The Armageddon Rag

  “I think we were all feeling a little blurred-out,” Sandy said, but he was thinking that the kid had absolutely no idea what had happened to him out there. The dog knew, but not the master. “What now?”

  “The tour,” Richmond said, beaming.

  “Tour?”

  “Sure. Hasn’t Mister Morse told you yet? He’s been setting it all up. A big national tour, coast-to-coast. Then maybe we’ll cut a new album, he says, but the tour first, to get people excited again.”

  “Of course,” Sandy said. “A national tour. Yeah, sure. You’ll be part of it, of course.”

  Richmond seemed puzzled. “Well, yeah, sure. I mean, why not?”

  “Nothing,” Sandy said, “nothing at all.” He smiled weakly. “I’ve had too much vodka, I think. Need some fresh air. ’Scuse me.” He turned away abruptly and headed for the door. When he glanced back over his shoulder, Richmond was still standing there, looking baffled.

  He groped down a hall, found a men’s room, splashed some water on his face. It made him feel a little less dizzy, but he did want some air, he thought. He went out the back door. One of the roadies was there, the man with the silver mirrored shades. He stared at Sandy and said not a word. Balrog was there too, tied up just outside the door. He barked, and Sandy patted his head before making his way to the street.

  A few people still lingered in front of the auditorium, and there was light traffic on the sidewalk. Sandy ignored it, leaned back against the wall, savoring the cool night air. It was what Richmond wanted, he thought to himself. The kid had lived his life wanting nothing so much as to be Pat Hobbins, and now he was going to get—

  “Sandy?” said a small, scared voice at his elbow.

  He turned, stared, felt a strange small sense of disorientation, of déjà vu. The teenaged girl standing there looking at him seemed oddly familiar, but in his half-drunk haze he couldn’t place her. She was short and thin, flatchested under a Nazgûl tee shirt at least three sizes too large for her. Her hand pulled at his sleeve, and there were rings on every one of her fingers. Her face was streaked with green where her eye makeup had run, and the big brown eyes looked as though they were going to start spilling tears again at any moment. “I know you,” Sandy said.

  She smiled weakly. “I’m glad you remember. I’m Francie.”

  “Francie?” Sandy said. Then it came back to him. Maggio and the Come On Inn. “Sure,” he said. “You were with Rick.” But there was something wrong, he thought doggedly. He remembered her all right, remembered her from that night, from that first interview with Maggio, but that wasn’t it, or at least that wasn’t all of it. He knew her from somewhere else as well, recognized her from… from where?

  “I used to be Rick’s old lady,” Francie said. “I want to see him, Sandy. I want to see him so bad. He never even sent me tickets or nothin’ and they wouldn’t let me in, even though I tried to tell ’em who I was.” Her voice was plaintive. “We lived together for almost two years, and he just up and left and he didn’t even write or phone or send tickets. I was sure he was goin’ to call when he got back to Chicago, you know? Bring me to the show and all. But he didn’t.”

  Sandy was still trying to figure out where he had seen her besides the Come On Inn, but nothing was coming. “I’m sorry,” he said. “They’ve all been very busy. Maybe he just forgot.”

  “Can you get me in to see Rick?” she asked hopefully. “Or at least tell him I’m here? Please? I need to see him bad, Sandy. I love him. He’s my old man, you know?”

  Sandy thought of Maggio inside, surrounded by his groupies. He knew damn well that the last thing in the world the guitarist would want right now would be for his old skinny girlfriend to pop up, teary and full of reproaches. “Look,” Sandy said, “I don’t think…I mean, the show just ended, everybody’s a little flaky right now, drunk and tired and crazy. I don’t think this would be a good time, but I tell you what. We’ll be in Chicago for another day or so, at least. You come by the hotel tomorrow morning and I’ll take you in to see Rick, OK?”

  “Please,” Francie repeated, her voice pleading. “I need to see him now. I don’t care if he’s with somebody else, Sandy. It don’t bother me none. I know he is. Rick is like that, you know? He don’t mean nothing bad by it, it’s just the way he is, and he needs girls. I’m used to it. Really. He used to have me fix him up with my girlfriends, when I could. He liked three-ways, you know?” She forced a smile. “It won’t hurt me any. I just got to see him. Please.”

  Sandy still wasn’t sure whether he could believe her, but she sounded so pathetic, and Maggio had treated her so damned shabbily, both at the Come On Inn and now, that he found himself getting angry on her behalf. “I told you once that you were more than he deserves,” he said. “You are.”

  “I just want to take care of him. He’s not a bad guy, he just needs somebody to take care of him. Will you help me?”

  “Yeah,” Sandy said. He took her hand. “Come with me. We’ll go in the back way.” The dude with the mirror shades might try to keep her out, but with Sandy along he had damn well better not try too hard.

  “Thank you,” Francie said as they walked around back. She squeezed Sandy’s hand.

  It was very dark by the back door. Very dark and very quiet. The roadie was gone. “Fuck,” Sandy said. “The door’s locked.” He made a fist and pounded. “Open up in there!” he yelled.

  No one answered. Finally, after a good three minutes of knocking, Sandy said, “I don’t think they can hear us over that damned party. Screw it. We’ll have to go back around front.” He turned away in disgust and started down the alley, Francie following.

  Sandy had taken four steps when his boot came down on something wet, the heel skidded out from under him, and he flailed and went down hard, scraping his hand and ripping the hell out of the seat of his jeans. He managed to land in some garbage too. It was wet and warm and there were lots of flies. “God damn!” Sandy said unsteadily. “What the hell is…” He groped, felt fur and warm wetness between his fingers, sucked in his breath, struggled to his feet.

  Francie made a small whimpery sound and backed off. “Blood,” she said.

  Sandy looked down and felt sick. He wanted to vomit. He could feel it rising in his throat, gagging him; he fought to keep it down. Waves of dizziness washed over him. He forced himself to kneel and look at it close up.

  Blood. Lots of blood. Lying there near the garbage cans, covered with flies and still warm, was Balrog. Or what remained of Balrog. The dog’s throat had been cut open, and he was lying in a spreading pool of his own blood.

  Sandy reached out a tentative hand to touch the dog’s head, the fly-covered staring blind eyes. The head moved easily, at an impossible angle. A huge raw wet mouth opened in his neck, and fresh blood washed out. Francie screamed.

  Whoever had done this was strong, Sandy thought numbly. Had severed neck muscles, tendons, and flesh in a single clean stroke, slicing right down to the bone, almost removing the dog’s head. Francie screamed again, more loudly.

  Sandy got to his feet, dizzy. Francie was sucking in breath between screams and then screaming again. Someone was running down the alley. Francie pressed back against the bricks, curled up small, her ring-covered hands in front of her face. Screaming. Screaming. She had a high thin scream, full of shock and almost unthinkable pain, and as she screamed it again and again, Sandy found himself regarding her with a sudden mounting horror that dwarfed what he had felt for the poor mutilated dog. He recognized that scream. He knew that goddamned scream. And now he knew why Francie had seemed so eerily familiar.

  He had met her at the Come On Inn, all right.

  But he had seen her again after that, not once but several times. He had seen her and he had heard her screaming. He had seen her in his dreams, at a concert, naked and bleeding and nailed to a great X-shaped cross.

  TWENTY-TWO

  When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead/

  And the white knight’s talking backwa
rds

  And next… and next… Sandy didn’t remember. He didn’t remember stumbling away from the dog’s remains, didn’t remember being sick, didn’t remember the door opening and all the people rushing out. Everything was a haze of blood and vodka. Francie saw Maggio stumble out into the night and she ran to him, crying, and threw her arms around him. He looked perplexed at first. Then he smiled, oddly, almost kindly, and returned her embrace. There was shouting, shoving, questions and screams. A policeman was barking orders; no one was paying attention. Sandy found he could not take it. He started to back off down the alley, away from the noise, away from the blood. Larry Richmond emerged, and the crowd made way for him. When Richmond saw Balrog, he went hysterical. Someone was holding him and shaking him when Sandy turned his back on it and moved off down the street. He began to trot, only half-aware of his destination.

  Dark streets, still crowded. His pants were torn, his palm was scraped, and his hands were covered with blood. His shirt-front was damp with spatters of orange juice and vodka that he’d brought back up. People shied away from him when they saw him coming. Sandy hardly noticed. He moved faster.

  He heard footsteps on the sidewalk behind him, the light steps of someone running. Sudden irrational fear overwhelmed him, and he bolted, trying to get away, running, running. She caught him anyway. She was faster than he was. She caught him by the shoulder and spun him around and he saw that it was Ananda, it was only Ananda. He trembled and grabbed her and pulled her as hard as he could, holding her, clinging to her, his anchor in an ocean of blood and darkness. She stroked his hair. “Easy,” she said, “easy, love. It’s all right. It’s all right.”

  Sandy pushed away from her. “No,” he said. “No, it’s not. They killed the dog. Cut its throat. And they’re going to kill her, too.”

  “Who?”

  “Francie,” he said. “Maggio’s old lady. Francie. They’re going to nail her up, and…” He couldn’t go on.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ananda said. “Where are you running to?”

  “I don’t know,” Sandy said. But he did. Suddenly he knew just where he had been going. “I’m going to see Morse. I’m going to talk to Morse.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Ananda told him, and her hand was in his, cool and firm, its ridge of callus and short-clipped nails very familiar to him now. She paid no attention to the blood on his hand, took no notice of his trembling. She walked beside him, and her very presence seemed to drive away the shadows.

  It was late. Sandy knew it was late. Gort opened the door to Edan Morse’s suite, looked at them, and said, “It’s late.”

  Sandy wanted to tell him to fuck off, but the words got caught in his throat and it was Ananda who spoke. “Wake him up,” she said crisply. “It’s important.”

  Gort studied Sandy’s torn, soiled clothing, grunted, and ushered them in. “Wait,” he said in that deep, threatening voice. He pointed them at a couch and left for a bedroom.

  Edan Morse emerged looking as wretched as Sandy felt. It had been several weeks since Sandy had seen him; the change was astonishing. Morse’s face was drawn and bloodless, his tan had faded, and his dimples were no longer in evidence, covered by a growth of scraggly brown beard. His eyes had that fanatical gleam to them, but they were tired as well, surrounded by the heavy dark circles of a man who hadn’t been sleeping well. He was dressed in a black satin robe. “What is it?” he demanded as he sat down in the big chair facing the couch.

  Sandy held out his hands. “I… the dog.” His voice was thick. “They butchered the dog. Richmond’s dog.”

  Morse feigned astonishment. “You know anything about this, ’Nanda?”

  “Mirrors was out watching the dog. He went inside for a couple minutes to bum some cigarettes. Somebody did the job while he was gone.”

  “Gort,” Sandy said suddenly, glaring at the big man.

  “Hey, fuck that shit,” Gort grumbled. “I been here with Edan for hours. Hell, if I wanted to kill the dog I could of done it at the party, when the fucker went nuts.”

  “It’s wrong,” Sandy blurted. He pushed his hair back out of his eyes. “The dog, Francie, what happened tonight at the concert…it’s all, I don’t know… wrong. Morse, I’m quitting. I want out.”

  “Why?”

  That was a question Sandy couldn’t answer. He hadn’t come here intending to say what he had just said; he wasn’t sure why he had come here. He wasn’t very sure of anything. His head was swimming. Morse’s features seemed to blur, as if they were going in and out of focus. “The blood,” Sandy said. “All the blood.”

  Ananda reached over and put a hand on his knee. “He’s drunk, Edan,” she said. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

  “No,” Sandy insisted. “I do …it’s just…I can’t take it anymore. All the blood. I don’t belong here.”

  “Oh?” Morse said coldly. “Where do you belong, then?”

  Where did he belong? Where indeed? If not with Morse and the Nazgûl, if not with Ananda, then where? It was all gone. Maggie and Sharon and all the women in between, the Hedgehog, his books, his agent, his house. All gone. And no one cared anymore, about him, them, anything. Of course he belonged here. There was nowhere else for him. “Edan, I’m afraid,” Sandy heard himself say. “I don’t understand what’s going down; it makes no sense, but it scares me. And all the blood… Lynch, the Gopher Hole, the dog…it’s not worth it.”

  “I don’t like blood any more than you do,” Morse said. “But there is a price to be paid here. I pay as much of it as I can myself.” He held out his palm, crisscrossed with white scars, deep and terrible scars. “Maybe not enough. I don’t know. I try. There has never been a truly bloodless revolution. The price has to be paid.”

  “To what?” Sandy said hoarsely. “Who killed the dog, dammit? Who ripped out Lynch’s heart?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “WHO?” Sandy screamed. “Or what? That’s the right question, isn’t it? What, not who! Some… thing… some force. I can’t believe it, but it’s true, isn’t it?”

  “You can’t believe it, and that’s your problem. The time for rationality has passed. You know that. You’ve heard the music. Why do you keep fighting it? This is the last cut on the first side. This is the—”

  “—prelude to madness,” Sandy finished for him. “Yeah, I get it. The dead man picked up his hand tonight, didn’t he?”

  Edan Morse smiled and said nothing.

  Sandy felt a terrible coldness in the room. One of the windows behind Morse was open, and the curtains were stirring slightly in the wind, but the warm June breeze had suddenly become frigid. Out there in the night sky, above the black towers with their jeweled lights, were stars like a million yellow eyes. They would never look away. Sandy shivered, and he knew somewhere, deep within him, that Morse’s master was with them now, called up by the music and the blood and the dying, staring at him now. “Close the window,” he said.

  “Do it, Gort,” Morse snapped. As the big man went to obey, Morse leaned forward. “You don’t approve,” he said.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Sandy said.

  “Oh, but I do. We’ve tried it all before, you and I, haven’t we? You tried elections, and newspapers, and persuasion, and compromise. I tried assassinations and riots and violence. None of it worked, did it? This is all that’s left, Blair. This is our last chance.”

  “It’s not worth it.”

  Morse stared at him, but it was Ananda who answered. She reached over and touched Sandy’s face and turned it to face her own. “You’re wrong,” she said.

  “No—” he began.

  “Yes,” she said harshly. “Listen to me. Not worth it? Sandy, some lunatic kills a dog, and you say it’s not worth it? A dog? Look around you. Look at the way the world is going. We have a raging nuclear arms race that could turn into a holocaust at any moment. We got the Ayatollah and we got Falwell and we used to have Jim Jones, and they’re really a
ll the same, right? We got a fucking government that doesn’t give a shit about poverty and hunger or human misery. Brushfire wars everywhere, and we’re running out of resources, running out of energy, running out of hope. We’re poisoning the air, the water, and the earth. We got genocide in the Middle East, racism and sexism at home, xenophobia and hatred on all sides. We face a future of grinding poverty, economic chaos, and iron repression in a new fascist police state, and we don’t even have the strength to oppose it, because we’ve lost our courage, we’ve turned cynical and selfish. We’re beaten, we’re lost, and we’re damned. We have got to change things. We have got to get back what we lost, and this is the only way to do it—tear down the whole rotting, stinking system and start over again, smarter and better. It’s worth it. I’d kill every fucking dog in the whole fucking world if that was what it took, and it’d still be worth it!” Her face was flushed and impassioned. The big dark eyes, so often playful, were angry now. The shining black hair that Sandy liked to stroke swayed as she shook her head in fury. She was breathing hard, and under her pale blue sweater, her breasts rose and fell with each breath. The wry, ironic smile was gone, replaced by a tight-lipped defiance, and the teasing way she so often held her head now seemed somehow like a challenge. Sandy had a sudden frightening feeling that he didn’t really know her at all. But she was all he had left, and he knew, dully, amid his confusion, that if he said the wrong thing now, Ananda too would retreat from him forever.

  “I just…” He could not find the words, did not know what they should be. She was right of course, everything she said was true, and yet, and yet…

  “We need you, Sandy,” Ananda said with sudden gentleness. She touched him lightly on the arm. “I need you.”