Beautiful City of the Dead (3 page)

Butt nodded, then pulled off his baloney disguise and grinned. Relly pointed over to a table where some of the popular kids were sitting. Good-looking football players, girls with beautiful hair and clear skin and perfect figures. "In a couple years," Relly told me. "They'll all be pumping gas or working as a greeter at K-Mart. 'Hello, have a wonderful day!'" He sneered the words. "And you know where I'll be?"

"No," I said, edging a little closer.

"I don't know, either. But wherever it is, I'll be big. I can tell you that. I will be
immense.
"He said that word like a challenge, like he dared anyone to disagree. "I will be so big, all those jocks and jockesses won't even be able to see me. Like ants can't see a person, just a huge shadow looming over before you squash them flat. I will be so big that these losers who think they're such winners won't even recognize me."

One minute I thought he was pathetic. And the next he seemed awesome. Then he was both at the same time. A whispering scrawny kid with a fiery look in his eye.

"Now that we're together, the four of us, it's gonna start. The big time. The biggest thing you ever saw." He kept watching me as he talked, waiting for me to laugh or say this was all stupid. But I didn't.

"It's the Ghost Metal thing," he said. "When we really get cranking, the four of us, we can cross over to the other side, the other world."

He needed Scorpio Bone with him. That's what he said, sitting there watching the clock in the cafeteria. Going over to "the other world" was too dangerous just by himself. "Four sides of the square to make it safe. Seeing in all four directions.

It takes four and no more.
It takes four to win the war.
"

Were these lyrics from some song he'd written?

I didn't find out that day. The bell rang and we pushed back from the table. Relly went to math and I had English.

B
EING AROUND
R
ELLY
made me feel very strange. Like when I watched a magician, I knew it was all fake and still I wanted to believe. Card tricks, pulling coins out of midair, sawing a lady in half. It's all bogus, of course. Still, part of me wanted to believe there was such a thing as magic.

Sitting in the cafeteria with Relly, or hanging around his attic after practice, I felt the same way. He talked about the magic four thing, how we had to be "four and no more." Like North, South, East, and West. Or the four Gospels in the Bible. Or the Sex Pistols, who my dad grew up listening to. Or the Four Winds, or the Four Seasons, or the Four Stooges, if you counted Shemp.

"It's always four guys," Relly said. "Every real band is four: bass, guitar, singer, and drums. That's all you need. Orion Hedd and Metallica and Sabbath and the Who. Superheroes, too: the Fantastic Four and those guys in the
Tales of Asgard
comics. The Ninja Turtles and the Four Horsemen at the end of the world. War. Conquest. Famine. Death."

It was like those crazy old men in the library downtown who smell bad and babble to themselves for hours. Aliens, secret mind control, werewolves, messages from heaven. It was all a bubbling stew of weirdness.

Yeah, Relly read a lot of comics and watched way too many Videos about wizards and warlocks. Yeah, his mom sure didn't discourage him from thinking that way. Yeah, he'd stay up sometimes three days straight with no sleep, which makes your brain do some very strange things.

But still, I never thought his talk of the fourfold gods was a put-on or a figment of his fevered brain. He really believed it. And the more time I spent with him, the more I did, too.

S
O
I
FELT STRANGE
when I was around him. But I felt even stranger when I was alone.

Our house is pretty empty at night with my dad gone to work. Sometimes I watched TV, of course, or put on some music.

After Relly said I was in the band, I started practicing more. He gave me some tunes to listen to. He gave me some charts to work from and explained what the symbols meant. Minor and major chords, repeats and intros, that kind of thing. He even said I could bring in songs for the band, if I wanted to write some.

And this was great. It really was, to be part of the band.

Still, sometimes when I'd sit home by myself, a feeling came over me that really scared me. The nights were getting colder and I'd turn on the electric heater in my room. Behind the metal grate there were coils. And they'd glow orange-hot, like a burning snake all wound in on itself.

I'd sit there and look at those glowing coils and I'd wonder what it would feel like to touch them. I know this sounds crazy. It would hurt, and hurt bad. What more did I need to know? Why would anybody want to touch something hot enough to sear the flesh?

I know some girls cut themselves on purpose. And some guys get into fights just to feel the pain of getting hit. That's not what I'm talking about here. Not at all. I know what pain feels like and I don't like it. Not one bit.

One night, the fever came back and my nose ran like a broken faucet. It wasn't the ick and the sweat that bugged me, though. Or the thought that I'd never shake this flu. It was the feeling that I couldn't look away from the orange-hot coils.

There was power in that glow. And I don't mean electric power. Power to burn, to heat, to cook, to hurt. And feverish power to bring something out of me that I'd never seen before.

When my mind would go down that way, it really scared me. That night I thought of calling my dad at work. But he'd be mad. I could go down to the Chimes and just sit in a booth for a while. He'd be in the back, and once in a while I might see him go by the pass-through window. Still, he'd be busy and I'd be out there all by myself.

I picked up my Ibanez and played for a while, pretty
loud, pretty cranked-up. But without the rest of the band, it just didn't do the job.

There was TV. There were books. There were dishes to wash and homework to do.

But no matter what I did, my brain kept dragging me back to those orange, snaky coils, burning hot.

So finally I called Relly, which I'd never done before.

"Hey," I said. "It's me. Zee." My voice was a shaky whisper.

"What's wrong?" he said.

"Nothing."

"Then why are you—"

"Does something have to be wrong for me to call?" I said.

"I don't know. You just sound weird. You OK?"

Hearing his voice calmed me down. We didn't talk about much. School, mostly. Music a little. Five minutes on the phone and I was OK again. The bad feeling was gone.

"All right, well I should finish up the laundry before my dad gets home."

"Sure. See you in Bio."

I hung up and took a deep breath. Wherever my panic had come from, it was gone now, back like a snake crawling into its secret hole.

R
ELLY CALLED HIS MOM
by her first name, which was Tannis. I found out later that she changed it from something normal back in the olden days. But her name wasn't the strangest thing about her.

"Why don't you sit down here for a second?" she said as I headed through the kitchen for the stairs.

"The guys are all—"

"Sit down." It wasn't exactly a command. But she wasn't asking politely, either. "We need to talk."

So I leaned my case against the wall and joined her at the kitchen table.

"Jonathan called. He'll be late." That was Butt's real name. Jonathan Vincent Butterfield.

Tannis had a trippy kind of feel about her. I don't mean she'd fried her brains with acid in the olden days. And she wasn't one of those have-a-nice-day gra-nola types. Mood rings, wheat grass, tarot cards, yoga.

That kind of stuff wasn't big with her.

The only thing that fit with the old hippie ways was how deep she was into zodiac stuff. There was a picture of Aquarius in every room. The best one hung in the kitchen. It showed a girl pouring water from a clay jar. And even though it looked like something from the ancient days, it was a photo, not a painting. The girl had beautiful hair and was wearing a loose kind of dress belted with a piece of silver rope. She looked out at me from the picture with the same trancey gaze that Tannis wore right there and then.

Tannis offered me tea, which was kind of strange. Jolt and Mountain Dew: yeah. And Panther Blood, the stuff Relly found at the old Italian market. I got used to that. But tea was something I hardly ever drank. And it turned out to be this nasty, poxy-smelling stuff brewed out of roots and berries.

"Relly says you're good."

"I guess."

"There's never been a girl in any of his bands before. You know that, don't you?"

"Sure. But I don't think that—"

She cut me off. "What you think about Relly is not important. I'm more concerned with what you feel."

I sat there, not talking, figuring she'd get to the point soon enough.

And she did. "You know it's just me and Relly here.
That's the way it's always been. And his band has always practiced here. That was my idea. Did he tell you that? I helped him clear out the space in the attic."

She was staring at me with those big, accusing eyes. "Relly is not like other boys. Do you understand that? He is different. And he needs a place where he is safe. Where nobody will lead him astray."

"Look, I'm just the bass player, OK? That's all. I'm not leading anybody anywhere."

"Yes," Tannis said. Then we were quiet for a little while. I stared down at the gray-green leaves floating in my teacup. I could feel her eyes on me, accusing me of something, but I didn't know what.

"Zee?"

"Yeah?" I didn't meet her stare.

"I want you to promise me something."

This was getting way too weird. I just wanted to play. That's all.

"Will you promise me that no matter what happens, no matter what you see or hear or find out, you'll keep it to yourself? Relly is all I have. It's always been just the two of us. Do you promise me that everything you learn stays here? He likes you, Zee. And he doesn't like many people. He says you're good. He says he can trust you. Do you promise you'll keep it that way?"

Just then Butt came blundering into the kitchen.
"Hey, I just heard a good one. What's brown and sounds like a bell?"

It didn't occur to him that neither Tannis nor I was in the mood for his stupid jokes.

"Dung!" he said, making his voice ring like a Chinese gong. "Get it? Get it? Dung!"

He headed upstairs.

When his clomping had dwindled to nothing, Tannis said, "Promise."

"OK, sure. I promise." I got up. "We done?"

She said, "I'm going to hold you to that promise. Do you understand?"

No, I didn't. But I wanted to be out of there real bad. So I nodded.

"All right. I've said my piece. Go on now. They're waiting for you."

The next day we had a new bio teacher. Actually he was the old one, but he'd been out on sick leave since September. So the long-term sub was gone and Mr. Knacke was back.

He had that evil old-man smell, kind of sour and dry, like old coffee breath and mothballs and burning dust. He wasn't big. Still, when he came in the room, you sure knew he was there. And he wasn't ugly. Not exactly. But even at eight fifteen in the morning, his bald spot was shining bright red through his combover. And he had those little webs of white goo in the corners of his mouth.

"My name is Mr. Knacke. That's pronounced Kuh-Nack-ee. Do I make myself understood? Festus B. Knacke. Say it! All of you, say it! Now."

The whole bio class repeated his name, like we were in Marine boot camp and he was the drill sergeant.

"You!" He was talking, or I guess I should say, growling, at me. "What is your name?"

"Me?" It was kind of a shock, him picking me out of the crowd. Usually, keeping my mouth shut and my head down is safe. The nail that sticks up gets hammered flat. That's what my dad says.

"Yes, you." He put so much disgust into those two little words. "What is your name?"

I told him.

He stared at me like I was making some dumb joke. "Zee? Your name is Zee?"

"Yeah." What did he want? Should I explain it, or say I was sorry that my name was so weird? I just slunk deeper into my chair and he moved on to harass another kid.

"L
ORD
C
ROT
A
LMIGHTY
," Relly moaned. "I thought he was never coming back."

"You know him?"

"Do I know him? He was the scumpack who gave me an F last year in bio. You're in serious trouble. It took him a while to hate my guts. It looks like with you it's hate at first sight."

"But why? What did I do?"

"Didn't have to do anything. It's just the way it works with Knacke. He's the worst, Zee. I thought he was too sick to go on teaching. I heard some kids say he had cancer."

Butt scowled. "I heard other kids say he
is
cancer." We were standing in front of a bulletin board promoting "good mental hygiene."

"He really is nuts," Relly said. "If he didn't have—what do you call it, tenure?—they'd lock him up in the state looney hospital. You know how I found out I flunked bio last year?"

"How would I know that?"

"I was sitting in the kitchen. Somehow Knacke figured
out when I'd be alone. This was right after finals last June. I heard a car horn and looked out the window into the darkness. When I stuck my head out the front door, I heard a noise, like a balloon popping.

"The driveway exploded. A huge big letter F was burning on the blacktop. The car horn started up again. You know, real loud and crazy. Then it stopped for a second, and Knacke yelled, 'There's your grade, loser-boy!'

"My big F burnt itself out pretty fast. I stood there staring, like I wasn't even sure if I'd really seen it. Or if Knacke's craziness had rubbed off on me. His car started up, honking again, and he drove away."

As his story got weirder, I wonder if Relly was making the whole thing up. And if he was, then why? "This is for real?" I said.

He didn't answer. He just smiled and finished up the story.