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

Jen turned the Strat towards her amp, not touching anything but the whammy bar, letting the feedback build up. It was such a cheesy, guy-liner-and-black-leather-pants thing to do. But fuck it: fighting a demon called for a little showing off.

“Well, all right, motherfuckers,” Jacks declared, the last syllable swooping up from a low baritone note all the way to a high tenor range that shook the bedroom windows. “Show me what you got!”

Jen blasted into an E-9 chord with an almost funk rhythm that ran counter to what the others were playing but would’ve made Prince proud. The effect was both dissonant and yet somehow sweet; the wrong move that sounded right.

In other words, rock ’n’ roll.

The room shook, though whether from their performance or from Kyle she couldn’t tell. The boy’s parents stood together in the doorway watching with impotent desperation.

“Help me, Daddy,” Kyle whimpered.

His plea would have been more convincing if his various secretions weren’t twisting and turning in the air, buzzing around the room like a swarm of wasps—and if he wasn’t giggling quite so much.

Jacks sang with a passion and furor that would have captivated an entire football stadium. So much so that it took a minute before Jen realized he wasn’t singing in English. She wasn’t entirely sure it was any kind of language.

But Levon’s drumbeats faltered. His upper body lilted back and forth as he struggled to keep up the beat. When he looked up, she could only see the whites of his eyes.

“What’s happening to him?” Jen asked Lucy.

“He’s losing it.” She slapped the drummer across the face. It didn’t do any good. “Come on, Levon, stay with me, brother.”

The rhythm from the drums started to drift then faded completely. The last trace of Levon disappeared.

“Hey, ladies,” he grinned at them, tongue lolling from one side of his mouth like a dog’s as foamy drool slid down his chin.

“Fuck!” Lucy cried stumbling away. She tripped over her own patch cable and fell, the bass giving a cacophonous crash that crushed the music, breaking it apart like stale bread.

“Ain’t givin’ it up ,” Johnny Jacks continued to sing. “ Ain’t givin’ it up to you. ” What had been a gravelly, bluesy voice before had become ragged.

Jen slammed a power chord on the guitar then reached to help Lucy up. The bass player took her hand but started to drag her down to the floor. Like Levon, her eyes showed only the whites, and her grin was anything but human.

“Come play with me, Jenny,” she cooed.

Jen yanked away, lost her pick but managed to hit the strings with her fingernails to give Johnny something to sing over. He fell to his knees, the way a crooner would during the big emotional moment of the song, but his performance was lifeless, barely audible above Jen’s guitar and the hiss that had risen to take the place of the rest of the music.

That hiss…

She’d thought it was the usual noise that came through guitar and bass amps when you weren’t playing, but this was different. Feral. Gleeful. Like an ocean wave, it crested higher and higher before crashing down on them, drowning everything in its path.

“Come on, Jenny, give it up, girl,” Lucy said with someone else’s voice.

“On your best day you couldn’t play worth a damn, baby,” Levon crooned.

A creak from the bed made her turn. Kyle was crawling forward on his mattress, eyes milky white except for pulsing strands of red like blood vessels bursting one after another. A rabid rat preparing to pounce on a dying cat.

Kyle’s parents entered the room, no longer crying, but instead humming with the stilted, painful buzz of wasps. They ran their hands along Kyle’s back, the gesture not loving but obedient. Sensuous. Perverse.

They continued past the bed and kneeled in front of Johnny Jacks, opening their mouths wide—wider than their jaws were meant to—and Jen heard something first click then crack wetly. Their lower jaws hung loose and wagged as they took turns breathing on Johnny, a sick, urine-stenched haze that wafted over him, making him choke.

Johnny, still on his knees, turned to her. He’d stopped singing, but his lips formed a single word.

“Run.”

The urge to flee was overwhelming. Jen was alone in a room of human bodies driven by something not at all human. They looked at her and grinned, reaching out with sickly white limbs, the skin riddled with veins gone black and green as if the blood itself had been replaced with bile.

Johnny Jacks flailed, trying to shove away the mother and father. They dodged his feeble blows effortlessly.

“Don’t go givin’ it up ,” he said—no, sang . It was weak and pathetic, not in any real key, but still it made the parents snarl at him. Their upper lips curled even as their broken jaws shuddered.

How he could manage even that much, Jen couldn’t fathom. Everything in the room stank. Everything was too hot and slick, and sweat dripped all over her, the salt burning her eyes. The right leg of her jeans was soaked, and her own piss dripped into her sock. Every time she tried to touch the strings her fingers felt like sausages left out in the sun, so hot and bloated, as if the skin would break apart and rotten meat would ooze out.

“Give ’em the shit ,” Johnny sang feebly. “ Give ’em the shit like ya never gave it before. ”

Give ’em the shit? Like she had any shit to give. She’d never known real fear, the certainty that everything you believed about yourself belonged to someone else, and that all was left was an empty vessel, waiting—no, begging—to be filled.

“Yeah, baby,” Kyle said, crawling on the floor towards her, more like a spider than a rat now. “Gonna fill you up just right.”

She looked around, panic shaking her loose. There had to be a weapon here somewhere. The crucifix above the kid’s bed was out of reach. She doubted it would do any good even if she could reach it.

Only one cross I’ve ever needed, a small, rebellious part of her whispered. The cross I’m wearing. Her gaze fell to the Stratocaster—not some religious symbol to pray to, but her true cross waiting to be played. She’d never really thought of her guitars that way. It had always just been her instrument. Such a dull, lifeless word. The guitar had always been more of an enemy she had to force to her will than a partner. Now, it was all she had.

Kyle slithered past his parents and Johnny, and past Lucy and Levon, who genuflected before him. The boy floated up until he was eye to eye with Jen.

“Gig’s over, baby.”

Jen squeezed her hand into a fist, cracking the knuckles, daring the swollen digits to split at the seams. They didn’t.

“Not yet,” she whispered, then slammed her fist down, opening the fingers at the last instant so they struck all six of the strings and sent a blast of distortion that blew through the room like a bomb exploding the inside of a doll’s house.

“Haven’t gotten to my solo yet.”

There was a part of playing the guitar that wasn’t about holding the right notes on the fretboard or plucking the right strings, that wasn’t about rhythm or tempo or precision. It was that mixture of easing into the music, of being loose and reckless and abandoning oneself to the guitar. It was the… playing .

Jen had never been good at that part. Her whole career, she’d had to prove she was a professional to bandmates who seemed to know instinctively there was something wrong with her. In a desperate effort to be good enough she’d foregone any hopes of being great.

How great a player would you have to be to fend off a demon that was already creeping his way inside you?