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

Jen sat on the front steps next to her. “Would’ve been nice to get a heads-up beforehand.”

Lucy stared off at the empty street ahead of them. “Wanted: guitar player for exorcism, must be able to improvise in all styles and fight demons.”

“What’s really going on in there?”

“What do you think is going on?”

Jen balked at the question, finding herself unexpectedly on the defensive. She’d been prepared for Lucy to rattle off some nonsense about demons and possession—which would have let Jen scoff or deny it or maybe even allow it might be possible.

“The kid’s fucked up,” was the only answer she could come up with that neither denied the evidence of her eyes nor admitted that the thing poking at her guts seemed only to lack her belief before it would crawl right into her throat and choke her from the inside.

Lucy shrugged. “Let’s say that’s all it is. Let’s throw out all the… weird shit for a second, and say this is some unusual mental disorder.”

“I can live with that.”

“Fine. So how do you fix a kid with that kind of problem?”

“Drugs. Therapy. Um… electric shocks?”

Lucy spit onto the grass. “They tried all that. None of it worked.”

Jen searched for another answer. When nothing suggested itself, she asked, “So rock music is the last resort? I mean, what’s the…” Crap. She really knew nothing about psychology, neurology, or pretty much anything with an ‘ology’ appended to it. “How’s it supposed to work?”

Lucy held up a hand, palm parallel to the porch, and shook it up and down. “Music vibrates the air, right? Our brains turn waves into sound. But when those sounds take the shape of music, they vibrate other things, too.” She placed her hand low down on Jen’s stomach. “Here. And it turns out, this is also where those… whatever they are that can take possession of a human being… get inside us.”

“You’re back to talking voodoo shit.”

Lucy gave her a wry smile. “I tried to let you hold onto your hang-ups as long as I could. From here on out, it gets freaky.”

Freaky. Jesus Christ. Understatement of the year. “Fine. Let’s say I come along for the ride here, you’re saying the music—”

“Not any music. The right songs, the right intensity, hitting all the right resonances. That’s the only way to shake loose whatever’s inside that kid.”

“So how do you figure out all those ‘right’ elements?”

“I don’t.” The bass player looked back up the steps where light from the hallway seeped onto the porch. “Johnny’s the only one who can do it.”

That, as much as every other weird thing that had been said tonight, was almost the hardest thing to believe.

“A rock ’n’ roll exorcist.”

“Only one in the lower forty-eight,” Lucy confirmed. “There’s a guy up in Alaska, but he never leaves the state.”

“So, you’ve seen this work?” Jen asked. “You’ve seen people cured?”

“One time, yeah. Not a kid, though. An old woman in a nursing home.”

“You cured her?”

“Yep. She died peacefully in her sleep a week later.”

“A week? One week?”

“Hey, it’s better than nothing. Besides, where she was headed was worse.”

Jen chewed on that for a minute. “So, here you are, in some suburban house, crying your eyes out between sets while Levon hurls up his guts, and your one success story is an old woman who ended up dying a week later. Why would you even bother?”

Lucy looked away. “Because I’ve seen what happens the other times.” Still not meeting Jen’s eyes, she rose and trudged back up the stairs into the house. “You should probably go home, Jen. The third set’s always the worst.”

Jen was halfway to the kid’s bedroom when a visibly strung-out Johnny Jacks stopped her in the hall.

“Just wait here,” he said. “Me and Levon’ll pack up your gear for you.”

She’d been heading to the bedroom to do precisely that. She’d been prepared for an argument with Johnny to get her stuff. Figured he’d go all Jesus on her and give a hundred reasons why she should stay and help him fight the good fight over the kid’s soul. But Jacks just looked at her as if she was some dumb bystander he was pushing out of the way of oncoming traffic.

“Who says I’m leaving?” she asked.

The aging rocker’s sneer made its way to his face, but for a second, she saw the other thing in his eyes—the thing she’d never expected to see there: hope.

“Not your war, kid.”

Jen had played guitar since she was fifteen years old. Even then, her parents, her teachers, and most of all, every band she’d been in, had said she’d started too late; she didn’t have that ‘spark’; her playing was workmanlike at best and ‘girly’ at worst. She’d practiced every day but it was never enough; played until her fingers had turned numb and then gone through harrowing visits to a neurologist who’d told her she needed to lighten up on the practicing or risk permanent nerve damage.

“Besides,” the doctor had said, “I thought you rock musicians weren’t about perfection. Isn’t it all about soul?”

Soul. Yeah, Jen could’ve used some soul in her playing.

“So, you figure this ‘war’ belongs to you?” she asked Jacks.

He licked his lips, not like a perv but like somebody’s uncle trying to figure out a nice way to say a kid wasn’t ready for football tryouts. “You didn’t sign up for this. It’s the worst case I’ve ever seen. Three hundred dollars is a lousy payday for what comes next.”

“Then why are you going back in there?”

He ran a hand through greasy graying hair. “I’m old, kid. If I go down fighting, well, I wasn’t going to live that long anyway. I don’t try? Then what’s the point of living?”

Lucy and Levon squeezed past her in the hallway and headed into the kid’s bedroom.

“What about them?” Jen asked. “Why are they going back?”

“No idea,” he replied. There was a subtle break in his voice, and his eyes were wet. “Until five seconds ago, I figured they were going to leave.” He patted her on the shoulder and headed towards the bedroom. “It was good playing with you, kid. Couple of times in that second set I heard a lion clawing at the doors of her cage getting ready to bust out. Don’t ever listen to anyone who says you’re second rate, Jen Farmer.”

He left her standing there. A lion clawing at the doors of her cage. Twenty years of playing guitar and that was the only time anyone had described her playing in a way that made sense. Of course, given what a manipulative prick Jacks was, there was a decent chance he’d said it just to see if he could make her stick around.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Hey, old man,” she called.

Jacks poked his head out of the bedroom. “Yeah?”

She pushed him out of the way and entered the bedroom.

The air was thick with a kind of green-black haze that stank of every kind of death and decay. Lucy and Levon were barely on their feet, coughing from the stench and trying not to look at the eight-year-old boy who floated, cross-legged, two feet above his mattress. Particles of puke, shit, and urine floated around him like Saturn’s rings.

When she walked in, Kyle said, “You’re the one I’m going to rip apart first, Jennifer.”

She plugged the amp cable into her guitar, not even bothering to tune the Strat, but instead turning the gain all the way up.

“The name’s Axe Girl, you little shit.”

“No more covers,” Jacks said. “No more playing it safe.”

Levon started up a heavy, nasty beat on the drums. Lucy plucked a steady rhythm of straight eighths on the second fret of the bottom string of her bass, but Jen knew the key wasn’t going to stay in F-sharp; this was going to be E all the way—open strings wherever possible, the strongest vibrations with a standard tuning.