An Augmented Fourth

by Tony McMillen

  “If someone else answers a question with another question I’m going to stab them in the ear, got it?” Rikki said.

  We went silent. Then…

  “…Did she?”

  “Probably, but who knows?”

  “Yeah, it might take us back if you play it right.”

  “‘Might’? Fucking hell.” I looked at the kid’s face, tried to imagine such a young face killing someone else. That was just my privileged, rich English ass not realizing how easy it was to kill when you believed in some gobshite barmy shit that told you it was okay. That it was necessary even. Vietnam, my generation’s biggest lesson and biggest blunder, always coming back into the conversation. “Before I ask you how this is supposed to work, what makes you so sure I’m the one who knows the song to begin with?”

  The kid actually smiled. “It’s gotta be you. It’s all based on your band’s music. The Master, the Unquiet One, wants you. He chose you in Birmingham and now he’s after you again to collect what’s his.”

  I was happy to finally know more than anyone else. “Master, huh? Sorry, but it doesn’t want me.” The kid’s head tilted. Then I spelled it out to him. “It wants her.”

  Visitation Rites

  Rikki had been in my room on the fourth floor. And she wasn’t alone. I’m not just talking about me; sure, I was there but I wasn’t much company. Rikki and her chaperon had been there the night before all this started happening, before I woke up in the closet feeling like death warmed over’s uglier cousin. I was two days into kicking the coke and the bottle and I thought that’s why I was getting on so miserably. It felt like my insides were shredding themselves and the blood in my veins was thick tar. Sure, it had been worse than the other time I tried to kick but I was getting older, I assumed I was just in a weaker state. John Lennon’s death had brought me to a critical depression and that was probably enabled by my guilt and anger at Sully for making us have to kick him out of the group. But none of that was what was wrong with me. All of it was true but what was really rotting me inside out was something left inside me a long time before, and it wanted out.

  I could remember it all now. I was on my bed, fever sick, foaming at the mouth, twisted into a ball wearing only my bathrobe. Typical junkie. Typical ungrateful rock star feeling sorry for himself. Disgraceful, really. I had two bowls left from housekeeping for me, one on the floor next to the bed and one on the nightstand in case I couldn’t make it to the floor, and I still managed to miss them both and get sick all over the sheets. Somehow the toes of one of my feet were covered in a thick coat of vomit, and then I remembered I had stepped in the floor bowl at some point. But there I was, certain I was dying and for once I wasn’t just being dramatic; I actually was dying. Marcus had said this whole process usually killed whoever it happened to. Usually. Me and Keith Richards, who’d have thought it? My body was shutting down, my mind was on fire. Then I saw the door open and I became calm. It was here. And it brought a friend.

  Rikki Fucking Spectre waltzed into my room, her pupils swollen to blank black dots. She was in its thrall. Behind her poured in the Earworm, in the guise of a more gentlemanly shape. The same shape I remember back in Birmingham. Its eyes, the burning windows, fixed to its skull or helm. The door shut behind it and I laid back on my bed, fingers digging into the vomit- and piss-soaked sheets like they were my mother’s arms. I was a frightened child and Rikki was what looked terrifying, more a witch then than in any of her cheap publicity shots. She knelt down before me, the Earworm behind her shifted its black form like a cloak and then produced a long shining and skinny forearm with an open hand on its end. It was her master and she was its pet and now it wanted to give her her treat. In that moment I realized I was more than its pet, I was its slave. And then the worst pain I had yet experienced took me over. I could feel something inside me burning its way out, trying to return to its master. I felt like I was being impaled or hung on horns. I had the peculiar image of a black tree that had grown inside me but was now upside down, uprooted, torn out of its hold from my insides and taking chunks of me with it. Something was now in my throat, making its way to the air. I was hunched over like a pleading monk and I was face to face with Rikki. If she was in there at all she had a hell of a poker face. Over her head hung the hand of the Earworm waiting patiently. And to its beckon, finally, the burning gift it had given me so long ago came rushing back to return to its grasp.

  Once it was outside of me it looked so small; it was a lot like having a rotten tooth that felt like it was the size of a small castle in your gums, but when the dentist pulled it out you’re embarrassed to find it such a tiny thing that had caused you all that distress. In the Earworm’s palm was a black seed. Instantly I could feel a void it had left inside me where it once resided. I could also feel my fever flood back over me. I collapsed backward onto the bed. I didn’t know what was happening to me yet, I was still under the sway of the Earworm too, but I could feel something changing in me. The seed, whatever it was, whatever talents it had given me, it was not only a key but a lock. It granted me access to wherever ideas come from but it also kept that place from opening me up. That was gone now. And instead I had an unguarded small entrance within that already felt like it was growing bigger. Before I passed out I could see the Earworm looming over Rikki, revealing her navel and inserting the seed into her like it had done to me ten years prior.

  So this is what I told Rikki and the kid as we continued walking the stone steps hidden inside the walls of the Alucinari Hotel. For Rikki it was a lot to take in.

  Altered Hymns

  “I… I thought it was a dream.” She still had her knife hanging by her side. With her other hand I thought I saw her feeling at her belly like an expectant mom-to-be but it was dark and hard to tell. I was still nervous not being able to tell if the Earworm was lurking behind us, climbing the darkened path with us. “I mean, I didn’t really remember much of it… just being led around by some black shape with the burning holes in its face where eyes should be. I remembered you on a bed but I… I don’t know. To be honest, I had been thinking of you.”

  “Really?” I was surprised.

  “Yeah, I knew Frivolous Black was in the hotel too, and I was thinking about that first LP and how much I loved it when I was younger. That first fucking song, the title track, how fucking scary it was. I just assumed the black shape in my dream was me thinking about that song. And you being on the bed writhing around looking like a corpse was all on account of me being nervous to meet you and sort of sad about what… became of you.”

  I was bleeding, on the run for my life and soul in a parallel version of Earth that was stuffed with monsters that were only slightly less frightening than the monster I myself had become a mere few hours before being led to what almost certainly was a dead end or trap by a murderous Yank who probably had it in for me on account of me munching off his arm in my aforementioned monstrous state, and what was I concerned with? Somebody young and cool confirming my suspicion that I was a has-been. Had my priorities straight, didn’t I? “‘Became of me’? It’s okay to say it, Rikki. I’m irrelevant. A fuck up. Worse, a cliché. I know.”

  “No,” she started to say. “…Yeah, all that. But who isn’t? Chances are, when it comes my time I’ll be one too. You were right before, I am afraid of making a new record. Because what if it isn’t as good? Or what if I want to do something different and nobody gives it a chance because they want me to be exactly like I was before? Nobody wants something they love to change. But it has to, right? Even if you try and maintain what you were, eventually you just become a distorted imitation of what you used to be, or worse, what you think people want of you… So you’re fucked.” She laughed. “Either way, no one gets to ride the high horse the whole time, right? And besides, you were flipping brilliant in your day, man. You and Frivolous put out more good shit on one album than any songwriter would be happy to put out in one career; which means yeah, to look at you now, yes, you’re a tremendous fuck up. And… that
’s commendable if being a fuck up is inevitable.”

  “I think… I think that actually makes me feel better.” It did. “Okay, I’ve given up my secret, tell us yours, kid.”

  He walked ahead a bit of a distance. He only had one arm and it was holding a lantern, but I still felt nervous around him. “You wanna know what that seed is that the Master has given you?”

  “You still think this thing is your master, then?” I asked him.

  He thought about it. “…Not really. I just don’t know what else to call him. Sounds cooler than fucking Earworm anyway.” I shook my head even though he wasn’t looking at me. “Right now what we’re walking towards is a church.”

  “A bleeding church in the middle of a hotel,” Rikki said. “Of course, it’s already got a secret staircase in the middle that looks like a castle’s asshole.” She wasn’t wrong.

  “This is the church I belong to. We lost ownership of the hotel before I was born so we had to break in here, to get to Frivolous Black and Frankie Gideon. We weren’t sure which of you had the seed. We didn’t think it was both.”

  “What’s the seed I have in my fucking belly button?” Rikki asked.

  “Oh yeah, sorry. The seed, as far as my church can tell, is what the—”

  “Earworm,” I said.

  “…Thing uses to grant whomever it finds worthy the ability to hear its song.”

  “What is its song?” Rikki asked.

  “I touched it,” I said. “Or I suppose it touched me. And then later when I got lost in all those other versions of myself, what I saw sort of made sense of what it showed me. The Earworm is some sort of entity that exists in a possibly endless amount of parallel universes simultaneously. And doing this has made it sort of like a god and sort of completely fucking mental at the same time. Because it was never meant to be a god. At least that’s what was happening to me when I became lost. And the music, this music it can hear, is the only thing that can make sense of its existence. It needs this music because it’s not just music.”

  The kid stopped walking. “It’s never just music.” I could hear his sneakers as they turned around. “There’s a reason why music is the most powerful of all the arts. There’s a reason why they banned the playing of the augmented fourth in the middle ages. There’s a reason why even animals can be lulled by a song. Music is magic. Lyrics can be incantations or spells. This world we walk upon is but one of countless others just like it. Each bounded together by a shared vibration that keeps them in place. This vibration is this particular universe. Vibration is music, music is vibration. Every single being has a unique vibration. You, me, her, and everything else. The rocks we’re walking on, this lantern in my hand… My church has known this for centuries. But even though everything in this hotel, us three included, are bound together by a shared vibration that means we belong to this universe, we also each have a special vibration that’s unique to just us. And we’re the only ones, the only things in our universe who can have it. But there are other universes, as you know, and there are other beings, other things there that share your special vibration. These are your shadow selves.”

  “Doesn’t sound so special to me then,” I said.

  “Shut up, Codger. I actually think I’m following this, go on,” Rikki said.

  “And what the seed does is allow you to access these other selves you have across the web of universes. Anything that shares your vibration. You view it as inspiration or daydreaming or a sudden change in temperament or mood, but it’s really you gleaning from these reflections of yourselves. And what you all possess is an ability to hear the music the… Earworm craves. So now with this seed that ability has been amplified.”

  “We already had the talent, then?” I said. “Earworm just gave us a Marshall stack?”

  “Exactly. All the beings that share your vibration, you all have the talent so you feed each other and through you, the seedbearer—”

  “Oooh, don’t like that,” Rikki said.

  “…All this is channeled through and you can make the music it wants.”

  “What does it want it for?” Rikki said. “Will it fix it, make it normal, no longer all fractured up into a thousand million other dimensions or whatever?”

  “We… we actually don’t know.” The kid said it and I gave a laugh. He started walking again. I think he might have been upset. “What? We don’t know for certain anything.”

  “So you’ve worshipped this thing, built a hotel which is actually a giant monochord or some such yampy nonsense just to summon it or whatever, hell, you’ve even killed for it, and you don’t know what it wants? You don’t know if it even wants you or your help.”

  “We know this,” the kid started. “Something went wrong a long time ago. Someone built something just like this church and the music chamber inside this hotel and tried to play along with the vibration of the universe or alter it somehow, transpose it in some way, and they made a mistake. Or worse, they did it on purpose… but doing this created the Master or the Earworm or whatever it is. Trapped it in that state it’s in. But it also might be the reason why everyone, everywhere, whatever religion they have or don’t, whatever color their skin is, or language they speak, everyone agrees that something’s wrong with the world. It’s the only universal truth. Something is fucked up with the world, with us. And maybe that’s because something really is wrong. Whatever made this thing fucked everything else up too.”

  “Knocked us off our axis, changed the pitch of our vibration, made a dissonance where there was once harmony?” I said.

  “Dude, exactly.”

  “Lovely thought, really,” I told him. “But I don’t think so. Even though there’s monsters and inter-dimensional fallen god demon type things, it doesn’t change the fact that the reason the world is fucked up is because there are a lot of shitty people doing shitty things, and half the time they’re not even trying to do shitty things, they’re just too fucking stupid to know that what they’re doing is shitty.” The kid didn’t have anything to say to that.

  We kept going up. I didn’t hear the Earworm behind us. Didn’t even feel that it was following us. Like it wanted us to get to the chamber. And that was even worse than being chased by it.

  “What do you think the monster wants?” Rikki asked me.

  I thought about it: That relentless hunger for the sound it chased that I had felt when our minds were joined. And then my own impulses when I was made like it, compacted and fractured. “I think it just wants to share its suffering. Purest form of the blues, really.”

  “It wants the world to be like it, in chaos?” Rikki asked.

  “Worlds,” the kid corrected.

  “Maybe,” I said. “It’s hell but it’s heaven too.”

  “It’s definitely a possibility,” the kid said.

  “And you’re okay with that?” I asked.

  We climbed higher, the kid kept talking. “I don’t know what I’m okay with anymore. I was raised in the church, so was my mother and my father, it’s all I’ve ever known. But seeing the Unquiet One close up, seeing what happens to the seedbearers after the gift has been removed and they’re left to shuffle in and out of all their other selves… if that’s what’s in store for us all… I don’t know. Maybe we were wrong this whole time. I don’t know, but Codger seems to think it wasn’t all bad, so then again…?”

  “Why did it bring us here? Why drop the whole hotel here in this version of the world? Is this where it’s from?” I was tired of philosophy, I wanted to know what to actually do, not why we were doing it.

  “It didn’t bring us here, I did,” the kid said. “It was an accident. Our mission was simple: Frivolous Black was going to be staying in the Alucinari. Even though we, the church, no longer controlled the hotel, we paid attention to it, we had certain ears to the ground. When we knew you’d be here we thought it would be the perfect time to try and get a seedbearer to operate the music chamber. But the thing is, we didn’t know if all three of you—”


  “Four, four in the band,” Rikki said.

  “No, that little American imp doesn’t count,” I countered.

  “Yeah, there’s no way that guy’s a seedbearer,” the kid agreed.

  “I happen to like his voice, it’s operatic,” Rikki said. “He’s got more range than Sullivan anyway.”

  “The thing is, or was, we didn’t know if all the original members of the band had been given seeds or not. The church has been studying this for centuries and we know that sometimes when there’s a group not everyone gets a seed. Sometimes it’s just the songwriter or whoever shapes the music the most. Other times it’s more than one member or the entire band. Those are usually the most powerful artists, their work can be revolutionary, it can create whole new forms of sound and music.”

  “Why doesn’t the Earwig or whatever just give everyone a seed so they can change music each time and get closer to this sound it’s after so badly?” Rikki asked.

  “We think that it only has a small number of these seeds. That’s why it comes to collect them if an artist…”

  “Goes to shit,” I finished for him.

  “Deviates too far from the sound it wants. If you stop being useful to it, it comes back and takes what it gave you so it can reinvest it somewhere else, give them a shot.”

  “Fickle fucking monster, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Back to why and how you brought us to this shitty place?” Rikki said.

  “Sorry, I think I’m still a little high,” the kid said. “I toked up after I got away from Codger and was tripping the fuck out about my arm.” This fucking kid. “And it’s just a theory but whatever thing you were when you took my arm, Codger… do you know if you or it had some sort of venom or something?”

  “Sorry, I’ve no idea. Why, do you feel sick?”

  “No, actually the opposite. I felt this insane rush of energy after the pain wore off. It’s fucking weird… like whatever got into my system was a paralytic but since it’s from another dimension it’s all fucked up and wasn’t prepared for someone like me so now I’m kinda stoned.”