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

He took a drag from his joint. “Of course, it’s an exorcism. What else would it be?”

She snatched the joint from him and sucked in a long drag that made her head spin. She’d stopped smoking years ago. “And you’re what? Trying to force it out with rock music?”

He accepted the joint back and gave her a toothy grin. “What the fuck else would we use to get rid of it? Prayers? And don’t waste your time,” he added, dropping the remains of the joint on the lawn and crushing it with the heel of his boot.

“With what?”

“Telling yourself you imagined it. It’s real, kid.”

She wanted to call him a liar but doubted that would do any good. “Let’s say… let’s say for a second, I believed any of it. Are we done? You prayed the gay away or sang the evil out or whatever?”

“Not fucking likely. It’s a three-set show, Axe Girl.”

“Stop calling me that! And what do you mean, a three-set show? What happens now?”

He started back up the stairs to the house. “We got his attention. Now we kick the shit out of him until he decides to leave for greener pastures.” He stopped at the top of the steps. “You coming?”

“What happens if I don’t?”

The back of his shoulders rose and fell. “Who knows? Maybe he’ll live. Maybe he’ll die. Maybe everyone inside that house gets consigned to some living hell.”

“What? You can’t put that shit on me! I’m just a guitar player!”

Jacks just stood there facing the front door. “Not even a particularly good one from what I’ve seen.” His hand wrapped around the doorknob and turned. “If you stay, you’d better get real fucking good, real fucking soon, Axe Girl.”

She followed Jacks inside the house without being sure why.

Fuck, maybe I’m possessed now.

Through the hallway and up the interior stairs to the second floor, where she had to step over Kyle’s parents who were huddled on the floor holding each other and crying. They looked shell-shocked. Part of her sympathized with their plight. The rest of her wanted to kick them in the ribs until they got off their asses and did something.

“Don’t judge what you don’t understand,” Jacks said, as if he could read her thoughts.

Inside the bedroom, Kyle still lay flat on his back, seemingly unconscious, but when she walked by him, he said, “Gonna take you, baby. Gonna take you all the way down with me tonight.”

“Don’t know that song.” She plugged the Strat back into her tuner and plucked the bottom E string. She couldn’t believe how out of tune the guitar was. She’d never smashed the strings that hard before. It was a miracle they hadn’t all broken.

“What now?” she asked Jacks.

“First set was to get its attention,” he replied. “Now we soften him up, see if he can stand the heat.”

“And if he can?” She watched Kyle roll onto his stomach, then push against the mattress with his hands, his torso rising up like a cobra.

Jacks raised an eyebrow. “Just keep playing.”

“And what if we can’t?” They hadn’t even started up again yet and already she was more tired than she’d ever been at a gig. “What happens when we run out of steam?”

Jacks walked over to the bed and leaned down going eye to eye with Kyle. “Then this little fucker eats our souls.”

They were halfway through the second set when things got weirder—and worse. For the first few songs, Kyle stomped all over his bed acting for all the world like a petulant child determined to get their attention. He said things Jen shouldn’t have been able to hear over the music.

“You really believe all this garbage they’ve been feeding you, Baby Jen?” he asked as she was finished off an improvised solo during some blues song Jacks had called out. “I mean, which is more likely?” Kyle went on. “That, after millennia of exorcisms being proven to be bunkum, you happen to find yourself in the middle of a real one? Or that two desperate, gullible parents fooled themselves into believing the source of their son’s cancer is possession by the devil?”

Jen did her best to ignore him, which he didn’t seem to mind because he had no end of ways to get her attention back.

“Just look around,” he commanded.

Her solo done and Jacks back to crooning his lead vocal, she found she couldn’t stop herself from doing as the kid suggested. Signs of religious fervor were everywhere. The cross over the bed, family photos arranged into a cross on the wall, the sword-wielding angel bookends on the shelf. Books with titles like, Healing with God’s Power and No Such Thing as Coincidence: Seven Signs Your Child is Possessed .

“See what I mean?” Kyle asked. “These people are crazy.”

He stood on the edge of his mattress again, ignoring Jacks’s raucous performance and undoing the buttons of his pajama top. On his chest were several burns, all the shape of a crucifix inside a circle.

Shit, Jen thought. They branded the poor kid.

An elbow jostled her in the ribs.

“Focus,” Lucy said.

Jen stumbled over the next chords trying to get back on track, but her fingers felt awkward, swollen. She looked at her hands to find the skin a sickly white, the veins exposed like those of a corpse pulled from the water. Her mouth filled with bile that she tried to spit out, but it clogged her throat, choking her. Only after forcing a violent cough did she manage to spew it out onto the floor and all over her clothes.

“Keep playing,” Lucy warned. “The music’s the only thing keeping him out of you.”

With horrifying, stilted slowness, she forced her fingers to take the shape of the next chord and strummed. The nausea subsided a little, and her fingers found their positions on the fretboard again.

For the next six songs, Jen tried to ignore everything she heard from the bed, focusing only on the tactile sensations of her right hand, holding the pick and slamming it against the strings, the dull thud of Levon’s kick drum coming up through her feet, and the way Lucy’s bass sent vibrations through her whole body. All the while, Johnny Jacks sang his heart out in a pitched battle against something Jen couldn’t see but was utterly and terrifyingly aware of.

Kyle gesticulated at her, using his body to get the attention his words could no longer draw from her—not that he shut up at all. He shouted, pleaded, moaned, cackled, and made every other use of the apparatus of a boy’s throat he could.

Somewhere in that second set, Jen Farmer started believing in the Devil.

Johnny called a halt to the second set after just half an hour, and that, even more than the haunted look in his eyes, told her something was wrong. As her guitar’s last ringing chord died, the singer stumbled out of the room, leaving the three of them behind.

“Come on,” Levon said, leading her out. He, too, looked shell-shocked.

Lucy Bottom was crying, which seemed incongruous with the sureness of her bass playing.

At the bottom of the stairs, Jacks spoke in hushed tones to the parents. Despite the quiet, Jen heard the raggedness in the singer’s voice. Kyle’s parents shook their heads, pleading with Jacks.

“I’m sorry,” he just kept saying.

“What’s going on?” Jen asked Levon.

“Johnny can’t cut the thing loose.”

“So, what now?”

The drummer shuffled past her without answering and stepped into the little bathroom in the hallway. He slammed the door shut, and a moment later she heard him puking.

“Lucy?” she asked.

The bass player walked out the front door. Jen followed.

“Sorry you got pulled into this shit,” Lucy said.