Кейт Форсит - Relics, Wrecks and Ruins - Anthology of Speculative Fiction Short Works

With a thick, deep and dirty voice, he began. “ Where… did we bury… those kisses… long entombed… ”

And then everything went straight to hell.

It’s hard for the human voice to overcome even as small a PA system as Jacks had brought, but the kid in the bed had no trouble doing it. The scream he unleashed on them made Jen’s ears feel like they were going to start bleeding. She nearly dropped the guitar, figuring for sure the kid was having some kind of seizure. But Levon kept the beat going steady, and Lucy, still holding down the bass line, jostled Jen with her arm to tell her not to stop playing.

“Please!” Kyle wailed. “Make him stop! Make him stop!”

“Lend… me your hand… ” Jacks went on singing, with all the intensity and preposterous rock poses as if the tiny bedroom was filled with fifty thousand screaming teenage girls throwing their panties at the aging rocker.

If the chords hadn’t been so dead simple, Jen would’ve dropped the rhythm for sure, because at this point, she couldn’t decide whether to keep playing or call the paramedics. Or the cops. Why the fuck were the kid’s parents not kicking open the door?

The band hit the first chorus and Kyle started shaking, his scrawny hands gripping the sides of his mattress. Soon the whole bed was rattling, and foamy spit dripped out the sides of his mouth. Still Jacks kept singing and the band kept playing.

“I’m your gra-ay-ay-ve digger…”

The screams got worse, like an insect burrowing deep inside Jen’s ear canals. The kid hurled himself up and down on the mattress, the bed’s metal legs carving scratches into the wood floor. She looked around, hoping to see the solution to all this insanity even as her fingers kept finding the chords on the guitar neck.

Stop playing, she told herself. Nothing’s worth whatever the hell these cult psychos are doing to this kid.

Jacks lifted a fist high, then jammed his elbow down—the sign to end the song. Had they gotten past the last chorus? All she could hear was the sound of the kid shrieking his lungs out. Her eyes were blurred from tears she hadn’t realized she was shedding.

“Scream out the Demon ,” Jacks called out.

“What?”

“Motley Crüe,” Lucy whispered fiercely.

Jen couldn’t remember that tune, so she had to wait for Lucy to start it up on the bass and followed along as best she could. Levon kept a heavy beat going on the kick drum, punching in with the background vocals.

“Yes. Shout. Scream the demon out! ”

If she had any doubts about this being some perverse form of child abuse, they were gone when Johnny Jacks started dancing wildly about the room, grinding out the lead vocal in some mad, gesticulating performance that freaked Jen out so much it took until the second verse before she found something else that freaked her out even more: the kid.

Kyle stopped shaking and sat up in his bed, a grin on his face as wide as if he’d just shoplifted his first nudie magazine. His eyes had gone milky white because the eyeballs were rolled up into his head and he was laughing so hard she could hear him over Lucy’s bass line and Levon’s drumming.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked Lucy when she couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Hell is what’s going on. Now shut the fuck up and keep playing if you don’t want to end up there yourself.”

Kyle bobbed his head back and forth, as though lost in an ecstatic trance. Jacks sang louder and harder, like the two were locked in some sort of deadly struggle and trying to prove who was in control.

They hit the end of that song. Without even calling it out, Jacks started singing Ramble On by Led Zeppelin. Fortunately, this was a tune she knew, and so kicked in smoothly with Jimmy Page’s riffs.

Jacks turned to her, eyes blazing, and shouted, “Not the acoustic, you idiot. Switch guitars!” Jen let Lucy and Levon hold up the rhythm as she put the acoustic down and reached for the Ricky. “Not the Ricky!” Jacks shouted. She put that down, grabbed the Strat, and kicked into a solo.

Kyle was on his hands and knees on the bed, right near the bottom edge like a dog getting ready to leap off. His eyes looked nowhere in particular but he sniffed the air as if he could smell her playing.

“Bitch got no soul,” he whispered.

Whispered?

How in hell could she possibly hear the kid whisper over the music?

“Play faster, slut,” he growled, and it sounded as if he stood on a stool right behind her, his lips touching her earlobe. Jen shivered and the ring finger of her left hand missed the fret. The buzz it produced was like a thousand wasps stinging her face, swarming inside her mouth and over her eyes.

“Keep your shit together, Axe Girl,” Jacks said. He stood right in front of her, making her feel trapped. Caged. Still, she pushed through the solo until Johnny picked up the vocal again. By the time the song was done, she was dripping sweat. Her shirt clung to her chest and torso, her jeans were soaked and too tight around her waist, as though her body had turned into nothing but sagging layers of skin and fat.

Jacks sang three more songs, and by the end of the third she couldn’t remember what the first two had been. All the while, Kyle raced around the tiny circumference prescribed by his twin mattress, alternating between screaming, and chortling at them.

When Johnny signaled her to play a solo again, the kid pulled down his pajama pants and pissed on the floor, wiggling his hips and sending the stream sputtering into the air towards them. A droplet of something landed on Jen’s lip and she started to gag.

“It’s just sweat,” Lucy told her, thumb slapping the bottom string of her bass. “He can’t touch us yet. Just don’t drop any more notes.”

Crazy cult assholes, Jen thought, but she didn’t stop playing; she was too scared. Whatever was wrong with these people, she couldn’t be sure someone wouldn’t slit her throat if she stopped going along with the game. So, she kept shredding on the Stratocaster, barely aware of what key she was in.

“Four more bars,” Johnny called out.

Jen looked up. Kyle lay flat on his back. Her fingers flew up the neck looking for a passably decent way out of the solo, but as she did, she finally stopped thinking everyone around her was crazy and started wondering if she was the one who’d lost her mind, because Kyle was now floating three feet above the bed.

“Shit!” she yelled and dropped her pick.

The kid fell back to the mattress. Jacks turned on her, fists clenched. She flinched involuntarily thinking the skinny freak was about to hit her. But he didn’t. He just gave a nod to Levon who train crashed the end of the song.

Then, for the first time since they’d started, the room was silent. No drums, no instruments, no Johnny Jacks dancing around singing raucously, no kid screaming.

Silence.

Jen was so exhausted she could barely keep on her feet. “What the fuck was that?”

“That was the first set,” Jacks said.

Jen still had the Strat hanging off her hunched shoulders as she hurried from the room. She should’ve packed it up along with her other guitars and the amp, but by then she was too terrified to do anything but skulk down the stairs and make for the front door.

“Smoke break?”

Jacks stood in the shadows out on the front lawn, smoke from his joint already making her gag. Her ears were still buzzing. She couldn’t draw a decent breath to save her life.

“What the fuck was that in there?” she demanded.

“What do you think that was?”

She took the Strat off her shoulder, partly because it was getting heavy and partly because she might need something to hit Jacks with. “Tell me it wasn’t a… shit, I can’t believe I’m saying this. Tell me this isn’t some kind of exorcism.”