by Zana Eliot
We were in the worst part of the tour. Overlong days stretched into weeks and sleep deprivation blurred the lines and days and miles that still lay ahead.
Then, it seemed as if the crew was passing around some sort of virus – the type of bug that could forge a real close bond between a fellow and whatever off-brown sadistic nightmare of a plumber’s special lurked in the low hallways behind the stage.
So, when I broke into a cold sweat behind the merch table I was hellbent on convincing myself that my number had yet to come up.
I put my book down & looked to where the crowd edged up near the booth. The room was a thousand tongued monster and all I could understand was a sense of largeness, of overwhelming noise. I tapped the foam end of my earplug and let the sound wash through like waves around a jetty.
Just as my sealegs finally kicked in I heard someone say: “I just grazed the son of a bitch, seven-feet-tall, it curled in on itself and rolled back into the trees.”
I couldn’t have heard that right.
I turned to see if Terri had heard it but she was already shaking her head and clicking away on her phone, her jaw working loudly around a piece of bubblegum. I slipped out of my chair and tapped her on the shoulder momentarily. “I’m going for a piss.”
She didn’t look up from her phone. “Pray it ain’t out your ass.”
I crossed myself, “In the name of the father, the son…” I let the spell mellow in the cauldron of my breath. She wasn’t listening anyway and it seemed like my hand was going numb as I made my way around the edge of the table, so I slipped it into the pocket of my jacket.
I scanned the people nearby, trying to clock the source of the incredulous clip of story. To my right was a couple. He kept checking his watch and sighing, she tried not to make eye contact with him. To their right was a group of three men in possession of three sets of clenched fists. One would occasionally lean over and holler something directly into his friend’s ear.
In front of them was a larger group, a loosely organized cluster of humanity consisting of a variety of hair colors, lots of visible ink. Everyone wore black.
On the stage, a guitar tech argued with the sound crew about levels in his monitor. The guitar fell slack against his hips as he gripped the mic with one hand and plugged his ear with the other.
By my assessment, nobody seemed locked into the sort of interaction that could have yielded such an intense exclamation. In my mind’s eye I could see the lips that uttered the strange claim – chapped and peeling, a snarling compliment to a pair of wild-set, red rimmed eyes. The orator would be flanked by his acolytes, drawn close, hanging on every cursed word.
I shook my head and let out a little laugh. I looked to the merch table. Terri had put her phone down and was watching the commotion on the stage. When she noticed I’d turned back to her, she smiled an acknowledgement and motioned me over.
“I thought you had to piss?” She yelled into my ear as I leaned in.
“I did. But I heard something weird.”
“I’m sure you did. I can hear his damned monitor from here. I’m surprised they’re not having feedback issues. Who the hell are these guys anyway?” Her eyes were already back on the stage.
“No, that’s not what I meant.” I bit down into my lower lip and wondered how to explain what I’d heard or what I was looking for. Instead of formulating a clear, cohesive thought my inner voice sort of sighed at me and reminded me that I’d had about four non-consecutive hours of sleep in the last twenty-four.
She kept her head cocked toward me for a few moments, waiting for me to proceed. I fumbled. What could I even say that didn’t sound absolutely batshit? I’d already forgotten what had been said verbatim — something about a tall thing, something about curling. They were just words but they bit into me, the more I thought of it the more wounded I felt.
Any sane person would conclude that I had simply misheard an orphaned message, and perhaps I had. She leaned back in her chair and unlocked her phone.
The lights went down and I couldn’t think of it anymore. So I told myself I was being foolish and sat back down at the table despite the unhinged bodily screaming of my muscles. My guts lurched against me and I felt my number being shredded, doused in gasoline — I felt it blazing in the night like a bonfire.
I wiped the cold sweat off of my forehead and picked my book back up. I would just ignore it.
I moved a shaking finger under a line of text trying to coach myself back into the story, but the local opening act had filtered onto the stage and the room got darker. My eyes struggled against it for a moment and then I just gave up and stared at the dark page, the comforting escape of the story lay shrouded in the dark, beyond my comprehension.
Then sound exploded from the stage and tore at the din. It filled the black-painted room with a complimentary mood.
My eyes were pulled off the page, pulled to their lead singer. He was a boulder of a guy that stood motionless as the rest of the band whirled around him with a rehearsed precision. I watched them for a few bars, mesmerized by jerky movements of his lips, interrupted only by the shadows of his hair.
The muscles in my arms tensed as I started to really see him. He was there in that room, a thick-shouldered statue with a raspy voice barely synching up with the drone of the music. But in my mind’s eye he was stretched tall, his limbs extended – dangling fingers ended in the guitarists, in a keyboardist, in a bassist with a rough bowl-cut that couldn’t pull his tongue all the way in to his mouth when he played – and they rolled and unrolled as his eyes remained on the crowd.
The book shook against my hands, the open pages tapping against my outstretched fingers, the music moved through me, filled the hollow parts of me — my guts were rioting.
Terri’s elbow went into my rib cage and I heard her yell in my ear. “Hey, you’re from around here right?”
I don’t know where she would have gotten that idea. I think I told her, “No.” I’d never felt further from home.
She furrowed her brow and leaned forward in her chair, tilting her head toward the stage. “They sound so familiar,” Her sneakers tapped to an unheard beat – certainly not matching up to the pulse coming through the speakers. “Someone had to have shown them to me before – they’re someone’s friends, somebody – “ Her voice trailed off.
I glanced back to the stage and tried to summon the band’s name from my memory. I usually researched the opening bands — but nothing seemed familiar as I stared up at the wall of hair and uncommonly wide shoulders that lurched out of the darkness behind the mic.
Terri rested her head on her hands and sunk deep into the pose, still watching. When she finally spoke, her words came in a slow rhythm that almost complimented the band’s groove, “These guys are out of this world!”
I turned my ear back toward the band, another shot for the sake of Terri’s approval. I decided to take one of my earplugs out — maybe I was missing something in my temporary insanity. As soon as I removed the plug, I felt a bite of treble against my ear drum that nearly knocked me sideways.
Still, after my ears adjusted to the volume, it sounded like mud, like a low, desperate growl caught in the throat of a hurricane, like the ocean if all the waves hit always and at once.
I moved to put the plug back in when I caught something else in the oddly proportioned swell of their mix: a low rumble of bass that didn’t appear to be coming from the motions of the bassist’s fingers or the predictable thud of the bass drum. It sounded lower than any instrument or voice that I’d ever heard. Still it danced with the music, married to the strange swell of sound, their uncoordinated movements, it invoked a blooming, deep-red aura around the stage.
“Well what color was it?” I heard a wave of conversation break over the movement.
I glanced toward Terri, she had her eyes closed with a smile tugging at her lips. She hadn’t said anything.
I looked to my other side, to the mismatched couple, the excitable bros, the troop of metalheads — they all stood like pillars, facing the stage, eyes closed, lips twitching into the same satisfied smile that Terri wore.
“It was crimson in places, black in others, shadows of indiscernible colors, I can’t be sure.”
The renewed dialogue sent me in another frantic search for the origin, my mind conjuring a narrator that simply could not exist among the crowd or on the stage.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know man, I just got this weird feeling looking at this thing. Like what I saw was only a portion of it — the tip of the iceberg or something.”
“What, was it behind a tree?”
“Not at first. At first it stood directly in front of me, staring me down in the clearing. It creeped me out and so I shot at it. Then it went into the trees but I don’t think it stayed there.”
I stumbled to my feet as the song began to wane. The panic of the narrative fully possessing me. I felt as if my stomach was trying to escape through my ass. My throat folded in on itself. I was baptized in adrenaline, fear burning through the deep muscles of my arms and legs.
“Whoa, what?” I heard Terri react as my book hit the floor. In my peripheral vision I could see her eyes catch me in a momentary glare before her face relaxed again. Her eyes settled back on the stage, tranquil.
I panicked. I tried to crawl over the merch table, over Terri, my own eyes were locked on the stage.
There was a shift of the light, I was staring up at a wall of hair and claws and teeth that hovered behind and all around the microphone. It now appeared as if the band was black and red and shadow — as if the individuals were a mural painted on the skin of a giant serpent that existed in unseen acres of space.
I cleared the table, but my feet failed to meet with the ground. I tumbled forward onto the black tar finish of the floor. I sprawled out, rolling onto my back and stared up at the abyss of the ceiling, feeling an unsteady heat rolling through me.
I sunk into the floor, into the ceiling — into a cavernous dimension of heat and rage. I heard the conversation between the two unseen correspondents played on an overlapping loop, overtaking the music which ebbed in fragments below. The low end of the noise sent punctuated tremors through the tar-black sludge that nearly encapsulated me.
I opened my mouth to scream. I swallowed hot sand. I was crushed and burned and folded into myself. The voices slid below the tremulous bass.
I caught one last glimpse of their faces: eyes closed, mouths twitching into a smile, heads bobbing softly with the unnatural beat.
Zana Eliot is a writer and musician based in Portland, Oregon. She writes contemporary horror and paranormal romance in long and short forms. She enjoys hiking, live music, eating from food trucks, and having weird conversations with pretty men. She’s a fan of man buns, gourmet pickles, and the music of Frank Zappa. She used to be in a power metal band.
