New Wave Detectives 01: Punk Rock Theatre
Brian Mclellan
Copyright 2010 by Brian McLellan
Cover design by Jeanie Nagora
Ian liked to do shows right. So with the night coming in through the windows, he carefully selected his tightest pair of grimy jeans, and put on a ratty, killer shirt. He slipped on one of his vests and gawked at himself in the mirror he'd hung just above his bed.
He was extremely tall, and he usually towered over passer-bys in the street. He often wondered if he were the tallest Asian man in the area. He was very thin, almost spidery, with long legs and long arms. He had angular features, a heavy Neanderthal brow and wild hair, which he had dyed bright scarlet earlier in the month. Now the roots were starting to show, but when you barely had money to eat, that was what you were stuck with.
He picked up his phone and checked the time. He and James were going to be late. It was his friend Elise’s band playing, and she had a tendency to scream at him when he didn’t show up on time. And she was very, very good at screaming.
But when he crossed his mess of a room and threw open the door, stepping out onto the creaking floors of their tiny, ancient apartment, his roommate was nowhere to be seen. Which was strange, since there weren’t many places for James to hide in the tiny, cramped apartment.
Standing very still, Ian could hear James’s voice coming from the hallway outside.
Going to the door, he peeked out into the darkness and the shadows of the hallway. He could see James standing and speaking to Inita, the girl who lived above them. James wore the mask-like, emotionless face he always put on in a crisis.
James was a small, handsome black man, his hair naturally curly and his eyes naturally wide. To onlookers, his face usually careened between a Vulcan inscrutability, and a kind of vulnerable, perpetually startled expression.
"What's up? Ian asked.
James looked up and said softly, "There's someone passed out upstairs."
Inita added, "In the stairwell."
Ian felt the rush of irritation that always came when a problem interfered with their plans. They were going to be late for the show, and Elise was just going to scream at them.
It was a boy who was passed out upstairs, a small stream of blood trickling down from a cut in his forehead. He was sprawled in the corner, right outside Inita’s door. He was young, maybe nineteen or twenty. He was Asian, and he was dressed like a Japanese schoolgirl, with the sailor suit, skirt, the whole works.
When Ian approached him, he didn't smell like alcohol, and there weren't any of the usual signs of drugs, as far as Ian could tell.
"I don't know who he is," Inita said.
Ian asked, "Maybe he belongs to the guy downstairs?"
Inita shook her head. "I knocked on his door first, but there was no answer. Should I call an ambulance?"
The kid was breathing, at least. Ian reached forward and tapped the boy on the cheek. The boy's head flopped, black hair falling in front of his eyes.
James spoke so softly that for a moment Ian thought it had been the boy who had talked. He turned and asked, "What?"
"Maybe we should call 911."
"Yeah."
The boy's eyes flashed open, and he jerked, reaching at his right hip, grasping at empty air.
Ian cried out and stumbled back. He nearly tumbled off the first step, but James leapt up and grabbed him by the shoulders, propping him back up.
"Whoa!" the boy said. He whipped about, twisting into an awkward leap that nevertheless ended with him on his feet. He looked up at the stairs leading up past Inita’s apartment towards the roof access. He sprang forwards, vanishing into the darkness.
Before James could protest, Ian was running after the kid, trouncing up the stairs. Ever the man of action, James thought.
He followed Ian and stopped where Ian had stopped, staring at the roof access door. It was open, and the kid was bent down searching through the shadows that drenched the stairs just inside.
In his mind’s eye, James watched the kid open the roof access door and then trip, rag-dolling down the stairs and landing in a heap. But how did he get in through the locked roof access door? And why?
"Here!" the kid exclaimed, straightening and holding something up. Proudly, he said, "Found it!"
He bounced back down and held something up to James's face. James backed away into the light outside Inita's door.
"No," he heard the boy say. "It's not you."
"Kid—" Ian said.
But the boy had already leapt down onto the landing. He was holding a Chinese machete, sheathed in a scabbard covered in intricate designs. Hanging from the end of it was a round metal sphere, hanging from a chain. The boy was holding the machete out at arm's length, letting the sphere dangle.
As if to explain what he was doing, he said to them, “I thought they were here for a reason, you know?”
James’s breath caught in his throat and he stared at the sphere. He had seen one like it, years ago.
Ian caught his arm and said, "We should call someone."
"Someone?"
"At the very least, this is breaking and entry."
The boy stopped, watching the sphere. “Jesus,” the boy said.
As James watched, the sphere began to move slightly, almost lifting up on its chain, as if attracted by magnetic force to him.
The boy was watching him. "It is you."
Behind him, James heard Ian say, "I forgot my cell phone. Can you call the police?"
The boy twisted his head, as if hearing a sound that only he could make out. Then, he was gone as quickly as he had come, rushing down the stairs, banging open the security door, and running out into the night.
“Well,” James said, turning to look at Ian and Inita. “That was weird.”
The aftermath of the encounter went surprisingly well. Inita insisted that there was no reason for all three of them stay behind while she called the police, and that they should really go out if they had plans. She didn’t have anything to do that night; they did. For her, it was as simple as that.
But James felt a weird weight on him all the way down the street, and down onto the subway. Ian was a master at filling these empty spaces with chatter, but he wasn't as forthcoming as usual.
They sat silently together on the train until it was obvious that Ian couldn’t take the quiet any more. "Wasn't that bizarre?" he asked.
James nodded. "It really freaked me out."
"Yeah?"
"Did you see that ball hanging from the machete—?“
"That was a machete?"
"I'm assuming. But I meant the pendulum hanging from it—" He held out his hand in front of him, opened his palm. "That was divination." He set his hands back down on his knees, and tried to order his thoughts so he didn't trip over his own tongue. "Back in first year, Elise’s brother and I used to hang out with these girls and we used to all hang out together and light candles and cast spells. It was really dorky.”
Ian's lips slowly opened into a wide grin. "You had a witch phase?” He laughed. “That's adorable. That's all kinds of funny."
James shook his head. It had been a year since he’d thought about Maggie M. His memories of her were strange ones, and not always pleasant, and he often wondered why, in his first year of university, he had decided that hanging out with a bunch of weird white women was a good way to cheer him up.
“It was really crazy how much I got into it,” he said. “I used to date this girl, Maggie. She was kind of our ringleader.” He tried smiling, and to his surprise, it did make him feel a little better. “It’s embarrassing to think about.”
"
Did you guys pretend to be vampires?"
"No, it was never like that. But, you know, we cast spells and chanted and tried to communicate with spirits—" He shrugged. "Elise’s brother really got into it. More than any of us, I think. The point is, we used to use silver pendulums like the kid was using. You could buy them from new age stores. When you concentrated on them, they were supposed to tell you things." He felt blood rushing to his cheeks. “We kind of really believed it for a while.”
The train came to their stop. “Come on, man,” Ian said, standing up. “We can use all this freaky energy to rock out. That’s what you new-age types talk about, right? Energy? The energy from Gaia?”
“How about I sock you in the mouth? Will that be energy enough for you?”
They headed out into the neon night of the downtown core. The Oak and Tremble was already a full house by the time they got there. Lights swiveled in the dark, lighting up the sweaty band on stage. James could see Elise already screaming into the mic, moving through the mottled lights, glistening. Her voice was like a whipcrack, deliberately scratchy. She would sink into the shadows and then fly out into the light again, a young white woman so covered in freckles that it made her shoulders two patches of brown spots. She was easily recognizable for her short razored hair, her thin, sharp chin and her upturned nose.
James tried to get into the vibe of things, but of course dancing was no use. It was the way his brain worked; mentally he was still back at his apartment trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.
After Elise’s set ended, Ian dragged James to a booth in the corner, where the band had shoved their equipment. The girls came off the stage and shoved themselves next to them, smelling not unpleasantly of sweat and hair product.
"You guys were fucking fantastic," Ian said.
Elise ran her fingers through her hair and grinned. "Hey, thanks." She smirked, wiping her hands on her jeans. “You guys didn’t have to come, you know. Tonight wasn’t the important show.”
The lead guitarist leaned in and said, in her raspy smoker’s voice, “The important one’s tomorrow.”
Ian grinned. “Do tell.”
Elise smiled, almost bursting with pride. “Call to Arms got invited to play at Hell’s Gate.”
“Hell’s Gate?”
“Get this: it’s an old theatre that this woman bought up and turned into a club. Tell me that isn’t perfect.”
James laughed. Elise and her riot grrl friends had developed their band Call to Arms along an idea she called punk rock theatre. The songs emphasized narratives and characters, with Elise and the lead guitarist calling back and forth dialogue to each other. Elise had admitted that the gimmick was mainly to make for great interviews in zines, but she definitely got into it on stage.
Elise shook her head, grinning. “The owner’s supposed to be a real freak. She’s really pretty but she wears this—“ She gestured to the back of her waist. “This harness with wooden wings on it. Real freak show. But I know she’s going to like us. Do you know what endears us to venues?”
James shook his head. “What?”
“It’s our professionalism. We have killer bedside manner. We could show up for a routine sound test, and bam, drop our entire set, perfect as punch.”
Ian grinned. “I bet.”
James looked towards the bar, thinking about getting a beer. He caught sight of a tall figure standing in the corner of the club. It was a man or a woman dressed in black, a white mask plastered to his or her face. The mask was theatrical, a face contorted into a tragic grimace. Long hair fell around the mask, and what caught James's eye was the way the person stood perfectly still, unmoving.
Elise was saying something to him.
“Sorry,” James said, turning back to her. “What?”
“You’ll never guess who e-mailed me yesterday.”
“No, I guess I won’t.”
“Daniel.”
James started, mouth opening. “Really?”
“You guys used to be really good friends, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Jesus, that’s so weird. I hadn’t thought about that gang since forever, and then just this night, this really weird thing happened to me that reminded me of them.” He shrugged. “Daniel stopped talking to me a while ago though.”
“Yeah, well—“ She rubbed her hand through her hair. “Don’t feel bad about that. He got really distant for a long time. No one knew where he was… He didn’t even talk to me, and I’m his sister. But he’s in town, so he’s going to want to hang out.”
Ian dug his elbow into James’s side. “You want to tell them about the ‘really weird thing’ that happened tonight?”
“Yes I do,” James said, getting up out of the booth. “But first I have to pee, so to be continued.”
As he made his way over to the stairs leading down into the dark and dank washrooms beneath the club, someone grabbed him around the wrist and yanked him backwards.
He twisted around and fell almost into a lover's clinch with the boy from earlier. Their noses were touching, and the boy was grinning.
James shoved him back and glared at him. “Dude, What do you want?”
"I knew you looked familiar!" the boy said. "You're James Jordan, aren't you?"
That stopped James short, and of course the boy gave a laugh and vanished back into the crowd.
Well, he couldn't let a mystery like this go. He pushed forward through the club, moving through the darkness and sweat, following the bobbing head of the kid. When he reached the stairs, he stood at the landing, staring down.
Graffiti swallowed him on all sides. The lighting wasn’t great below, and he couldn't see if the boy had given him the slip, or if he was waiting down there in the shadows.
Of course he walked down the steps. He had to. He had to know what was up with this kid’s deal.
The Oak and Tremble’s washrooms were as grimy as he remembered, but of course that was part of the aesthetic. The sound of the club above was muffled and dull, surrounding the room. It felt like being underwater.
The boy was standing at the opposite end of the washroom. He wasn't wearing the schoolgirl uniform any more, instead standing there in a belly shirt, dark vest, and large cargo shorts. He was eyeing James with a shrewd gaze, and James wondered if this whole thing was some kind of elaborate pick-up.
"Okay," James said. "Well, I'm here."
“We can’t talk long,” the boy said, looking in the mirror. “Tragedy and Comedy can’t stand the band’s music, but the music’s stopped, so obviously we aren’t protected any more.”
James noticed that the boy was wearing the machete around his waist, hanging at his back. He had no idea how the boy had smuggled it in, but suddenly he was a lot less comfortable about forcing the issue and meeting him here, alone, in a dark men’s room.
The boy said, “Man, it’s an amazing honour to meet someone from the original five.” He made a kissy-face at himself in the mirror and then turned to meet James’s gaze. “I heard you used to date Maggie M.”
James blinked. "You know Maggie?"
The boy laughed, a sharp surprised guffaw. Then he lunged forward, grabbing at James's hands, desperately asking, "Do you know where she is? Have you spoken to her? Have you seen her?"
James flinched, yanking his hands out of the boy's grip. "Look," he said, "I don't know you—"
"I'm Cris," the boy said, tapping his chest. "Listen, you're the last remaining link to her." He shook his head wildly. "They chopped Natalie up and no one knows where Carol is—"
James realized he might be dealing with a genuinely crazy person. He started to back up slowly to the door, trying not to spook the kid. On his third step, he felt it happen. The temperature in the room plummeted.
Cris looked up with madness in his eyes, staring at the washroom door. “They’re here!” he shouted. “I knew you were important to them!”
Turning, James saw ice creeping up the wood of the door, crackling over the doorknob.
His breath appeared in the air, and he felt he was definitely not wearing enough layers for this kind of cold.
When he reached for the doorknob, Cris shouted, "Don't!"
It didn’t matter. Before James could grab for the door, it opened, ice crystals shuddering off and falling to the floor.
From the inky blackness beyond, he could hear crying, a soft low weeping. A pale hand emerged, wrapping long fingers around the side of the door. The masked figure leaned in out of the dark,. The mask was even more twisted than James had earlier seen, a devil's face contorted into grotesque frown.
A tragedy mask, James thought.
It was this thing that was crying, the low voice coming from behind the mask.
James found himself involuntarily stumbling back, his eyes fixed on the long knife sticking out of the figure's hand.
He opened his mouth, but something had robbed him of his voice. He saw something dripping from the tip of the knife, and realized that the whiteness of the flesh behind the mask was soft and wet, moisture beading on its sickly skin.
He felt himself start to close up, which tended to happen to him in a crisis. He felt detached, withdrawing into himself, almost to the point where it seemed like he was watching from a far distance. He didn't feel afraid. He didn't really feel much of anything.
Instead, he backed away to the opposite wall, next to Cris.
As the masked figure passed the mirrors, they shattered, one by one, glass shards falling into the sink.
James managed to ask, “What is it?”
His voice sounded dull and emotionless to his ears, but he was never sure how to get out of this state once it happened.
He turned and saw what Cris was doing. The boy was crouched, an insane grin almost splitting his face. He was all animal readiness, coiled springs. When the masked figure passed the third and final mirror, shattering it, Cris shot forward, hand snaking out and snatching the mask away.
James looked away. He shut his eyes, but that almost made the image worse, seeing the thing's lack of a face in his mind. When Cris had ripped the mask off, there was only a carved out emptiness where a face should be.
The thing hissed from its gaping cavity and retreated in starts and fits, finally shuddering out of the washroom, the door slamming closed behind it.
Cris brought his foot up and slammed it down against the mask, shattering it. Almost instantly the room felt warmer. The sound of the club came rumbling back in.
“See?” he asked. “They don’t like the music, but once the band’s gone, they come out to play.”
Breathlessly, James asked, “Did you kill it?”
Cris laughed. “No, he’s off to get another mask.”
They went for the door and fell out together into the sudden, surprising loudness of the stairwell. Cris was on his feet first, slamming the door shut behind him.
James collapsed onto the stairs, sat down, and managed to get out, "What was that thing?"
"It was nothing," Cris said, turning back and grinning at him with mad eyes. "They're enslaved spirits, working for the Heedless.”
James blinked. He knew that name. It had cropped up in the stories Maggie had written back in the day. She had written supernatural stories for a creative writing class, and the Heedless had featured prominently in them. They had been beautiful creatures, faerie-like in their looks, but often selfish and petty. Hence the name. It had been the usual embarrassing fantasy crap young people often wrote.
He shook his head. There was something unfair and ridiculous about something from an ex-girlfriend’s tossed-off creative writing project coming back to threaten his life.
Before he could say anything, Cris looked at him with wide eyes, smiling. He knelt down beside him and asked, "What was she like?"
"What was who like?"
"Maggie M. I never got a chance to meet her."
James looked up. He remembered first-year history student Maggie M as a scrawny young woman with frizzy red hair and a bony face that could, impolitely, be called horse-faced. He remembered her being stunningly, alienatingly intelligent. Eventually, they had started hanging out with different groups of people and not with each other. Other than spending twelve months pretending they were witches, there wasn’t much to tell.
James looked up at the men’s room door and touched his hair. His hands came away with ice crystals and frost. "What does any of this have to do with Maggie?"
Cris looked down at this hands, and then back up at James. "Maggie's vanished," he said. "We've been trying to find her, and we can't."
"What do you mean she’s vanished?"
The boy's seemingly boundless energy was finally starting to wane. He seemed to bring himself back to earth, smiling apologetically. "I'm sorry," he said. "I thought the Heedless were trying to snatch you, because you were one of the original five.” He grimaced. “I think they were just trying to hurt me. I just thought you might know where Maggie is. That’s why I broke into your building, and tripped like a klutz.”
"Has something happened to Maggie?"
"Don’t worry about it.” He shrugged. “You’re better off not knowing what monsters are out there.” Then, as if to himself, he added, "Well, it was worth a shot."
"What was?"
"I'm sorry for breaking into your apartment building, and I'm sorry for putting you in a frightening situation."
He stood, sheathed his machete, and then slowly and dejectedly walked up the stairs and out of sight. James sat there, mouth open, watching him go. He was stunned, unable to put the series of events into any kind of order, or any kind of sense.
He ran up the stairs after the kid, but when he emerged into the darkness of the club Cris was nowhere to be found. He shoved his way forward, and almost cried out when Ian caught hold of him and asked him where the hell he'd been.
"I just had—“ James began. “I think I just had a supernatural experience."
After they'd gone home, James googled Maggie's name on his laptop, while Ian watched him from across the room.
Ian glanced at his fingernails, and then asked, “What does the M stand for?”
“Magdalene,” James said. “Maggie Magdalene.”
“That makes me sick.”
“What does?”
"James Jordan dating Maggie Magdalene? That's so cute it makes me want to retch."
"We just called her Maggie M."
One of the links got him somewhere. It was a website for the Rosecrest Research Institute. The front page had a picture of six women standing around a plaque. James recognized three of them. There was Maggie, still with her halo of frizzy red hair, and Carol, blonde and model-gorgeous, and Natalie, with her pale skin and dark black hair.
The original five, he thought; when Cris said that, was he referring to us? To me, Daniel, Maggie, Natalie and Carol?
That night, when he went to bed, he dreamed of tall masked men in black, stalking him with knives.
When he woke up that morning, he couldn’t fall back asleep. He found himself pulling out bins of old documents from his student days. He found an address book with the number of Maggie’s old house and wondered if her parents still lived there.
He gave it a call and waited. After the sixth ring, the voice of an older woman answered, and James recognized the voice of Maggie’s mother. When he asked her if she had spoken with Maggie recently, the woman softly broke down into tears while James stood there and listened. Finally she managed to say that no, there had been no word from the police or anyone. There hadn’t been any word for close to a year.
Oh my god, James thought.
After the call, he sat down for a while, unsure of himself. He didn’t like thinking about those times with Maggie. He had been deeply depressed and anxious and morbidly obsessed with the occult and the afterlife. It made him uncomfortable to think of the times he thought he’d contacted another spirit. He remembered sitting with Maggie and stuffing little pouches full of herbs and metals. For protection against evil spiri
ts. And he had believed every single word.
His phone rang. It was Elise.
“Guess what?”
“What?”
“Daniel just called me. He wants us to get together. I guess he heard about the gig at Hell’s Gate, because he wants to meet us outside there. Works for me; now I’ll know where the heck it is. You coming?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’d like to.”
If nothing else, he thought; this’ll give me a chance to ask him about Maggie.
Ian got up, heard about James and Elise’s plans, and invited himself along. That was fine with James. He was shaken and needed some cheering up.
Soon, Elise was waiting for them outside their place, smiling at them from the driver’s seat of her beat-up Honda.
Hell’s Gate was a huge surprise when they finally reached it. When James saw it, his mouth dropped open.
The building was so much bigger than he'd initially thought it would be. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ian lean forward from the backseat to gawk. "Look at the size of that thing. That used to be a theatre?"
If it had originally been a theatre, it had been an imposing one, all gothic steeples and knife-edge rooftops. Elise parked across from the looming building, got out and looked for Daniel. “He said he’d be waiting outside for us.”
“Maybe he’s inside?” Ian offered.
They crossed the street and clambered up the stone steps. James wrapped his fingers around the cool metal of the door handles and pulled. They were locked.
“Well, of course they’re locked,” Ian said. “It’s not even the afternoon. Why would they be open?”
“I’ll look up the street,” James replied, leaping down the steps. “See if I can see him.”
As he landed on the sidewalk, light flashed at him, blinding him for a moment. He turned wildly and looked at a figure standing a few feet from him holding a camera.
It was Cris. The boy lowered the camera and grinned at him.
"You!" James said.
Cris took off, rushing down the sidewalk. James leapt into pursuit, tearing after him, ignoring the cries from Ian and Elise.
But man, could the boy run. He veered down an alley suddenly, and James couldn't believe how spry the goddamn kid was, leaping over garbage cans and parked trucks with acrobatic grace.
"Wait!" James shouted.
Why was this so hard? he thought; why couldn’t someone just tell him what happened to his old friend?
They burst out onto a narrow street under a crowded skyline of signs dotted with Chinese lettering. The sudden colour of cloth banners and bright clothes and vendors confused him. He staggered into the crowd, smelling spices and incense and street food. He couldn't see Cris anywhere.
Dammit, he thought; I'm really getting sick of this.
A voice from behind him said, "Over here.”
He turned and saw Cris standing on some stairs hidden at the back of a Chinese restaurant. His arms were folded and he was wearing a pair of sunglasses low on the bridge of his nose, so he could glare over them. He said, "You obviously know more than you were letting on, you cocksucker."
“Have you been following me?”
“Yeah. And apparently you’ve been holding out on me, so I guess we’re squaresies.”
"I have no idea what you're talking about. I just want to ask you a couple of questions.”
"Oh, was that why you were at Hell's Gate? You wanted to ask me a couple of questions?"
"I was there because we got a call from my friend’s brother." He walked towards Cris slowly and deliberately, feeling anger rising up in him. "Now why don't you fill me in? I called Maggie's mother today. She hasn't heard a word about her in a year."
"No, Sherlock; no one has."
"So what’s happened to her?”
Cris's face fell. He glanced around at the passer-bys, a storm of emotions crossing his face. "You were going to Hell’s Gate because your friend’s brother called you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Not because you knew that Alice was there.”
“I don’t know who Alice is.”
Cris looked genuinely upset. “Maybe you should come upstairs."
James glanced up. It looked like the stairs led to a dingy apartment above the restaurant. "What's upstairs?"
"What’s upstairs?” He mustered a thin smile. “What's left of Maggie's friends, that’s what’s upstairs.”
New Wave Detectives 01: Punk Rock Theatre Page 1