The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (18 page)

Come on then. Let’s get it done.

He flicked through his folder of tabulated guitar parts and selected the opening riff from
Alive
, an old Pearl Jam track that he admired, but wasn’t too demanding. His efforts never seemed to correspond with the recording, however. The strings buzzed as he mis-fretted. He had to resolve notes that were outside the scale he was trying to target. His wrist started seizing up. He remembered reading an interview with Dave Grohl, the former Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters main man, who said that he didn’t have time for people who learned scales and that they should just pick up a guitar and have fun, but how could you have fun with an instrument if you didn’t know anything about how to use it? Surely Grohl had taken lessons, even if he was self-taught. You had to start somewhere. You had to have some kind of guidance. And for those who
were
self-taught, how did you know what order in which to learn things? Chords first? Or dive into the pentatonic? How did you know what you were doing was right?

His frustration was partly due to the knowledge he had always been a man inclined to structure and method. He followed rules. He was mistrustful of anything that was random, or wild: he hated jazz, for example. Maybe he was too tightly wired, too trapped by his own apparent eagerness to fail to be able to release the creative spirit he thought he saw in himself.

He put the guitar down and rubbed his aching wrist.

He ate dinner. He drank a glass of beer in front of a football match. He went to bed.

#

A black wet mouth opening in the night, barred with saliva: strings across a sound hole.
Mi contra Fa diabolus est in musica.
The wet mouth closing. Dried blood bracketing it, adhering to the cracks like flecks of rust on a fissured drainpipe. His red guitar falling through shadows, redder than he remembered it; redder than he liked. A voice edged with sarcasm and age.
Your guitar… older than you think.

#

He jerked out of sleep and the sounds of dissonance came with him, or to him; he could not be sure. He listened in the dark and thought he heard the ghost of a chord recently strummed. It resonated in the air like electricity after a storm. He sat for hours in his bed, straining for silence.

#

What are the notes on the B string?
he thought to himself, on the bus ride into the office.
Open B. C. C sharp. D. D sharp. E. F. F sharp. G. G sharp. A. A sharp
. The B String. They’d called it the
Beast Ring
in music classes at school. Ha ha. Ho ho. The B string was different to all the others. It was an awkward bugger. When you reached the Beast Ring, you had to change what you did or things would go south.

He arranged meetings. He made coffee. He flexed his finger muscles and fiddled with his plectrum. The day faded like Gilmour’s solo at the end of
Comfortably Numb
.

He watched one of his colleagues, Alice, yawn and stretch. She caught his eye and smiled guiltily. It was five o’clock. The evening spread out before him with all its attendant disappointments. He would eat an under-seasoned dinner alone with the radio, and then he’d slope off to his room and cause Jimi and Gary and Kurt to turn in their graves for an hour or two.

Alice got up from her desk and made her way to the ladies. Fleckney began packing away his things. By the time he had pulled on his jacket and switched off his computer monitor, Alice was back, dramatically transformed from a drab, grey, tired creature into a woman shimmering, Kohl-eyed. Her skin seemed to gleam. She caught him staring at her and smiled. “Amazing what a bit of lippy and the promise of a cocktail can do for the soul, isn’t it?”

He falteringly asked Pat, at his lesson that evening, if he knew anything about the Devil’s Interval. He expected Pat to scoff, but he seemed pleased to have been asked a question. Maybe it was because it meant he would be spared having to listen to Fleckney make the guitar sound like something newly stabbed in an abattoir.

“A little,” Pat said, rubbing at the stubble on his chin. “Less theatrically, you’re talking about something called a tritone, a musical interval—you remember what an interval is, right?—composed of three adjacent whole tones. It produces dissonance. If you omit the perfect fifth and highlight the diminished fifth—so play a C followed by an F sharp—you get a… forbidding sound. It was given this Devil’s interval name because it sounds, I don’t know, scary? Evil? It’s no biggie. You’ll hear it in Hendrix and Black Sabbath. But you’ll also hear it in Liszt and Wagner.” He laughed. “You’ll find it in the theme tune to
The Simpsons
. Now, how have we been getting on with that minor arpeggio?”

On the journey back through the city to his home in the suburbs he thought about Alice and saw how he might perform his own transformation. The guitar could not change; basically it was a tool, a means to an end, and the notes were ineluctable, unless you started messing around with different tunings, which was something he was not interested in. It was he, Fleckney, who had to change. Learn the notes, know the neck, and its mysteries would open up to him, he was sure. What was that saying?
Perfect practice makes perfect
.

When he arrived home, he went straight to his study and switched on the amp. The guitar gleamed, as Alice had done. It felt solid beneath his fingers. He felt the power surge softly through the body and neck. The strings made an ethereal hum as if they might sound out without any contact to aid them. Last night’s dream seemed as disconnected from this beautiful instrument as he was from Jimmy Page’s talent.
Perfect practice
. A new start. A routine. Five minutes of finger stretches. Five minutes on one scale. A new chord every day. And finish off by choosing a key to play in, and creating a little riff. Half an hour.

That thirty minutes disappeared in what seemed like seconds. His fingertips tingled where they had pressed against the strings. Five minutes of repetition had rewarded him with a new chord—Dsus4, picked at random from an online chord library—implanted in his muscle memory, and he felt confident with the shape of the natural minor scale that he had played in G. He made a note of his new chord on a notebook and set his goals for the following day. Usually his frustration would force squeals and groans from the Strat. But this time it had sounded all right because he had taken his time and worked diligently through the exercises he set himself. There was no rush, no exasperated pauses where he thrust the guitar away from him and stalked off to make a cup of tea. There had been tangible progress made. He was excited about the possibilities. A simple little bit of planning had given him fresh drive and direction.

He stretched and left the room, without the hot, regretful feelings he usually suffered. He drew a deep bath and relaxed in it with a glass of wine. He ate dinner and watched a recording of Jimi Hendrix playing at a concert on the Isle of White. There was no longer the mild jealousy he felt when he watched Jimi segue from his improvisation on the wah pedal into
Voodoo Chile
, nor the confusion over trying to demystify what was being played, and how. He went to bed and fell asleep immediately.

#

The dream crashed through him like a falling wall of plangent chords. He was in a stadium: Shea stadium, New York, the baseball ground where The Beatles had performed the first major outdoor concert in ‘65 and The Police played to 70,000 in ‘83. The stadium now, though, was apparently empty. Not a hint of any staff or security. Just him, alone on the stage, while a beam of cold blue light arced crazily around the stadium, uncontrolled, random. Fleckney shivered as if the ghosts of Harrison and Lennon had moved through him on the stage. He was trying to plug the lead from his guitar into the giant stack of amps behind him, but it was too dark to see, and anyway, there was something wrong with the cables; they felt wet in his fist. He thought maybe it was a good thing that he couldn’t see to complete his task because he might only succeed in electrocuting himself. He thought of Keith Relf of The Yardbirds who had done just that. Maybe he should leave all this to the roadies and go home. But the grip of the dream would not allow it. Now he saw that what he held in his hands was cabling, but the kind of organic cabling that ought to be packed away inside a body. The blue light swerved across the great expanse of the baseball pitch and picked out a figure staring at him, its body opened like a great red flower. It stretched out its arms to him and the hands fell open like a clumsily packed roll of tools; the fingers seemed too long for the hands. Far too long… He looked back at the guitar in his fist and it was not his guitar, if it could even be called such a thing. This thing now, this
thing
fashioned from so much matted hair and bone and gut.

The chords seemed to follow him out of sleep. They sounded like the shrieks and growls of something deep in pain. He bolted upright. The noise did not dissipate; someone was playing on his guitar. A grinding, ragged sound, as if something metallic was being dragged along the strings. He felt the vibrations in his own fingers as if he was the architect. He was too scared to rise from his bed even though his mind was trying to overcome the fog of fear and provide a logical reason: he had forgotten to turn the amp off and the guitar had slipped over causing a riot of feedback. That must be it. That must be it.

Or despite the reality piling in on him, his dream had not finished. Maybe it was the stress of work, or his new regime. Maybe his brain was flushing itself of all the toxic build-up of the past months or years. This was a good thing, really then, this dream of chaotic sound. The belief he was still guarded by sleep gave him steel. He rose and felt the pile from the carpet spread under his toes. He padded along the hallway to his den. He switched on the light and the noise died; only the echo of those final, discordant notes remained. His guitar was where he had left it, in its stand. The power indicator light on the amp was dead. He went to his guitar and pressed his fingers hesitantly against the neck. It was warm; vibrations died under his touch. Dried flakes of blood fell from the strings. A wet smell of iron was everywhere.

Dawn was there in the threadbare weave of his curtains, soaking through them. The dream crumbled like a vampire in light. He dressed and went downstairs. He took a cup of coffee into the garden. He thought of Karen, the only woman he’d ever been really interested in and who had shown any kind of interest in him. He thought of how good it had been and how bad it had become. He thought about practice and whether it applied to relationships. Probably. There was another self-taught failure.

He saw the kid again, in a school tie with a comically large knot. He was walking briskly, head down, towards school. He was carrying a guitar case. Fleckney felt a twinge of jealousy.
If only I’d started that young
. He called him over to the fence when he drew level.

“Hi,” he said. “Eddie isn’t it? I didn’t know you could play guitar.”

“Just starting,” he said. His skin was bruised under his eyes. His face was changing from that of an infant to a young boy. Fleckney hoped that sadness wouldn’t be trapped within it. It could dog you your whole life.

“Great,” Fleckney said. “What are you working on? Simple chords?”

“No,” Eddie said. “We’re learning how to read music. Minims and crotchets. We did E, B and G last week. We’re learning A and C today. Dad played guitar in a band in the eighties. He wants to pass on what he knows to me.”

“And what about those boys? Are they giving you any more trouble?”

“A bit.”

“Just walk away.”

“They follow.”

“Then tell someone,” Fleckney urged.

“You?”

“What about your mum and dad?”

“I don’t have a mum. Dad just tells me to fight back.”

“Why do they pick on you?’

Eddie looked at him as if it was the most stupid question in history. Perhaps it was. But Eddie shrugged. “Dad says it’s because I don’t make an effort to join in with people. He says I’m a loner.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“Are you a loner?”

“How’s the guitar coming along anyway? You enjoying it?”

Eddie nodded. “Except the strings hurt my fingers after a while.”

“That will stop, soon enough,” Fleckney said. “All the pain will be worth it in the end.”

Eddie glanced at Fleckney’s fingers. “Sometimes Dad says that I mustn’t be related to him.”

“Really? I’m sure he must only be joking.”

“He says we’re totally different notes. He says the distance between us is too great. He said he and mum were harmony but me and him are dissonance.”

Fleckney didn’t know what to say. He was shocked.

“I’ve got to go,” he said.

“Good luck,” Fleckney said.

He ignored his guitar while he readied himself for work. In the past he would have grabbed it before leaving and performed some half-arsed noodle, which more often than not left him feeling dissatisfied. He had defined his practice schedule now and would not deviate from it. At the weekend he would think about extending that programme, but only if he could guarantee that it would be a fulfilling session and not descend into random, pointless strumming.

He tore out a sheet from a pad of paper in the kitchen and spent the bus journey working out the notes of the major and minor chords he knew, given their respective formulae.

When he returned, he was feeling spiky, unsettled. He was also excited about the half hour of practice he was due. But it wasn’t solely down to that. He’d given Jackson a mouthful in response to the latest jibe at the expense of his passion. They’d almost come to blows and both had received a carpeting from their boss, a normally ultra-placid guy called Wearing who brought his slippers into the office. Fleckney and Jackson had both apologised profusely to Wearing and each other. On the way out of the office, Jackson had said to Fleckney that he’d ram his guitar down his throat if he ever saw him with it. The rage had only just begun to subside; last night’s lack of sleep and the dream entangled within it probably had something to do with it too.