His hair was long, hanging in straight, glossy black planes on either side of his dark, serious face. He wore a dark mustache. Omar Sharif, Mario thought, made up to look like a satanic priest. He reached instinctively to finger a set of rosary beads he’d thrown in a garbage pail five years earlier. He turned
his gaze to Annie Epstein.
The auditorium was in nearly total darkness, the only light in the great room the reflection of the stage lights and the spots that blazed from the balcony lighting booth. The stage lighting cycled through dazzling white, orange, red, green, blue and back to white.
Annie was pointing her Minolta light meter at the Whisperers, barely visible expressions of annoyance
and distraction chasing each other across her round, animated face with each alteration in the lighting. In her bulky quilted jacket and ragged jeans, with her wire-rimmed glasses and rain-frizzed hair she looked like the underground comic book hippy chick Pudge.
Mario left the dusty plush seats and moved out onto the big dance floor himself. He turned back to face the stage; from this distance
the elevation of the platform mattered only a little, and he could see the Whisperers without the distortion that would annoy a front-row listener and watcher.
They’d cut their first number short—no need to run through it all at a sound check—and Olivia had turned her back to the “audience,” to walk to Johnny’s arp and leaned over it, conferring with him. After a little while the two musicians
nodded their heads in agreement on some point and Olivia walked away from the synthesizer and back to her microphone. She made a small gesture with her left hand and a low, eerie sound began to filter through the giant speaker
banks behind the stage. It was the unearthly lead-in to another Whisperers number.
Mario watched Olivia Oldham: she was a complete contrast to Kendrick. Where his hair
was like jet hers was a glistening blonde that picked up each color in turn from the glaring lights; under the white glare it looked as pale as Johnny Winter’s. Her face was thin and pale; when she smiled or sang Mario could see the play of every tendon and muscle in her face and her throat. When she gestured—she had a peculiar, fascinating way of holding her fingers, as if she were grasping some
invisible line for support—he could almost feel her touching him.
He shuddered and squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. The stage lights were off for the moment, and the Whisperers were bathed in separate spotlights: Johnny Kendrick in a deep blue that emphasized his satanic appearance; Olivia Oldham in a deep, almost tangible deluge of red that made her platinum hair, her pale, thin
face, her billowing white dress a montage of crimson textures.
Almost involuntarily Mario sat down, cross-legged on the hard wooden floor.
He’d heard all of the Whisperers’ music before: their singles on the radio for the past year and half since they’d appeared out of dusty Midwestern obscurity, their two released albums
Anubis
and
Nightshade
the past few nights at home as he prepped for the
big interview, the new
Cthulhu
in the Volvo 1800 on the way to Winterland today. But he’d never heard them before like this.
He watched the Whisperers on the stage. Under those lights, he thought, and with the auditorium itself in almost total darkness, the Whisperers could hardly know there was anyone present beside their technical crew. Yet the way they moved, looked and sang….
It was almost
as if Mario were being carried away on some sort of astral journey, carried away by two exotic creatures—preternatural essences, of darkness and of light, pure distillates of yin and of yang, elemental embodiments of the male and female principles of being.
The colors cycled, the dark Kendrick and the pale Olivia were transformed from orange to red to green to blue; the eerie sounds coming from
the big Ampeg/Acoustic towers seemed to whisper to him personally. He could almost understand what the Whisperers were saying to him, almost feel Olivia Oldham’s tremulous,
needing
touch—“You’re
not on something, are you, kid?”
Mario flinched away from the heavy hand that shook him roughly. He blinked his eyes and saw that Johnny Kendrick and Olivia Oldham were gone from the stage; the house
lights were on and half a dozen casually dressed technicians were rechecking every piece of equipment.
Turning, Mario saw the jowly face of Barton Starke peering into his face. Starke looked annoyed. He was chewing a fat brown cigar, or the last inch or so that remained of one. Mario blinked up at him and grunted in confusion. He pressed both his hands on the floor and started to stand up.
“I said, you on something, kid?”
Mario shook his head. “N-no sir. I was just, ah …”
“Yeah,” Starke nodded. “You got carried away with the music. All right, I don’t want nobody coming around here stoned out on anything, you know? The customers are bad enough, but that’s not my problem. You want that interview, you better get backstage now and do it before my kids go to take their nap before the
show.” He jerked his hand toward the door that led from the auditorium to the backstage area where they’d first entered the building.
Mario rubbed his hands over his own face, picked up his attaché case with tie cassette equipment in it and started for the door. He was starting to get back together now. He could see that Annie had picked up her gadget bag and was a few paces ahead of him. He
caught up to her as they reached the door and stepped through it behind Bart Starke.
He stumbled through the door, through the cold, drab room he’d been in earlier, up the stairway where he’d first seen Barton Starke. There was still a slight ringing in Mario’s ears—surely the after-effect of the overwhelming loudspeakers in the auditorium—and his eyes had apparently not returned altogether to
normal after the odd visual experience.
Annie Epstein had gone off somewhere, maybe to change lenses or load a fresh roll of tri-X. Mario stopped at the top of the stairs and looked back but he didn’t see anyone—not Starke, not the doorman, Gooley, not any of the stage hands or technicians.
He went into another room. It was dimly lighted—he couldn’t tell whether there were recessed electric
bulbs somewhere or whether the light came entirely from the candles that stood on low shelves. The room seemed to be furnished in dark plush, ancient black velvet cushions and maroon drapes.
There was an odor in the air—something musty, yet somehow sweet. He turned to look back at the door but it had receded, or maybe Mario had unconsciously advanced to the middle of the room. He looked down
and saw that he was standing in the center of a dark, heavily patterned carpet. He tried to follow the pattern with his eyes: it wove tortuously, seemed almost to present an objective picture of—something. But he couldn’t quite make out what it was, not in the dimness, the wavering illumination.
There was a sound of swishing draperies and he saw a figure beside one of the candles. It was Olivia
Oldham; in the flickering candlelight she looked slimmer than ever, and far more pale. Her hair was pure white, and to Mario she seemed, for an instant, not to be the very young woman he had watched on the stage.
For the first time he could see her eyes clearly: they were pale, too, like everything else about her. He couldn’t tell what color they were: faint blue, or perhaps a whitened golden
tint that picked up flickers of candlelight and gleamed at him across the room.
Olivia Oldham said “Hi.”
The single syllable, struck Mario like an electric shock. He hadn’t expected her to speak, even to him. She had seemed like a creature from some other plane of existence. To hear her commonplace greeting was more astounding than it would have been to see her slowly fade into invisibility.
She crossed the room toward him and put out her hand. “You’re Mr. Cipolla? Please make yourself comfortable. Would you like anything? A cup of tea?”
He managed to croak an affirmative response.
Olivia’s voice was soft and low, like a whisper, yet plentifully clear to him. Mario found himself sitting on a plush velvet bench. He felt clumsy and inadequate. Olivia Oldham, unbelievably fragile, sat
beside him, a cup in her hands. Mario looked into her eyes. They were golden. He realized suddenly that she was the most beautiful person he’d ever seen, that he was—he felt himself turning crimson.
He fumbled for his notebook, his recorder. “Uh—there’s—Annie said her father had –”
“Annie went with John Kendrick.” Olivia sipped from her cup, raised her eyes to look up at him as she did. “To
get some shots in better light. Brighter light, that is.”
“Uh.” Mario tried a sip of the tea himself. He’d heard stories of the
strange backstage scenes at places like this, of the dangers and the temptations. He looked at Olivia. She seemed completely at home in this dim, plush room, her white gown floating about her like the soft wavering fins of a delicate tropical fish. Mario’s head felt
light, his body tingled. He took another sip of the hot orange tea.
Outside, he reminded himself, the world was carrying on. He was here to do an interview for his school paper, Olivia Oldham was a singer, half of the Whisperers, that was all. And not forty feet away, outside this place, San Francisco was going about its rainy Friday night routine: late commuters still heading for the bridge
to Marin, tourists from Omaha and from Osaka riding up and down the city’s hills on cable cars, freaks from Berkeley and what was left of the Haight cueing up right now at the front door of Winterland –
He snapped his head up and looked at Olivia Oldham. “Uh—where’s—uh—where did you start, um….” If only he could get the interview going, get back in control of the situation. But Olivia was making
that peculiar gesture with her fingers, and Mario found it harder and harder to move.
She took the cup from him and put it back on the shelf. She stood before him and drew him to his feet.
“Uh, I meant to ask you …” he ploughed on doggedly. If he could get some fresh air. It was so stuffy in this room, the peculiar odor in here. He looked at Olivia and couldn’t tell whether she was very tiny
or whether she towered over him, whether the room itself was crowding in or retreating to monstrous dimensions.
“Oh,” he tried once more. “The, ah, the Whisperers –”
She smiled at him and nodded encouragingly.
“Ah, you have unusual material, I mean, ah, why do you write songs about such, ah, morbid topics? Like, ah, you new album. What does Cthulhu mean? Doesn’t it have something to do with,
ah, some old, ah –”
“Yes,” she nodded, “it is an old tradition. Very old. You might even call it an old religion. Those who know of the Elder Gods. Those who would open the way once more.”
“But why the Whisperers? I mean, if it’s a religion –”
“A religion that was suppressed a million years ago. A religion that existed only in secret places, only in isolated villages. A religion that was discovered
and secretly attacked again, and nearly wiped out fifty years ago. You can read of it, you can find it all in the works of the Providence writer.”
“But—but—“Mario stammered.
“But now,” Olivia went on, “Now we have the way. Tonight you will see. Tonight you will see four thousand young people swaying and chanting with us, moving in the ritual steps, calling back the Elder Gods, worshipping them.”
Her thin hands holding his were like iron, strong and resistless; she towered, her eyes gleaming, her white flowing dress fluttering and whirling with a life of its own, as if it were not mere cloth, but a sentient thing.
“But why do you tell me this? Won’t you be destroyed again? I’ll write about you, we’ll print it. Annie’s photos –”
Her shrill laughter cut him off, and from behind him there
came more laughter, deeper. He whirled and saw Johnny Kendrick standing, the candlelight reflecting from the black satin of his suit and the red of its flashing, of the great jewel that hung from its filigreed chain. Beside Kendrick stood Annie, her face expressionless.
“Four thousand people,” Kendrick said softly. “Four thousand young people, full of the vital energy needed to feed the Beast,
to summon the Opener, to bring back the Elder Gods.
“We let you come so there
would
be a record of this great night. Use your best words, boy.” He turned to Annie. “Use your best skill, girl. Tonight is a night that will live forever. And in coming days, as the mighty sounds of the Cthulhu music drive from millions of speakers, drive through millions of brains, the Mighty One will hear. He will
rise. The Elder Gods will return.”
Kendrick stepped to the door, opened it, snapped, “Starke! Send that nuisance Gooley for some food for us. Get enough for our guests. We have to be thoughtful of the power of the press!”
He laughed and slammed the door.
Vernon Browns looked at the mural behind the cash register-and blinked, startled. He put down his icy margarita and waved at the bartender. “Rudy,” Vernon said, “c’mere. C’mere a minute, will ya?”
“What’s ’at, Vern?” Rudy Valdez lowered the glass he was wiping and leaned on the polished mahogany. “Something the matter?”
“No, look.” Browne pointed.
“That lady in the big hat?
Hah! She looks something like you, Vern. You got a sister or what?”
“No, not the lady. Wait, wait, she’s paying her bill. There. See it now? The picture on the wall. The Aztec picture.”
Rudy squinted at the mural. The heavy summer atmosphere, thickened by cooking fumes, smoke, and just a touch of alcohol, was almost tangible. “I don’ know what you mean, Vern. That picture been there for years.
Mr. Vega likes Aztec paintings. Tha’s why the place is full of them.”
Browne exhaled loudly, exasperated. Look at that guy. In the painting. Don’t you see him?”
Rudy turned to face the painting. He studied for a minute, then turned back to Browne. “You mean the guy in the Crushers helmet?”
“You do see it, then! Phew, for a minute I thought I was nuts. What’s an Aztec doing in an Oakland Crushers
helmet? Who painted that mural, some local guy, right?”