The Armageddon Rag

  Sandy sat very still, looking at Edan Morse, and a cold chill ripped through the marrow of his bones. Outside the sun had gone down. It was black beyond Morse, with only a thin scarlet line of light slashing across the horizon. Clouds rolled across a dark sky, above the red-tinged sea. Darkness and storm and chaos; and Morse’s eyes glittered. “When?” Sandy said.

  “You know,” Morse replied. “It’s written across your face. You know it in your gut. You’ve sensed it all along.” His smile was somehow frightening. “Say it,” he commanded.

  “September 20th,” Sandy said through dry lips. “September 20th, 1971.”

  “West Mesa,” said Morse, “and the end of the Nazgûl.” He took the silver knife in his right hand and drew it across his left palm, hard, opening a long red gash. His palm bore the scars of other markings. Blood welled from the wound and dripped down onto the blotter, leaving crimson spatters on Sandy’s purple card. “It was in our blood all along,” Edan Morse said in a voice of fierce conviction. “The music, Sandy, the music. It was our fuel, it was our spirit, it inflamed us and exalted us and gave us courage and purpose and truth. The songs were more than songs. They caught and shaped our minds and souls, and they summoned up something primal in the universe, and in us.

  “You know the truth. We all know it, instinctively. Even the enemy. Look at how the TV networks treat the period! Marches and riots, demonstrations, elections, assassinations, Vietnam—every clip they show, they back with rock music. Something deep within them realizes that rock was a part of it all.

  “The cliché is that music is a reflection of the times, but the cliché has it backward. There is power in music, Sandy. The songs touch us in ways deeper and wilder and more basic than words. Every army that has ever marched to war has gone to the beat of drums, humming martial music. Every revolution has had its music. Every epoch. The music defines and shapes the age.

  “And in our age, the Movement exploded to the hard beat of rock, moved to it, marched to it, fucked to it, swelled to it. Drugs and sex and rock and revolution, peace and freedom. And I think the enemy understood better than we did. We were a threat to the whole rotten system, to the corrupt power and the immoral wealth. Our music had already crushed theirs, driven it from the airways and the streets and the culture, and the rest would surely follow. I think they knew that.

  “And then the music died. Little by little, partly by chance and partly by design, I think. The Beatles broke up, so did a hundred other groups. The hard-edged, scary stuff was banished from the radio. The moneymen tightened their controls over the media and the record companies, and squeezed the vitality out of rock, turned our steel to marshmallow, progressively, day after day, damping our inner fires while we hardly noticed. And those who could not be bought out or broken up or retired, the loudest and most dangerous, they were killed, one after the other, in the space of a few years. Hendrix. Joplin. Jim Morrison. And finally Hobbins, finally West Mesa. The Nazgûl were the Sixties, more than any other group. They were young and vital and angry, they had blood in their music, and they were too big to be ignored, too committed to be co-opted. They were dangerous. They had to be silenced. No wonder the assassin was never caught.”

  Sandy stared at him. He wanted to laugh. He needed to laugh. But he couldn’t. It wasn’t funny. Edan Morse’s hand dripped blood and Morse ignored it. He had passion in his voice where there should have been pain. He almost seemed to feed off the agony. To grow bigger. Stronger. His eyes were filled with slow brown fire, with absolute certainty. “And now?” Sandy said quietly.

  Morse closed his bloody hand into a red fist, slowly, deliberately. “And now the hour has come round at last,” he said in a voice like a preacher’s. “The hour of the wolf and the serpent, the great conflagration that will destroy the house of lies. The Nazgûl will fly again. We will seize the bloodtide, and in its wake we will have a new world.”

  “You’re crazy!” Sandy said with a conviction that he did not really feel. His rational mind was telling him that it was all insane, but there in Edan Morse’s presence, looking at that pulsing red-stained fist, the world did not seem rational at all, and Morse seemed very plausible.

  “No,” Morse said. “The forces are aligned. Everything is come to place. Listen to the music.”

  “I’ve talked to the Nazgûl,” Sandy said fervently. “All three of them. Even if all this crap was true, they’ll never play together again. Oh, Maggio wants to, sure, but not Slozewski, not Faxon.”

  “You don’t understand the situation quite so well as you think you do,” Morse replied, his voice calmer now. He didn’t even look at Sandy. He was staring at his bleeding hand, as if he found it vastly and endlessly fascinating. “Take Slozewski. You know about his fire. Consider the implications. His business is gone. He was underinsured and cannot rebuild. He is being sued for large sums of money he does not have. He will play when the time comes.”

  And then Sandy understood at last. “You weren’t trying to kill him!” he blurted. “You waited until he left with me, and then you burned it down! To make him…to get him to…”

  “You have my word, as one brother to another, as companions in the revolution—I had nothing to do with that fire.” Morse reached into a pocket with his right hand, shook out a handkerchief, and wrapped it around his left to stay the flow of blood. “The fire was inevitable, Sandy. The fire was part of the pattern, the pattern the Nazgûl themselves foresaw. It was prophesied. Forces greater than any of us are at work.”

  Sandy didn’t listen. “What are you going to do to Faxon? Kidnap one of his kids?”

  “You don’t understand. You’re being thickheaded. Faxon will come around in turn. He must. It has been promised. The hour has come round at last, and everything will fall into place. Listen to the music.”

  Sandy was suddenly, furiously angry. He couldn’t stand any more of this. He stood up. “What the fuck are you talking about?” he yelled. “Faxon wants nothing to do …Faxon is past…” But even as he fumbled for words, he remembered that slow balloon ride over Albuquerque, and Tracy’s words in the truck afterward, and his denial rang hollow. “Wait a minute,” he said. “What the fuck difference does Faxon make? You’re nuts and I’m nuts for sitting here listening to you. So what if you get Faxon and Slozewski? That’s only three out of four. And that fourth dude is going to be real fucking hard to convince.” Sandy was shouting now, as if the volume of his denial lent weight and truth to it. “Strain your little memory for a sec, and you may be able to recall that Patrick Henry Hobbins died in 1971. He got half his head blown away by a high-powered rifle, and he never did sing worth a shit after that. How do you figure on getting around that?”

  Edan Morse was astoundingly calm. “Death is not always so formidable an obstacle as you might imagine,” he said. He rose and walked quickly around his desk and over to the door. He opened it, turned, and beckoned Sandy with a wave of his maimed hand. The handkerchief had turned red. Numbly Sandy walked to the door.

  In the living room, Ananda sat on a couch talking to a short, slim man in denim whose back was to Sandy. “Pat?” Edan Morse said.

  Patrick Henry Hobbins turned, got up off the couch, looked at each of them in turn, and said, “Yeah?”

  THIRTEEN

  And I come back to find the stars misplaced/

  And the smell of a world that has burned

  A noise, a soft footfall, and suddenly Sandy was awake, his heart pounding. He was naked and cold under a thin sheet on a wide king-size bed. The room was strange to him. He peered through the dimness at a fireplace, wood-paneled walls, smelled the salt of the sea, and felt dizzy and disoriented. Then he rose unsteadily and pulled back the heavy curtain beside the bed. Pale chilly light flooded the room. Beyond a pair of sliding glass doors was a patio deck and a gray, cold beach, wisps of fog curling around the deck railing and lying heavily on the sea.

  Then Sandy remembered, vaguely. He was in the guest room of Edan Morse’s beach house. Yes. But how…?
>
  While he stood there, squinting and frowning, the door behind him opened and Ananda came walking in. “Morning,” she said cheerfully. “Thought I heard you moving around. We’ve got coffee and fresh orange juice, and I make the meanest waffle you ever tasted. Learned at Mommy’s knee. Want to try one?” She was wearing a white tee shirt and the bottom half of a blue bikini. She looked as though she’d come straight from a morning swim. Her hair was wrapped up in a fluffy brown towel, and the tee shirt was sopping wet and clinging to her, emphasizing those incredible breasts. Her nipples were large and hard.

  Sandy stood looking at her and realized that her nipples weren’t the only things that were large and hard. He was suddenly very conscious of his nudity. He turned away from her slightly, trying to keep his cool. “Uh,” he said eloquently. “Good morning.”

  Ananda grinned and walked over to him, her small bare feet leaving wet footprints on the parquet floor. “Hey,” she said, “why so shy?” She caught him under the chin and gently turned his face toward hers. “I saw it all last night, right?” Her mouth was slightly open and she did that little thing with her tongue, flicking it across her lower lip. “Liked it, too,” she added.

  His erection throbbed, and Sandy looked from her to the bed and back again. “You mean you…I… us?”

  Ananda gave him a mock scowl. “You don’t remember? I’m hurt. I thought I was better than that.” She kissed him lightly. “Well, we’ll just have to try it again, I guess. And again and again and again until I get it right. I is a greedy lil’ girl, massa.”

  “Jesus,” Sandy muttered. He walked back across the door, sat on the edge of the bed, and cradled his head in his hands. “I don’t remember anything. Well, hardly anything.” He glanced up at her; she was standing there, one hip cocked, smiling fondly at him with vast amusement in her eyes. “What happened last night?” he asked her. “I mean, besides you and me. Us. You know.”

  “I know you need that coffee,” Ananda said, “and that waffle, too. Why don’t you take a shower while I whip ’em up? There’s a couple of robes in the wardrobe. All different sizes. You should be able to find one that fits.” She turned on her heel and pattered out. He stared at her trim curved ass as she left, and groaned.

  The shower helped. He got it good and hot at first and scrubbed himself thoroughly, then wrenched it all the way over to the cold to blast the cobwebs off his memory. He emerged shivering, with beads of water in his beard, feeling a little closer to human. In the heavy wardrobe he found a thick green robe with white peace symbols all over it, and slipped it on. It was very warm. He sat on the bed, drying his hair and trying to remember.

  Yet what he remembered most vividly were his nightmares.

  They crowded his head now, refusing to fade as dreams ought to fade with the coming of the dawn, and Sandy knew they would be with him for a long time to come.

  He had seen Sharon in the night, staring at him, her face still, her eyes cold behind her tinted glasses. As he’d watched, frost rimed over her glasses and crept up her cheeks until her whole face had turned to ice. Then it cracked and blew away.

  He remembered papers fluttering in the wind, turning and rising, away and away, paper after paper. One paper in particular, half-covered with writing, twisting as it rose up into a storm-lashed purple sky. He had watched it go with a strange bittersweet feeling.

  He heard Jared laughing at him, nastily, his great belly shaking with the force of it.

  He was with Slum, talking to Slum, looking at Slum. Except that Slum was different; the beard and the great nimbus of hair were gone and he was gaunt and hollow-cheeked, and dressed neatly in white clothes, but his smile was tentative and his blue eyes were pale and watery and full of fear. And he began to scream, very suddenly, over and over, and his thin hands clawed at the empty air in front of him.

  He dreamed of a candlelight parade he’d once marched in, walking through endless dark, windy, rain-swept streets with a small candle in his hand, holding it cupped between his fingers so the wind could not snuff the tiny flame. Others marched with him, before and behind, and they emerged in some vast field beneath a high white building on a hill. There were thousands of them, each with a candle; everywhere the flames burned, small brave stars in a sea of night, winking, shivering, held in frail cupped hands. Up above the stars in the night sky flickered like a million more candles. And then, suddenly, the stars changed. They were not candles. They were eyes. A million yellow slitted eyes. Watching. As they watched the darkness yawned, and gray faceless shapes in blue and khaki rushed in, and the candles fell and died.

  But the longest dream, and the one he recalled most vividly, was one he had dreamed before, that terrible night in Chicago. Yet this time it had been longer, more real, more detailed. In some huge dark hall, the dance went on forever. The Nazgûl were up on stage, playing the “Armageddon/ Resurrection Rag” again, but they were hideous. Gopher John was gray and horribly burned, and ash flew from him as he played. Maggio’s sneer had become satanic, and his chest crawled with maggots. Faxon’s face was serene and handsome on one side and bleeding from a hundred grisly slashes on the other. And in front Hobbins stood, twice as large as life yet somehow insubstantial. Sandy could see through him, to the back of the stage, where a naked woman had been nailed up to a great X-shaped cross. She was a thin, big-eyed child-woman, and she was screaming in anguish as blood dripped from her nipples and ran out her vagina and down her legs. Her voice was strangely familiar, but none of the dancers paid her any mind. Froggy was there, dancing with a blond and trying to feel her up. Maggie and Lark danced together, around and around. Bambi sat on the sidelines, surrounded by children, waiting for a partner. Burning men and corpses and flayed women moved through the press of dancers. And Sandy was shouting at them, warning them of the coming bloodtide, but none of them would hear.

  Ananda broke him from the grisly reverie when she returned with a tray bearing a hot, fragrant pot of black coffee, two cups, plus orange juice and waffles. The smell was heavenly, and Sandy suddenly realized that he was ravenous. “Want to go outside?” she asked him. “The sun’s burning off the fog, and it’s getting nice and warm.”

  Sandy nodded absently, got up, and opened the sliding glass doors for her. There were a white iron table and three chairs out there. Ananda set down the tray and Sandy settled into a chair. She poured him a cup of coffee, and he took a good healthy swallow of it before she even had time to serve the waffle.

  She did make good waffles. He drowned his in butter and maple syrup—real maple syrup, the one-hundred-percent kind that costs the gross national product of Ecuador—and found that after a few bites he felt much better. He looked up at her. “Did I get drunk last night, or what?” he said. “I don’t have a hangover, but I sure as hell had some weird dreams.”

  “Not dreams,” Ananda said seriously. “Visions.”

  Sandy scowled. “Visions?”

  “Don’t you remember any of it?” she asked.

  “I remember my little conference with your boss real well,” Sandy said. “He took that motherfucking knife and slashed his palm halfway to the bone and bled all over the goddamned desk. It was one hell of a memorable conversational gambit, I’ll tell you that much. It didn’t bother him, either.”

  “Edan has learned disciplines that can banish pain,” Ananda said. “He’s taught me a few of them, but I’m not as good as he is. I can will away the pain of a toothache or a bruise, but Edan can withstand anything if he chooses to.”

  Sandy could believe her. He knew damn well that the hand had more nerves than any other part of the body, except the genitals. And Morse had cut deep. A normal man would have been in agony. “But why?” Sandy demanded. “What was the point of it?”

  “For the blood,” she said in all seriousness. “He needs the blood for the visions. But not only that. He wants your help, Sandy, he wants you to understand. That gesture showed you he isn’t a fake or a liar, right?”

  “No,” Sandy said curtly. ?
??It only showed me he’s a fucking masochist, and a nut.” He took another bite out of his waffle and was washing it down with some coffee when he caught sight of a figure walking along the beach, off in the distance. A big dog followed at his heels, romping and barking. The man had his jeans rolled up to his knees to walk in the cold surf. His hair was long and white in the sun. And suddenly it all came rushing back to Sandy. He almost dropped his coffee cup. “The kid!” he said. “Hobbins!”

  Ananda smiled. “You were pretty wrought up by your talk with Edan. I heard you shouting through the wall. When the door opened you looked like you wanted to hit somebody. And then you saw Pat, and you really freaked out. I thought your eyes were going to pop out of your head.”

  The wind gusted off the sea, and Sandy shivered with cold. “Yeah? Well, I thought I was going to die! I almost shit my pants. Talk about seeing a ghost! I saw the film clips of Hobbins’ death a dozen times, saw him lying there bloody in Faxon’s arms with half his head gone and that microphone still clutched in his hand, went to his funeral, and then suddenly Morse opens the door and there he is, small as life, looking like he ain’t aged a day since West Mesa.” Sandy held his head in his hands and sighed. “You bet I was shook. Your boss shouldn’t do things like that. That kid looks enough like Pat Hobbins to be his fucking clone. If you spring him on Faxon the way you sprung him on me, you’ll give the guy a nervous breakdown.”

  Sandy was still unsteady, remembering it, but little by little the knots in his stomach untied. The kid wasn’t Hobbins, of course. That had become clear the minute he’d opened his mouth and said a few words. He looked just like Hobbins, and his voice had roughly the same timbre and tone, and even the same kind of Philadelphia accent. But the personality was totally different, obviously different. The real Patrick Henry Hobbins had had most of the traits that so often seem to come with genius and fame and vast success early in life: when Sandy had interviewed him, he had been cocksure, arrogant, loud and opinionated and often derisive. He’d had an enormous ego. But the kid was none of those things. He was soft-spoken and deferential, painfully polite, shy. Four times he had said he hoped he was good enough for the Nazgûl, and Edan Morse and Ananda had had to reassure him.