“Or maybe you’re just stoned because you got stoned,” Rikki said. “Why are we here?”
“We’re here because I was messing around in the chamber, I’ve done it in the past a few times with no problems, but I played some sequence of music this time and then all of a sudden there was crazy fucking pressure on me. Like I was stuck to the wall in a Gravitron or whatever at the fair. And then I just passed out. I woke up and everything was dark. I left the chamber, went to a window, and at first I thought everything was normal. This was after the hotel had been evacuated from the storm, so I figured that’s why the power was out. But I kept looking out into the snow and then I saw one of those things, those big towers, it wasn’t a building, it was something else. And I saw the lights, those animals next.”
“So why didn’t you go back and play the song again?” I said. “Do you actually want to be here?”
“I did go back and I did play it again, back when I could still play anything… But nothing happened. I don’t know if that’s because I wasn’t playing the exact same thing the exact same way or if it didn’t matter because I was just playing the song that matched up to this universe, where we’re at now, not the song that matched up to our original universe. This has never happened before. Everyone in the church talks about all this shit, but it’s all just theories and superstitions like any other church I guess. But this actually fucking worked and I don’t have a clue why.”
“So the hotel is some sort of spaceship that can travel through dimensions if you play the right song in it?” Rikki sounded exhausted.
“Sort of,” the kid told her.
“What made you think I could play the song that’d get us home?” I asked.
“Or send us into some sort of multidimensional hell place, you know, whichever?” Rikki said.
Finally we came to the top of the stone steps. The kid held up his lantern and I could see a massive round wooden door. “I need help with the door.” The kid waved his stump in my direction.
I walked over to the door to pull but not before telling Rikki, “Watch him.” The kid backed up in response, giving me space as I pulled on the door handle and dragged the door open. I watched from the corner of my eye, making sure the kid didn’t come darting over.
He couldn’t hold a knife without dropping the lantern but who’s to say he wouldn’t just bash me with the lantern and be done with it? But he didn’t move. And Rikki watched him like a cat. As I finished moving the heavy wooden door I noticed her rubbing her belly again. This time I knew I saw it.
We came into the chamber and it actually felt like a church to me. Like the one I used to go to with my mom when I was still a lad. Solemn, deadly serious, calming. The chamber seemed immense, built from the same stone as the steps. And it was round. The kid went around with his lantern lighting torches located along the sides. With the light I could see that at the center of the room there laid what looked like a throne made from pipe that reached into the ceiling. It was some sort of organ, only it looked like its parents were Battersea Power Station and a bagpipe that had a little bit of spider in it from its mother’s side. “The door,” Rikki said and we started moving it back together. Then we walked over to the organ where the kid was standing.
He put his lantern down to rest on the bench that sat next to the coiled pile of the thing. His hand rested on what looked like the keyboard but upon closer inspection I saw a collection of keys and strings. I looked down towards the lantern and saw foot pedals feeding into the thing on the ground too. “How the fuck do you expect me to play this thing?” I said. “I play bass because I’m not good enough to play guitar in a band where the guitar player keeps it simple because he cut off the tips of his fingers in an industrial accident. What the fuck am I supposed to do with this mess?”
With his one good hand the kid pulled a string then tapped out a beat on one of the crooked black keys. The sound that came out of the thing was low, scuttling and sharp beneath the bass blast. I had never heard anything quite like it. Not sure if that was a good thing. Like most church music it had a distinct lack of balls. But then again, it was all church music then, wasn’t it? Mine included. “It sounds better when I have two hands to play it.”
“Who told you to reach out and try to touch me when I was a fucking hydra?”
I put my fingers on one of the keys, pressed down, and the spider made a hiss from one of its legs. The hiss wasn’t especially melodious. “So since I have the fucking seed inside me now should I be the one to play us home?” Rikki asked. She took a finger to one of the strings and plucked. It sounded worse than my hiss.
“This was your fucking plan then,” I started. “Us fingering away blindly at this thing like it’s an eighth grade date at the movies?”
“Fuck you, dude. I don’t know, I thought one of you would know what to do,” the kid said. “I’m just a fucking kid, you’re adults… adults are supposed to know what to do. My parents and their stupid fucking church told me to kill that guy so I did it because they were in charge. And now I’m finding out it’s all bullshit. And you, you’re all bullshit too. You don’t even appreciate how lucky you are. You pretend to but you don’t. I thought you were a genius but you don’t know shit. Just like me and all the rest of the fuck ups.” His eyes were wet. “I’m doing the best I can, man.” He shoved me with his one arm. I backed up a little before finding my footing, then I took him by the wrist and stopped him from doing anything more. He tried to wrestle free but I had him. I wanted to be mad at him, he was a murderer, a fuck up beyond even my expertise, but I couldn’t. He was just a broken puppet realizing its own strings only now after they’d been severed. Young, dumb, but not evil, just bred and raised to carry it out. He was right, we were adults, he was just a kid. He was an errand boy like the rest of us.
“I’m sorry, John.” He wouldn’t stop trying to get at me. “Hey, John, I’m sorry. None of us know what to do and we should.” He stopped fighting with me and I let go of his hand. “What you played before, was it something we know, can you tell us how to play it?”
He smiled like a dope. “Yeah, I think so. It was bits and pieces of different Friv songs, but sort of pulled together like one big medley. Then I kind of did my own thing. It all started with the title track, the augmented f—” There was that familiar buzz, only since we were in the chamber the sound was amplified into a clockwork moan. The stucco of the black bricks started glowing the same red glow that the lift had back with Frankie in the lobby. The same color as the slits in the Earworm’s coils. I could hear something under the floor moving, something large and mechanical, like a factory. I used to work in a factory with Vinnie before the band took off. I knew that sound. It was the one I was running from by joining a band and trying to do something other than what my dad had done for a living… The industrial sound kept grinding and then the floor shifted. The black bricks underneath us moved up and some moved down. The walls were burning with the glow of the Earworm. All of them scrolling down or rapidly shifting themselves to the side, a poltergeist in control of a demonic abacus made from coal. It felt like whatever was happening was now happening faster and then the organ, the great pipe spider in the center of the room, started twisting its way around. The pipes burst as it was snapped from the ceiling. The broken remains became coated with the red light from the wall, turning and twisting down into the floor then swallowed up by it. From the remaining organ pipes on the ceiling dripped a thick black liquid, some of which spilled onto my forehead. There went that plan. I wiped off whatever had fallen from the pipe. The door into the chamber smashed to pieces but instead of the Earworm waiting behind it was only black. Nothing. I watched the walls move some more and it hit me: we were going up.
The remaining pipes of the organ that stuck out like stalactites reared up into the ceiling as the black bricks above us revolved clockwise. The red line that framed each brick grew in intensity as the pieces began to fall away from the roof just as the floor stopped shifting and we came to a re
st. As more and more of the ceiling disappeared I saw flecks of white in the air: snow, and behind that, stars… or maybe just those terrible lights… the anglers. The remains of the organ still rested in the middle of the room but was now bathed in the red light. It looked like it had been dipped in lava when it started to become something else entirely. The last bricks fell away from the room and I saw that we were outside now, on top of the building. The snow fell down delicately, almost a mercy. I looked out at Rikki and saw her staring up at the night sky. Above us storm clouds rolled in like some Old Testament Hollywood movie starring Charlton Heston. The buzzing had stopped and my head felt clear, the snow and the cold almost soothing.
“Codger, look.” The kid’s voice startled me, I turned over to him. He was standing near the center of the roof, next to the red glowing pile that had been the organ. He wasn’t alone.
Standing in front of him were three figures. Vinnie Izzloni, Burt Dank, and Sully Sullivan. Frivolous Black. Impossible. What was this that stood before me?
Friv Today, Die Tomorrow
They looked just like I remembered them. Not the last time I saw them, but the last time I was happy to see them. Six years ago, give or take. Right after we recorded our third record, Summoner of Sorrows, before we started taking a bump every time our elbows slipped on the record button, back when we still were just smoking a shit ton of weed. Back when we still had something to say musically that felt fresh. Back when we were friends. That was the Frivolous Black that stood before me. All three of them stared back with an empty sort of recognition, like how a deer or a rabbit will stare at you when they know you’re watching. Were they human? Or just another imitation like the LP witch or whoever the giant man who led Frankie on to the elevator had been? Did they look younger, really look younger, or had they survived the extraction of their own seeds like me? Did they make it through the descent into their fractured other selves and emerge stronger, healthier than they’d felt in years after they clawed their way out of a heap of husks that shared their own face?
I pushed past the kid and got right up in front of them. Sully walked towards me, lifting his chin up slowly, the way he always did when he started to talk. But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. It felt like a knot had gotten itself loose in my head, like concentric rings on a pond suddenly smoothing themselves to a calm. Then Sully’s mind and mine were at one. I could feel him with me, not controlling me but open to me. And then the others stood by him and the cord inside my head became even looser. All four of us had been joined. It wasn’t quite like before when I had been part of the We or even when the Earworm had sent its transmission to me. This was different. I didn’t have access to any vital personal information or emotion, every single one of us simply had one impulse, one singular desire: we wanted to play. This desire was so compulsive that I barely registered that sickening buzzing sound returning and I paid little notice to Rikki screaming out a warning to me and the kid.
It looked like the night had come alive and taken him. His small frame was a sugar cube dropped into a cup of coffee, disturbing its dark contents before being swallowed whole by them. The Earworm had emerged from the night air itself and the kid fell away screaming into its black swirling mass. I could make out his last words, “…not my master, I don’t follow—” but then his words gave way to screams. I could see the kid’s eyes locked on to my own, see how the skin on his skull was stripped away layer by layer, revealing a mask of muscle and blood until this too was stripped and the brilliant white of bone shimmered out bright as any other star in the sky. I could see his eyes still pleading to me, his hero, to save him; I could see all of this and I could not have cared less. Even when the kid’s eyes and their nest of bone receded into wherever the Earworm would now keep them. I could only register that these things had occurred, I had no feelings otherwise. So I turned away from the flowing witch hair tangle of the beast’s body and the red light there screaming out from within its coils. I was wholly uninterested and neither was my band; they followed me as I went towards the center of the tower we now stood on.
The entire surface of the tower was now washed in the strange red light. It had deposited itself into an intricate grid of sorts and we passed through it unharmed until we got to where all the red light seemed to flow like blood rivers back to the sea. The shattered remains of the music chamber’s organ, bathed in the red, were reconstructing themselves, swelling and expanding as if given breath, and then they became taller than us all. This red mass that looked volcanic or like molten steel oozed up, somehow becoming solid, and we were dwarfed by it. We waited. Moving and resting as one like a pack of dogs. It cooled down, or the light dissipated, and still we waited. We knew what was going to happen. What we needed to happen.
The red light crept away and in the place where the organ once sat instead there was a high black wall that curled over at the top, making it look like a black wave at its highest before it broke. From the center of this curled tip hung a large black bell. In front of this sat Burt’s drum set, just the way he always laid it out. Our old logo, the wavy one, stretched across his bass drum head. Surrounding the kit were four small pillars that looked made of polished onyx or some dark gemstone. On each pillar sat an item. To the left, Vinnie’s guitar, to the right, Sully’s microphone, and right before me was my bass. My old Ibanez, the purple one that I had used to record most of our first three records. The one that Sully had smashed to pieces when I had made the mistake of using it on stage one night in Cleveland and he had a right cob on. That bass had a bit of my old girlfriend’s nail polish on the back of it, it was her initials and the date at the time… April 7th, 1973. I didn’t have to check, I knew the guitar I held in my hands now would have the same marking. Just like we didn’t need to check to know that none of these instruments were plugged in and that it wouldn’t matter at all. They wouldn’t need electricity to sound or to become amplified. Whatever the Earworm used to power lifts, that red light, it was more than enough to let us be heard now.
Part of me, the part that was still solely me, distantly observed the Earworm scuttling past Rikki then taking to the air, leaving long trails of colors behind it. Lightning flashed overhead revealing a sky filled with a frenzy of those wriggling monstrosities with the lights. Swimming through the air, the anglers circled the tower like sharks. The Earworm flashed red, green, blue, yellow as it arced through the air dispersing some of the beasts with the lights before the remaining creatures started to orbit it like satellites. The worm swelled in mass and still the creatures circled it cautiously. They couldn’t help themselves, all of them in the black star’s sway. Below this Rikki stood across from the band, her eyes wholly black now, like back in the hotel room when she took the seed that was once mine. Why wasn’t the Earworm using her now for its song? She still had her seed, I didn’t. Why me, why us now? Was it just giving us a proper send-off before it tore us apart? Or perhaps we, or I had changed now that I’d come back from the brink? Maybe it thought I was useful again. Maybe it thought I knew its song better than the punk rocker again. The dark globes that were Rikki’s eyes seemed to flash at me. She waited, like every other terror in this world, for us to begin. It was time. I took a long breath, held it in my lungs like I was diving. The change was complete. I stopped looking at Rikki, I stopped being an I and became We again. Only now We were Frivolous Black and We served one purpose. Thunder overheard. Thunder and then some more lightning. Finally the rain started to fall. Not snow anymore, rain. That same rain that had always been falling.
The bell entered. Once, twice. Thunder. Three times, four times, five times… thunder. Six, seven, eight…
We came in with a sound like a waking behemoth. Vinnie’s guitar was pure menace, the tritone positively sinister, my bass underneath it muscular and fuzzy. Burt splashed on the cymbals, rolled on the toms. Our sound was a deep, dark swamp, you could drown in us if you fell in or jumped. The only thing that could cut through this exquisite sludge was Vinnie’s guitar,
a gnarled black tree reaching out from the water with bent crooked fingers. We were Frivolous Black, this was “Frivolous Black,” and this was what We were meant to do. This sound was the reason why We four were born, why We came together, why We will be remembered. This was why the Earworm was drawn to us, to me. But there was no me, there was only We. We didn’t have to think, didn’t have to worry about getting out of pocket, about Vinnie speeding up after his solos, throwing the tempo to shit, We didn’t have to worry about Sully forgetting the fucking words to a song of our own that We’ve played hundreds of times before. Words that only he could sing. Words that I wrote.
Now We’d cooled, Burt just gently moved on the toms as Vinnie’s guitar hit that devil’s chord, again and again. Everything We did now was to build anticipation for Sully’s entrance. For the spell We’ve been casting all these years to truly become complete. This sound is what gives our lives meaning. It could never be made by anyone but us four. Us four at that exact time in our lives. We sounded good. Better than good, We sounded like a fire in the heart of the sun. Sully put the mic to his lips. But We didn’t sound like We did when We recorded this song. Because We were not those men. Not anymore or maybe at all.
With a grace I had never before known I lifted up my bass in my hands, held it over my head, letting the guitar strap slip off my right shoulder, and then took the neck of the instrument in my hands like it was the hilt of a sword and sent the body of this perfect copy of my Ibanez bass directly into Sully Sullivan’s ever-angelic-looking face. It hit so hard the tremor it sent up my arms hurt my teeth. It hit so hard I could see the bass embedded in Sully’s face, like a bowling ball thrown into a TV set. Pieces of bone fragment or maybe something else caking the sides of the wound spilled out like confetti. But before I could investigate further, find out whether or not I’d just killed my old friend or merely something made to look like him, I pulled out the bass with a loud wet THUNK and Sully stumbled backward and then fell off the tower. I rushed to the side, thinking idiotically I could reach down and save him. Even though it had been me who sent him on his fucking way. I peered over and thanks to the lightning could see Sully or this imitation of him falling into what must have been thousands of nightmares gathered together on the ground. None of them looked human, even from this great height. Some had eyes which glinted yellow like wolves as they looked up the tower at me. Others didn’t even seem to have eyes at all, nor faces. A crepuscular coalition of things that usually only live below. Below in the pits of the ocean or below the surface of the earth itself, these were things that didn’t belong crawling along on the land. Maybe they weren’t even indigenous to this place, maybe these were just factions of the Earworm itself, maybe it had dissected itself, made itself legion in order to give us a fitting audience for the wretched song we were to play for it.
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