Rob Zombie - Lords of Salem

He checked his watch again. “Looks like a whole lot of nothing is about to happen,” he said. Heidi next to him didn’t respond. She looked a little dazed, just stared straight ahead at the stage. “You okay?” he asked.

“Whitey never showed so I walked,” she said. She said it in a friendly but semi-pissed-off way, identical to the way she had said it outside, but this time her face remained motionless, expressionless.

“Yeah, you already told me,” he said. “I heard you the first time.”

“What are you so uptight about?” she replied. Again, same exact intonation as outside. But her face was still as dead and still as that of a corpse. God, she was freaking him out.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” he asked. He was about to dress her down when the house lights suddenly went off. “Thank God,” he said. “I think the show might actually be starting.”

Chapter Fifty-four

Slowly, very slowly, the red velvet curtains began to draw apart in a grand and effortless sweeping motion, to reveal a stage empty except for a figure of a man made from sticks, a nearly life-size effigy. A small lantern burned within the figure’s belly. The lantern was the only thing lighting the stage.

The sound of a single drum began. A slow, regular pounding. A hush fell over the crowd as a robed figure entered the stage from somewhere out of the darkness behind. A mask covered the figure’s face: a rough burlap mask dyed black with a white death’s head painted on it. A primitive drum was slung around its neck and was being struck, over and over again, with what looked like a human thighbone.

“What the hell is this bullshit?” Herman whispered to Heidi. “Seems more like some weird religious ritual than a concert.”

“Whitey never showed so I walked,” mumbled Heidi.

What the fuck? wondered Herman. He grabbed her arm and shook her, but she didn’t look away from the stage.

The robed figure began to chant in rhythm with the beating on the drum, in some weird language that for all Herman knew might be nonsense. Lots of hard sounds, like German, but shitloads worse. Made his head ache even to listen to it. But next to him Heidi seemed totally transfixed.

A ring of fire erupted around the figure as the chant continued. The crowd began moving, swaying back and forth to the repetitive rhythm of the hypnotic drum, a few of them beginning to pick up the sounds of the chant as well, which gave it a weird watery emphasis as it shifted from a single voice to a voice with many other voices layered over it. The ring of fire grew taller, then taller still, until both the effigy and the hooded figure were nearly hidden within it. If you looked at it just right, you could almost believe they were on fire.

Beams of deep red smoke curled along and seeped through the stage as another figure appeared from the darkness behind. This one was similarly dressed, similarly masked, but the mask it wore had had holes burned through it, so bits of a pale white face were visible beneath. As it walked forward, the figure manipulated an instrument made of wood and animal skin. One hand cranked a small lever while the other pumped a rawhide bellows, creating a bizarre cluster of discordant notes. It was the sound, Herman thought, of someone screaming, but worse than that, too. It was much more disturbing than that.

The flames of the ring of fire dipped lower and the figure stepped through them and into the ring, continuing to play. The flames rose again, in one spurt and then another, until Herman couldn’t see anything through it. Shit, must be hot inside there, he thought. And how had they managed to do that? He would have sworn, when he walked the stage just a moment ago, that there was nothing there.

There was a screeching sound, the scrape of an out-of-tune violin being played deliberately off-key. Another robed figure appeared out of the darkness of the wings, wearing the same burlap mask as the others. Instead of a bow, it played with a bone that looked like a humerus. It made the strings shriek and quiver. The figure didn’t wait for the flames to die down, but calmly strode through them and was momentarily aflame.

“Holy shit,” said Herman.

The flames fell low enough that everyone could be seen clearly. The robe of the figure playing the violin was smoking but didn’t stay lit. The drum was playing louder and faster now, and so was that strange other instrument, whatever it was. With the violin added in, the noise was extremely loud and discordant, enough to make the hall shake and bring little bits of plaster down from the ceiling.

Herman looked up a little nervously, then turned to Heidi. “I have to admit,” he said, “this is pretty wild stuff.” Yeah, they were getting to him. They were definitely showmen. He had to give them that. But, he thought, looking up at the ceiling again, there was no fucking way this was going to end well.

They played, the music dipping and falling but always staying repetitive and ritualistic and discordant and very intense. They weren’t playing songs exactly, or rather it was like they were playing one single song that just kept going and going. It was fucked-up.

In front, down near the stage, several of the audience members began stripping off their clothes and walking toward the stage. They seemed like zombies, moving stiffly and awkwardly. Must be plants in the audience who work for the band, thought Herman. All part of the show. But then if that was the case, there wasn’t much of an audience at all. He watched them ascend a small set of stairs at the base of the stage, gathering around the edge of the ring of fire, bowing before the hooded figures.

Beside him Heidi was mumbling. God, if she repeated again that Whitey never showed so she walked, it’d really freak him out. Anything she said, he told himself, had to be better than that.

Turned out he was wrong. What she said was: “Unholy Father, make your presence known this night. I am but your humble servant in this land of misery.”

What the living hell? Was she in on it, too? Was this some kind of elaborate joke that the station was playing on him to fuck with him? Or was Heidi just messing around, playing along to get under his skin? He hoped so, because whatever the alternative was to those possibilities he had the feeling he didn’t want to know what it was.

“What was that?” Herman said. “Come again?”

“Help me breed this new world with your blessed spawn of glory.”

She stood and left her seat, moving into the aisle.

“Where the hell are you going?” asked Herman. But suddenly she was lost from sight as a powerful gust of wind whipped through the room, sending thick clouds of black smoke spiraling toward the ceiling. Herman coughed and choked, his eyes watering, waving his hands to clear the air in front of his face. When he caught sight of Heidi again, she was nearly to the end of the aisle. She had shed her coat and dropped it on the floor, was taking her sweater off over her head. By the time she was at the bottom of the stairs leading to the stage, she was wearing only her shift: a sheer white dress, see-through and short. On it was emblazoned a symbol that Herman recognized. It was the same as the symbol that had been on the Lords album.

At first, when she first entered the Palladium, her body did not seem to want to go where she wanted it to go. As Heidi tried to maneuver it into a seat near the back, next to where Herman was, something kept trying to turn her feet and steer her forward, down the aisle and toward the front of the stage. It was odd, but not too insistent, something that with a little effort she could control, but strange nonetheless and a little disturbing. Even once seated she still felt the pull, something calling to her to get up, to rise to her feet and walk down to where the other women were, circulating in front of the stage or sitting in the seats near the front. My sisters , she thought, and then thought: That’s weird. Why would I call them that?