“But why?” Jon-Tom wanted to know. “What’s he after? What’s his purpose in doing all this?”
Gathers’s long locks shook as he replied helplessly, “How should I know? You’d have to ask him.”
“At first we thought he wanted to steal it as some kind of, like, you know, revenge,” Hill speculated. “Now we think there’s more to it than that.”
“Yeah,” agreed Gathers. “Maybe he thinks that if he steals all the music everywhere, then people won’t have any choice except to listen to him. And believe me, dudes, until you’ve heard Hieronymus Digbee Hinckel try to sing, a worse fate you can’t imagine.”
“Can’t imagine,” echoed Zimmerman.
“Righty-ho!” barked Mudge briskly. “We’ll soon put a stop to this nonsense.” He clapped Jon-Tom on the back. “Me mate, ’ere, ’e’s not only a great spellsinger, ’e is, ’e’s also a great… well, a bloomin’ good musician.”
“You’re just bubbling over with compliments on this trip, aren’t you?” Jon-Tom responded.
Mudge blinked innocently. “Why, mate, that’s me natural nature, don’t you know?”
“Won’t do any good.” Gathers sounded regretful. “I don’t care how fine you are, man. Hinckel, he’s gotten stronger every day. Go up there and he’ll steal your music, too. Suck it right out of that funny-lookin’ guitar you’ve got hanging against your back. Leave you standin’ there lookin’ stupid and mumbling to yourself.”
“That’s what he did to you?” Jon-Tom inquired.
Zimmerman nodded miserably. “Flat out. We can’t even sing a cappella. It just comes out like a kind of croak, like.”
Gathers tapped the blade of his homemade tomahawk in the flat of an open palm. “We’ve been playin’ it real cool, waitin’ and tryin’ to bide our time so’s we can get close to him. But while Hinckel can’t sing worth shit, he ain’t stupid, neither. He watches his ass all the time.”
“We’re not violent guys,” Hill put in. “Offstage we’re pretty laid back. But this is different. Hinckel’s dangerous and he’s gotta be stopped.” He let his gaze rise toward the cloud-swathed crags. “Only problem is, like, he ain’t alone. If he was, then the three of us would just hike up there and pound him.”
“Pound him,” echoed Zimmerman. “But he’s got help.”
“’Elp?” Mudge was suddenly suspicious. “Wot kind o’ ’elp?”
“You try to stop him and you’ll see,” said Gathers meaningfully. “It’s worse than anything you can imagine.”
“Worse than anything you’ve ever seen,” agreed Hill “Or heard.”
“I’ve seen and heard quite a bit.” Jon-Tom remained calm. “And I’ve a pretty radical imagination.” He nodded in the direction of the drifting, softly ringing chord cloud. “This bit of music, for example. I wonder if it’s some that this Hinckel character stole but neglected to fully entrap. It’s stronger music than most. I wonder if it escaped and came looking for help for its fellow notes. Chords support one another all the time.”
“He ain’t, like, perfect.” Zimmerman chose his words carefully. “Powerful, yeah, but not like, you know, omnipotent. Not yet. But if anybody’s gonna stop him, it better be soon.”
“You guys look like grunge,” Jon-Tom remarked, “but you don’t talk like it.”
“Actually, you look like ’ell,” Mudge added, but under his breath.
“Hey, dude, just because we like our music heavy doesn’t mean we ain’t got brains, like,” insisted Gathers.
“Speak for yourself.” Hill was tapping out a beat on a flat rock with a couple of twigs he’d scavenged. Even this muted effort saw him eyeing the crest of the mountain nervously. “I like goin’ around brainless.”
“All right, some of us, then,” Gathers corrected himself irritably. “What’s your story, man?”
Jon-Tom remembered, “It was a long time ago. I was at college, trying to decide whether to stay with my music or finish law school.”
“Tough decision, dude.” Zimmerman sniggered. “Like, not.”
“Think so? You don’t know my family.”
“Hey, don’t whine to me about your ancestry, man,” exclaimed Gathers sharply. “My family’s from freakin’ Scarsdale. I mean, it’s not like they’ve disowned me, but when I go home and there’s somebody visitin’, I have to, like, use the servants’ entrance, you know? My parents’ friends think I’m somebody who’s there to pick up the garbage.”
“My family thinks I am the garbage,” Zimmerman muttered.
“I was hoping that if the group hit big …” Gathers continued, “but now …” His voice trailed away and Jon-Tom realized that underneath the facade of cool they were really scared. Scared and lonely, not much more than a bunch of kids, all music and attitude. It was a condition he could empathize with. And now they didn’t even have a tune to comfort them.
“I’ll get your music back,” he heard himself saying vehemently. “I’m sure it’s up there with the rest of it.”
“You go up there, you watch yourself, man,” Hill warned him. “Hinckel may look like a nerd and sound like a toilet, but he’s strong now. Real strong.”
“We’ve ’andled worse before, ain’t we, mate?” Mudge fingered the hilt of his sword. “You distract ’im with your singin’ an’ maybe I’ll ’ave a chance to slit ’is bloomin’ throat a little. Bleedin’ difficult to make magic with ’alf a foot o’ steel stickin’ out o’ your neck.”
“This help he’s acquired.” Jon-Tom turned back to Gathers. “You can’t describe it any better?”
The guitarist made a face. “Wouldn’t do no good. It, like, changes according to his whim. Let’s just say he ain’t lonely up there. The forces he’s gathered to him are, like, simpatico, you know?”
“And the worst of it is,” Hill added, “he keeps singing to himself. All the time. If it’s a real clear day and the wind is wrong, you can’t not hear him.” He eyed the swirling, angry clouds. “Be grateful for the thunder.”
“Deuced odd sort o’ thunder,” Mudge observed. “Plenty o’ noise, but no lightnin’.”
Zimmerman speculated freely. “My own personal take on the storms is that his singing’s so bad it generates an elemental migraine, and this is, like, you know, nature’s way of protesting.”
“To hear him is to hate him,” added Hill. “That’s our slogan, anyway. We’re workin’ on some songs about it. Maybe we can’t make any music, but he can’t stop us from thinking up lyrics.”
Gathers nodded enthusiastically. “We’ve had a lot of time here. We’ve put together a whole double album.” He looked wistful. “It’d sound great … if we could just get home.” Hill sat up suddenly. “Hey, dudes, your pet harmony’s goin’ apeshit!”
Scintillating and sparkling, ringing and chiming, the chord cloud was soaring up the slope, pausing to spin brilliantly on its axis, then returning. As they looked on, it repeated the sequence again and again.
“It gets impatient.” Jon-Tom looked down at Mudge. “We’ve done enough talking. I guess if we’re going to do this we’d better get on with it.”
“Oi, for once I’m with you, mate.” The otter’s expression was resolute. “Imagine a world without music. Wot would a chap get drunk to? Wot would ’e dance to? Wot would ’e make …”
“Let’s go. And no humming.” Jon-Tom started after the eager, misty music. After a couple of steps he looked back. “Will you come with us? You guys have as big a stake in the outcome as anybody.”
The band members exchanged a glance. Then Hill spoke for all of them. “What the hell. He can’t do much more to us than he’s done already.”
“Damn straight,” agreed Splitz Zimmerman.
Gathers advanced until he was standing alongside the spellsinger. “We’ll come with you as far as we can. If we can help we will, but don’t count on us. Hinckel, he knows us too well.” He headed upslope. “I only hope we catch him in one of his quiet moods.”
“I’ve heard bad singing before,” Jon-Tom assured him as he st
epped carefully over a fallen, rotting palm trunk.
The guitarist looked back at him. “No, you haven’t, spellsinger dude. No, you haven’t.”
Chapter 22
THE TERRAIN GREW progressively steeper and more rugged. Though because of the otter’s short legs there were places where they had to assist Mudge, they were never in any danger of falling. Surmounting even the most difficult rock face called only for determination, balance, and a steady hand.
Jon-Tom was grateful the ascent was not especially difficult. While he’d retained his strength, the years had wreaked havoc with his wind. Even the usually indefatigable Mudge was starting to wheeze, rapid-fire little puffs that were in keeping with his faster respiration.
As they climbed, the vegetation began to thin. All of it had been damaged to some degree. The cloud chord led them on.
“Hear that?” Jon-Tom paused both to listen and to rest. Mudge nodded.
A brilliant, pellucid susurration filled the air, intensifying as they listened. It was muddied but still euphonious.
“Not so bad,” Mudge opined.
“That’s not Hieronymus.” Gathers pointed abruptly to his left. “Look, here it comes!”
Pouring through a saddle on the side of a mountain, a stream of music spilled toward them. It sounded strained, a reluctant clamor whose proximity caused the chord cloud to duck behind Jon-Tom and ring nervously like an agitated alarm clock.
Whole measures, ripped from their original melodic lines, clung like harmonic driftwood to the musical mass. Reverberations, individual notes, plunks and whistles, echoing threnodies, lullabies, and martial roars, all swarmed and mixed uncontrollably within the stream. Like a sandstorm composed of notes instead of dust, the river of sound rushed past them, filling their ears with a mad cacophony the likes of which no dozen composers working in tandem could have concocted.
It pulled powerfully at the chord cloud, but that isolated patch of harmony pressed itself against Jon-Tom’s back, using the duar as a shield. Only when the roaring had rushed on by, leaving a few abandoned arpeggios in its wake, did the cloud reemerge.
“Wish I could play like that.” Zimmerman’s ears were ringing.
“No one plays like that.” Gathers was shaking his head, as if trying to dislodge a handful of notes that had become stuck in his cochlea.
“It turned and went up the mountain.” Hands on hips, a grim-faced Hill was staring upward. “There’s always new music going in, but never any coming out. He keeps sucking in more and more.” The drummer caught Jon-Tom looking at him. “Hinckel.”
A few laggard streamers of sound ascended in the wake of the main flow. Reaching out, Jon-Tom temporarily blocked the path of what sounded like a Mozart quartet as interpreted by John Coltrane. It was neither, of course. Except for the sounds of Pancreatic Sludge, he knew that all the music here had to be of this world. Dropping his hand, he let the chords race freely on upward. It sounded to him as though they departed reluctantly.
What if the crazed Hinckel grew powerful enough to start stealing sounds from Jon-Tom’s former world? No rock, no metal, no rap, no grunge. No jazz or folk, no classical or country-western, no ethnic or world music. To hear the band members talk, Hinckel wouldn’t leave so much as a nursery rhyme. Jon-Tom didn’t think he’d want to live in a world without music. Any world.
Thunder pealed overhead. There was work to be done. That’s when the sound struck him.
He cringed. Though less sensitive, Mudge found himself grinding his teeth together. It was the aural equivalent of fingernails dragging across a blackboard, of a cheese grater peeling glass. It was as if someone were dragging a nail file across his nerves.
Their guides were not immune. Splitz Zimmerman shuddered visibly while Wolf Gathers squeezed his eyes shut and clapped his hands to his ears. Nuke-o Hill handled it better than any of them, but that was understandable. Hill was a drummer.
The awful din faded. Straightening, Jon-Tom took a deep breath. The sonic tremor had passed through him like a dull knife. Having shattered into a dozen individual puffs of sound, the chord cloud was only now reforming.
“First time’s the worst.” Zimmerman was sympathetic.
The bass player was right. As they resumed the ascent, the sound came again. Though it continued, Jon-Tom found he was better able to tolerate the hideous voice. The guitar accompaniment, if such it could be called, was so atrocious it sounded as if the player were fingering catgut strings still attached to the original feline.
Choosing his footing carefully as he resumed the climb, Jon-Tom found that the voice was making him sweat. It didn’t merely grate; it abraded, it corroded, it made one pray to be struck temporarily deaf. Jon-Tom would far rather have been subjected to a concert by a choir of tone-deaf banshees.
“Wonnnnn’t you be my bayyyy-beeee!” it bawled like the voice of Hell itself. No, Jon-Tom decided. Not even Hades could tolerate such pandemonium. Compared to that voice, Jon-Tom knew he sounded like Caruso. Or at least Daltrey.
Mudge’s fur had fluffed up like a spooked cat’s. “Bloody ’ell but I’m grateful me ears are as small as they are! ’Tis a sound not o’ this world.”
“Actually, I think Hieronymus is from near Stuyvesant Town,” Gathers informed them. “Hard to believe such gibbering could come from a human throat.” Jon-Tom swallowed hard.
“Can you imagine try in’ to make a recording with that as your lead?” Gathers brushed at his long locks. “I sort of think of it as the human equivalent of all those new electronic rodent repellers.”
When the unearthly singing resumed it was backed by unidentifiable vocals and instrumentals only half as hideous as the lead itself. From what Jon-Tom could hear they were adequately gruesome in their own right. Though it was something of a strain just to form words while being subjected to the dissonant barrage, he forced himself to shut out much of the demonic doo-wop.
“What’s all the rest of it?” he asked Gathers.
“I told you. Hieronymus isn’t alone.”
“Well,” he muttered stubbornly, “it’s only music.”
“He’s got to be stopped,” Zimmerman exclaimed.
The band members accompanied them for another hundred feet or so before Gathers finally had to halt. He’d been slinging his head for the past several minutes, as if an angry wasp had become lodged in his ear. His expression was wretched.
“We can’t go any farther, spellsinger. You’ve got to understand, we’ve had to listen to this stuff every day for weeks.”
“Months.” By now even the phlegmatic Hill was covering his ears.
“Eons.” Zimmerman’s eyes were seeping badly. “Never thought I’d hear anything that’d make industrial grunge sound sweet. Hieronymus makes a construction site sound like the Philharmonic.”
Gathers nodded agreement. “Compared to him, thrash is The Lark Ascending.”
Jon-Tom frowned uncertainly. “I don’t know that piece. Smashing Pumpkins?”
Gathers shook his head. “Vaughan Williams. I spent a year at Juilliard. Liked the music, couldn’t stand the people. We’re gonna have to leave you here.”
Zimmerman nodded vigorously. “If I get any closer to the source, my head’s gonna split.”
“That’s all right,” Jon-Tom assured them. “We understand.”
“We does?” Mudge was less forbearing.
Leaving the duo with handshakes and words of encouragement, the three band members turned and started back down. Rocks and pebbles skidded beneath their feet as they hastened to retreat.
“Not the best o’ omens, mate.”
“It was brave of them to accompany us this far.” Turning, Jon-Tom resumed the climb. “Besides, you heard what they said before. They’ve tried to stop this Hinckel and failed. Now it’s up to us.” The black cloud and its resident thunder closed in suffocatingly around them.
Gasping for air, they eventually emerged onto a small plateau. Off in the distance a few sharp spires rose still higher. Between the edge
of the stony, sheared-off platform on which they stood and the remaining crags squatted a turreted castle constructed of gray gloom that was an ill-conceived parody of every medieval fortress which had ever been built to satisfy a deranged nobleman.
It was actually fashioned of the same brooding basalt as the mountain, the building blocks torn from the ragged flanks of the great volcano. The upper levels commanded a sweeping view of the sea where it showed beyond the fringes of the all-encompassing black cloud. There was an entrance with a drawbridge and portcullis but no moat. An inner keep glistened with lingering dew.
Jon-Tom was thankful no architect was in their company, for merely gazing upon the ramshackle structure was enough to turn a professional’s stomach. Walls canted crazily at impossible angles. None of the parapets was level, none of the turrets perpendicular to the ground. The central keep wasn’t in much better shape. Dark banners flew from the apex of each turret as well as from the higher interior. As he studied his and Mudge’s dismal destination, Jon-Tom had the feeling that the weight of the stone was all that kept the edifice from collapsing.
Of life there was no sign save for the occasional tooth-grating hubbub which emanated from somewhere within.
“The venue fits the music,” Mudge commented grimly.
With an absent nod, Jon-Tom turned to take a last look behind them. Below lay the blighted rain forest. Farther on he could see the rocky shoreline with their boat and its cargo of displaced femininity. Beyond lay the ocean, clean and inviting, spacious and alive with the promise of distant welcomes. Even at their present altitude he thought he could make out the periodic spouts of the many cetaceans who had gathered around the island. Songless cetaceans, he reminded himself.
Taking a deep breath as if he could somehow inhale resolve, he brought the duar around to his front. His fingers weren’t as nimble as they’d once been, his lung power not as long-lasting. He’d traded them in for experience, all of which he had the feeling he was going to need.
“Let’s go.”
“Right with you as always, mate.” So saying, the otter accompanied his friend onward, keeping the usual couple of discreet steps behind.