The Devil of Echo Lake (24 page)

“Make it happen,” Rail said. He tossed back his scotch and crushed the ice with his molars.

Jake found the shop crew in the kitchen amid the remains of Chinese takeout. They pulled an amp from Studio B, and tape was rolling again by one o’clock. The session wrapped by five, narrowly avoiding overtime.

Jake felt jittery from too much caffeine and no lunch. He also found himself in the unusual position of having a night off. Strings had been the only item on the agenda for the day.

He stood in the parking lot watching the vans roll down the dirt road that would soon join the pavement and carry the little orchestra back to the city, crushed his cigarette in the icy gravel underfoot, and fished his car keys out of his pocket. “Okay,” he said aloud to the first cold stars, “I’ll fix this. I just haven’t been able to talk to her lately, but maybe this happened for a reason. A night off. A minor miracle.”

*  *  *

Ally was standing at the top of the stairs when Jake pulled his key from the door and closed it behind him. He couldn’t read her face in the gloom. Night had fully settled, but she hadn’t turned on any lights yet. Even in the dark, something about the set of her shoulders told him she was depressed. He thought of asking her why she was standing in the dark, but when he opened his mouth, he only sighed gently and said, “My girl.”

“Hey, Jake. Did I get you in trouble?”

“No. Are you dressed? I want to show you something.”

“Show me what? I thought we could talk before you go back to work.”

“We can. I don't have to go back.”

“You have the night off?”

“Yeah, crazy, huh?”

“Because of me?”

“No. Come on, put your coat on.”

“Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise. Your Christmas present. We can talk at dinner. We’ll have dinner in Kingston, okay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Please, Ally. Just come with me. You’ll feel better. We have all night to talk.”

She nodded and said, “Let me get my shoes.”

They drove in silence. Jake unfolded a crumpled piece of notepaper to consult his own scribbled directions. He soon made a series of turns down empty side streets. There were no shops in this part of town. Even the houses soon petered out.

“Are we lost?” she asked.

“No. We’re almost there.”

“Almost where?”

“The Christmas Surprise Place, silly.”

She looked out the window as the car rolled down a dark, tree-lined lane, ending in a parking lot with a long, low cinderblock building flanked by chain link fences. As soon as the car cleared the trees, they could hear it—even with the windows rolled up—a cacophony of barking dogs echoing inside the building, spilling out into the quiet night.

Jake parked the car and cracked his door open to see her face by the dome light. She looked surprised, but more scared than happy.

“It’s an animal shelter?” she asked.

He nodded. “We’re going to rescue a puppy. I would have just brought one home to you, but I wanted you to be able to pick it yourself.” He waited for her reaction.

“You’re giving me a dog for Christmas?”

“I know how much you’ve wanted one. Ever since we met.”

“You always said the apartment was too small.”

“Well, puppies start out small, too. And things are going well for me. Maybe we’ll have a bigger place before long. I know it’s hard for you, being alone. You should have a companion.”

She started to cry and turned her head away from him to look at the kennel building. He touched her hand where it lay in her lap. She squeezed his fingers tight and a deep sob wracked her body.

“Ally? Honey, I thought you wanted a dog. What’s wrong?”

The silence spun out between them, punctuated only by the sound of desperate, lonely animals, crying out from their cages. When she looked at him and tucked her hair behind her ear, he realized it was the first time in weeks he had really seen her face close enough and long enough to read it. It required no interpretation. She wore a sadness so complete it seemed to fit her like a pair of jeans she had already broken in.

She reached out and brushed his sandy hair away from his glasses with a slight wrinkle of her forehead as if she was only now noticing that it was getting shaggy.

“You smell like cigarettes,” she said.

He didn’t say anything, just looked into her eyes.

She said it softly, but it hit him hard, “A dog isn’t going to fix this, Jake.”

He started the car and shut his door. The darkness enveloped them again.

Seventeen

Jake felt something pushing his shoulder. He hoped it would stop. It came again, hard enough to wake him. Ally was shoving him. “Summuns at the door,” she said through the pillow. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes and interpreted the thin promise of light on the ceiling. It could hardly be dawn. His second coherent thought of the day startled him into action: if that banging woke the landlord… He got on his feet and looked at the alarm clock. 4:48. Wearing only boxers, he plodded down the balding carpeted stairs to the foyer door. Before he reached the bottom, he recognized Billy’s haunted face, framed by cupped hands, peering through the dingy, bubbled glass.

Jake unbolted the door, swung it open to the tune of a loud creak, opened his mouth to ask Billy if he knew what time it was, and instead found himself saying, “What happened?” Billy looked more intense than Jake had ever seen him. Was the church burning?

Billy looked at him wild-eyed and asked, “Do you have a portable recorder?”

Jake chuckled humorlessly. It became a cough in his dry throat. He said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Billy shook his head.

Jake turned and climbed the stairs, scratching the back of his head. Billy closed the door and followed without invitation. Jake looked back at the sound of Billy’s boots on the stairs and pushed his palm down beside his knee,
keep it down
. Billy gingerly crept up the rest of the steep stairs with a gait like Elmer Fudd’s in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons.

In the kitchen, Jake turned on the coffee machine, which wouldn’t have automatically started to gurgle and hiss for another three hours. As he took the half-and-half from the fridge, he tried to ignore Billy, who was shifting his weight anxiously from one foot to the other as if he had to pee. At last, Billy said, “Listen, Jake, I’m sorry about the hour, but this really can’t wait. Can you please just get dressed and come with me?”

Jake said, “With a recorder.”

“Yeah, do you have one? I left my mini-disc recorder back home in San Fran.”

“Billy, you sleep in a studio in case inspiration strikes. You know how to plug a mic into your computer. You don’t need me to make a demo at five in the morning.”

“It’s not in the studio, it’s in the woods.”

“What is?”

“What I need you to record. It’s in the woods. Do you have a handheld DAT or something?”

“Yes, but what are you trying to get, bird calls at dawn? We could set that kind of thing up in advance with a little notice. Hell, we have an FX library full of stuff like that.”

“It’s not birds, it’s… You’ll see. You have to see for yourself. I can’t tell you. Just get dressed. I’ll show you,” Billy said, fumbling in his pocket for a cigarette. His hand was trembling.

“Don’t smoke in here,” said Jake. “Wait for me outside.”

“Okay. Cool. You’re coming, right?”

“Sure. You’re killing me with curiosity,” Jake said.

“I’ll be out front.”

“Hey, how did you find my apartment?”

“Just looked for the shitbox car on the main drag.” The little grin that curled one side of Billy’s mouth at the end of the remark won Jake over, and he almost forgot how aggrieved he was. The guy had charisma, you had to give him that.

 “I’ll be right out,” Jake said.

He  hastily poured the coffee into his travel mug and spilled some when he heard Allison’s voice behind him say, “Oh. My. God.” She was standing in the hall, pulling her bathrobe tight around her chest. “Billy Moon.”

“Yeah,” Billy said, lowering his head boyishly, clearly expecting to be scolded for waking her.

She looked past him at Jake. “Jake, darling?” she said, “Why is there a rock star in our kitchen at five AM?”

“He needed to borrow a cup of sugar. Why don’t you go on back to sleep?”

She started laughing nervously and Billy joined in. It became a warm, genuine sound before it trickled away.

“I’m sorry,” Billy said. “I’m very sorry to have woken you.”

 “S’okay,” she whispered.

Still looking like she’d seen a ghost, Ally pivoted on her heels. As she shuffled back to the bedroom, Jake called after her, “Uh, I’m going to work early.”

“Whatever.”

*  *  *

The story came out as they drove in the gathering dawn up the winding dirt road to the church.

Billy had dreamed that night of taking his acoustic guitar to a little pool he had found in the woods. Once there, he sat on a tree stump and sang a new song—one he had not yet written. It was a beautiful haunting melody. When he awoke from the dream, his head was clear for the first time in weeks, but he couldn’t remember how the song went.

He felt sure that if he took his guitar to that glade in the heart of the forest, like in the dream, the song would come to him. So he slipped out of bed without waking Rachel. Deep in the woods, he came to the place he had been visiting on his walks, and with fingers numbed by the cold, he was able to hear the song in his head and find it on the fret board.

And here was the part he didn’t think Jake would believe, the reason he had gone into town to wake him. While he was working out the chords, and scribbling little notes on a legal pad, he heard fragments of flute on the air playing a counterpoint melody against his guitar. At first, he wondered if it was just the wind sounding in the hollows of dead trees. But the more he played, the more convinced he became that it was there, a clear melody.

“Your musical imagination is just really vivid,” Jake interjected.

“Like the piano in the church? C’mon, Jake. I can tell the difference between what’s in my head and what’s in my ears.”

“But you were half asleep.”

“Look, that’s why you’re here—to record it and
prove
it’s not in my head, okay? I know what I heard. Maybe I’m
crazy. You’re gonna let me know.”

Jake waited outside the church while Billy ran in to get his guitar. When he reemerged, they crossed the creek using the stepping-stones and started up the trail into the woods. A thin cover of snow reflected and amplified the scarce light. Jake checked the recorder slung over his shoulder on its strap. The batteries had enough juice in them for a good hour.

The not-yet frozen ground made for a mucky surface to walk on, and Jake had to stop twice to pull his foot free, one time losing his work boot when his foot slipped out of it, leaving him to balance on the other foot while pulling the boot from the mud with the sound of greedy suction. Billy watched with an impatient glare until Jake was moving again. After that, Jake tried to follow Billy’s course more carefully, placing his boots on the same thick tree roots and grasping the same overhanging branches for balance. Billy seemed to know the path well.

Jake wondered what Eddie would say if he knew a client had dragged him out of bed at dawn to do a little field recording in the middle of the woods. Probably something like, “Better not end up on your time sheet, you make enough OT as it is. And if you drop one of our mics in the creek, I’ll have your head.” Eddie might also wonder what Moon was on at the time. Probably mushrooms purchased on the village green.

Jake’s problem, however, was that he didn’t think Billy
was
high. His pupils were a little big out here in the semi-dark, but they had looked normal in the kitchen. Besides, Billy just seemed like himself. Excited, yes, very excited, but not zoned out. No, he was pretty sure Billy wasn’t on drugs, just batshit crazy.

Jake was so accustomed to the stress he imbibed daily now—like a low dose of a poison he was developing an immunity to—he wasn't especially miffed about this latest violation of his personal life. Even the notion of a personal life seemed like a joke. He knew he could have refused Billy’s request, so why exactly was he cooperating with this madness? Was it because he saw more of Billy than Ally these days and had come to regard him as a friend? Would proof of delusion in the form of a recording with no flute break Billy’s psychosis? 

Jake was also aware of a less virtuous motive underlying his cooperation. He felt a boon from the simple fact that Billy was trusting him and confiding in him. It placed the two of them on a different side of the fence from Trevor Rail, and that seemed important. That they were about to record something, however bizarre, without Rail’s knowledge gave Jake a thrill. This was, after all, a new Billy Moon song, written with just a guitar in the woods, and he was going to be the first person to hear it and record it on the spot. Just the two of them.

What if he captured something special? Something even usable. Maybe a demo version that had some magic that just couldn’t be recaptured or surpassed in the studio. It was unlikely, but such things had been known to happen. Sure, Billy’s voice and hands were probably too cold to deliver a clean performance of something so new and fragile, but it was possible. Magic was always possible, every time you pressed the record button. That was why he had taken the job in the first place, and that was why he was tromping through the mud at dawn.

Lost in his own thoughts, Jake bumped into Billy’s guitar case before noticing the singer had stopped. They were in a little clearing with a black pool in the center ringed with mossy stones under a lonely, gnarled rowan tree. The sight of that tree gave Jake a chill, though he could not say why.

Billy laid the case down on a relatively dry patch and popped the latches. Taking the acoustic from its plush shell, he sat down on a fungus-riddled tree stump and did a cursory tune up.

Jake said, “Strum a few chords while I get a level.”