He stabbed at the papers with one long fingernail. “What you have right here is real, and your visions aren’t. You know that.”
I was suddenly angry. “How can you be certain? This is in my head, not yours. No one else can see the things I do.”
His stare held me coolly. “But you’re the most logical person I’ve ever met, Alana Ray. And you wouldn’t have come here for a sound check if you weren’t going to play tonight, and you wouldn’t play tonight if you weren’t going to sign. So you don’t really believe in monsters, do you?”
I swallowed, looking down at my hands—perfectly still, ready to play. I had dreamed of drumming all last night, of being under the spotlights. “But you say Minerva is going to change things. What if she makes the beast real?”
“I’ve watch this epidemic roll across New York City for two years, and I’ve never seen anything like what you describe.”
I stared at him, wanting to believe. Astor Michaels had discovered the New Sound, after all. Maybe he knew what he was talking about.
“Don’t you trust me?” he said, the pen flickering in his hand. “Don’t you think I’ll do right by you?”
“I think it was right, what you did for Minerva.”
He let out a snort. “Finally somebody thanks me.”
“Yes. Thank you,” I said. Minerva’s freedom had frightened Pearl, but I’d watched too many schoolmates graduate into mental institutions, into group homes and jails, and I knew that locking people up was paranormal—against normal, not beside it. Locks didn’t cure; they strangled.
“Well, then.” He held out the pen, eyes glinting. “I don’t think you’re afraid of me or afraid of monsters. I think you’re just afraid of your own success.”
I shook my head. Astor Michaels was very wrong about that. That morning, I’d thrown my change bucket away. Moral hazard or not, I wanted to be more real than someone begging on the streets.
So I signed, as he’d always known I would.
24. 10,000 MANIACS
-ZAHLER-
The crowd was filling the main room now—a thousand people, Astor Michaels said, but it sounded like millions. Here in the backstage dressing room the noise was smoothed to a hum, like a hive of bees just waiting for someone to poke it with a stick.
The more I listened, the more they sounded like they were ready to boo somebody off the stage. Especially some lame bassist who’d only been playing for about four weeks . . .
I swallowed. Nobody had ever been this nervous before.
This was real. This was actual. This was happening right now.
Under the dressing room fluorescent lights was the worst place to practice, but I sat there in my chair slapping at the strings. Maybe I would get a little bit better, maybe just enough to save myself from humiliation.
Sometimes, playing my new instrument, my fingers moved more gracefully than they ever had across a guitar. Lately I’d been dreaming of the whole world expanding from guitar-size to bass-size, everything suddenly scaled just right for me and my big, fat, clumsy hands. But right now, the strings of Pearl’s bass felt an inch thick, dragging at my fingers like quicksand in a nightmare.
Moz didn’t look much happier. He was standing in one corner of the dressing room, wearing dark glasses and trembling. A sheen of sweat covered his face and bare arms.
“You look like you got the flu, Moz,” I said.
He shook his head. “Just need my cup of tea.”
“Almost ready, Mozzy.” A teapot was plugged into the wall next to where Minerva sat doing her makeup. She had some weird herbs waiting to be brewed.
“Your cup of tea?” I shook my head. Living with a girl had turned Moz totally lame. And it was all my fault, because I’d told him to call Minerva, because I’d been so mad at him for wanting me to switch instruments. . . .
It was all the stupid bass’s fault!
Alana Ray stood right in the center of the room, staring at her own outstretched hands. Their rock-steadiness made her look incomplete, as if Moz had stolen all her twitchiness.
She’d traded her usual army jacket for this fawesome Japanese kimono over jeans. No one had told me we were supposed to dress up. I looked down at my same old unfool T-shirt. Would the crowd boo me for wearing it? They sounded really impatient now. The whole thing was starting an hour late, which Astor Michaels kept saying would make everything really intense. . . .
But what if it just pissed them off?
Pearl was in the opposite corner from Moz, in the same dress she’d worn to Red Rat Records. She looked fawesome, I could tell, even if my brain was melting.
But she didn’t look happy. She kept swearing under her breath: “Special Guests? More like Special Retards. I can’t believe we’re going out as ‘Special Guests.’ Why don’t we just call ourselves Special Education?”
“The band going on first is called Plasmodium,” Moz said. “How much does that name suck?”
Pearl looked at him, gave Minerva a two-second glare, then said quietly, “Sounds a lot like Toxoplasma.”
“We should pick a real name soon,” Minerva said, staring at her reflection in the mirror, applying makeup with steady hands. She was wearing a long evening gown, lots of jewelry, and didn’t look nervous at all. She didn’t notice the looks Pearl had been giving her. “If we let Astor Michaels choose one, it’ll have the word plasma in it.”
“What does plasma even mean?” Moz asked.
“It can mean two things,” Alana Ray said. “Electrified gas or blood.”
“Gee,” Pearl muttered. “Which one do you think he was going for?”
The teakettle suddenly spit out a crooked screech, the sound fading into a moan as Minerva unplugged it. She poured the boiling water into her cup of herbs, and the smell of compost heap filled the room. “Here you go, Mozzy.”
An explosion of sound came from the walls, a thudding from the floor beneath us.
“Crap!” I hissed. “It’s the first band. We’re the second band. That means we’re next!”
“That is correct,” Alana Ray said.
My stomach started roiling like that time when I was little and I swallowed part of my chemistry set. We were going to face a possibly homicidal crowd in . . . “Half an hour.”
“Plus changeover time,” Alana Ray said.
I shut my eyes and listened. The crowd wasn’t booing yet. Maybe they weren’t such a nasty bunch after all. But Plasmodium sounded tight, not like they’d been forced to switch instruments, say, in the last month or so. . . .
“Listen to that,” I said. “Their bass player is way faster than me. Everyone’s going to think I suck.”
“You don’t suck, Zahler,” Moz said. “And he sounds too fast to me.”
“Be dead by tomorrow at that speed,” Pearl said, staring down at her fingernails.
“Dead?” I said. “What do you mean?” Did people ever die on stage? I wondered. Like from heart attacks? Or the audience killing them because they sucked?
“Relax, Zahler.” Moz was sipping his tea now, still trembling, Minerva mopping at the sheen of sweat across his face with a towel. “You’ve got half an hour to get yourself together.”
Great. I was being told to chill out by a guy who looked like he was dying of Ebola fever. Maybe Moz was about to collapse, and then we could do this whole Special Guest thing after he recovered—and I got some more practice in.
Alana Ray was still staring at her hands. She’d hardly moved the whole time, like some kind of kung-fu Zen master contemplating destiny. I was thinking how maybe I should have worn something Japanese—then I’d at least look fool. Well, actually, I already looked fool. In the usual sense of the word.
“Time is a strange thing, Zahler,” Alana Ray said. “If you focus your mind, thirty minutes can seem like five hours.”
But it didn’t. It seemed like five seconds.
Then Astor Michaels came in and said that it was showtime.
A thousand of them waited out there, all just lookin
g at us.
Random shouts filtered up from the audience—they weren’t heckling us exactly, just bored and ready for another band to start. We didn’t have any fans yet—the few friends Moz and I had invited were too young to get in. The sight of the unfriendly crowd made me realize one big thing missing from my rock-star dreams:
In all my fantasies about being famous, I was already famous, so I never had to get famous. I never had to walk out in front of a crowd for the first time, unknown and defenseless. In my dreams, this awful night had already happened.
I looked over at Moz, but he was staring down at his feet and still trembling, like he was having a seizure. Behind her paint buckets, Alana Ray’s eyes were shut, and Pearl was peering down at her keyboards, flicking switches as fast as she could, like she was about to take off in a spaceship. Nobody looked back at me, like they were all suddenly embarrassed to be in the same band.
It’s not my fault! I wanted to shout. I never wanted to play the bass!
Minerva was the only one who looked happy to be onstage. She was already leaning over her mike stand, talking to a bunch of tattooed guys down in front, flirting with them, flicking at their grasping hands with spike-heeled black boots. Even through her dark glasses you could see that her eyes were scary-wide and glowing, sucking energy from the crowd before she’d sung a single note.
Pearl gave me a low E, and I took a deep breath and tuned up. The sound boomed out from my bass like a foghorn, rumbling through the club. A few howls from the audience answered the noise, as if I’d interrupted someone’s conversation and they were pissed.
The guys flirting with Minerva had big muscles and tattoos on their shaved heads. I’d read the night before about a big riot in Europe, a whole crowd at some soccer game going crazy all at once, attacking one another. Hundreds had died, and nobody knew why.
What if that happened here, right now? The whole crowd turning into deadly maniacs? I knew exactly who everyone would choose to kill first.
The half-assed bass player in the lame T-shirt. That’s who.
When we were all tuned up, the stage lights lowered. Total darkness, like I’d suddenly gone blind from freaking out. More impatient shouts filtered up from the crowd, and someone yelled, “You suck!” which people laughed at, because we hadn’t even started yet.
We were so dead.
I swallowed, waiting to begin. . . .
“Zahler!” Pearl hissed.
Oh, right. We were doing the Big Riff first. I was supposed to start.
My fingers groped for the strings, and I heard the amps squeak with the sweat on my fingers. I tried to remember what to play.
And I couldn’t.
No, this wasn’t happening. . . .
I’d been playing this riff for six years, and yet it had somehow disappeared from my brain, from my fingers, from my whole body.
I stood there in silence, waiting to die.
25. MASSIVE ATTACK
-MOZ-
Zahler had frozen up.
Perfect.
My head was burning, sweat running into my eyes, heart pounding like something in a cage. But it wasn’t stage fright; it was the beast gone wild in me. I’d been anxious all day, too nervous to eat, and now the hunger had caught up with me all at once.
Garlic and mandrake tea wasn’t cutting it. I needed flesh and blood.
“Play, Zahler!” I heard Pearl hiss, trying to get him going.
The crowd was growing impatient, a restless hum building before us, but at least the delay gave me a few more seconds of darkness. My vision had been doing weird things all day: I hadn’t been able to look at Min, as if her face were made of sharp angles that cut into my eyes. Even the smell of her clothes and perfume was making my head spin, as if living together had somehow given me an overdose of her.
But here in the darkness I felt alone, almost under control.
Zahler still wasn’t starting the Big Riff, though, which left only me. I could play his old guitar part and wait for him to come in. But once the music began, the lights would pop back on, so bright, so sharp. . . .
And then the hunger would take control again.
I could run offstage right now, slip out of the club and into some all-night store, wolf down a slab of raw meat. Probably a better idea than taking a chunk out of someone right here in front of a thousand witnesses.
But even with the beast ravenous inside me, I had to stay. I couldn’t let Zahler live forever with the shame of having blown it tonight.
I took a deep breath, and just as my fingers moved . . . Zahler finally began to play.
Six years of practice took over: the Big Riff grabbed me, coiled around my spine and out my fingers, my nervous system responding as automatically as breathing. Pearl followed, then Alana Ray came in, the echoes of her paint buckets making the space huge around us.
The lights came up, and the crowd was suddenly cheering.
Good move, Zahler, I thought. Making them wait for it.
Minerva kept them waiting too, left the Big Riff grinding for a solid minute before she brought the microphone anywhere near her lips. But you could tell she hadn’t frozen up—her whole body moved with the beat, drawing every eye in the crowd, gulping in their energy.
She played with them, drawing the microphone close, then pushing it away, grinning behind dark glasses. The Big Riff could hypnotize you, I knew all too well—Zahler and I sometimes played it for hours at a stretch. When Minerva let it flow through her body, she was as spell-binding as a swaying cobra.
Then she pulled off her glasses, braving the spotlights to peer into the audience, to fix them with her gaze. I saw their faces ignite with the light reflected from her, as if somehow she’d made eye contact with everyone.
That was when she started to sing, and when I started to feel really funny.
The words that Minerva had scrawled down in her basement tumbled out of her, as lunatic as the first time she’d played with us—incomprehensible, ancient, and wild. They dredged up weird pictures in my mind, the skulls and centipedes carved into the iron lock on her bedroom door.
The ground began to rumble.
Maybe it was just my stomach, the gnawing hunger changing into something sharper. It felt as if all the raw hamburger I’d consumed over the last few weeks had gotten to me at last, my iron gut finally succumbing to food poisoning.
The sight of Minerva with her glasses off made my head spin, the spotlights flashing from her face like crystal. I felt the garlic leaving my body in a hot sweat, as if giant hands were squeezing me, wringing out every protection I had against the beast inside.
Disgust was leaking into me, a loathing for everything that had put me on this stage: Minerva, this band, the Stratocaster in my hands. The whole insane idea of fame and adulation and even music itself . . .
I wanted to throw it all away, to run from all these pointless complications and let the beast inside take over. To hide in some distant, shadowy place and gnaw on nothing but flesh and bones—perfectly sated, an animal.
But my fingers kept playing. The music held me there, balanced between love and hatred.
I stared down at the stage, not looking at Minerva, but I couldn’t keep her song out of my ears. It kept pouring from the amplifiers, echoing back and forth across the club, building like feedback in my head.
The cables at my feet were moving, shivering like dizzying snakes across the floor. I tore my eyes from them, glaring out into the darkness of the nightclub.
I saw it start out there.
A shape moved through the crowd, a swell of hands thrown up into the air, like a stadium wave carrying itself along, traveling toward us from the back of the club. It broke against the stage, shattering into wild cries of surprise.
The ground rumbled under my feet.
Then the swell appeared again, moving from right to left this time, carrying screams along with it. That’s when I realized this wasn’t something innocent, like upraised arms at a baseball game. . . . Reality was
bending before my eyes.
The floor itself was surging up, the bulge moving like a rat scurrying under a rug. More violent this time—the people in its path were thrown into the air, tossed up to fall into the outstretched arms of the crowd, like stage-jumpers.
My sharp ears caught a thin scream behind me, and I glanced back to see Alana Ray crying out, “No, no, no . . . ,” unheard in the booming beat of the Big Riff. But she kept playing: the music had also captured her, locking her hands into their fluttering patterns.
The Last Days Page 19