Oh my God, John thought, behind the hand he’d put up to cover his mouth. Oh my God.
“They rushed him to the hospital,” True explained. “He’s all right. Physically, that is. If you can look beyond…all that damage. But he’s gone inward. They’ve got him on suicide watch.”
Terry breathed out with a whooshing noise. Berke couldn’t look anywhere but at the floor. Ariel’s gaze went to John.
“We caught another man,” True told them. “Coming up the side of the mountain with a .22 rifle. Obviously he was intending to get in position for a shot, though I can tell you he probably would’ve shot himself first, by accident. He’s a part-time handyman and full-time…what was your term, John?…nutbag. Lives in a trailer park about forty miles north of Stone Church. His neighbors say he’s always talking about hearing voices. He’s mounted all sorts of homemade antennas up on the roof of his trailer, says he was an electronics expert in the Navy. Not verified. Anyway, his neighbors say he thinks his trailer is sitting on what he calls a ‘comm line’. Know how he described it to the police? An ‘angel line’.” True’s smile didn’t stick. “He says there must be a really important reason for the girl in that Five band to be dead, because the angels are very disturbed with her. Disturbed with the whole band, really. He says the angels are putting it out on the line everywhere, every second of every minute of the night and the day, to everyone who can hear. He says they’re getting a little…his word…frantic. Kind of like a telegraph line of the spirits, I suppose,” True said, and he shrugged. “If you believe in that. So this guy, he decides if the angels want her dead, this is a good way to show what side he’s on. If you believe in that.”
He closed his laptop.
He arranged the notepaper on the writing desk that had never seen a pen put to a letter.
Then he turned to The Five, and very clearly and as forcefully as possible without sounding—as Berke would say—‘creeped out’, he said, “I want you to tell me—right now, nothing held back—what you people have gotten yourselves involved with. Whatever it is, and it may sound strange, or…illogical, or whatever. You may not even know what kind of boundary you’ve crossed. But listen…do not hold anything back. Anyone want to speak?”
“They’re two crazy people,” Nomad said, but for one time in his life his voice was weak because he knew he was lying. He was still standing with his back against the corner, his hands up at his sides and curled into fists, ready to knock something down.
“I’ll speak,” said Ariel.
TWENTY-SIX.
From the front on the sparkling, electric-bright Sunset Boulevard the Cobra Club was a dreary brown-painted building with no windows, no sign and no evidence that it was in use except for clear plastic displays on the walls showing band posters and an ornate black gate that was locked over the entrance until eight o’clock.
Inside, at a little past midnight, the club’s stage crew had finished setting up for The Five. The place was packed and noisy. It was another black box club, the walls deepest ebony. The bar in the lounge was lit by yellow bulbs behind ceramic fixtures shaped like cobras. Behind the stage was a backdrop of a large red-eyed cobra rising from a basket, painted on black velvet. The big, silent black-and-silver JBL speakers, still cooling down from the hard harmonics of the previous band, Twenty Million Miles To Earth, promised the moving, chattering crowd a continuation of mind-blowing entertainment to go along with the three-dollar beer, the mixed drinks and the house specialty, the Cobra Cock.
Rock and roll, baby.
The particular difference on this night, of any other night of the club’s checkered and sometimes violent existence, was that everybody who wanted to come in had to stand just beyond that open black gate while two men in Cobra Club T-shirts scanned their bodies with metal detecting wands. The women had to open their handbags. Everyone and everything coming in had to be scanned. If a nipple ring or a Nefertiti piercing or a labia bead made the wands squeal, or in the case of the male a dydoe, a dolphin, an ampallang or any of the other insertions into or through the summer sausage, then it was either go let the female or male police officers stationed inside pat you down in a curtained-off room or take your metalled pride somewhere else, like the Viper Room further along the boulevard. No likee, no have to stayee.
Some left. Most stayed, because they wanted to say that not only had they been felt up by the cops, they had seen the Band That Will Not Die.
It was a hectic scene backstage. The road manager and four members of Twenty Million Miles To Earth were still moving their gear out along the narrow green-painted corridor to the stage door while being trailed and delayed by a knot of various people who wanted something. There had been a problem with the Lekolites and the techs were going over the wiring. Two of the crew were arguing with the stage manager about who had last had possession of a missing gobo, and someone had left a handcart full of coiled elecrtrical cables out where its metal edge nicked the ankles of anybody going past, like a cobra bite.
Through this confusion, Ariel moved in a hurry because she had to pee.
The several bottles of silver needle tea she’d consumed during the long afternoon and at dinner had been going right through her. It was nerves, she thought. It was from the video of Connor Addison’s attempted suicide by M&Ms and True’s story of the man who heard voices in the trailer park. It was from her own revelation of what she believed the song to be, and her belief that the girl at the well was using them to write it for reasons unknown. It was from her retelling of the dream, and her revisiting the image of Jeremy Pett vomiting forth his dark air force. It was from the interviews with the news media here at sound check, and from the guy who’d shown up with a business card saying he was the head of A&R at Manticore, and he had some great ideas for their future but since there were no longer five of them they shouldn’t be called The Five, they should be named Death Ride. It was from talking John down when he wanted to tear the guy’s head off his neck, because John was in a fragile state, and she would never have said that about him but he wore the sick and uneasy look of a little boy caught walking through a cemetery at sundown. It was from warding off other A&R people with other business cards and other great ideas, and from the radio interviews and the throngs of people who were waiting outside the radio stations with CDs to be signed and more questions to be answered.
And it was from True’s instruction, given in his very clear and forceful voice, that nothing seen or spoken about in that room at the Days Inn should be discussed with anyone outside it.
Silver needle tea in, silver needle tea out.
She got past the handcart without being bitten and she went into the bathroom.
It was small and the white-tiled floor was not the cleanest in the world, but neither were musicians. It was unisex with two stalls and a pair of urinals, one sink and a mirror. The ceiling light, a simple glass bowl, was stark and harshly unflattering, as a glance in the mirror told her. She entered the stall furthermost from the door, closed the stall door and latched it, unzipped her jeans, pulled down her lace-edged panties, sat down on the toilet and went “Ahhhhhh.” She had a sudden fright and looked to make sure there was paper. About half a roll, so she was okay.
As she relieved herself of the silver needle pressure, she worked her hands, moving her fingers back and forth, getting them ready for the guitar.
There was always the guitar. And the wonderful thing was that it always waited for her.
She had to get all this off her mind and focus on the show. That’s what it came down to, no matter what. Focus on one performance at a time. Actually, it was focus on one song at a time. No, down to even smaller increments than that. One bar at a time…one note. That was how you did it, when you were troubled or anxious or scared. One note after another, and then suddenly you were free.
What was really bothering her, apart from Jeremy Pett and Connor Addison and the idea that the spirit line was lit up and the angels were very disturbed with her and her bandmates, frantic ev
en in their disturbance, was that she hoped she could hold her next pee until Berke’s drum solo.
She heard the bathroom door open and close.
She heard the lock on that door turn.
She heard the click of a dirty switch, and the light went dark.
“Hi, I’m in here!” she called out.
No one answered.
“Hello! I’m in here!”
She heard someone walking across the tiles. The squeak of sneakers.
“Please turn the light back on!” Ariel said, and she fumbled to find paper. The roll moved on its cylinder with a metallic squeal.
Music began.
It was a thump…pathump…thump…pathump. Low bass beat, low-fi, scratchy. Maybe from a voice recorder?
Ariel blotted herself, grasped her panties and jeans and stood up. She wriggled her bottoms back on. She was about to ask whoever this was to stop playing around when the gasping, gutteral echo-enhanced male vocal kicked in, backed by a clattery rhythm of tambourine, cabasa, and drumsticks being cracked together.
“When I come ta kill ya,
I’ll come right through ya door.
I’ll bring my best man and my little midget whore.
We’ll cut off ya face, won’t it be groovy,
then we’ll sit down and watch a shemale porn movie.
That’s right…that’s right…that’s right…that’s right.”
“Hey, stop it!” Ariel said. She heard her voice quaver. “Turn the light back on!”
“When I come ta kill ya,
I think I’ll eat ya brain,
then I’ll stand with my bloody teeth out in da rain.
I’ll curse da sky above and da fool who made me,
then I’ll go kill another one, or two, or three.
That’s right…that’s right…that’s right…that’s—”
The music abruptly stopped.
He came right through the door.
It burst open in her face, propelled by a single savage kick. The door hit her and knocked her back over the toilet, she thought her nose had been smashed and her lips split open, and before she could do anything but make a soft bleat of terror he was upon her. She put her arms up for protection, as if from a whirling mass of crows coming at her through the dark. A hand flailed for her and caught her hair. A fist crashed into the side of her head. She saw stars and lightning bolts and tasted blood. Her knees gave way, and she felt something sticky being wrapped around her mouth. Around her head. Catching in her hair. Around and around and around.
She realized it smelled like Band-Aids.
He grabbed her by the neck and threw her, and she skidded out in the dark on the dirty tiles. She was on her stomach, she tried to get her knees under herself and stand up, but her arms were wrenched behind her to their breaking point. She screamed beneath the tape that sealed her mouth. He had her arms, and he was wrapping the tape around her wrists, binding them together.
He was very fast and he was very strong and he had done this before.
He grasped her jeans and yanked them down, scraping her flesh with his fingernails.
Then he started pulling off her panties.
Dazed, bleeding, her mind full of cold shock, she thought someone was going to come save her. Someone was going to put a stop to this. It was ridiculous, is what it was. She had a show to do. One note after another, and then suddenly you were free.
She felt his hard penis, pressing against her vagina from behind.
No, she said but her mouth would not repeat it. No.
His grasped her hair with both hands, and he began to push himself in.
No one was going to save her. She realized that, finally and fully. She could lie here and be raped waiting for the rescuer who would not arrive, or she could fight until this man killed her.
Ariel twisted her body away from him. He wrenched back on her hair and kept driving in. She twisted once more, and she heard him say, “You fuckin’ bitch,” and then he hit her again, an open-handed, disdainful slap swung against the right side of her head just above the ear. Hard harmonics buzzed in her brain. Tears were hot in her eyes, they were spilling over down her cheeks, but when he tried to push into her a third time she arched her body backward and flung her head up as hard as she could and the back of her skull hit something—collarbone, shoulder, chin, something—and his weight was suddenly off her.
She pushed forward, feet and knees, across the floor.
“You dirty little fuck,” he said from the dark. “You little shit.”
She heard the squeak of his sneakers, coming after her. She turned over, the weight on her trapped arms causing her to gasp with agony behind the tape, and she kicked out with both feet toward the sound.
Her right shoe hit something solid. A shin? A knee?
“Fuck,” he said quietly, a painful sound. “You’re fuckin’ dead.”
She recognized that voice, only now it was a gutteral growl dripping with snide menace. It was the voice of a thousand horrorcore and death rap songs. She kicked at him again but found nothing. He was coming at her from the side; she thought she could see the smear of his movement. She scrabbled backward and clunked her head against what felt like a metal pipe. She was up under the sink. A shoe grazed her ankle. She kicked at it and missed. She was pulling her leg back when his fingers caught her foot. He jerked her out from her little unsafe haven and dragged her across the floor, and she kicked out with her other foot, swung it wide and hard, missed on the first swing but tried again with the heel, and this time she hit bone and he made a hissing noise but held on tight. His shoe came down into her crotch and started pushing there as he wrenched at her leg, and she thought he was trying to tear away the part of her that interested him and take it home to his aunt’s basement.
Someone was at the door. Ariel heard the knob being worked.
“Ariel!” It was Berke. “We’re on! Let’s go!”
He released her.
“Ariel?” The knob was turned back and forth. “You okay?”
Ariel got up on her knees, facing the door. She tried to scream, tried as hard as she could. The sound came out as a muffled moan, and then he was down on the floor with her, one arm snaking around her throat from behind and his face buried in her hair. He was breathing raggedly into her ear. As he breathed, the pressure of his arm steadily tightened.
“Open up!” said Berke.
Ariel felt pressure building in her head. Felt it begin to push her eyes out of their sockets. His arm was crushing her windpipe.
The doorknob rattled once more, back and forth.
And then Berke was gone.
Outside in the hall, Berke was about to go back and get John. She thought Ariel must be sick, and what were they going to do?
Then she saw a camera tripod leaning against the wall next to the door. It was a pitiful thing. One leg of it was wrapped with duct tape. On the floor beside it was a black camera bag. She unzipped it. The video camera was in there. It was a nice one, it said ten-point-six megapixels on the side. Who would leave something like this sitting around? With a light meter in there, and a battery pack, extra lenses, filters, the works. Ripe for the stealing.
She knew tech people swore by it and used it in all sorts of situations, but, she wondered, who really needed to carry around four fucking rolls of duct tape?
In the bathroom, behind the locked door, he was choking Ariel to death.
She tried to fight him. She tried to twist, to arch her back, to thrash him off, to strike with a backwards blow of her head. But he had her, and he breathed in her ear as he was killing her, and his free hand was working on himself, fast fast fast, and he started to make the noise that men make when they have mistaken possession for love and pornography for sex, a high keening whimper and to the world an announcement of, “Oh yeah, I’m gonna cum, oh yeah I’m gonna—”
The bathroom door blew off its hinges.
Berke hurtled through, shoulder-first.
The light that streamed in
fell upon the swollen-eyed face of DJ Talk It Up, his lips wet with saliva and his hair sticking up in spikes stiffened with product. He was wearing a dark brown hoodie, the jacket twisted on his torso and the hood lying down across his shoulder. Tonight he had left his rings at home, because he’d wanted to dress down.
Berke saw the duct tape over Ariel’s mouth, saw the terror in her eyes and the guy’s arm squeezing her throat. She saw blood streaming from both of Ariel’s nostrils, making a mess of her pretty lavender-colored blouse with the puffy sleeves that Berke herself would never have been caught dead in.
Berke thought she was going to have to kill him. She was ready.
He shuddered, came to himself and his current predicament with a jolt, and he let Ariel go. He pushed her aside and sprang up, like a stocky panther searching for escape. The zipper of his jeans was open. Before Berke could think to shout for help, DJ Talk It Up charged her and swung a fist at her face, but Berke saw it coming and warded it off with one arm while the other punched five into the fool’s bulbous nose.
She gave it all she had, and she had one hell of a lot to give.
His nose exploded like a blood balloon. But that didn’t stop him, he was enraged and desperate and so he kept flailing at her, grabbing at her hair, her breasts, trying to claw her eyes out.
Fucker fights like a girl, Berke thought just before she drove a knee right up into his balls.
Maybe that did hurt him, from the way he whined, but he was running on nerves and adrenaline and he was not going to be stopped by a bagful of smashed nuts. His face might have gone ghost-white, but he still wanted out. He clawed his way past Berke and through the door, tearing himself out of his jacket as Berke grabbed hold of the hood, and then in his flagging white T-shirt stained with tonight’s Hungry Man dinner he started to limp to the left but there were still people who’d gotten backstage passes from Twenty Million Miles To Earth in the corridor, jamming things up, and now they were gaping at him and Berke was shouting, “Stop him! Stop him!”