The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (20 page)

“But what you do, you can’t call them reviews, can you? You don’t seem to ever talk about what’s there. You just react to the idea of its existence.”

From one pocket, Tomas pulled out a couple of quartered pages, a printout from the online magazine that Derrick Yardley wrote for, a pop culture site called
The Pipeline
. Tomas dropped them into Derrick’s lap.

“Go on,” he said. “Read it. Out loud.”

We waited for him to unfold the pages, and Derrick’s face went the colour of cream cheese. Now, finally, he knew.

“Hey. It’s just… it’s not…”

“Go
on
.” This time, Tomas punted a boot tip into Derrick’s ribs for emphasis. “Read it like you mean it.”

“Come on, it was supposed to be funny.”

“Then make me laugh.”

He was squirming now, getting a full sense of how isolated we were. “I’m not really a performer.”

“Apparently I’m not much of one either, but that’s never stopped me.” Tomas gave him a harder kick that sent him scuttling back with a yelp.

Go on, just read the stupid thing
, I willed him, and after a couple of shaky breaths, he smoothed the pages and got started:

Well, fuck me with a pentagram, points and all, but that’s rich. If you’re going to call your new album
Cures For A Sickened World
, maybe you might first want to make sure you haven’t spent your previous nine albums establishing yourself as part of the disease.

Derrick peeked over the top of the pages to see if any more pain was coming but Tomas only stood there as impassive as a granite carving, so he continued.

Listen, dipshits, I’ve got your cure right here. Kill yourselves! Do it onstage, film it as a how-to video for every other lame-ass band that would stoop to follow in your wake, and take as much of your poxy audience with you as you can, because if they’re supporting you, then they’re part of the disease too. Do that much, and the rest of us will all feel so much better in the morning. Because, if I haven’t made myself clear enough, the prospect of performing acupuncture on my testicles with rusty needles is preferable to the idea of waking up tomorrow suffering the knowledge that this is still a world afflicted with a Balrog infestation.

The entire band had taken exception to this broadside, but none more so than Tomas. Co-founder. Rhythm guitar. Lead vocals. Main songwriter. He wasn’t a solo artist, but it was very much
his
band.

Balrog. See how their name has R—O—G in it? They’re missing a huge opportunity here, but I’ll get back to that. For now, just look at these asshats. I know it hurts, but look at them. Take a good, hard look and keep trying to remember these are grown men. Allegedly. Grown men painted up like fucking rodeo clowns that the ancient Greeks might’ve sent into the fucking Labyrinth to distract the fucking Minotaur, because even the Minotaur would have to possess enough of a sense of humor to fall down fucking laughing. We get it, you twats! You’re evil! With a capital Eve! Or something.

Interesting that he chose to deride them for being grown men. Because, just based on his approach to so-called journalism, I would’ve thought it was coming from some smarmy douchebag still in college, or not long out. But he’d obviously seen his thirtieth birthday, maybe even his thirty-fifth.

I don’t even know where to begin. So why bother. Just this: if this pack of sheep in wolves’ clothing proves anything, it’s that pretend-evil can still be a lucrative career path as long as your amp knobs go to eleven and you’re lucky enough to find four other hairy dudes with the same birth defect that gives them a super scary scowl. Didn’t these short-bus regulars have mothers around to warn them that their faces were going to freeze like that? Sorry, my bad. They didn’t have mothers! They were born of goats!

Okay, so the guys had gotten a laugh out of that part.

Speaking of goats, that’s how much I don’t want to hear any more from these shit-mongers. I’d rather be staked out spread-eagle while Satan’s most incontinent he-goat takes a steaming infernal dump on my face than listen to another minute of this. I can almost guarantee that the sound of it would be more musical. I would rather scarf up a rotting platter of serpent roadkill scraped off the Highway To Hell, tail-to-head, washed down with a bucket of demon jizz.

Back to that R—O—G in their name: They’ve got it backwards. In the world of so-called extreme metal, you can’t swing a ritually sacrificed cat without hitting some band with G—O—R in its name. I looked it up so you don’t have to. Gorgoroth. Gorguts. Gorefest. Belphegor. Cirith Gorgor. Don’t make me go on. So what I humbly suggest is that the brainiacs in Balrog change their name to Gorgonzola, so they can quit dicking around and lay claim, once and for all, to the title of Cheesiest Metal Band In The World.

And that was that. Mr Sunshine folded the papers again and, when Tomas made no move to take them back, set them on the grass, lightly, as if hoping they might vanish in a puff of fairy dust.

Tomas stood with folded arms. “You never even listened to the review copy, did you?”

Getting through the reading without another kick in the ribs seemed to have given him a little fire. “You’re so fucking wise and all-seeing, what do
you
think?”

“I think it was a rhetorical question,” Tomas said. “They’re all like that, aren’t they? Your ‘reviews’. Every line trying to be more insulting than the line before. I got bored looking for anything different before I could find it.”

“You’d be looking a long time.”

“I’m curious,” Tomas said. “Did you aspire to be a sham all along, or did that just happen? There’s no other word for it. Sham. You occupy a position that implies objectivity, but your mind is made up about something before it even occurs to the creator to create it. Your hatred isn’t just cowardly. It’s lazy.”

One corner of his mouth curled into a self-satisfied sneer. “It’s consistent.”

I’d already figured him for the kind that couldn’t lose. The readers who lapped it up, thought his shtick was the funniest thing they’d ever seen, that was pure validation. But so were the ones who thought he was a plague, and took the time to say so. The more pique in their comments, the better. Attention was attention. He was the kind who’d find scorn just as nutritious as praise.

As long as no one was actually holding him accountable.

So when Tomas squatted next to him, Derrick began to squirm with unease again. Tomas could go a long time without blinking. Silence didn’t bother him. Eye contact didn’t bother him. He was a master of simmering hostility.

“The hatreds I have, I come by them honestly. They’re considered,” he said. “Let me tell you a few of them. I hate smug little hipsters in retro cardigans and thick black glasses. I hate disingenuousness. I hate people who say ‘my bad.’ I hate people who lack the courage to back up their professed convictions.” He pushed his hair back out of his eyes so nothing got in the way of the glare. “All my hatreds, they’re earned. I’ve put the time and effort into cultivating them. They’re pure. But you… you dishonour that ethos.”

Now, finally, Tomas took back the printout, although he didn’t unfold it. What he needed was already in memory. “Do you get off when people quote your own words back to you? ‘I’d rather be staked out spread-eagle while Satan’s most incontinent he-goat takes a steaming infernal dump on my face than listen to another minute of this.’ When I read that, I didn’t see hyperbole. What I saw was you laying down a challenge for yourself.”

Tomas stood again, as, moment by moment, Derrick started to put the pieces together.

“You may find this disappointing, but Satan is about as real to me as Saturday morning cartoons. You might’ve even picked up on that if you’d bothered to look into the album a little.”

Still weakened by his hours of sedation, Derek was in no condition to put up a fight as Tomas dragged him by his bound ankles halfway across the meadow, where a quartet of iron stakes was already driven into the ground.

“But I do believe in goats,” he said. “We’ll start there.”

There wasn’t much of a struggle even when Tomas lashed him, limb by limb, to the stakes, although he had plenty to say to Tomas’ back as he walked away.

It was when Tomas reappeared, leading the shaggy, horned thing from the barn, that Mr Sunshine really started to squeal.

#

The band was based out of Seattle, but hardly anyone knew about this remote place that Tomas Lundvall owned high in the Cascades, across the border in Oregon. The rest of the band knew. I assumed there was a real estate agent who knew. Now I knew. And, naturally, so did Mr Sunshine—not exactly trustworthy inner circle material.

“When you told him that nobody’s going to believe him,” I said to Tomas later, inside the cottage’s kitchen. “I need to know you mean that. I need to know there’s not going to be blowback from this once we get him back home. This is the kind of thing that the term ‘federal crime’ was invented for.”

Tomas looked amused. “Isn’t it a little late to start looking for assurances now?”

“I trusted you on faith when that’s all there was time for. I never said details wouldn’t matter.”

“No, you didn’t,” Tomas said. “He can talk all he wants, if he’s not too afraid to do it, and it’s only going to sound like so much delirium. He’ll never know where he’s been, exactly. You’ll drop him off outside an emergency room, and with everything in his system, it’s only going to look like he’s been on a bender for a few days. While he’s gone, there’s somebody in Chicago still using his ATM card once or twice a day. And his phone. There are pictures on the phone from a couple nights ago at the club, and he’s having a good time. There’ll be a few more by the end, too blurry to make out. It’s all time-stamped. He’ll have it all with him again by the time he lands at the ER.” Tomas see-sawed his upturned hands like a balance scale. “Which would you believe?”

A bit later, as the sun was starting to fade, Tomas went out to hose Derrick Yardley down and get him moved from the meadow into the barn for the night and take him a plate of food.

He was quiet now, had either screamed himself hoarse or given it up hours ago as pointless. There was no one coming, no one to hear. The nearest neighbour seemed to be at least a mile away, along winding roads, while the hills and valleys would contain almost any mortal sound.

This was land made to shield miseries from view, and keep them secret.

The place seemed as if it might have first sprung up as some long-ago settler’s homestead. The barn may have even been original, minus repairs, although the cottage was clearly newer, a replacement built on the foundation of the original. Its rustic nature seemed more by design than scarcity, and it was solid through and through, built of heavy timber, with a lot of stonework, too, including a rock fireplace that would have fit right into a hunting lodge.

As a getaway home, it was an unusual choice. Retreats, for those who could afford them, usually meant luxury and ostentation, oceanside villas and penthouses thirty floors above the great unwashed. I didn’t have to be Tomas Lundvall’s accountant to know that, even after seventeen years of second-tier success in the music industry, he didn’t have that kind of money… but then, he didn’t have those kind of aspirations, either. He had no use for a place that others would look at and envy. Instead, I figured, he would need a place to exile himself from the stink of humanity.

He was back in the cottage after a few minutes.

“You’re just going to leave him by himself all night?” I asked.

“If you’re worried he’s going to get away, you can join him and keep watch. As for myself, I have faith in the chain and the anvil.”

I wasn’t expecting that. “You’ve chained him to an anvil?”

“It’s a very big anvil.”

He looked at me then as if studying me. It was blatant. All these years of working for the band, and I’d never managed to decide if he did that with people because he was assessing what made them tick, or forever looking for something he was missing.

“End of the tour leg and all,” he said. We had a month of precious downtime before heading to Europe for the summer festival circuit. “Are you sure you don’t have someplace better you’d rather be?”

“Apparently I don’t. But you know that already.” I’d married late, and even then, because of all the time on the road, it hadn’t lasted. I wouldn’t try again until I was a stationary target, if there was someone out there who would even have me by then. “You did ask for my help with this, remember.”

“It wasn’t part of your job description. You could have said no.”

“I figured you would’ve gone through with it anyway. I didn’t want to hear about it going wrong because somebody else fucked it up for you.”

He appeared pleased by this. Although even I wasn’t sure if it came out of a warped sense of loyalty or just the challenge of it, to see if I could get away with this madness. Had I really become that bored with life? That desperate to avoid going home to an empty apartment before helming the next leg of the tour got me out again?

“Having second thoughts?” Tomas asked.

“It’s just a lot of trouble to go to, and a lot of risk, to get back at some prick who said nasty things about you.”

He looked at me as if I didn’t understand anything. “It’s not about revenge. Punishment is only a means to an end. He needs to be educated. He needs to be corrected. If I feed his own words straight back to him, then maybe he’ll realise he should use them better in the future.”

“And you don’t think this is a little excessive?”

“The stove has to be hot if you’re ever going to learn not to touch it.”

“I’ve only ever heard that about kids,” I said. “He’s not a kid.”

“Exactly the point,” Tomas said. “He’s not a child, but he’s still no better than a baby who’s just learned to stand up and reach a wall so he can smear it with whatever he’s managed to scoop out of his diaper. There have always been people like that, but they were ignored by most people who recognised them for what they were. Now… now they set the parameters of conversation. They’ve found each other. They try to outdo each other in pointlessness, and their last allegiance is to the truth, or even accuracy, if that means it would take three more minutes of their time to check. They set the agenda. They have a voice that drowns out whatever remains of basic intelligence and actual thought. They’re the human equivalent of a car alarm that won’t shut off.”