Karl Wagner - The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

She met a lot of people, and offers came in all the time. Would she like to join this band or that? Some years it seemed that any girl group—from lightweight popsters to heavy metal sirens—who needed to replace a departed member would call her before they’d try anyone else. She always refused.

Liz made plenty of money off studio work. Concerts, tours, clubs—she didn’t need them. She was rich and successful. Musician magazine even featured her on its cover and did a seven-page article about her career, with a full checklist of her recorded output and a small sample CD—bound right into the magazine—which demonstrated two of her specialized melodic drum licks.

Liz found that she’d become a living legend. Her name was a recurring feature in music magazines’ annual polls of outstanding drummers. Her style was widely imitated, and her halting efforts at songwriting—the occasional filler track on another artist’s album—were invariably given prominent mention in reviews.

Significantly, however, there were no cover versions of either “Lonely Nights in Whitechapel” or “Pretty Maids All in a Row.” Not even one.

Not even Muzak—that omnivorous corporate consumer of musical compositions, that ubiquitous purveyor of “elevator music” which homogenized everything from The Rolling Stones and Iggy Pop to The Strawberry Alarm Clock and The Clash— not even Muzak would re-record them.

Liz discovered that a rumor had spread though the industry. A dark, ugly rumor. A rumor whispered—never spoken aloud—by everyone from studio janitors to the major recording artists of the day: The two songs on Jackie and the Rippers’ single were cursed. So while the single became a radio airplay standard and eventually went triple-platinum, no musician ever dared to record their own version of either of its sides.

It was 11 years before Liz and Gary saw each other again.

The occasion was a show Gary promoted at Madison Square Garden. Opening that night was a new, all-female supergroup called Raincoat Brigade which featured former members of Girlschool, Mystery Date, and the Carrie Nations. It was their debut performance, and they were all quite nervous. Gary had invited Liz as a special backstage guest. He’d hoped her presence would give the band some encouragement.

Raincoat Brigade’s debut was sensational. They went over as well as Jackie and the Rippers had done a dozen years earlier, but this was a much larger venue. Thousands of people were standing and cheering for them—for them, a new band without even a CD in release yet. Liz watched from the edge of the stage curtain, her heart racing as the show brought back bittersweet memories of her own performing debut so many years before.

And then it was over.

The audience demanded more. “We want the Raincoats!” they chanted. “We want the Raincoats!”

Strutting back onstage to the shrill cheers of the crowd, Raincoat Brigade’s lead vocalist seized the microphone and motioned for silence. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said once the crowd was calm again, “we have a special visitor here tonight and I’m sure you’d all love to meet her. Some of you know her as Pam Jones, the little lady who’s put the kick in hit records by more bands than I’ve got time to name.”

The audience stirred with excitement.

Liz felt her heartbeat quickening. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, “I hope she’s not going to—”

“But you older rock’n’rollers out there will remember her by another name. Folks, everyone please give a great big New York welcome for the former drummer of Jackie and the Rippers, Miss Long Liz!”

Liz looked around in panic. “Am I supposed to go out there?”

The crowd went wild. The cheering was even greater than that which had greeted Raincoat Brigade. It was a thundering ocean of shrieks, clapping, floor-stomping, airhorns, and firecrackers. It was infectious, hypnotic, more powerful than anything Liz had ever experienced. Someone pushed her gently from behind and she stepped slowly out onto the stage, her eyes widening at the scene. A constellation of flashbulbs lit up.

And then, in the midst of the uproar, a familiar chant emerged.

“We want the Rippers! We want the Rippers!”

Inebriated with the excitement, only dimly aware what was happening, Liz was led over to the drumkit. Raincoat Brigade’s drummer yielded her seat and handed Liz a set of sticks.

“We want the Rippers! We want the Rippers!”

In that instant, twelve years melted away.

Liz smiled, raised the drumsticks high in the air, brought them down hard on the floor toms, then up at the cymbals.

Raincoat Brigade recognized the intro at once—the classic “Pretty Maids All in a Row.” A nervous glance passed between the band members. The bass guitarist shrugged, picked a note, and began to play. The others joined in where appropriate, providing the minimal accompaniment necessary to re-create the tune from the single. The group’s vocalist even did a passable imitation of Jackie’s sole lyric, “Catch me if you can, Mister Lusk!”

About 40 seconds shy of the tune’s finale, as Liz was dealing jackhammer blows to the bass drum while setting up a countermelody with cymbal splash, she noticed the scene in the front of the crowd.

There was a surging mob crushed right up against the edge of the stage, partially obscured by the row of black monitors. The jumble of bodies was so thick it would have been impossible to count them. Moving as one writhing, throbbing, dancing, jumping waving mass of arms and heads, they crashed against the border of the stage like ocean waves on a rocky coastline—but with the surreal speed of a fast-motion film.

And somewhere in this chaos of shaking flesh, almost lost in the confusion of limbs, was a large human hand.

The instant she saw it, Liz could not take her eyes off it.

It was a dark hand, olive in complexion with heavy patches of thick black hair on its back. The fingernails were sharpened, long and hooked at their tips. The hand bounced with the music, following the motion of the crowd.

As she continued to play, Liz noticed that the hand seemed to emerge from a long, black sleeve somewhere out there, and that there was a wide white cuff between the hand and sleeve. The hand was held straight up, shaking with the music’s beat. And then, as the song crashed to its finale, the hand descended. It angled down toward the stage, the thumb and the three lower fingers folding back gradually while the index finger remained extended.

It was a left hand, and it was pointing directly at Liz.

T.E.D. Klein returns to The Year’s Best Horror Stories after an absence of far too many years. Meanwhile he has been busy, as he notes: “Founding editor, in 1981, of Twilight Zone (whose total lifespan, eerily enough, coincides with the Reagan years: our first issue came out shortly after RR’s inauguration; the final issue, under Tappan King, came out around the time of Bush’s inauguration, or thereabouts). Founding editor, in 1991, of CrimeBeat , a true-crime monthly (of a decidedly law-and-order persuasion) which expired last spring.”

A native New Yorker, Klein was born there in 1947 and now lives in Manhattan. Somehow during the 1980s he found time to write a novel, The Ceremonies , and a collection, Dark Gods —both highly acclaimed. Just now, he is laboring over a new novel, Nighttown. Of other projects: “I was hired to write the script for Dario Argento’s Trauma , shot in Minneapolis in 1992 and (thankfully) still unreleased in the U.S.”

The words had been emblazoned on the plastic wrapper of Andy’s new sleeping bag, in letters that were fat and pink and somewhat crudely printed. Andy had read them aloud as he unwrapped the bag on Christmas morning.