Ghosts in the Attic (7 page)

He saw a war raging in Patty’s eyes. Hope warring with the fear of false hope. “What is it?”

“How would you feel about relocating?”

***

Barry and Danielle left the library and started across the campus quadrangle. Danielle said, “I need to run by the Business office. Wanna come with?”

Barry glanced over at the large white Administration building on the opposite side of campus, his pace unconsciously slowing. “I hate going in Curtis, gives me the creeps.”

“Well, I do think the whole place is going to just collapse someday. I mean, have you gone up the stairs by the switchboard lately? I swear, they lean to the right. It’s like you’re in a funhouse…or drunk. Plus some of the offices seem to be on a tilt. Hell, there is a reason why whole sections of the building are closed off.”

“And then there’s the ghost,” Barry said matter-of-factly.

“What ghost?”

Barry stopped right in the middle of the walkway, causing a group of girls behind them to divert into the grass. “You haven’t heard about the ghost of Curtis?”

Danielle shook her head and narrowed her eyes skeptically. “Are you shitting me or what?”

“For real. You know some of the offices on the third floor used to be dorms back in the day, right?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Well, back during the Civil War, there was this chick named Patty something-or-other, and her fiancé got blown up by a landmine in battle.”

“I don’t think they had landmines in the Civil War.”

“Whatever. Point is, he kicked it and she was all heart-broken, right? So one night after dinner, she takes a knife back up to her dorm room and plunges it right into her chest, bled to death in her bed. And now she wanders around Curtis, there have been several sightings of her on the third floor. They stay she still has the knife sticking out of her chest.”

Danielle laughed, but there was a nervous edge to the sound. “Sounds like a bunch of horseshit, if you ask me.”

“No way. I heard Dr. Rob telling some of the guys on the lacrosse team about it, and Dr. Rob would know. He’s a history professor, after all.”

Danielle looked back toward Curtis, now seeing the building in a new light. With its flaking paint, bell tower, and large white columns out front, it certainly looked like the kind of place that might be haunted. And she had always gotten a weird vibe in there, like someone was watching her.

“So you still wanna go by the Business office?” Barry asked.

“Uhm, no, it can wait.”

***

From one of the upper windows of Curtis, the ghost of someone who had never lived looked down on the quad and smiled.

REVOLUTION OF SOUND

Leslie and Joanne stopped at a Taco Bell on the way to the concert. They’d left their respective houses this evening wearing jeans and T-shirts, their hair pulled back in sloppy ponytails. In the restroom of the fast food restaurant, they unloaded the duffel bag they’d brought with them and started their transformation. Leslie changed into a pair of ripped fishnets, a red-and-black checkered Catholic schoolgirl skirt, and a baggie black T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands. She smeared eyeliner under her eyes so that she looked like she hadn’t slept in a week.

Leslie glanced over at her friend and was a bit amazed by the audacity of Joanne’s outfit. Leslie wasn’t exactly a slender girl, a little too thick in the hips and thighs, but Joanne was downright fat. A tank of a girl, she weighed close to three hundred pounds, and yet she had a confidence when it came to her body that Leslie envied. Joanne had changed into a short black skirt that came only halfway down her thighs, and a shredded shirt that had several gashes in the rear, nearly exposing her entire back. She applied black lipstick that looked like greasepaint and used a giant can of hairspray to tease her hair into a dark brown helmet.

“Wanna use some of this?” Joanne asked, holding the can out to Leslie.

Leslie shook her head, loosening her dyed-black hair to fall about her face. She preferred to wear her hair over her face like a veil, looking out at the world from in between the curtain of dark strands.

They left the bathroom and went to the counter to order some sodas for the road. They inspired a lot of disapproving stares and whispered comments, but they were used to that. It was the kind of treatment they always got at their high school. It was a world of Neanderthal jocks and vapid cheerleaders, and Leslie and Joanne didn’t fit the mold, neither physically nor mentally. Sometimes Leslie thought she and Joanne had become friends out of a desperate need to commiserate with someone.

Back in the car, Leslie behind the wheel, Joanne pulled a plastic bag out from beneath her seat and said, “I got a little mood music for the trip.”

“What is it?”

Joanne reached into the bag and pulled out a CD, still in the cellophane wrapping. “It’s a new Revolution of Sound CD.”

“Get out of here,” Leslie said, snatching the disc from her friend’s hand. “But we already have all their CDs.”

“This is an import. It’s got a lot of unreleased tracks, some live performances, and an early demo of ‘Nasty Love.’”

“Awesome,” Leslie said, already tearing off the wrapping and popping the disc into the player. “Where’d you get it?”

“I got Alec down at the record store to special order it for me. Came in yesterday.”

“Perfect timing.” Leslie cranked the volume and screeching guitars and heavy bass pounded out of the speakers, Dante Reed’s low, resonate voice twining through the music like a snake.

The girls rolled down the windows and yelled at the passersby as they pulled out of the parking lot and got back on the interstate.

* * *

They arrived at the arena just as the opening act was finishing up their set. That was fine, no one came to see the opening act anyway. Leslie and Joanne were only interested in the main event, Revolution of Sound.

Revolution of Sound was a Goth rock band that had formed in the mid-seventies. Dante Reed, the lead singer, had a sensual voice that quickly made the band a phenomenon. They’d produced a half dozen albums over the next ten years before breaking up in ’85. However, the band reunited approximately every five years and toured the country. This was the band’s first tour of the new millennium.

Leslie had discovered the band last year, after reading an intriguing article about them in
Rolling Stone
and buying one of their CDs. Their music was dark and disillusioned, full of cynicism and a distrust of authority. Revolution of Sound confirmed all the things Leslie believed—that adults had no more idea what they were doing than kids, that Christianity was just an elaborate myth created to keep people in line, that the American government was actively working against its citizens best interests, that life really was pain. Leslie had introduced the band to Joanne, and they’d been diehard fans ever since. The kids at school considered it one more thing with which to ridicule the girls, loyalty to a band that had broken up before they were even born, but Leslie wouldn’t expect those carbon-copy clones to be able to appreciate the philosophy of Revolution of Sound.

Their seats were in section 8, row M, seats 25 and 26. Not the best seats in the house, but not the nose-bleeders either. The roadies were down on the stage, setting up Revolution of Sound’s equipment. People were leaving their seats, using this intermission for quick trips to the restroom, concession stands, and to buy obscenely overpriced T-shirts.

“This is gonna be awesome,” Joanne said with a smile. She had gotten black lipstick on her front teeth.

“I hear they put on a hell of a live show,” Leslie said, excitement bubbling in her gut like a witch’s cauldron. In an age when lip-synching plastic pop princess ruled the album charts, Leslie found little music to which she could relate. That was probably why she’d had to delve back several decades to find music that spoke to her.

“Do you notice anything weird about this crowd?”

“Weird? What do you mean?”

“Just take a look around.”

Leslie did, but she failed to see anything unusual about anyone. To her right was a couple in matching tie-dye shirts, the man with long black hair streaked with gray, the woman with a pockmarked face that looked like a patch of bad road. In the aisle in front of her was a bald man with a thick bushy goatee that looked like a scrub brush. Leslie glanced over her shoulder and saw two amply endowed women wearing tube-tops that looked in danger of becoming belts. She scanned the arena, her gaze alighting on several people then passing on, not sure what Joanne was talking—

“Everyone is old,” Leslie said, realization coming like a slap to the face. At sixteen, people in their thirties seemed old to Leslie, but a large portion of the people in the arena were in their forties and fifties. She and Joanne looked to be the only young people in attendance.

“It’s like we’ve stumbled into a Barry Manilow concert by accident.”

“Well, Revolution of Sound is an old band. Dante Reed himself is fifty-six. Some of these people have probably been fans since they were our age.”

“I’ll bet we’re the only ones here under the age of thirty-five. I just hope no one has a heart-attack when the band really starts rocking.”

Leslie laughed at her friend’s joke, but she was actually feeling a little uneasy. Over the years, she had developed a distrust of adults—her parents most of all—and being surrounded by so many grownups left her feeling vulnerable and exposed. She didn’t know how to explain this to Joanne, however, so she pushed it aside. Once the show started, she was sure she’d forget her uneasiness in the onslaught of aggressive music.

When the band took the stage, the crowd roared in a single voice, loud and raucous. Leslie and Joanne were on their feet, hands in the air, screaming out all the frustration and boredom of their normal lives, a form of primal scream therapy that left them feeling energized and full of life in a way they seldom did. Dante Reed was the last to appear, stepping out from around the drum kit, strutting like a combination of runway model and streetwalker. The crowd’s voice increased to ear-shattering decibels as the music started up and Dante grabbed the microphone and snarled the opening lyrics to “Heart of a Thousand Lies.”

As far as Leslie was concerned, everyone else in the arena disappeared at that moment. Even Joanne was an insubstantial wraith next to her. It was just Leslie, diving into the deep pool of Dante’s voice, swimming in the waters of every intonation, every howl, every whisper. She balled her hands into fists and beat them against her upper thighs in time to the music. Tomorrow she may have bruises there, but tonight she felt no pain, only the throbbing rhythm of the music, the desperate urgency of the lyrics. She sang along at the top of her lungs, and during the final verse of the song—“
Who are you to tell me I’m fucked up when you’re just as fucked up as me
?”—Leslie thrust both hands into the air, the middle finger of each raised, as if shooting God himself the bird.

As the whine of the electric guitar died, Leslie realized there were tears on her cheeks, and when she glanced over at her friend, she saw the same expression of stunned ecstasy on Joanne’s face. Having shunned the god of their parents, it was as if they had just found a god for themselves. Not Dante Reed himself, but what he represented. Hope for those who were not perfect, who were not beautiful, who were not what they’d been expected to be. Acceptance for those who didn’t yet know exactly who they were, but knew who they
weren’t
and who they wanted never to become. In the music of Revolution of Sound, the girls had found a home.

“Hello out there all my faithful,” Dante Reed said, and the crowd went wild, jumping up and down, screaming, crying. It didn’t matter that Dante was no longer the physical specimen he’d been twenty years ago, that his face was mapped by wrinkles, that he had a bald spot like a yarmulke on the top of his head, that the leather pants and long purple jacket with fur trim he wore were too young for him. He was above all that, ageless in a way, his music as vital and relevant today as when he’d first recorded it, keeping him forever young in spirit if not in body.

Strutting to the edge of the stage, scanning the crowd that had gathered to worship at the altar of his music, Dante said, “This is our first show on our first tour since early ’99. How disappointing that the world did not end in chaos and technological revolt as had been predicted. But we soldier on, into this new millennium that looks to my eyes very much the same as the last. Sure, we have CDs instead of vinyl, DVD instead of VHS, TiVo instead of just picking one fucking show to watch, but nothing really ever changes, my friends. The new generation learns nothing from the one that proceeds it, the same tired mistakes being made decade after decade, the same weak protests being raised, the same pointless compromise that benefits neither side. And through it all, one other thing never changes—the Revolution of Sound.”

Leslie screamed ‘til her throat burned, a wordless cry of affirmation and understanding, her voice lost in the cries of all those around her.

“I see a lot of familiar faces out there,” Dante said. “A lot of long time fans who’ve remained faithful to the music all these years. I’m grateful for your loyalty, my friends. But I wonder, are there any new fans out there, any young people who’ve happened across our music and found in it a core of truth that transcends age?”

Leslie and Joanne yelled until they thought their lungs were going to collapse, their cries so shrill and high-pitched they’d have put Mariah to shame. The entire arena seemed to turn and look at them, and Leslie suddenly felt self-consciousness grip her, and she shook more hair into her face to hide her from the scrutiny.

“Ahhh,” Dante exhaled. “I see we have a couple of ripe young lovelies out there. Why don’t you come down to the front so I can have a better look?”

Leslie and Joanne exchanged a glance, unsure if he was serious. Those nearby encouraged them to go, taking their arms and pulling them toward the aisle. Leslie was dazed, couldn’t quite believe she and her friend had attracted the attention of Dante Reed, a veritable legend of rock’n’roll. On numb legs, moving with the exaggerated slowness of a dream, Leslie glided down the aisle toward the stage, Joanne close behind her. Perhaps it was the influence of her skirt, but Leslie felt she was on her way to take communion.