Dark Arts (2 page)

The pain had lessened to a throb by the time
he downshifted and turned down the side street behind the Wild
Side, an old pub repurposed as a rock bar. Bernie was behind the
wheel of their converted school bus, smoking and listening to
Mississippi Queen. The early 60’s bus had been repainted black on
the outside, and the interior cab lights were upgraded with
brighter, bare bulbs. Bernie’s cousin, Scott was hanging out
inside, leaning against the dash. They both got out of the van,
Bernie flicking his cigarette down the alley, and met Max as his
motorcycle came to a stop. “We’re ready for our set, getting ripped
off by the owner though. They’re only paying us a hundred because
the other band just dropped an album,” Scott said, running his hand
over his recently shaved head. “I remember when that was us.”

“Anyone I know?” Maxwell asked as he leaned
his Harley Davidson Sportster onto its kickstand and pulled the
antique book he’d just taken from his jacket.

“No,” Bernie said, lighting a fresh
cigarette. “Some band called the Racer Kings. Good rhythm section,
God awful singer and a guitarist who thinks he’s Clapton.”

“Everyone wants to be Clapton,” Max
sighed.

“Guess you’ll have to show him,” Bernie
replied. The tall, lanky man was by far Max’s favorite Canadian,
the only one he told all the details of his hunting excursions to,
and the only one he trusted to back him up. His cousin Scott was a
close second, but he was easier to unnerve. Max snatched the
freshly lit cigarette from Bernie and popped the filter into his
mouth. “I’ll be having that,” he said.

Bernie started lighting another. “Did you
get it?”

“I did,” Maxwell said. “Had to fight for it,
but we stay on the road.” He carefully opened the book and almost
failed to catch a small object that fell out. “Nearly lost my head
for it, but Angelo’s five hundred is all ours.”

“Five hundred?” Bernie said. “I thought you
were kidding before, five hundred doll-“ he stopped, noticing the
mess on the side of Max’s head, even in the dim light of the alley.
“Is that blood?”

“I said I nearly lost my head for it,” Max
replied.

“What happened? Is it bad?” Scott asked.

Bernie reached out to touch Maxwell’s ear.
“Holy shit, what did this?”

“Oi!” Maxwell said, recoiling, the sliver
that fell out of the antique book clenched in his free hand. “I’m
good to play, just need to get some whiskey on it so it doesn’t
infect. Get some in me first though.” The wound burned and stung at
the same time. He tried to ignore it, holding up the hard sliver
that had fallen out of the middle of the book so he could inspect
it in the scant illumination of the streetlight. “Petrified wood?”
he muttered to himself.

“Let’s hurry up and get this taken care of,
Zack’ll start puking if he sees this,” Bernie said.

“I might start,” Scott said. “Is it the
whole ear? Did you get stabbed? What happened?”

“Bugger started shooting,” Maxwell said,
chuckling at Scott’s boggling. “Monk with a gun, figures he ends up
over-piercing my ear.”

“Are you sure the bullet didn’t go in? I
heard a story about this guy, didn’t even know he got shot until
the X-Rays.”

“If he didn’t know he got shot, why was he
getting X-Rays?” Maxwell asked. “Didn’t go in, don’t worry your
little head,” he said, patting him eight times on the top of his
scalp so the slaps rang out in quick succession.

“C’mon, I’ve got the first aid kit in the
back of the bus,” Bernie said. “What is that?”

“Bonus,” Maxwell said, pushing the sliver
into the inside pocket of his leather bomber jacket, “maybe part of
the book, don’t know.”

The bus and the band were well behind in
North Bay, the boys decided to sleep in after a raucous night at
the Nipissing Inn. They played until one in the morning, then
invited a few old timers – Gib Frost, Vernor Newman, and Maria
Townsend – on stage for a jam that pushed the noise until three, an
hour too late for the local police.

The party started after the police left and
the doors locked. It was an old hotel, recently upstaged by a newer
establishment so the rooms were empty. Max did as he often did,
kept his guitar in hand so he reached for the constantly refilling
pint glass less, and passed on ladies who wouldn’t mind taking the
place of his instrument on his lap. He had a big payday coming, the
kind even his father would envy if he were still alive.

The music of the night before still rang in
his ears as the wind blew through his long hair and the sunlight
painted the road in hues of gold. The two lane concrete connection
between North Bay and Sudbury was anything but pristine. He had to
pay close attention for large cracks, potholes and animals ahead.
He knew he was getting close to Sudbury when he started seeing dead
trees instead of the thick green wood.

The country in Canada was staggeringly
beautiful to Maxwell, except for certain parts, like Sudbury. As
the road rolled under the wheels of his Harley Davidson motorcycle,
vistas of green woodland gave way to bare black and grey stone.
This was the part of the trip he tended to forget. A century of
mining and smelting made Sudbury and the area around it look like
the crater it was.

He throttled up; passing a car with reckless
weaves in and out of the opposing lane and didn’t slow down after.
He tried to focus on the road as the trees along side changed color
from lush green to rust red, then grey. The vista opened up to each
side, revealing a dead marsh with fallen trees, still water and
decades-old, thick tree stumps that would have been removed from
the landscape by the organisms that flocked to rotting wood, but
that process never took place, the organisms were as dead as the
fallen grey trees that surrounded the still waters. A pair of
smoking stacks rose up on the horizon, and Max couldn’t help but
feel like he was returning home.

He was raised in England, bouncing between
cities there with his father until they moved to Sudbury when he
was eight. He met Bernie and Scott then, and his years of playing
with his guitar instead of other children paid off. They were
inseparable from that point on, ignoring the strange pursuits of
their artifact-seeking fathers as much as they could while they
played music in the barn. Other kids joined in when they could,
especially when they got a little older. Every girl in the
neighborhood seemed to want to take their turn singing like Brenda
Lee, or some other radio siren, but they got bored before long,
except for Miranda, who wanted to sing songs from the Beatles and
Rolling Stones. She was the little girl with the big voice, and the
fourth member of their barn band. That was until her mother died,
and she left with her Aunt when Max was thirteen.

Bernie was a rhythm section magician by the
time he was fourteen, pounding on the drums like a cross between
Bonham and Pert before those gents were famous. He wasn’t as
talented on the bass, but he loved the instrument much more than
the drums, and Max learned to accept that Bernie would rather play
bass than drums. Scott, who was never far behind his older cousin,
learned to play drums from Bernie, and said so little about playing
with the band that it was years before Max knew for certain that
Scott enjoyed it. He loved it, in fact, and found playing any other
instrument intimidating, singing included.

So they wrote music together and eventually
formed their band – Road Craft. The name had a ring to it, but
Maxwell didn’t like where it came from. Bernie’s entire family was
life long nature worshippers, and, like Max’s father, believed in
superstition, magic, and the power of spirits. While Max had an
appreciation for nature, he had no use or belief in those other
things. He enjoyed dark music like Black Sabbath, loved playing in
the devil’s scale on the guitar, and horror movies, but that was as
close as he got to believe in the occult. For him, the closest he
got to believing in the occult was artifact and book hunting.
Scraping after rare artifacts and forbidden books was a way to earn
money, and he’d learned from one of the best seekers on two
continents – his father.

Max slowed down to turn into a curved
section of road that had been cut through high black stone. Flat,
unforgiving faces of rock rose up along either side of the curve,
they were driver killers, regardless of whether someone was in a
car or on a motorcycle. Fly off that corner, and the unyielding
stone would turn man and machine into a terrible wreck, he’d seen
it more times than he could count. You could test yourself, find
out how fast you could make it down the road, but you couldn’t test
stone.

He made it through the dark corner and
accelerated until he hit ninety miles an hour, nearly twice the
posted limit. He shifted his shoulders so the guitar case strapped
to his back was centered and watched the road carefully. The dead
stone and fallen trees along side the road were ignored, slowing
down for rock cuts; bad sections of road and turns were his
focus.

Before long he arrived in Sudbury, the
highway becoming the Kingsway. The road was newer, straighter, cut
in a better line through the dark stone the mining city was built
on. Instead of dead trees, there were car dealerships, their lots
brimming with glittering vehicles.

The single yellow arch of the Deluxe
Hamburger place made his stomach rumble, but he pressed on, headed
for the down town center of the city. He slowed down as he came
around the last corner, and sat up straight in his seat. After
seeing Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and so many smaller cities
between that summer, Sudbury seemed small and dirty.

Even so, the brown brick buildings of the
modest downtown center, a few rising as high as four and five
storeys were a welcome sight. The place was alive with shoppers on
Elm Street, so much so that he slowed to a cruising speed, catching
the eye of more than one pedestrian through his dark sunglasses.
Leather clad motorcyclists weren’t common, were sometimes
completely unwelcome, and the low rumble of his Harley drew
attention.

As Maxwell passed the Woolworth’s and turned
onto Durham Street, he noticed a dark figure in the crowd; Miranda,
looking right at him with her brown eyes, her long sable hair
stirring in the air. He flashed her a grin the instant before his
front wheel caught a pothole, nearly ripping the handlebars from
his grip. He recovered and rolled on, finishing his turn. “I’m a
bloody git,” he said under his breath.

Seeing her on the street corner, years after
her sudden departure when they were children, in a black leather
jacket with long fringes, wild long hair, and the full figure of a
woman was a shock. Those eyes were instantly recognizable, but the
wear on her leather, how she wore it, and her steady gaze on him,
however brief, spoke of a worldliness that he already found
seductive.

He decided to look for her later. They both
stood out, it wouldn’t be hard to find her. For the time being, he
had business to attend to at Harmony Music. The place stood out
from the other shops, marked by a two story G-clef. Max drove into
a side lane, stopped, and dismounted, trying to put the vision of
Miranda out of his head. He loosed the homemade straps holding his
guitar case to his back and carried it by the handle down the
street.

The sound of the bell on the door of Harmony
Music sent several heads turning in his direction. All Along The
Watchtower was playing softly inside Sudbury’s largest music store.
Brass and wind instruments were along one wall, the drum section
was in front of that, with orchestral strings to the right. On the
opposite side of the store were guitars, basses, with stools in
front of the racks. Bins with music notation books filled a space
between the door and the guitar section, with a glass case between
the counter and the door. A stairway by the door led downstairs,
where there were pianos and more sheet music. “Max, you’ve got to
see this!” said one of the younger patrons standing in front of the
case.

Max wiped his boots on the mat at the door,
a habit that didn’t much matter to the store, since the brown
carpet was in fairly bad condition. Paths were worn from the door
to the counter and to the three walls of guitars to his right.
There was much less wear and tear towards the drums and orchestral
instruments. “Hey, Toby, what’d they find for the case this
time?”

The high schooler with shaggy blonde hair
waited for him at the case with two of his mates. Inside was a
pristine white Fender Stratocaster guitar. “New Strat,” Max said,
looking into the case. “If that’s your love.” He looked around the
store and didn’t see Angelo, so he moved to the side where he could
see the only guitar in the shop he wanted. “There’s a beauty,” he
said, not surprised that it was still there. It was grossly
overpriced.

“You and Les Pauls,” Toby said. “Clapton
plays nothing but Fender.”

“Everyone wants to be Clapton,” Max said
under his breath as he eyed the ebony Les Paul Custom in the case,
his focus drawn towards the golden hardware almost as much as it
was to the price tag, $999.99.

“Man, Max is right,” one of the teens said.
He had no idea who the shaggy kid was. “Besides, I was in here the
other day with my dad and he said that Fender was like a girl who’s
too pretty – if you’re afraid to play dirty with her, there’s no
point.”

“I wouldn’t repeat that around town,” Max
said with a chuckle. Freddy Mann, one of the owners of the shop
came towards him with the keys for the case in his hand and a grin
on his face. “Oh, no need to open it up,” he told the shop keep.
“I’m here to see Angelo. He’s expecting me.”

“You sure you don’t want to try her again,
Max?” Freddy asked, twirling the ring of keys around his finger.
The bell on the door rang, Miranda and a friend with long blonde
hair in a summer dress entered. They both flashed him a smile and
walked downstairs. “I’ll let it go for nine hundred, c’mon, have a
seat with that Gibson and fall in love all over again.”