“Where’s Whitey?” said Herman. “Where’s Heidi? Why is it that Herman’s the only WXKB employee here?”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” said Chip. Even over the phone he sounded like he was pulling on his hair. “Hey, look, I wanted to fire Heidi,” he said. “I was all set to, and you, buddy, were the one who convinced me, against my own better judgment to…”
But Herman had stopped listening. Someone was coming down the alley and as they got closer and stepped into the light, he realized who it was.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. “Heidi’s here after all. Got to go.”
He hung up the telephone with Chip still talking and pocketed it. Then he crossed his arms over his chest and waited for Heidi.
“Where the hell have you been?” asked Herman. “Where’s Whitey?”
“Whitey never showed so I walked,” said Heidi. She looked a little pale and dazed, maybe was on something, but he’d had it out with her once this week already. No point starting bad blood just before the show.
“Are you serious? Goddamn it, what is with that kid? I thought he said his car was fixed.” He looked at his watch. “Fuck, we should get inside. It’s almost showtime. Not that it matters since I can’t find anyone.”
“What are you so uptight about?” Heidi asked.
“I don’t know,” said Herman. “Something about this whole night is really getting under my skin. Something just isn’t right. Feels like a setup.”
“A setup for what?” asked Heidi.
Herman shook his head. “I wish I fucking knew.”
They made their way through the door and up the aisle, taking a seat toward the back of the venue where some of the chairs were still in pretty good shape. There was still no sign of the Lords. Most of the rest of the audience was up front, huddled together. And yeah, he’d been right. All women. Not a single man in the whole place except for him. If he told the warden that, she’d really give him hell.
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.”
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?
And so she had to focus on staying put, on keeping from moving, and that was where other things began to slip. Herman asked her something and her mind thought of something witty to respond, but her voice didn’t say it. Her voice said something else, something it had answered to a question that he’d asked her before, when she’d been outside. Even when she’d said it outside it hadn’t felt like something she’d been saying but something being said through her. What was wrong with her?
Come to think of it, most of the way over she hadn’t felt like she was the one walking. One moment she’d been in her apartment and something strange and troubling had been happening. What was it? She’d been trying to get out, but she couldn’t get out. Each time she’d opened the door something had been wrong.
No, she must have dreamed that, right? That sort of thing wasn’t real, just simply couldn’t happen. She’d been having bad dreams lately. That was simply one of them.
But then again, she couldn’t remember leaving the house. She could remember little bits of the walk over, but only bits. Could remember, if she thought hard enough about it, talking to Herman outside, but there, too, it had been as if she was watching her body talk rather than being in the body itself.
And then, inside the theater, Herman said something else, obviously surprised by how she’d answered, and she felt her mind again composing a response but her tongue was already operating, already speaking, giving again a piece of language it had already given, something that was wrong for the situation. She tried to turn toward him and explain that something was wrong, that she couldn’t figure out what was happening to her, but her head refused to turn away from the stage. No matter how hard she tried, it remained fixed there, motionless, staring on. All she could do was desperately flick her eyes his way, try to get Herman to see the panic and fear in them. But before he saw it, the music started.
And then things got really strange. The draw of the stage on her body was nearly physical now, as if someone had looped a rope around her waist and was beginning to tug on it, slowly pulling it tighter and tighter. Or, more than that, much more: like someone had cut her belly open and pushed out loop after slick loop of her intestine and was using that as the rope, pulling on her own flesh to drag her forward. She had to hold on to her chair tightly with both hands just to stay put. She felt, too, as if her vision was becoming smaller, as if she had been looking through a mask and as she moved
the mask farther away from her eyes the holes she looked through showed her less and less. She could see the stage but it felt distant now, as if she had shriveled up, receded into her own body.
And then her eyelids blinked, and with that blink something else blinked inside her. It was not just that she was receding into her own body, she realized. It was that something else—something that she had never seen, hadn’t realized was there—was growing, had switched places with her. So that while before it had been a hard tumor or fistula deep within her, now it filled her whole body and she was the tumor; she was the fistula.
Help me
, she tried to say, but nothing came out.
The creature within her laughed.
Something you’ve never seen?
it said.
Sweetheart, you created me. You brought me to life.
And she saw flashing through her mind a cascade of images, of every way she had lied or cheated or stole, the dark days of using especially, her last time with Griff when she had curled up beside him and slept and then woke up and left, only later hearing he was dead. Did he die from that fix, because of her? No way to know. So that, above all, but also the innocent enough things that she had done that slowly had made her a sort of monster. That had made her into this.
But no, another part of her said, or tried to say. This
wasn’t
her. This was all a trick. It was something else trying to take control of her.
As the music started, the beating of a lone drum, she kept hold of the arms of the chair, and the thing inside her let her. No, it was happy to wait, to let her resist until she couldn’t stand it anymore. She suddenly realized it believed this holding back would tire her, make her more pliable, and reduce the last of her resistance. But still she couldn’t help holding on.
When the creature took charge, it took hold first of her throat and mouth. She was trying to scream
Help me
, but the creature kept the words back. Instead, it offered its own dark chant, a glorification of the Satanic majesty. She saw Herman give a start, confused by what
she was saying, and she was confused, too, but she could not stop. And then the creature crept into her extremities, seizing control of her hands, slowly prying her hands away finger by finger from the arms of her seat. Then, tingling, it moved into her legs, tightened the muscles in them, made her stand up, and she was heading stiffly down the aisle, still trying to resist but hardly with any control at all now. She felt her arms groping her body, then slowly pulling pieces of her clothing off, her coat, then her sweater, then her shoes and socks, until all that was left was a sheer see-through shift. She looked down, saw that the Lords symbol was inscribed upon it, written in dark red paint or in blood. When had that happened?