Relics, Wrecks and Ruins

Six-String Demon ^{By Sebastien de Castell}

Jen leaned into the Ford Galaxie 500’s voluminous trunk and hauled out her old Fender Bandmaster and the cable bag before reaching for the three guitar cases. The first held an acoustic with a cheap, glued-on pickup for amplification; the second, a decent Mexican Fender Strat.

She hesitated before taking out the third—the 1964 Rickenbacker 425. A beat-up, semi-hollow-bodied instrument that supposedly had been used by George Harrison to compose “My Sweet Lord” whilst in the throes of some sort of Hare Krishna religious ecstasy.

Jen sighed, trailing her fingers over the hard case. The Ricky was all that remained from those brief days when she’d had money and let herself believe she was going to be a rock star. But the advance on the Axe Girl record deal was gone, the recording itself deemed unmarketable. Now her life was shitty gigs in backwater towns.

Staring at the pile of gear, Jen gave one last thought about leaving the Rickenbacker in the trunk of her crapped-out car. But the asshole singer who’d called her in as a sub for his usual guitarist had been adamant about the Rickenbacker. Something about it having the right ‘vibes’ for the gig because it had once belonged to Lennon.

That made her nervous. It wouldn’t be the first time someone booked her as a side player, had her bring her best gear, and then tried to steal it after the show. Still, he’d been pretty insistent, and she did need the cash.

She loaded the amp, cable bag, and three guitar cases onto a foldable dolly she kept in the trunk, before hauling everything down the street towards the address she’d been given.

The house was smaller than Jen expected, not much more than a two-story box seated between larger—and substantially nicer—homes. She hated house-party gigs. Getting harassed was an occupational hazard at the best of times. The ass grabbing was always worse at house parties.

“There you are,” called a voice from the shadows beneath the hedge fence. At first, he appeared as nothing more than the red dot of a cigarette and the stench of stale Marlboros. The singer, then—only rock singers still thought it was cool to smoke.

“Car trouble,” she explained.

He stepped into the streetlamp’s sick light, thin limbed with stringy gray hair that probably hadn’t seen a comb since the black leather pants and vest he wore had still been cool. He was older than he’d sounded on the phone.

“Did you bring the Rickenbacker?” he asked.

She stopped pulling the dolly and nodded towards the case on top. “Still don’t know why it’s so important.”

“You’ll find out soon enough, Axe Girl.” He extended a hand. “Johnny Jacks.”

He hadn’t given the last name on the phone. Johnny Jacks. Good grief.

“Jen Farmer,” she said taking his hand. “Please don’t call me Axe Girl.” He held her fingers a fraction too long.

Two others sidled from the darkness. The man was young, early twenties at most, with tight curly hair and a thick-lipped smile.

“Levon,” Johnny said. “Drummer.”

A woman about Jen’s age stomped out the remains of a cigarette on the front lawn before joining them. “Lucy,” she said. “Lucy Bottom.”

The bass player, no doubt, hence the “Bottom.” These people might have been time travelers from the late seventies except even then, bands weren’t so on the nose.

“So,” Jen said, nodding towards the house. “What’s the gig? I never did get your song list.”

Johnny shrugged and headed for the front door. “Song lists are for feebs.”

Dragging her amp’s head, cab, plus the cable bag and two guitars up the walkway and through the door—only to be informed the gig was on the top floor—worsened Jen’s mood. The others left her to carry the equipment up in stages, starting with hauling the guitars and cable bag up the narrow flight of stairs to a tight hallway and then going back for the amp and cabinet.

When she passed an open bedroom, she caught sight of a man and woman sitting on the bed. They looked to be about Jen’s age, maybe thirty-five or so, and could have been Sears catalogue models except for their haggard looks and the tears running down the man’s cheeks.

“Sorry,” Jen mumbled when they glanced up to see her staring. She hoisted the amp head onto her hip and shuffled down the hall towards the next set of stairs going to the top floor.

“Are you…”

Jen turned to find the woman standing behind her, one hand on the doorframe of the bedroom as if she might suddenly run back inside and slam the door shut.

“Guitar player,” Jen said, then, not knowing what else to say, she asked, “Big party tonight?”

The woman stared, a horrified expression on her face. “A party?”

“Don’t mind her,” Johnny Jacks said, striding the hallway towards them. “Axe Girl here is… eccentric.” He gently shunted the woman out of the way, whispering as he passed Jen, “Never talk to the clients.”

“Whatever,” Jen said, following Jacks up the stairs. It wasn’t unusual for a band leader to insist that only he communicate with the clients, but it wasn’t as if she’d been trying to book herself for the next party.

“You’ll set up in there,” Johnny said when they reached the top. He pointed to a door on the left at the hallway’s far end. A sliver of yellow light crept from beneath the closed, peeling timber panel.

“Why up here?” she asked, guessing at the size of the room. “Isn’t it going to be kind of tight in there for dancing?”

“Nobody’s going to be doing any dancing tonight,” the skeletal singer replied. “Just get the rest of your gear and set up on the window side of that room. Lucy and Levon will be up with their stuff in a few minutes. Right now, I’ve got to warm up my voice.” He turned to go then stopped. “And when you get in there, remember what I said: Nev—”

“Yeah, yeah. ‘Never talk to the clients.’”

When she opened the door, only a small desk lamp provided dim illumination. The room was even smaller than she’d figured. “Great,” she said.

“Are you the band?”

Opposite the door, a single bed was pressed up against the wall. A kid, maybe eight or nine years old, lay under the covers. He wore some kind of beanie and she couldn’t see any hair underneath. Pale features. Wan expression. Probably chemo or radiation. Now, the whole scene made a lot more sense: the parents looking exhausted and miserable, setting up inside a bedroom on the top floor, and of course, the fact that the aging rocker hadn’t given her any details about the show. Probably the kid’s cancer treatments were going poorly, and this was a special present for him.

Geez, kid, she thought. You make your last wish to hear crusty old Johnny Jacks croon out his one hit song and collection of mediocre follow-ups? No accounting for taste.

“Are you the guitar player?” the kid asked. “Guitar’s my favorite.”

Jen held up the acoustic case and smiled. “Me too. You ever learn to play?”

The boy shook his head.

“Want a quick lesson?” She had done two years of afternoons in the back room of a local guitar shop teaching aspiring high school rockers and over-the-hill wannabes how to play their favorite AC/DC covers.

The kid in the bed pushed himself up to a sitting position. “Is it hard?”

Jen set the acoustic case down and flipped open the clasps. “Easy-peasey. You like rock?”

He shook his head.

“Metal? Pop? Jazz? Folk?” Apparently, none of those interested him, because his head just kept swiveling back and forth. “Help me out, kid. What kind of music do you like?”

“I don’t like music,” he replied.

She tried to guess at what she’d done to trigger this sudden bout of petulance. “You don’t like music?”

“No.”

“Everybody likes music, kid.”

“What the fuck are you doing?” Johnny Jacks demanded. His sudden appearance at the door and the snarl on his lips nearly sent her tripping over her guitar case.

“Just setting up.”

He stormed in and grabbed her by the arm, his long, thin fingers digging into her skin right through her jacket. He hauled her outside the room, kicking the door shut behind them. “I told you never to talk to the clients.”

Jen hesitated. She needed the money from this gig, but she also needed to lay down the law. She took a deep breath, then met Jacks’s eyes and served up the death stare she’d learned from another guitar player years ago—the look you gave band leaders to make them realize they’d crossed a line.

“Take. Your. Fucking. Hand. Off. Me.”

Jacks let go, smiling as he did. It was one of those asshole ex-rocker smiles that said he thought he was still too sexy to have some chick with a guitar tell him off, but if that didn’t work, he’d plead harmless old man.

She kept glaring. “I’m not kidding. Don’t ever touch me again. I’m here to play guitar, that’s it. I don’t want any of your shit. I’m not your date. We’re not going to flirt.”

“But you’ll actually play the guitar, right?” he asked.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Just go set up your goddamned rig and don’t let me catch you talking to the clients again.”

“The kid talked to me. What was I supposed to do? Tell him to shut up?”

“If he talks to you again, pretend he isn’t there. You’re here to play the songs I tell you, and then leave. Until you hear otherwise from me, mind your own business. In exchange, you get three hundred bucks, and I promise not to look at your ass when you’re soloing. Think you can handle that?”

“Whatever,” she said and went back into the room.

Creep.

For the next half hour she followed Jacks’s instructions to the letter, plugging in her amp, checking her strings, tuning both the acoustic and the Strat, all the while ignoring the kid.

“How long have you been playing?” he asked. When that got no response he said, “It’s my birthday, you know.”

“Yeah? How old—” she stopped herself. Fucking Jacks and his stupid rules.

“I’m going to be nine. The doctors said I’d never live past five, but they were wrong.”

She looked at the pale skin stretched over bony features. He may have beaten the doctor’s predictions, but he wasn’t likely to see ten.

Jen set down the tuned acoustic and then yanked the patch cable out, plugging it into the Ricky. It only took a couple of seconds to tune—that guitar almost never lost its tuning. She flipped on the standby switch on the amp and was going to do a couple of test chords, but Jacks appeared at the door again.

“Leave it.”

“I need to set my amp sounds,” she said.

“Do it with the acoustic and the Strat. Don’t play the Rickenbacker until I tell you. You’ll play the acoustic and then the Strat. If and when I tell you to, you’ll bring forth the Rickenbacker.”

“Bring forth?” Who talks like that? She set the Ricky back in its case and plugged the acoustic back in, strumming a few chords from “With a Little Help from My Friends.” She glanced at the kid to see if he liked it. He stuck his tongue out at her.

I’m surrounded by heathens, she thought.

“Meet me downstairs when you’re done,” Jacks told her.

“For what?”

“Band meeting, of course.”

Great. A speech about who was boss mixed with some pontification on his personal philosophy of live performance.

This was going to be the gig from hell.

“The first rule,” Jacks said, staring at each of them in turn, “is that once I start the song, you don’t stop playing until I give you the signal.” His gaze swept the other two. “What’s the rule?”

Levon scuffed a toe on the kitchen’s linoleum floor and Lucy Bottom slumped against a cabinet, but they dutifully repeated his words: “Don’t stop playing until Johnny gives the signal.”

“What is this?” Jen asked, suddenly irritated past the point of caution. “Some kind of fucking cult? You don’t think we know how to play in a goddamned cover band?”

Jacks, far from being angered by her rebellion, seemed heartened. “Cool. Okay, so what’s rule number two?”

“Oh, for fuck’s—” Shut up, Jen, she thought. So what if he’s a weirdo? They’re all weirdos, and you need the money.

Levon seemed eager to please, or at least to get that over with. “Don’t pay attention to the audience.”

“And why don’t we pay attention to the audience?” Jacks asked, with all the patronizing smugness of a primary school teacher.

“Because the audience is the enemy,” Lucy replied.

“Good,” Jacks said, wrapping his arms around Levon’s and Lucy’s shoulders.

Jen no longer had any trouble understanding how Johnny Jacks had descended into playing private parties for sick kids.

“Oh,” she said. “What about requests?”

“No requests,” the skinny singer replied. “That ain’t how the game is played.” He locked eyes with her. “We clear on that, Axe Girl?”

“Please don’t call me that.”

His stare remained. “Clear?”

“Fine. Whatever.”

“Good.” He removed his arms from the bass player and drummer and stuck his hand out, middle and ring fingers pressed into his palm, index and pinky straight out like devil horns. “Join with me, brother and sisters.” Lucy and Levon complied, and then all three had their hands out making the idiotic gesture that Jen hadn’t seen anyone over high school age do since… well, high school. “Axe Girl,” he said.

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“Just do it,” Levon urged.

“No.” She was all set to launch into a tirade because at this point sleeping in her car seemed better than playing with these psychos, but then Johnny Jacks reached his free hand into the back pocket of his skinny black jeans and pulled out a wad of bills.

“Three hundred, like we agreed,” he said, thrusting the money at her. “You decide to walk from here on out, you keep the cash.”

She reached for the wad, but he pulled his hand up. “But first…”

Jen stared at the money, then at her fellow musicians with their devil-horn salute, then back at the money. “You’re really going to make me do this?”

“Please, Jen,” Lucy chimed in. “It’s important.”

Ugh. I’m going to hate myself in the morning. She stuck out her hand and made the gesture, shaking her arm for emphasis.

Jacks grinned like the self-satisfied eight-year-old he was. “All right, my babies, time to rock this shit all the way to the gates of hell!”

“It’s MY birthday, and I don’t want any stupid music,” the kid declared as Jen, Lucy, and Levon got their instruments ready. Jacks stood by the bedroom window facing away from them as if he were a superstar meditating before leaping onto an arena stage to sing for fifty thousand fans.

“It’s okay, Kyle,” the kid’s mother said from the doorway. “Just try it and see what you think.”

“No! They’re shit. I can already tell.” He pointed at Jen. “Just look at her. Bet she can’t solo worth a damn.”

Little prick.

“Don’t be like that, kiddo,” the father said. He stepped past his wife into the room and instantly Jacks turned, eyes blazing.

“Get the fuck out. You know the deal.”

Jen fully expected the guy to take three strides into the room and punch Jacks in the face, but instead he bowed his head and backed out. “Sorry. Sorry, I just—”

“And close the door.”

Jen looked at Levon, waiting for some explanation of this insanity, but the drummer just shrugged with a “Hey, takes all kinds” sort of look. The kid—Kyle—apparently found it all hilariously funny.

“Did you see that?” He looked at Jen. “Daddy’s got no balls. Mom says it all the time to her friends.”

The level of disfunction in this household was terrifying in its ordinariness. Jen blocked it out by focusing on retuning on her acoustic and waiting for Jacks to tell her what the first song would be.

The singer paced the length of each wall of the room like a panther looking for gaps in his cage. When he got to the kid’s bed, he looked down at Kyle. The boy shrank under his blankets, which was a perfectly natural thing to do when faced with an emaciated, corpse-like old man in skinny jeans, with long gray hair hanging wild, and eyes looking like something from an old Iron Maiden album cover.

“Don’t,” the boy said.

“Shut up, motherfucker,” was Johnny’s reply.

“Hey man, come on,” Jen said. “Don’t.”

He turned his head and shot her a look that made her slightly more afraid for herself than the kid. “Did I tell you to talk?”

The wad of cash in her pocket was telling her to pack up her guitar and walk, but Lucy put a hand on her arm.

“It’s okay, just go with it.”

Five minutes, she told herself. One song. Then if this shit didn’t get real normal real quick, she was out of here.

Jacks left the kid’s bedside and came to stand with the rest of the band. “Grave Digger,” he said. “The Joe Cocker version.”

Not actually the worst choice in the world, Jen thought, waiting for Levon to count in with his drum sticks. Cocker’s version of Procol Harum’s barely known B-side love song was slow and soulful, a little on the raspy side, but that would probably suit Jacks’s voice. She got her fingers into place to play the opening riff, but Johnny started without waiting for the count or for her to play.

With a thick, deep and dirty voice, he began. “Where… did we bury… those kisses… long entombed…”

And then everything went straight to hell.

It’s hard for the human voice to overcome even as small a PA system as Jacks had brought, but the kid in the bed had no trouble doing it. The scream he unleashed on them made Jen’s ears feel like they were going to start bleeding. She nearly dropped the guitar, figuring for sure the kid was having some kind of seizure. But Levon kept the beat going steady, and Lucy, still holding down the bass line, jostled Jen with her arm to tell her not to stop playing.

“Please!” Kyle wailed. “Make him stop! Make him stop!”

“Lend… me your hand…” Jacks went on singing, with all the intensity and preposterous rock poses as if the tiny bedroom was filled with fifty thousand screaming teenage girls throwing their panties at the aging rocker.

If the chords hadn’t been so dead simple, Jen would’ve dropped the rhythm for sure, because at this point, she couldn’t decide whether to keep playing or call the paramedics. Or the cops. Why the fuck were the kid’s parents not kicking open the door?

The band hit the first chorus and Kyle started shaking, his scrawny hands gripping the sides of his mattress. Soon the whole bed was rattling, and foamy spit dripped out the sides of his mouth. Still Jacks kept singing and the band kept playing.

“I’m your gra-ay-ay-ve digger…”

The screams got worse, like an insect burrowing deep inside Jen’s ear canals. The kid hurled himself up and down on the mattress, the bed’s metal legs carving scratches into the wood floor. She looked around, hoping to see the solution to all this insanity even as her fingers kept finding the chords on the guitar neck.

Stop playing, she told herself. Nothing’s worth whatever the hell these cult psychos are doing to this kid.

Jacks lifted a fist high, then jammed his elbow down—the sign to end the song. Had they gotten past the last chorus? All she could hear was the sound of the kid shrieking his lungs out. Her eyes were blurred from tears she hadn’t realized she was shedding.

“Scream out the Demon,” Jacks called out.

“What?”

“Motley Crüe,” Lucy whispered fiercely.

Jen couldn’t remember that tune, so she had to wait for Lucy to start it up on the bass and followed along as best she could. Levon kept a heavy beat going on the kick drum, punching in with the background vocals.

“Yes. Shout. Scream the demon out!”

If she had any doubts about this being some perverse form of child abuse, they were gone when Johnny Jacks started dancing wildly about the room, grinding out the lead vocal in some mad, gesticulating performance that freaked Jen out so much it took until the second verse before she found something else that freaked her out even more: the kid.

Kyle stopped shaking and sat up in his bed, a grin on his face as wide as if he’d just shoplifted his first nudie magazine. His eyes had gone milky white because the eyeballs were rolled up into his head and he was laughing so hard she could hear him over Lucy’s bass line and Levon’s drumming.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked Lucy when she couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Hell is what’s going on. Now shut the fuck up and keep playing if you don’t want to end up there yourself.”

Kyle bobbed his head back and forth, as though lost in an ecstatic trance. Jacks sang louder and harder, like the two were locked in some sort of deadly struggle and trying to prove who was in control.

They hit the end of that song. Without even calling it out, Jacks started singing Ramble On by Led Zeppelin. Fortunately, this was a tune she knew, and so kicked in smoothly with Jimmy Page’s riffs.

Jacks turned to her, eyes blazing, and shouted, “Not the acoustic, you idiot. Switch guitars!” Jen let Lucy and Levon hold up the rhythm as she put the acoustic down and reached for the Ricky. “Not the Ricky!” Jacks shouted. She put that down, grabbed the Strat, and kicked into a solo.

Kyle was on his hands and knees on the bed, right near the bottom edge like a dog getting ready to leap off. His eyes looked nowhere in particular but he sniffed the air as if he could smell her playing.

“Bitch got no soul,” he whispered.

Whispered?

How in hell could she possibly hear the kid whisper over the music?

“Play faster, slut,” he growled, and it sounded as if he stood on a stool right behind her, his lips touching her earlobe. Jen shivered and the ring finger of her left hand missed the fret. The buzz it produced was like a thousand wasps stinging her face, swarming inside her mouth and over her eyes.

“Keep your shit together, Axe Girl,” Jacks said. He stood right in front of her, making her feel trapped. Caged. Still, she pushed through the solo until Johnny picked up the vocal again. By the time the song was done, she was dripping sweat. Her shirt clung to her chest and torso, her jeans were soaked and too tight around her waist, as though her body had turned into nothing but sagging layers of skin and fat.

Jacks sang three more songs, and by the end of the third she couldn’t remember what the first two had been. All the while, Kyle raced around the tiny circumference prescribed by his twin mattress, alternating between screaming, and chortling at them.

When Johnny signaled her to play a solo again, the kid pulled down his pajama pants and pissed on the floor, wiggling his hips and sending the stream sputtering into the air towards them. A droplet of something landed on Jen’s lip and she started to gag.

“It’s just sweat,” Lucy told her, thumb slapping the bottom string of her bass. “He can’t touch us yet. Just don’t drop any more notes.”

Crazy cult assholes, Jen thought, but she didn’t stop playing; she was too scared. Whatever was wrong with these people, she couldn’t be sure someone wouldn’t slit her throat if she stopped going along with the game. So, she kept shredding on the Stratocaster, barely aware of what key she was in.

“Four more bars,” Johnny called out.

Jen looked up. Kyle lay flat on his back. Her fingers flew up the neck looking for a passably decent way out of the solo, but as she did, she finally stopped thinking everyone around her was crazy and started wondering if she was the one who’d lost her mind, because Kyle was now floating three feet above the bed.

“Shit!” she yelled and dropped her pick.

The kid fell back to the mattress. Jacks turned on her, fists clenched. She flinched involuntarily thinking the skinny freak was about to hit her. But he didn’t. He just gave a nod to Levon who train crashed the end of the song.

Then, for the first time since they’d started, the room was silent. No drums, no instruments, no Johnny Jacks dancing around singing raucously, no kid screaming.

Silence.

Jen was so exhausted she could barely keep on her feet. “What the fuck was that?”

“That was the first set,” Jacks said.

Jen still had the Strat hanging off her hunched shoulders as she hurried from the room. She should’ve packed it up along with her other guitars and the amp, but by then she was too terrified to do anything but skulk down the stairs and make for the front door.

“Smoke break?”

Jacks stood in the shadows out on the front lawn, smoke from his joint already making her gag. Her ears were still buzzing. She couldn’t draw a decent breath to save her life.

“What the fuck was that in there?” she demanded.

“What do you think that was?”

She took the Strat off her shoulder, partly because it was getting heavy and partly because she might need something to hit Jacks with. “Tell me it wasn’t a… shit, I can’t believe I’m saying this. Tell me this isn’t some kind of exorcism.”

He took a drag from his joint. “Of course, it’s an exorcism. What else would it be?”

She snatched the joint from him and sucked in a long drag that made her head spin. She’d stopped smoking years ago. “And you’re what? Trying to force it out with rock music?”

He accepted the joint back and gave her a toothy grin. “What the fuck else would we use to get rid of it? Prayers? And don’t waste your time,” he added, dropping the remains of the joint on the lawn and crushing it with the heel of his boot.

“With what?”

“Telling yourself you imagined it. It’s real, kid.”

She wanted to call him a liar but doubted that would do any good. “Let’s say… let’s say for a second, I believed any of it. Are we done? You prayed the gay away or sang the evil out or whatever?”

“Not fucking likely. It’s a three-set show, Axe Girl.”

“Stop calling me that! And what do you mean, a three-set show? What happens now?”

He started back up the stairs to the house. “We got his attention. Now we kick the shit out of him until he decides to leave for greener pastures.” He stopped at the top of the steps. “You coming?”

“What happens if I don’t?”

The back of his shoulders rose and fell. “Who knows? Maybe he’ll live. Maybe he’ll die. Maybe everyone inside that house gets consigned to some living hell.”

“What? You can’t put that shit on me! I’m just a guitar player!”

Jacks just stood there facing the front door. “Not even a particularly good one from what I’ve seen.” His hand wrapped around the doorknob and turned. “If you stay, you’d better get real fucking good, real fucking soon, Axe Girl.”

She followed Jacks inside the house without being sure why.

Fuck, maybe I’m possessed now.

Through the hallway and up the interior stairs to the second floor, where she had to step over Kyle’s parents who were huddled on the floor holding each other and crying. They looked shell-shocked. Part of her sympathized with their plight. The rest of her wanted to kick them in the ribs until they got off their asses and did something.

“Don’t judge what you don’t understand,” Jacks said, as if he could read her thoughts.

Inside the bedroom, Kyle still lay flat on his back, seemingly unconscious, but when she walked by him, he said, “Gonna take you, baby. Gonna take you all the way down with me tonight.”

“Don’t know that song.” She plugged the Strat back into her tuner and plucked the bottom E string. She couldn’t believe how out of tune the guitar was. She’d never smashed the strings that hard before. It was a miracle they hadn’t all broken.

“What now?” she asked Jacks.

“First set was to get its attention,” he replied. “Now we soften him up, see if he can stand the heat.”

“And if he can?” She watched Kyle roll onto his stomach, then push against the mattress with his hands, his torso rising up like a cobra.

Jacks raised an eyebrow. “Just keep playing.”

“And what if we can’t?” They hadn’t even started up again yet and already she was more tired than she’d ever been at a gig. “What happens when we run out of steam?”

Jacks walked over to the bed and leaned down going eye to eye with Kyle. “Then this little fucker eats our souls.”

They were halfway through the second set when things got weirder—and worse. For the first few songs, Kyle stomped all over his bed acting for all the world like a petulant child determined to get their attention. He said things Jen shouldn’t have been able to hear over the music.

“You really believe all this garbage they’ve been feeding you, Baby Jen?” he asked as she was finished off an improvised solo during some blues song Jacks had called out. “I mean, which is more likely?” Kyle went on. “That, after millennia of exorcisms being proven to be bunkum, you happen to find yourself in the middle of a real one? Or that two desperate, gullible parents fooled themselves into believing the source of their son’s cancer is possession by the devil?”

Jen did her best to ignore him, which he didn’t seem to mind because he had no end of ways to get her attention back.

“Just look around,” he commanded.

Her solo done and Jacks back to crooning his lead vocal, she found she couldn’t stop herself from doing as the kid suggested. Signs of religious fervor were everywhere. The cross over the bed, family photos arranged into a cross on the wall, the sword-wielding angel bookends on the shelf. Books with titles like, Healing with God’s Power and No Such Thing as Coincidence: Seven Signs Your Child is Possessed.

“See what I mean?” Kyle asked. “These people are crazy.”

He stood on the edge of his mattress again, ignoring Jacks’s raucous performance and undoing the buttons of his pajama top. On his chest were several burns, all the shape of a crucifix inside a circle.

Shit, Jen thought. They branded the poor kid.

An elbow jostled her in the ribs.

“Focus,” Lucy said.

Jen stumbled over the next chords trying to get back on track, but her fingers felt awkward, swollen. She looked at her hands to find the skin a sickly white, the veins exposed like those of a corpse pulled from the water. Her mouth filled with bile that she tried to spit out, but it clogged her throat, choking her. Only after forcing a violent cough did she manage to spew it out onto the floor and all over her clothes.

“Keep playing,” Lucy warned. “The music’s the only thing keeping him out of you.”

With horrifying, stilted slowness, she forced her fingers to take the shape of the next chord and strummed. The nausea subsided a little, and her fingers found their positions on the fretboard again.

For the next six songs, Jen tried to ignore everything she heard from the bed, focusing only on the tactile sensations of her right hand, holding the pick and slamming it against the strings, the dull thud of Levon’s kick drum coming up through her feet, and the way Lucy’s bass sent vibrations through her whole body. All the while, Johnny Jacks sang his heart out in a pitched battle against something Jen couldn’t see but was utterly and terrifyingly aware of.

Kyle gesticulated at her, using his body to get the attention his words could no longer draw from her—not that he shut up at all. He shouted, pleaded, moaned, cackled, and made every other use of the apparatus of a boy’s throat he could.

Somewhere in that second set, Jen Farmer started believing in the Devil.

Johnny called a halt to the second set after just half an hour, and that, even more than the haunted look in his eyes, told her something was wrong. As her guitar’s last ringing chord died, the singer stumbled out of the room, leaving the three of them behind.

“Come on,” Levon said, leading her out. He, too, looked shell-shocked.

Lucy Bottom was crying, which seemed incongruous with the sureness of her bass playing.

At the bottom of the stairs, Jacks spoke in hushed tones to the parents. Despite the quiet, Jen heard the raggedness in the singer’s voice. Kyle’s parents shook their heads, pleading with Jacks.

“I’m sorry,” he just kept saying.

“What’s going on?” Jen asked Levon.

“Johnny can’t cut the thing loose.”

“So, what now?”

The drummer shuffled past her without answering and stepped into the little bathroom in the hallway. He slammed the door shut, and a moment later she heard him puking.

“Lucy?” she asked.

The bass player walked out the front door. Jen followed.

“Sorry you got pulled into this shit,” Lucy said.

Jen sat on the front steps next to her. “Would’ve been nice to get a heads-up beforehand.”

Lucy stared off at the empty street ahead of them. “Wanted: guitar player for exorcism, must be able to improvise in all styles and fight demons.”

“What’s really going on in there?”

“What do you think is going on?”

Jen balked at the question, finding herself unexpectedly on the defensive. She’d been prepared for Lucy to rattle off some nonsense about demons and possession—which would have let Jen scoff or deny it or maybe even allow it might be possible.

“The kid’s fucked up,” was the only answer she could come up with that neither denied the evidence of her eyes nor admitted that the thing poking at her guts seemed only to lack her belief before it would crawl right into her throat and choke her from the inside.

Lucy shrugged. “Let’s say that’s all it is. Let’s throw out all the… weird shit for a second, and say this is some unusual mental disorder.”

“I can live with that.”

“Fine. So how do you fix a kid with that kind of problem?”

“Drugs. Therapy. Um… electric shocks?”

Lucy spit onto the grass. “They tried all that. None of it worked.”

Jen searched for another answer. When nothing suggested itself, she asked, “So rock music is the last resort? I mean, what’s the…” Crap. She really knew nothing about psychology, neurology, or pretty much anything with an ‘ology’ appended to it. “How’s it supposed to work?”

Lucy held up a hand, palm parallel to the porch, and shook it up and down. “Music vibrates the air, right? Our brains turn waves into sound. But when those sounds take the shape of music, they vibrate other things, too.” She placed her hand low down on Jen’s stomach. “Here. And it turns out, this is also where those… whatever they are that can take possession of a human being… get inside us.”

“You’re back to talking voodoo shit.”

Lucy gave her a wry smile. “I tried to let you hold onto your hang-ups as long as I could. From here on out, it gets freaky.”

Freaky. Jesus Christ. Understatement of the year. “Fine. Let’s say I come along for the ride here, you’re saying the music—”

“Not any music. The right songs, the right intensity, hitting all the right resonances. That’s the only way to shake loose whatever’s inside that kid.”

“So how do you figure out all those ‘right’ elements?”

“I don’t.” The bass player looked back up the steps where light from the hallway seeped onto the porch. “Johnny’s the only one who can do it.”

That, as much as every other weird thing that had been said tonight, was almost the hardest thing to believe.

“A rock ’n’ roll exorcist.”

“Only one in the lower forty-eight,” Lucy confirmed. “There’s a guy up in Alaska, but he never leaves the state.”

“So, you’ve seen this work?” Jen asked. “You’ve seen people cured?”

“One time, yeah. Not a kid, though. An old woman in a nursing home.”

“You cured her?”

“Yep. She died peacefully in her sleep a week later.”

“A week? One week?”

“Hey, it’s better than nothing. Besides, where she was headed was worse.”

Jen chewed on that for a minute. “So, here you are, in some suburban house, crying your eyes out between sets while Levon hurls up his guts, and your one success story is an old woman who ended up dying a week later. Why would you even bother?”

Lucy looked away. “Because I’ve seen what happens the other times.” Still not meeting Jen’s eyes, she rose and trudged back up the stairs into the house. “You should probably go home, Jen. The third set’s always the worst.”

Jen was halfway to the kid’s bedroom when a visibly strung-out Johnny Jacks stopped her in the hall.

“Just wait here,” he said. “Me and Levon’ll pack up your gear for you.”

She’d been heading to the bedroom to do precisely that. She’d been prepared for an argument with Johnny to get her stuff. Figured he’d go all Jesus on her and give a hundred reasons why she should stay and help him fight the good fight over the kid’s soul. But Jacks just looked at her as if she was some dumb bystander he was pushing out of the way of oncoming traffic.

“Who says I’m leaving?” she asked.

The aging rocker’s sneer made its way to his face, but for a second, she saw the other thing in his eyes—the thing she’d never expected to see there: hope.

“Not your war, kid.”

Jen had played guitar since she was fifteen years old. Even then, her parents, her teachers, and most of all, every band she’d been in, had said she’d started too late; she didn’t have that ‘spark’; her playing was workmanlike at best and ‘girly’ at worst. She’d practiced every day but it was never enough; played until her fingers had turned numb and then gone through harrowing visits to a neurologist who’d told her she needed to lighten up on the practicing or risk permanent nerve damage.

“Besides,” the doctor had said, “I thought you rock musicians weren’t about perfection. Isn’t it all about soul?”

Soul. Yeah, Jen could’ve used some soul in her playing.

“So, you figure this ‘war’ belongs to you?” she asked Jacks.

He licked his lips, not like a perv but like somebody’s uncle trying to figure out a nice way to say a kid wasn’t ready for football tryouts. “You didn’t sign up for this. It’s the worst case I’ve ever seen. Three hundred dollars is a lousy payday for what comes next.”

“Then why are you going back in there?”

He ran a hand through greasy graying hair. “I’m old, kid. If I go down fighting, well, I wasn’t going to live that long anyway. I don’t try? Then what’s the point of living?”

Lucy and Levon squeezed past her in the hallway and headed into the kid’s bedroom.

“What about them?” Jen asked. “Why are they going back?”

“No idea,” he replied. There was a subtle break in his voice, and his eyes were wet. “Until five seconds ago, I figured they were going to leave.” He patted her on the shoulder and headed towards the bedroom. “It was good playing with you, kid. Couple of times in that second set I heard a lion clawing at the doors of her cage getting ready to bust out. Don’t ever listen to anyone who says you’re second rate, Jen Farmer.”

He left her standing there. A lion clawing at the doors of her cage. Twenty years of playing guitar and that was the only time anyone had described her playing in a way that made sense. Of course, given what a manipulative prick Jacks was, there was a decent chance he’d said it just to see if he could make her stick around.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Hey, old man,” she called.

Jacks poked his head out of the bedroom. “Yeah?”

She pushed him out of the way and entered the bedroom.

The air was thick with a kind of green-black haze that stank of every kind of death and decay. Lucy and Levon were barely on their feet, coughing from the stench and trying not to look at the eight-year-old boy who floated, cross-legged, two feet above his mattress. Particles of puke, shit, and urine floated around him like Saturn’s rings.

When she walked in, Kyle said, “You’re the one I’m going to rip apart first, Jennifer.”

She plugged the amp cable into her guitar, not even bothering to tune the Strat, but instead turning the gain all the way up.

“The name’s Axe Girl, you little shit.”

“No more covers,” Jacks said. “No more playing it safe.”

Levon started up a heavy, nasty beat on the drums. Lucy plucked a steady rhythm of straight eighths on the second fret of the bottom string of her bass, but Jen knew the key wasn’t going to stay in F-sharp; this was going to be E all the way—open strings wherever possible, the strongest vibrations with a standard tuning.

Jen turned the Strat towards her amp, not touching anything but the whammy bar, letting the feedback build up. It was such a cheesy, guy-liner-and-black-leather-pants thing to do. But fuck it: fighting a demon called for a little showing off.

“Well, all right, motherfuckers,” Jacks declared, the last syllable swooping up from a low baritone note all the way to a high tenor range that shook the bedroom windows. “Show me what you got!”

Jen blasted into an E-9 chord with an almost funk rhythm that ran counter to what the others were playing but would’ve made Prince proud. The effect was both dissonant and yet somehow sweet; the wrong move that sounded right.

In other words, rock ’n’ roll.

The room shook, though whether from their performance or from Kyle she couldn’t tell. The boy’s parents stood together in the doorway watching with impotent desperation.

“Help me, Daddy,” Kyle whimpered.

His plea would have been more convincing if his various secretions weren’t twisting and turning in the air, buzzing around the room like a swarm of wasps—and if he wasn’t giggling quite so much.

Jacks sang with a passion and furor that would have captivated an entire football stadium. So much so that it took a minute before Jen realized he wasn’t singing in English. She wasn’t entirely sure it was any kind of language.

But Levon’s drumbeats faltered. His upper body lilted back and forth as he struggled to keep up the beat. When he looked up, she could only see the whites of his eyes.

“What’s happening to him?” Jen asked Lucy.

“He’s losing it.” She slapped the drummer across the face. It didn’t do any good. “Come on, Levon, stay with me, brother.”

The rhythm from the drums started to drift then faded completely. The last trace of Levon disappeared.

“Hey, ladies,” he grinned at them, tongue lolling from one side of his mouth like a dog’s as foamy drool slid down his chin.

“Fuck!” Lucy cried stumbling away. She tripped over her own patch cable and fell, the bass giving a cacophonous crash that crushed the music, breaking it apart like stale bread.

“Ain’t givin’ it up,” Johnny Jacks continued to sing. “Ain’t givin’ it up to you.” What had been a gravelly, bluesy voice before had become ragged.

Jen slammed a power chord on the guitar then reached to help Lucy up. The bass player took her hand but started to drag her down to the floor. Like Levon, her eyes showed only the whites, and her grin was anything but human.

“Come play with me, Jenny,” she cooed.

Jen yanked away, lost her pick but managed to hit the strings with her fingernails to give Johnny something to sing over. He fell to his knees, the way a crooner would during the big emotional moment of the song, but his performance was lifeless, barely audible above Jen’s guitar and the hiss that had risen to take the place of the rest of the music.

That hiss…

She’d thought it was the usual noise that came through guitar and bass amps when you weren’t playing, but this was different. Feral. Gleeful. Like an ocean wave, it crested higher and higher before crashing down on them, drowning everything in its path.

“Come on, Jenny, give it up, girl,” Lucy said with someone else’s voice.

“On your best day you couldn’t play worth a damn, baby,” Levon crooned.

A creak from the bed made her turn. Kyle was crawling forward on his mattress, eyes milky white except for pulsing strands of red like blood vessels bursting one after another. A rabid rat preparing to pounce on a dying cat.

Kyle’s parents entered the room, no longer crying, but instead humming with the stilted, painful buzz of wasps. They ran their hands along Kyle’s back, the gesture not loving but obedient. Sensuous. Perverse.

They continued past the bed and kneeled in front of Johnny Jacks, opening their mouths wide—wider than their jaws were meant to—and Jen heard something first click then crack wetly. Their lower jaws hung loose and wagged as they took turns breathing on Johnny, a sick, urine-stenched haze that wafted over him, making him choke.

Johnny, still on his knees, turned to her. He’d stopped singing, but his lips formed a single word.

“Run.”

The urge to flee was overwhelming. Jen was alone in a room of human bodies driven by something not at all human. They looked at her and grinned, reaching out with sickly white limbs, the skin riddled with veins gone black and green as if the blood itself had been replaced with bile.

Johnny Jacks flailed, trying to shove away the mother and father. They dodged his feeble blows effortlessly.

“Don’t go givin’ it up,” he said—no, sang. It was weak and pathetic, not in any real key, but still it made the parents snarl at him. Their upper lips curled even as their broken jaws shuddered.

How he could manage even that much, Jen couldn’t fathom. Everything in the room stank. Everything was too hot and slick, and sweat dripped all over her, the salt burning her eyes. The right leg of her jeans was soaked, and her own piss dripped into her sock. Every time she tried to touch the strings her fingers felt like sausages left out in the sun, so hot and bloated, as if the skin would break apart and rotten meat would ooze out.

“Give ’em the shit,” Johnny sang feebly. “Give ’em the shit like ya never gave it before.”

Give ’em the shit? Like she had any shit to give. She’d never known real fear, the certainty that everything you believed about yourself belonged to someone else, and that all was left was an empty vessel, waiting—no, begging—to be filled.

“Yeah, baby,” Kyle said, crawling on the floor towards her, more like a spider than a rat now. “Gonna fill you up just right.”

She looked around, panic shaking her loose. There had to be a weapon here somewhere. The crucifix above the kid’s bed was out of reach. She doubted it would do any good even if she could reach it.

Only one cross I’ve ever needed, a small, rebellious part of her whispered. The cross I’m wearing. Her gaze fell to the Stratocaster—not some religious symbol to pray to, but her true cross waiting to be played. She’d never really thought of her guitars that way. It had always just been her instrument. Such a dull, lifeless word. The guitar had always been more of an enemy she had to force to her will than a partner. Now, it was all she had.

Kyle slithered past his parents and Johnny, and past Lucy and Levon, who genuflected before him. The boy floated up until he was eye to eye with Jen.

“Gig’s over, baby.”

Jen squeezed her hand into a fist, cracking the knuckles, daring the swollen digits to split at the seams. They didn’t.

“Not yet,” she whispered, then slammed her fist down, opening the fingers at the last instant so they struck all six of the strings and sent a blast of distortion that blew through the room like a bomb exploding the inside of a doll’s house.

“Haven’t gotten to my solo yet.”

There was a part of playing the guitar that wasn’t about holding the right notes on the fretboard or plucking the right strings, that wasn’t about rhythm or tempo or precision. It was that mixture of easing into the music, of being loose and reckless and abandoning oneself to the guitar. It was the… playing.

Jen had never been good at that part. Her whole career, she’d had to prove she was a professional to bandmates who seemed to know instinctively there was something wrong with her. In a desperate effort to be good enough she’d foregone any hopes of being great.

How great a player would you have to be to fend off a demon that was already creeping his way inside you?

Pretty fucking great.

With no drums to give her time, no bass to offer a chord structure to hold her up, she propelled herself headlong into a solo. It was just noise at first, hitting strings like a caveman who’d just discovered a guitar amidst the rocks and rubble.

“Whatcha doin’, little girl?” Kyle asked.

She heard him inside her head where he was taking up residence, pushing at the bits of her brain with probing fingers, licking them to get a taste for the place.

She ignored him, finding the straight rhythm first, just letting the notes ring out. She’d forgotten that the guitar didn’t really need finesse or elegance to sound good. It was all right there: the steel strings, the maple neck, the thick, solid body and the wound pickups, coiled like snakes just waiting to be let loose. She reveled in the dumb simplicity of it.

“That all you got, Axe Girl?” Johnny Jacks asked, looking up at her with blind eyes.

Her middle finger pressed the A string on the second fret. The note rang out true, going on forever to that infinity where every note goes when you think you’re done with them.

“Ain’t gonna work,” Kyle’s voice churned inside her skull. “I’m too deep inside you now.”

Jen kept playing, her fingers lazily tracing a pentatonic scale up and down in almost random patterns, not hurrying, not worrying.

“Are you really, baby?” she asked.

“Oh yeah. So deep you’ll never shake me.”

“Shake you?” She stopped moving her fingers, holding one note for a full measure, then another, letting it slowly fade out almost to that point of oblivion where she knew she’d be lost. “Who says I’m trying to shake you?”

There was time to hear the odd silence within her mind, like a sudden intake of breath. She felt him scratching at the inside of her skull like an animal that’s just discovered it’s been caged. Every clawing attack filled her with pain and misery—a migraine mixed with suicidal depression.

Kyle, or whatever had taken his place, understood what she was doing.

She disregarded everything except the guitar, sliding her hand farther up the neck, her fingers moving faster and faster, recklessly picking out a solo that was neither blues nor jazz nor classical but something more primal. The grunting of teenagers fucking for the first time, in the back of a car with the radio up loud. Awkward. Painful. Stupid. But full of whatever rock ’n’ roll was when you took away the chords and melody.

She played that on her Strat, reveling in it, the sounds from the amp both sweet and salty. Inside her, the demon struggled to get away.

“Don’t run off now, baby,” she said. “We’re just getting started.”

Somewhere in there, in the space between two notes on the guitar, between her fingers holding down one fret and another as her pick hand prepared to come down hard on the string, Jen got lost.

It was perfect.

She didn’t care anymore. She was halfway to hell, dragged by the weight of either a demon in her soul or a psychotic break in her fragile mind, yet she was flying. The essence of a great solo—the essence of being the guitar player she was meant to be—was in not giving a shit. Whatever came out of her amp right at that moment, for good or ill, sweet or stale, perfect or messy as all hell… was her.

It was Jen.

Let the demon take her soul if he wanted, because she had the music and the music was all the soul she cared about. The feel of her hands on the guitar and the sounds in her ears and nothing else.

Boom.

Boom.

A beat came out of nowhere. She let it carry her upwards.

Bah-duhn-duhn.

Bah-duhn-duhn.

Lucy Bottom’s bass came up alongside.

“Stop,” Kyle commanded, no longer with the voice of a nine-year-old, but something deeper and darker—something incongruously full of both malice and pleading.

She paid it no heed. The playing was all that mattered—and she was playing, not practicing, not trying to live up to anyone else. Just playing her guitar the way she wanted. The more she did, the freer she became, and the more terrified the thing that had been living inside Kyle grew.

“Jen,” Johnny Jacks said, his voice hoarse and wrecked but with a tinge of joy like the subtle half bend of the note she was playing.

“Yeah?”

“Levon and Lucy can hold it for a few seconds.”

“And?” What did he want from her?

“And it’s time,” he bellowed, like an old-time preacher standing at the front of a tent before a thousand hand-clutching congregants. “Bring. Forth. The. Rickenbacker!”

Jen glanced at the battered old guitar. Its fireglo paint job shimmered, already aflame as if with hellfire, demanding to face down the horrors around her. The strings hummed a defiant counter to the demon’s hideous buzzing.

She popped the patch cable out of the jack on the Strat and plugged in the Ricky. All the while Lucy and Levon pounded away at a rhythm that was nothing but straight eighths and pissed-off determination.

The Ricky let out a vicious twang, a belligerent melodic relic from another time. Jen kicked her amp around, so it faced the windows. It shouldn’t have been able to do more than rattle them, but as she played a run up the neck, the scornful dissonance of shattering glass added itself to the music. When she glanced at her guitar, there was blood on the strings. Her blood. She didn’t care.

Night air flooded into the room, and she breathed in the sweetness, not even minding the other stenches that still lingered in the room. Lucy had blood dripping from a cut on her forehead. Levon played using only one arm, his left twisted at an odd angle. Johnny’s face was pale, hair matted, his skin cracked and bleeding at the sides of his mouth. They all looked happy as pigs in shit.

“Come on, come on, come on,” Johnny sang. “Gotta get it up, get it out, send it down.”

Kyle floated before her, head hanging back, and arms spread wide in a Jesus pose while his parents hung onto his legs. Jen eyed the tendrils of black and green haze that filled the room and trailed back to the boy’s mouth. His stomach and throat convulsed, vomiting out whatever thing had made its home inside him.

Johnny sang something at her, but she didn’t hear, she was too busy playing the notes that would pull the last remnants of the demon out of Kyle’s mouth.

The filthy mist coalesced, taking on its own shape—a man with black wings and a face so beautiful it made her want to cry. He smiled at her, but she used his beauty against him, translating it into an aching melody that came from her guitar, from her guts, from her lust. The smile faded as the thing discovered that all its best weapons had been turned against it, that all the power in the universe is nothing but vibration, and music shaped vibrations according to the player’s needs.

“You’ve got him now!” Johnny said. He wasn’t singing anymore, just issuing commands like a general. “Hold him. Hold him tight!”

“I’ve got him,” she said, irritated. “Just tell me what to do with him.”

“Send him down, Axe Girl. Send him all the way down.”

Jen had no idea what that meant but knew exactly how to play it. She slid her fingers up the neck to the seventh fret, held down the same sweet E-9 chord she’d started with, and slammed all six strings.

Then she let go of the pick and twisted the tuning heads loose one after another. The chord dropped and dropped and dropped, passing through discordance back to proper chords and then into discordance again. By the time she stopped, she’d tuned the entire guitar down so far, the strings were slack and wobbling.

The creature, the demon, the… whatever, shattered into a thousand bad memories.

Jen slumped, her knees banging hard against the bedroom floor. Kyle’s parents, their jaws still broken and no doubt in terrible pain, hugged their son between them. The boy turned to Jen, eyes blinking away the salt and sweat. He said something, but no words came out at first, as if he’d misjudged how used-up his vocal cords were.

The second time she heard him.

“I like that song,” he said. “Could you play it again?”