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

Pretty fucking great.

With no drums to give her time, no bass to offer a chord structure to hold her up, she propelled herself headlong into a solo. It was just noise at first, hitting strings like a caveman who’d just discovered a guitar amidst the rocks and rubble.

“Whatcha doin’, little girl?” Kyle asked.

She heard him inside her head where he was taking up residence, pushing at the bits of her brain with probing fingers, licking them to get a taste for the place.

She ignored him, finding the straight rhythm first, just letting the notes ring out. She’d forgotten that the guitar didn’t really need finesse or elegance to sound good. It was all right there: the steel strings, the maple neck, the thick, solid body and the wound pickups, coiled like snakes just waiting to be let loose. She reveled in the dumb simplicity of it.

“That all you got, Axe Girl?” Johnny Jacks asked, looking up at her with blind eyes.

Her middle finger pressed the A string on the second fret. The note rang out true, going on forever to that infinity where every note goes when you think you’re done with them.

“Ain’t gonna work,” Kyle’s voice churned inside her skull. “I’m too deep inside you now.”

Jen kept playing, her fingers lazily tracing a pentatonic scale up and down in almost random patterns, not hurrying, not worrying.

“Are you really, baby?” she asked.

“Oh yeah. So deep you’ll never shake me.”

“Shake you?” She stopped moving her fingers, holding one note for a full measure, then another, letting it slowly fade out almost to that point of oblivion where she knew she’d be lost. “Who says I’m trying to shake you?”

There was time to hear the odd silence within her mind, like a sudden intake of breath. She felt him scratching at the inside of her skull like an animal that’s just discovered it’s been caged. Every clawing attack filled her with pain and misery—a migraine mixed with suicidal depression.

Kyle, or whatever had taken his place, understood what she was doing.

She disregarded everything except the guitar, sliding her hand farther up the neck, her fingers moving faster and faster, recklessly picking out a solo that was neither blues nor jazz nor classical but something more primal. The grunting of teenagers fucking for the first time, in the back of a car with the radio up loud. Awkward. Painful. Stupid. But full of whatever rock ’n’ roll was when you took away the chords and melody.

She played that on her Strat, reveling in it, the sounds from the amp both sweet and salty. Inside her, the demon struggled to get away.

“Don’t run off now, baby,” she said. “We’re just getting started.”

Somewhere in there, in the space between two notes on the guitar, between her fingers holding down one fret and another as her pick hand prepared to come down hard on the string, Jen got lost.

It was perfect.

She didn’t care anymore. She was halfway to hell, dragged by the weight of either a demon in her soul or a psychotic break in her fragile mind, yet she was flying. The essence of a great solo—the essence of being the guitar player she was meant to be—was in not giving a shit. Whatever came out of her amp right at that moment, for good or ill, sweet or stale, perfect or messy as all hell… was her.

It was Jen.

Let the demon take her soul if he wanted, because she had the music and the music was all the soul she cared about. The feel of her hands on the guitar and the sounds in her ears and nothing else.

Boom.

Boom.

A beat came out of nowhere. She let it carry her upwards.

Bah-duhn-duhn.

Bah-duhn-duhn.

Lucy Bottom’s bass came up alongside.

“Stop,” Kyle commanded, no longer with the voice of a nine-year-old, but something deeper and darker—something incongruously full of both malice and pleading.

She paid it no heed. The playing was all that mattered—and she was playing, not practicing, not trying to live up to anyone else. Just playing her guitar the way she wanted. The more she did, the freer she became, and the more terrified the thing that had been living inside Kyle grew.

“Jen,” Johnny Jacks said, his voice hoarse and wrecked but with a tinge of joy like the subtle half bend of the note she was playing.

“Yeah?”

“Levon and Lucy can hold it for a few seconds.”

“And?” What did he want from her?

“And it’s time,” he bellowed, like an old-time preacher standing at the front of a tent before a thousand hand-clutching congregants. “Bring. Forth. The. Rickenbacker!”

Jen glanced at the battered old guitar. Its fireglo paint job shimmered, already aflame as if with hellfire, demanding to face down the horrors around her. The strings hummed a defiant counter to the demon’s hideous buzzing.

She popped the patch cable out of the jack on the Strat and plugged in the Ricky. All the while Lucy and Levon pounded away at a rhythm that was nothing but straight eighths and pissed-off determination.

The Ricky let out a vicious twang, a belligerent melodic relic from another time. Jen kicked her amp around, so it faced the windows. It shouldn’t have been able to do more than rattle them, but as she played a run up the neck, the scornful dissonance of shattering glass added itself to the music. When she glanced at her guitar, there was blood on the strings. Her blood. She didn’t care.

Night air flooded into the room, and she breathed in the sweetness, not even minding the other stenches that still lingered in the room. Lucy had blood dripping from a cut on her forehead. Levon played using only one arm, his left twisted at an odd angle. Johnny’s face was pale, hair matted, his skin cracked and bleeding at the sides of his mouth. They all looked happy as pigs in shit.

“Come on, come on, come on, ” Johnny sang. “ Gotta get it up, get it out, send it down. ”

Kyle floated before her, head hanging back, and arms spread wide in a Jesus pose while his parents hung onto his legs. Jen eyed the tendrils of black and green haze that filled the room and trailed back to the boy’s mouth. His stomach and throat convulsed, vomiting out whatever thing had made its home inside him.

Johnny sang something at her, but she didn’t hear, she was too busy playing the notes that would pull the last remnants of the demon out of Kyle’s mouth.

The filthy mist coalesced, taking on its own shape—a man with black wings and a face so beautiful it made her want to cry. He smiled at her, but she used his beauty against him, translating it into an aching melody that came from her guitar, from her guts, from her lust. The smile faded as the thing discovered that all its best weapons had been turned against it, that all the power in the universe is nothing but vibration, and music shaped vibrations according to the player’s needs.

“You’ve got him now!” Johnny said. He wasn’t singing anymore, just issuing commands like a general. “Hold him. Hold him tight!”

“I’ve got him,” she said, irritated. “Just tell me what to do with him.”

“Send him down, Axe Girl. Send him all the way down.”

Jen had no idea what that meant but knew exactly how to play it. She slid her fingers up the neck to the seventh fret, held down the same sweet E-9 chord she’d started with, and slammed all six strings.

Then she let go of the pick and twisted the tuning heads loose one after another. The chord dropped and dropped and dropped, passing through discordance back to proper chords and then into discordance again. By the time she stopped, she’d tuned the entire guitar down so far, the strings were slack and wobbling.

The creature, the demon, the… whatever, shattered into a thousand bad memories.