or I guess I assumed he was dead somewhere under that pile of glowing flesh where you used to be. And if Marcus had him on his mind he wasn’t telling me about it. So we get the barricade removed finally and then we notice the glow or whatever starting to fade from the pile of flesh or corpses and we decide this is a bad sign and we start grabbing our torches and whatever we’re going to need for outside. We’re getting ready to run out and that’s when the kid comes charging at me, out of fucking nowhere, he knocks me on my ass
after running into me with his shoulder. And he’s screaming like a banshee the entire time and he just flies past Marcus and goes through the opened door and is gone.”
“What the hell?”
“He had one arm, it looked like yo—it had burned it off. Marcus and I tried calling after him, I even ran after him but the kid was a goddamn jackrabbit. When we got to the lobby he was gone.”
I looked down the stairwell some more, tried to imagine the kid climbing the stairs slowly waiting for me. Him, with his one good hand wrapped around an axe or maybe even a gun. What if he found a gun, or had it stashed away somewhere? Here I was beset on all sides, contending with otherworldly forces (myself included), weird beasts, witches, angler bat things and even punk rockers and I still had to worry most of all about some fan with a gun. But I didn’t hear anything. Couldn’t even be sure anymore what I had heard. It sounded like it had come from inside the walls. “Let’s get moving. If he’s out there then he’s out there.”
We proceeded, albeit slower than before, more cautiously. “You know what bothers me still?”
“No?” I answered.
“Who was the tall man in the lift with Frankie?”
I had entirely forgot about him. “Hmm, good question. I don’t know the answer for certain but after running into the LP witch down in the lobby—”
“Did she come to life again? Me and Marcus almost set her on fire just to make sure she wasn’t going to get us. And who killed her? The kid?”
“What? No. No one killed her—that’s what I’m getting at—she wasn’t even really a corpse, she was a husk. And I suspect Frankie’s mysterious friend on the lift is somewhere in a similar state.”
“But why take the form of a giant man in a suit? At least the witch on the flipping album cover makes sense. That’s something I know. That’s something which has ties to you.”
“I dunno, maybe the giant had ties to Frankie?”
“What if it’s him who’s watching us right now?”
“Why would a giant have to slink around in the shadows, all willy-nilly? He’s a fucking giant. He would just come out and get us if that’s what he wanted.”
Rikki looked somehow wounded that my knowledge of lift giants might eclipse her own. “I don’t know what he was or where he is but I don’t care to stick around here to prove you wrong or right. Let’s get out of here.”
We picked up the pace and then that’s when we heard it: Something from below us. Whatever it was it was trying to be quiet but it still was making noise. Maybe because it was speeding up as it got closer to us. Rikki’s eyes were wide, she could hear it now too. She turned around and we started climbing the stairs in a full-on run. When I started moving faster the cut on my arm started to sting. I wasn’t sure if the activity was getting the blood pumping and causing the pain or what but I put a hand over it and pressed down just in case. The thing below us got louder, it must have heard us running now and figured it was no longer time to play it coy. We made it to the fourth floor and my heart was a burning drum in the center of my chest. “Do you have the key to your room on you?” I asked.
“What? Yes, why the shit does it matter? We’re only on the fourth floor, my room is up on the twelfth.”
But I had seen her on the fourth. I remembered her on the fourth. How? Then it happened. The memory I was trying to put together since I woke up in the pile of my dead selves, another forgotten puzzle piece I had brought back with me, restored to my mind after I clawed out from the We; now it was back. I could see that Rikki was telling the truth, she never had a room on the fourth floor but I did see her on it.
Something below us rounded a corner and collided with a railing there sending a vibration up the staircase to where we were. The vibration was enough to shake my hand off the railing. Maybe the kid had been telling the truth about the way this place was built. It being one giant instrument… Regardless, whatever was down there was big and in quite the hurry to get to us. The fear was useful, it helped me to move even faster and try to catch up to Rikki. She had just turned the corner to the fifth floor and I was about to do the same when I heard it pulsing behind me.
That familiar buzz. The same one I heard all those years ago in Birmingham, England… The Earworm. I had to turn around, had to look at it again. When I did I still couldn’t understand fully what I was looking at. A rolling, churning black shape coiled with rows of light which seemed to flicker like street light through half-drawn window shades. There were visual echoes all around it, making it look like a blacklight poster turned into a shell game. It was moving so fast it collided with the left wall and the vibration from that took me and Rikki off our feet. The sound of the collision was massive, like it had smashed into a belfry instead of hotel wall. I dropped my lighter, heard it fall down the stairs. I looked down to watch the dark mass of the creature as it poured up towards me. A fresh hideous bouquet of corruptions blossomed forth from out the rainbow oil slick bramble, metastasizing into billowing, diaphanous limbs. Proving to me yet again that even when utterly terrified I could at least be comforted knowing I’d never have need for a thesaurus. I got to my feet, Rikki screamed something encouraging back towards me, and I rounded the corner and got to the next flight.
This wasn’t going to work. The Earworm was too damn fast. And worse, that sound it was making, something about the light that crawled out of the slits that decorated its coils; it called to me. Even stronger than the We, the light called to me. I wanted to turn around, to look into its eyes which weren’t eyes at all again. I wasn’t going to last much longer. I pounded my feet against the stairs. Past Rikki I could see the door to the sixth floor. There was no way we were going to make it to the seventh. Our lead wouldn’t last, the thing was gaining too fast. And that wasn’t even putting into account how likely it was that I was going to turn around and just let the big black fucker swallow me up. Then I felt the smallest sliver of that old feeling creep back into me. That feeling of dumb optimism I had waking up from the wreckage in the kitchen. That need to pick up my bass guitar and write something. I didn’t care if it was dumb anymore. It was all I had. It was the only part of me that didn’t want to surrender to that dark thing coming to pull me under.
We had to change course, there was no other option. The sixth floor was our best bet. “Follow me,” Rikki yelled as she pushed open the door to the sixth floor ahead of me. Well, there went my chance to play hero I suppose. I ran after before the door could slam behind her. I took the handle in my hand and closed the door as I entered, hoping it would buy us some time. It did not. Almost the instant I closed the door and started running the Earworm tore right through it like it had been made of paper. The creature filled up the hall with its bent black shape. Up close it resembled some enormous severed black tongue slithering all on its own. The different visual echoes that rippled off it pushed against the debris and the various surfaces of the hall, seeming to prove that all were substantial even if I could see through some of them. I thought of my song, that unborn piece of music that lived inside me and only me, and I turned away from the creature and took off down the hall. I made it around the corner, the buzzing of the Earworm getting close enough to drown out any sort of real thought from my skull. Around the other side of the corner I saw Rikki disappearing into an open door. It wasn’t a hotel room, it was a supply closet or something similar. She turned back, scanning for me, and when she caught sight of me she motioned for me to follow her. I had no other choice so I did, hoping that she had enough sense not to dead end us in a supply closet while that thing was sure to see me slip into it.
Luckily the supply closet wasn’t a supply closet. Inside there were mops, spray bottles, towels, other supplies including the anus crackers the kid had promised, yes, all of that type of thing, but they only lined the walls. At the center where another wall should have been, instead there was an opening like a tunnel. Rikki disappeared into this and I had no other choice but to follow her into the darkness. I could hear someone ahead of he
r breathing but I couldn’t see their face. It was dark, cold, and wet inside this tunnel and it sounded like I was stepping on stone. Rikki was running up ahead of me, and ahead of her I could see a torch or maybe even a lantern. I followed the light and caught glimpses of the walls as we got further and further in. The walls were indeed stone, black bricks irregularly patterned and dripping with moisture. I looked behind me quickly to see if the Earworm followed, then realized if it did, how was I going to see it? The blasted thing was as black as the walls here. I could only see the light that threatened to escape from its fissures when I was close up to the thing and it was in motion. And that wasn’t a position I was looking forward to returning to. So I kept my head turned around the right way and followed the flame which led us onward, and upward too, I noticed. Below me the stones made a gradual staircase.
After another few moments I understood that the tunnel we had been in had given way to a spiral staircase that was taking us up. I knew where we were going and I knew who was leading us there. “John.” I whispered it but the word broke the quiet like thunder. The fire stopped hovering ahead and it froze for a moment… then started floating back toward me. The kid appeared with it a few seconds later. With his remaining hand he held a lantern colored gold and shaped like an upside down owl. The arm he lost, that I… that We had taken appeared to have been cauterized by the bite just below the elbow. Even though it was neat and clean looking it made me sick to see what I had done. Next to him was Rikki. I could see she had her knife out, she was no fool. The kid looked at me like he wanted to tear my head off but knew it’d cost him too much. That reminded me of Sully, actually. I told him, “I know where you’re taking us, can it help get us back home?”
“So you know where we are now,” the kid said. “Us getting home? That would depend on you.” He raised his smooth-skinned stump up and I winced. “I can’t exactly play music anymore, can I, dude?”
“So you think I can play whatever instrument is in this bloody music chamber at the top of this secret staircase and that it’ll take us back to where we come from?”
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