Mobius blvd, p.9
Mobius Blvd, page 9
I kept banging those drums. I was used to a bit of rough-housing at some of the gigs we played. I laughed it off; pretending I was in on the joke. But Jesus, he was terrifying.
He perched up on the bass amp, licking his lips and tugging on that dark-red pointed beard, like some sort of hideous goblin. Then he leapt down, and his mouth was right in my ear. He stank of Jack Daniels. I mean reeked – it was seeping from his every pore. But there was some other smell there, that I couldn’t place at the time. It was awful. Putrid.
Sandy Bane towered over me as I sat on the drum stool. He leered into my face, trying to put me off. I kept up my pretence it was all one big joke. Then he spoke. It was an order.
“Next song’s mine.”
I nodded, turned around and kept drumming. He sat back up on the bass amp, lurking like some unhinged version of Rumpelstiltskin, here to claim his dues. As the crowd cheered again, Sandy Bane leapt towards Ewan like a raptor, grabbing him by the neck. “Next song’s mine, Ewan, my lad,” he sneered. We were hostages to this lunatic.
“Let’s do what he wants,” said The Kid, ever the diplomat. “What song do you want big man?”
“Ewan knows my song,” the goblin grinned.
You were always the fighter in the band, Alex. Even when we were wee boys, you were always the first to get into a scrap. But you handed your microphone to Sandy Bane as meek as a kitten. I’d never seen you cowed like that before.
Sandy Bane was gurning and grunting to the audience at the front of the trailer, whipping them into a frenzy. His biker pals-and-gals were throwing their beers in the air and hollering. Ewan, tuning his bass, had a fearful resignation in his voice.
“Johnny B Goode.”
At least it was one we knew.
The Kid smartened himself up and took his stance. He blew out that opening riff like Chuck Berry himself had risen from the dead. Before we knew it we were like a freight train, like the song had possessed us. The juggernaut pace was all on me. But with this maniac at the front, no wonder I wanted it over.
The crowd went wild, but now that I think of it, were those screams were something other than jubilation? His singing was terrible. I mean, down the crapper and round-the-bend. He just shouted and grunted through the whole song. The Kid did his usual super stuff on lead guitar, and the whole thing must have been done and cooked-through in two minutes. But when it was over, I swear to God I felt like we’d just done the live version of Led Zepplin’s Moby.
The relief when he leapt off the trailer, to the acclaim of The Offspring biker gang, was palpable. If only we had all got out of Dodge after the last number; maybe then The Kid would still be alive. Maybe then we wouldn’t have had to watch his mother bawling her eyes out at his graveside.
Drinks were put in our hands, and we were welcomed into Sandy Bane’s gang like returning heroes. The gals fawned over The Kid. No wonder; he was some player. I realise now I set aside how bat shit crazy the whole mess was. I guess attention from a group of biker gals can do that to a young man. Later that evening, Sandy Bane made us his offer.
He wanted a private set for his gang in the woods; a party till the wee hours. His eyes flashed and he barked a laugh, like a red-bearded circus bear. Our eyes and our crotches bulged at his promises. I don’t really remember how we got out to the woods. I had been using the “house” kit in the trailer so all I had was my Zildjian cymbals and a couple of tambourines. The Kid had two guitars, one electric, one acoustic; Ewan had a pick-up and amp for your mic. That was all we needed.
We got some help with the gear from the ogre who looked like a rubber ball with axes-for-arms. He told me his name was Denzel, though I could hardly understand his thick Ayrshire brogue.
Denzel led us to the clearing at the bottom of a steep hill and there must have been fifty of them in the motorcycle club. Their bikes encircled their camp like sentinels, and the bikers were whooping and hollering. Sandy Bane was welcomed like a General returning from the front. Their camp was set up for an all-nighter; boxes of booze, half a dozen barbecues, and tents everywhere.
A couple of the biker guys helped us clear a spot and hooked us up with a genny. You appeared with some gal twice your age. I guess you must have been having a right old jolly somewhere behind us in the woods.
So, we did the private gig for them. Without my full kit I had little to do, which was just fine with me; I had a girl hanging round my neck, who said she loved drummers. She had fiery red hair and serious goth make-up. Clara, that was her name. Jesus, they make them pretty forward down in those parts, don’t they?
We did some old school blues, some Johnny Cash prison songs, and fifties rock-and-roll. The Kid had them all in the palms of his hands. They were entranced with the flash of his fingers up and down that fretboard. He played until his fingers bled, and then he lifted up his Les Paul and said he couldn’t play anymore. He had sliced his middle finger something bad, and there was blood on the high E.
I stumbled back to Clara’s tent. I don’t remember if we had a good time or not; it’s a total blank. I woke up in her tent with a blinding headache. It was pitch black. No Clara. I felt like I was behind a veil; that I was partly absent. I mean, my body was there, but my mind was somewhere else. I was desperate to take a leak, so staggered out to find a tree. The only light was the embers of the campfires. I had to pick my spot with care.
But then I saw an outlier; a smaller camp, away from the main clearing. Having done my business, I ambled toward it. That was when you appeared from behind your own tree. “After show VIP,” you said, pointing to the second camp. We doddered over, laughing at the state of each other. As we neared, a marquee loomed from the trees. This had to Sandy Bane’s den. He was the Big Man, so the Big Tent would be his. We approached carefully, and peered in.
There was a fold-up table lying dead in the centre, and a handful of the bikers were standing around it like soldiers surveying a war map. It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing.
I saw The Kid lying across that table, and standing over him like a rabid butcher was Sandy Bane. He was eating the Kid’s fingers. Holding up his arm and eating the fingers off his left hand. His FINGERS, Alex.
The Kid was moaning. Christ help me and save me, he was alive. Standing next to Sandy Bane, some fat, heinous bastard with grease-ridden straggly hair was holding The Kid’s guitar, licking the blood off the strings.
My mind screamed at me that this was all a figment. But you saw it too Alex. I know you did. Then Sandy Bane bit off one of The Kid’s thumbs with a horrid crunch, and passed it to a girl next to him ... Clara. She stripped the thumb of it’s flesh with her teeth, and threw the bone in a slop bucket with a horrid splat. She grinned at me, her eyes meeting mine. Her teeth were smirred with the blood of my friend.
“Cannae let the wee man’s magic go to waste,” Sandy Bane slurred.
“We’re all Offspring,” Clara said, with horrid joy.
“Sawney’s Offspring. Now your friend is too. Now he’s part of us, and we’ll all go on.”
She put something in my mouth, and made me swallow, and as I saw her do the same to you, I blacked out.
Well Alex, you know the rest.
The next morning, they told us The Kid had gone out on a Chopper, and crashed the bike. They brought us his mangled body. Denzel was carrying him in those axes-for-arms.
The Kid was in some state. His arms were broken and stripped of flesh, and his jaw was missing. His tongue was lying exposed, out on his neck like he was some sort of lizard sniffing the air. One of his eyes was completely bloodshot. The other seemed fine, but it stared straight past me into a deep well of nothingness. Jesus, how can I ever get past seeing The Kid like that?
Whatever they gave us, it had fried our short-term memory. I couldn’t remember anything after hooking up with Clara earlier in the night. You must have been the same. There was nothing for us to do but believe there’d been a terrible accident. It was years after all this that the flashbacks started to come, and I got awful, gore-ridden glimpses of what I saw in Sandy Bane’s Big Tent.
When did they come for you, Alex? The flashbacks? I’m guessing around the time you stopped taking my calls. Maybe you did as I did, and discovered Sandy Bane thinks he’s Sawney Bean.
Denzel wrapped what was left of The Kid in a blanket, and took him away to the hospital in Ayr. We were dropped off back at Kiloway, and it wasn’t until later, when the police showed up, that I really understood The Kid was dead. Perhaps I had sobered up. I had to give the police his mum’s number, so they could tell her that her son was dead.
The Kid’s death was written off as an accident. He was written off, like the bike. But we know better, don’t we Alex?
This is why you and I have not spoken. It’s why Ewan lost touch. We’ve all agreed to some conspiracy of silence. I guess we’re all guilty.
But I know what I saw. They ate him. Those bastards ate The Kid.
I’m done pulling this rotting memory out of my mind. I can feel the stink of it on my tongue, the stick of it on my finger-tips. I feel Sandy Bane’s hot breath when he hovered over me in the trailer. The stench of dead flesh. Human flesh.
There’s only one way I will ever find sleep again, and that’s the Big Sleep - the Great Gig in the Sky. I tell myself The Kid is up there, maybe jamming with Stevie Ray Vaughn.
We OWE him, Alex. We owe The Kid. Those bastards killed him. The killed him and they ate him.
When you see this email, I’ll already be on my way to stalk that crimson-bearded ghoul Sandy Bane, and his bastarding family of cannibals. I’m going find them, and I’m going to kill the whole stinking, rotted lot of them.
I could do with a fighter at my side. I could do with an old friend.
I’ll be seeing you, Alex.
[SEND]
SHADOW CAST BY EYE AND MAW
Keith Buzzard
In the dead of Winter, any day above zero was good. As February sputters out and March strides in, stone-faced and sober as a judge, any day above freezing was good. The first official day of Spring was a marked occasion and celebrated in its capacity as the Furthest Point from Next Winter there could be. But no matter how much optimism she could drum up, Hannah still knew that the first day of Spring did not correlate with the End of Winter. It would trudge on and continue to doggedly needle her like the Creature stalking Frankenstein from long shadows. It was a Liar’s Spring, she thought to herself with a sigh.
Thirty-six degrees had felt down-right balmy after the dark months of freezing cold, but nearly a month later of low-to-mid thirties every day, Hannah’s level of enthusiasm was quite well represented by the mire of snow-melt mud that she was currently schlepping through. Not quite warm enough to evaporate, not quite cold enough to freeze solid, just the right temperature to make walking through the woods a miserable chore.
“Didn’t we already do this...what’s-her-fuck?” asked Hannah, forcefully pulling her over-sized Chesapeake rubber boot free of the muck and nearly toppling over in the process. The too-large size was intentional for a quick escape for her feet if she needed to shift forms in a life or death hurry, but it made for difficult walking if she didn’t want to lose the boot to the mud or risk twisting an ankle.
Several yards ahead was Samuel, who was the following to Hannah: a business partner of sorts, a pseudo-mentor figure, and her extremely unadvisable hematologist. He was having a much easier go of things because, unlike Hannah, he didn’t have to wear over-sized clothing. He was a full foot taller with longer legs, at least while she was in her human-presenting form, and could more easily step or side-hop over the muddier patches. He stepped up onto the trunk of a fallen tree, turned back to face her, and balanced himself against an adjacent, still-standing tree. He looked at Hannah with confusion written across his angular, subtly asymmetrical face.
“By ‘what’s-her-fuck,’ do you mean ‘what is her name?’” he asked. Seeing the benefit of being out of the muck, Hannah followed suit and carefully pulled herself free of the mud to stand on an exposed tree root and leaned against the tree trunk. She huffed, nodded her head, and made a ‘go-on’ rolling motion with her hand. “Fiadh. I think it means ‘to be of the wild’ or something to that sentiment in Gaelic.”
“Right. Lovely,” said Hannah, scraping off clumps of mud that clung to the side of her boot against the tree bark. “Didn’t we do Fiat—”
“Fiadh. ‘Fee-uh.’”
“Didn’t we already do ‘Fee-uh,’” she said patiently, gesturing with an open palm to Samuel, “a favor by setting her up in these woods? That’s got to mean a lot for an orphaned dryad.”
“Yes, but apparently there is some sort of taint on a portion of these woods that I previously wasn’t aware of, so this could still be considered part of the original favor,” said Samuel, taking the momentary stillness to adjust the faded blue baseball cap on his head and checking his clothing, presumably for ticks. Hannah knew that he was vigilant against blood-borne pathogens, which made sense to her in general but especially because blood was Samuel’s bread and butter, so to speak.
“And the only thing more dangerous than doing a favor for a member of the fae,” continued Samuel, “is not following through with a favor to a member of the fae once one is offered.”
“Look at you. You’re a regular Oscar Wilde of the Wild,” said Hannah, smiling at Samuel, who merely blinked twice in response.
“Oh,” he said, “The Oscar Wilde quote about there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
“That’s the one,” Hannah said, still smiling.
“I get it,” Samuel replied. “That’s funny.”
“Thank you,” said Hannah.
“You’re welcome,” said Samuel. She still got a kick out of Samuel’s lack of reaction to most things, most notably comedy. He may be a very experienced magic practitioner, if a very bloody one, but for Hannah, his most impressive ability was his talent for understatement. During one of their investigative jobs, on its surface just a simple case of tracking down a smash-and-grab robbery which, as was tragically/comically the case in their lives, uncovered a convoluted conspiracy. This particular conspiracy involved a virgin sacrificing murder cult and the two of them inadvertently sprung a trap that summoned a particularly nightmarish inter-dimensional demon of teeth and oozing wounds. Samuel’s response to the sudden appearance of said nightmare was to tilt his head, raise his eyebrows, and say ‘Oh,’ in much the same tone as someone surprised, but not necessarily inconvenienced, to learn that their lunch bill was $15 instead of $10.
But that had been two months ago and therefore ancient history. That wasn’t even the most recent demon that they had interacted with. Though Essiel was much more amiable, willing to impart esoteric knowledge in exchange for leaving a television on in a very specific place and tuned to a specific channel that aired telenovelas ten hours a day and had Polish closed captioning.
“Two questions,” Hannah said, holding up two fingers and waiting for Samuel to acknowledge the expectation. He nodded and she continued. “Did Fiadh say what sort of taint she found, and, two, do you know how hard I am trying to not make a joke about said taint?”
“One, she described it as an offensive incongruence, and, two, I admire your professionalism in the face of such temptation.”
“Thank you for your support in these trying times.”
“It would be low-hanging fruit.”
Hannah gritted her teeth. “You’re absolutely right.”
“Because we could be walking into a potentially very dangerous situation.”
Hannah took a centering breath. “Yes. That’s true.”
“Taint the time nor place for such childish jokes.”
Hannah went apoplectic.
Samuel smiled briefly before gesturing further into the woods. “Shall we?”
Forty minutes later they had covered a distance that would have only taken twenty, had the temperature been a mere ten degrees warmer. They had rounded a bend to see a long-since abandoned building at the center of a small clearing. If they had been in a suburban environment, the building could have been described as being at the center of a cul-de-sac, but here in the woods, the building was surrounded on three sides by a large berm that ran around the clearing, forming a natural bottle-neck. Trees lined the berm so that unless approached from a specific angle, the building would be impossible to see from a distance. Even from above the canopies nearly stretched over the roof like extended, protective arms.
Hannah and Samuel walked up the slope towards the building and thankfully drier ground. The sun would be dipping below the berm soon, but for now was shining directly into their eyes. Samuel pulled the hood up on his torn and beaten, yet paradoxically indestructible, bomber coat and his face disappeared into the limitless void that the hood created. A moment later, two glowing red orbs literally blinked into existence.
Hannah wasn’t sure if these were Samuel’s actual blood-magic-enhanced eyes, a magical illusion that was meant to and spectacularly failed at lessening/humanizing the horror the void instilled, or if the orbs were the eyes of the demon that Hannah knew lived in the void of the hood. Samuel had explained to her previously that, yes, the demon spoke to him, and that, no, it was not as insanely dangerous as that seemed, and, yes, seriously. All of these things she found unsettling, to say the least.
As for herself, she relied on more practical methods to keep the sun from getting in her eyes. She retrieved a pair of welding goggles from the deep center pocket of her too-large hoodie and tightened the elastic strap around her head. Even with the near onyx black of the lenses, she could still see perfectly fine thanks to her heightened senses, even beyond the normal superior senses all lycanthropes possessed, due to her lineage. A potentially divine lineage if one were to believe the more religious members of the lycanthrope community.
