Scott Westerfeld - The Last Days

I didn’t complain, though. Her glare had made me shiver once already.

I set up in one corner, two walls of foam padding at my back, twenty-one paint buckets arranged before me, the stacks growing taller from right to left, one to six buckets high. ( S 6= 21)

I pulled out six contact microphones, my own mixer and effects boxes, and went to work. I don’t like rehearsal spaces or recording studios as much as the open air—but at least I can bring my own echoes.

Pearl watched me clip the mikes to my stacks of plastic, run their cables into the mixer, then route them out through the effects.

“Paint cans, huh?” she asked.

“Paint buckets,” I corrected, and saw Moz smile for the first time.

“Uh, sure. How many channels you need?” she asked, fingering the sliders on the mixing board. “Six? Twelve?”

“Just two. Left and right.” I handed her the cables.

Pearl frowned as I turned away from her. This way, she couldn’t control my mix from her board. It was like she wanted me to give her my eggs, my cheese, and my chives all in separate bowls. But instead I was handing her the whole omelet, cooked just the way I liked it.

She didn’t argue, though, and I saw that Moz was still grinning.

“Everybody ready?” Pearl asked. Everyone was.

Minerva swallowed and walked up to grasp her mike with one pale hand. The other held a notebook, which I could see was open to a page of chaos, like the handwriting of the unluckiest kids back at my special school.

Moz just nodded, not looking up at Pearl, flicking his cords around on the floor with one toe.

The burly boy (whose name I’d already forgotten; should have written it down) was the only one who smiled. He leaned his head down to stare closely at his strings, setting his fingers carefully. Then, concentrating hard, he began to play. It was a simple riff, thick and dirty.

Pearl did something on the board, and the sound softened.

I listened for a moment, then tuned my echoes to ninety-two beats per minute. Moz started playing, high and fast. I thought it was a strange way to start, too complicated, like a guitar solo bursting out of nowhere. But then Pearl entered, playing a gossamer melody that wrapped a shape around what he was doing.

I listened for a while, not sure what to do. I had a lot of choices. Something simple and lazy, to give the music more backbone? Or should I swing the beat, a little off-kilter, to loosen it up? Or follow Moz’s superquick fluttering, like rain against the roof?

I always relished this moment, right before starting to play. It was the one time my fingers didn’t tremble or drum against my knees, when I could hold my hands out steady. No reason to hurry.

Also, I didn’t want to make a mistake. There was something fragile about this music, as if it would fly apart if pushed in the wrong direction. Pearl, Moz, and the other boy thought they knew one another already, but they didn’t yet.

I began carefully, only a downbeat at first, building the pattern one stroke at a time—simple to complicated, less to more. Then, just before it got too crowded, I slipped sideways, subtracting one stroke for each I added, gradually shifting the music around us, but leaving it still tenuous, directionless.

For a moment I thought I’d made a mistake. These were just kids. Maybe they needed to be pushed in one direction or another, or maybe they’d wanted a drum machine, after all.

But then the junkie girl came in.

There were no words, though she held one of the notebooks open in front of her. With the microphone pressed close to her lips, she was humming, but the melody emerged from the speakers sharp-edged and keening, cutting through the mass of intricacies we’d built.

Suddenly the music had focus, a beating heart. She wrapped the rest of us around herself, piercing my gradual shadows with a single ray of light.

I smiled, having a rare moment of absolute comfort in my own skin, every compulsion satisfied, the clockwork of the whole world clicking into place around my drumming. Even if they were young and flawed, these four had something. Maybe a happy accident was happening here, like the first time I’d ever noticed the echoes from the street matching my footsteps…

Then the strangeness began, something I hadn’t seen since I was little. The air started to glitter wildly, my eyelids fluttering. This was more than ripples of heat from summer asphalt, or the shimmers I saw when someone was angry at me.

Shapes were forming on the cable-strewn floor, and faces materialized in the patterns of the soundproofing: I glimpsed expressions of hurt and fear and fury at the edges of my vision, as if my medication was failing.

I imagined dropping my sticks, reaching into my pocket, and spilling out my pills to count them. But I was positive I’d taken one that morning, and the labels always warned that they built up slowly in the bloodstream: weeks to take effect, weeks to fade away. Never stop, even if you think you don’t need them anymore.

Minerva was glowing, her pale skin luminous in the darkness. Her movements had smoothed out, no longer insectlike. She was singing now, teeth jammed close to the microphone, her incomprehensible song sputtering for a moment as she turned a page of the notebook.

The practice room was seething, phantasms filling up the spaces between objects, demons with long tails riding the sound waves in the air.

I was afraid, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t bring my drumming to a halt any more than I could smother the tapping of my foot or the twitches in my face. I was trapped here, caught in the pattern I’d helped shape.

Then reality shifted once more, like the sprockets of a film finally catching, and I saw something I’d almost forgotten… what music looked like .

Moz’s guitar notes were scattered like Christmas lights across the ceiling, shimmering in and out, Pearl’s sinuous melody linking and electrifying them. The dog-boy’s riff spread out underneath, solid and steady, and my drumming was the scaffolding that held it aloft, all of it pulsating at ninety-two beats per minute, alive and connecting us.

I stared at the apparition, awestruck. This was the way I’d been born to see music, before the doctors had taught me to separate my senses, to grab objects and faces and hold them in place. Before they’d cured me of these visions with therapy and pills.

How had this other reality returned? Every sense conjoined, complete and undivided…

But then my eyes dropped to the floor, and I saw Minerva’s song.

It was tangled around our feet, twisting its way through cords and cables, plunging in and out of the floor, like loops of Loch Ness monster in the water. It was a worm, blind and horned, its rippling segments pushing it through the earth, rearing up a hungry maw teethed with a ring of knives.

And suddenly I knew that Minerva’s curse was something a thousand years older than heroin or crack.

I let out a gasp, and she turned her head toward me, saw me seeing it. She dropped the notebook and pulled off her glasses in one brittle motion, her song dissipating into a long, furious hiss. The architecture of the music shattered overhead, my drumsticks spinning from my hands.

The rest of them stumbled to a halt. Pearl was staring at her friend, alarmed. Moz was staring at Minerva too, and for a moment his expression was unmistakable: the boy was dripping with desire.

“Why’d you two stop, man?” the burly dog-boy cried. “That shit was paranormal !”

I blinked, looking down at empty hands. No trembling, just like after any good session. I felt no need to tap my feet or touch my forehead. There was nothing in the air but the hiss of amplifiers, a barely visible ripple in the corners of my eyes.