He flipped through the records, found the Velvet Underground & Nico’s self-titled album. Shit, she actually had the early edition, where the banana peel was still a sticker, and the sticker was still on. Not bad. That, and wondering where the pops and scratches would come on Heidi’s copy, was enough to convince him to get the record out of the sleeve and put it on one of the turntables, side one up. He started the table spinning and carefully lifted the needle, placing it on track four.
The sound of “Venus in Furs” filled the room. When he turned, Heidi had her wrist balanced on one hip, the spatula balanced loosely in the other hand. She was giving him a wry look.
“What?” he said.
She rolled her eyes. “Nothing,” she said.
“Too obvious?” he said. He liked her, so what? It wasn’t like he thought playing “Venus in Furs” was likely to get her to invite him into the bedroom.
She shrugged and began to sing along to the record. After a moment, he joined in as well.
Steve made his appearance as soon as the pancakes were served. How he’d known food was on, and why he hadn’t come before when he’d first smelled them, Whitey didn’t know. Steve was like that. A much smarter dog than he let on. Kind of freaky, if you thought about it.
But there Steve was, begging bites of pancake until they’d finished their first round and got their second and Heidi told him to go lie down. He did, with a kind of exasperated noise, crawling up onto the fainting couch where he quickly fell asleep. “He’s not supposed to be up there,” Heidi confided to Whitey, but she let him stay anyway. Considering how unhesitatingly Steve had hopped up there, Whitey would guess that probably happened a lot, that Steve had her wrapped around his little finger. Or whatever it was that dogs had rather than fingers.
“This is one sweet apartment,” said Whitey, carving off another bite of pancake. “The rent must be insane.”
“Only three hundred bucks a month,” said Heidi.
Three hundred bucks? He was paying basically double that for a shit hole.
“How is that possible?” said Whitey. “What’s the catch?”
Heidi shrugged. “Weird story,” she said. “I was walking Steve and ran into my landlady. We got talking, just chatting about nothing really, and she told me she thought she was going to have an apartment open and asked if I was interested. I was perfectly fine where I
was, so I told her no, but then she told me how little she wanted and how could I say anything but yes?”
“You couldn’t,” said Whitey. “Not if you were sane.”
“Right,” she said. “But she’s kind of a freak, too. When we were talking, very first time we met, she grabbed my hand and stroked it like it was an animal or something. For a while she wouldn’t let go. I was on the way to getting creeped out when she told me I could have the place for three hundred bucks a month. I couldn’t believe it.”
Whitey shrugged. “Old ladies have different rules about how long they can hold your hand. My grandma was that way. And for the price, you’re just lucky,” he said. “That’s probably all it is.”
Heidi smeared her syrup around her plate with her fork and shrugged. “I think maybe my landlady has the hots for me,” she said. “That probably explains it. You saw her. She’s kind of got that hippie free-love vibe going on. I mean, she’s sweet, but… I don’t know.”
“My place sucks ass,” said Whitey. “I’m paying a fortune for absolutely nothing. My landlord is some asshole Russian guy, Kazmir Yakov… total cunt.” He pulled himself straight and tried to imitate his landlord. “Vitey, Vitey, you got my rent? In Ukraine, rent is due when landlord knock on door. If landlord have to knock twice, then KGB knock next.”
But Heidi wasn’t listening. She wasn’t looking at him but at some indefinable space beyond him. “Dead air,” she said.
“Huh?” asked Whitey.
“Music,” said Heidi.
Oh, right
, thought Whitey,
the record ended.
He got up and took the record off the platter, slid it back into its sleeve, and then kneeled down to put it away.
“You manage to file things right over here,” said Heidi. “Why can’t you do it at the station?”
“What?” asked Whitey. “Oh, here it matters,” he said. Inwardly, he winced. What was that supposed to mean?
She must think I’m an idiot.
He flipped through the closest stack of records, looking for the next thing, his mind wandering. How was he supposed to choose something when she’d make assumptions about him from anything he chose? Heidi’s bag was right there as well, leaning against the side of the milk crate. It was half open, the wooden box sticking out of it.
There we go
, he thought. Neither of them had heard it, so it wouldn’t say anything about either of them if he chose it.
He put on his landlord’s accent again. “How about this? In Ukraine, music always delivered in wooden box. Like dead body.”
“Sure, whatever,” said Heidi.
Whitey took out the box and tried to open it, but it seemed stuck. He could tell where the lid stopped and the box started, but there didn’t seem to be any latch or hook to separate one from the other. How had she done it again? Embarrassed, he pried at it.
“See those two dots in the symbol on top?” said Heidi. “Press them at the same time.”
“What for?” asked Whitey, but when she didn’t answer, he pressed them. The box clicked and the lid became slightly loose. “Clever,” he said. He carefully lifted the lid off, removed the record from inside.
He held its edges against his palms, still speaking in mock-Russian. “Ah, very thick vinyl… strong like bear.”
Actually, it
was
unusually thick, and strong, too. He stood and laid the record down on the turntable.
He lifted the needle and set it in place. But as soon as he let go, it immediately slid across the entire record.
What the fuck?
he wondered.
“Whoa, sorry,” he said, lifting up the needle and hoping Heidi hadn’t been paying too much attention. “Let’s try that again.”
But when he replaced the needle, the exact same thing happened. He set the needle in place and released it and it fled to the center of the record, as though it were blank. But he could see the grooves, which meant something was pressed on it.
“That’s weird,” he said, reaching out for the needle again. “The needle keeps jumping to the other side of the…”
But before he could lift the needle, the record began to play, the needle moving slowly backward across the vinyl, from the center toward the rim.
“Huh?” said Heidi. “The other side of the track?”
“Well, I was going to say ‘that’s weird, the record won’t play,’ but now it’s playing…”
“So what’s the problem? Why don’t I hear anything?” asked Heidi.
“It’s playing backward. Look at this. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Heidi got up and went over to the stereo.
“What the fuck?” she said. “How is that even possible?”
Whitey just shook his head. “It’s not,” he said. “The motor doesn’t work that way, unless you’ve made some weird sort of mod on it.”
“Why would I do that?”
Whitey shrugged. “I’m just trying to explain it,” he said. “I’m not accusing you of anything.”
Together they looked down at the needle moving in reverse. No, it shouldn’t be able to do that, but there it was, doing it.
Damn
, Whitey couldn’t help but think.
This isn’t Heidi messing with me somehow, is it?
But she seemed as confused by it as he was.
“I guess it’s blank,” said Whitey. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Why would it be blank?”
“I don’t know,” said Whitey. “Some kind of joke?” He began to reach out for the needle, ready to pluck it off the record.
“Hold up a second,” Heidi said. She reached down and cranked the volume all the way up. And then Whitey could hear something, a sort of faint moaning sound. But how Heidi had been able to hear it with the sound turned down to normal levels damned if he knew. Maybe she hadn’t been able to hear it and had just made a lucky guess.
It was moaning voices, he was pretty sure, a bunch of them, or the same voice overlaid a bunch of times. It sounded strange, definitely. Gradually the sound grew louder, melding with a rhythmic and repeated booming sound. The booming was repeated three times
in succession, followed by a fourth strike at a higher pitch, then repeated again. Together with the moaning it was almost hypnotic, and as Whitey continued to listen he heard something else. What was it, exactly? A kind of crackling noise, like a fire, or like twigs being snapped, but not quite either of those things. And there, far beneath the other sounds, was the strange discordant noise of various primitive instruments, a flute or a kind of pipe, a screeching from some sort of stringed instrument being played wrong, a sound like someone blowing through a long tube, a sound like sand being thrown against an echoing surface:
spat, spat, spat
. It was all pretty chaotic, but it definitely added up to something. Not really a song exactly, more a kind of drone or chant, the music (if it was properly speaking music) wandering and shapeless. But there was a note pattern there, too, if you listened for it, a structure of repetition beyond the rhythmic boom of the drum, but one that seemed to have little interest in resolving itself. There was something there, too—it was hard for him to put his finger on it since so many aspects of the music were so different—that reminded him of the tracks they’d played from Leviathan and the Fleeing Serpent earlier. Maybe a tone? Even just a repeated gesture, something very slight? Very hard to say. But yes, there was definitely a connection. Was it just the fact that both that and this kind of made his skin crawl?
“Man, this is really fucked-up sounding,” he said. He looked at Heidi but she didn’t say anything, just stared at the turntable. “I’m going to take it off,” he said, and when she still didn’t say anything, he reached out and lifted the needle.
“We should Smash or Trash it tomorrow and see what happens,” he said.
But Heidi still didn’t answer. She seemed lost in thought, standing almost like she was paralyzed over the turntable.
He reached out and touched her arm. “Heidi,” he said.
“Huh?” she said. She looked up at him, disoriented and a little scared, almost like she didn’t know who he was.
“Just for the fuck of it should we Smash or Trash this tomorrow?” Whitey asked.
“Yeah, sure,” said Heidi.
He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. “Or not,” he said.
Heidi put her hand to her forehead, rubbed her temples. “Whew, I am suddenly really tired,” she said.
Maybe he’d outstayed his welcome. Not a good thing to do on his first visit, particularly if he wanted to come back. “Yeah,” he said. “I should get the fuck out of here anyway. I’ve got to walk all the way back to the station to get my car.”
“You didn’t have to walk me home,” said Heidi. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” he said. “Besides, I got paid in pancakes.”
Heidi wasn’t playing along, though. She really must have been tired. “You can crash on the couch if you want,” she said, but he could tell by the way she said it that she was just being polite.
“Naw,” he said. “I should go.” She just nodded. Still holding her head, she led the way to the front door and let him out.
What the fuck was that all about?
wondered Heidi.
Did I drink more than I realized?
No, that couldn’t be it. She’d been just fine, having a good enough time, eating pancakes and talking with Whitey, listening to music, a little tired, and then suddenly everything had changed. It had been that record, the one by the Lords. Why had the needle done that? It shouldn’t have been able to do that.
She massaged her temples. And then when the record started playing, why had Whitey been unable to hear it? It hadn’t been loud, true, but even when Whitey was claiming the record was blank, she could
feel
it. Not hear it exactly, but feel it somehow pulling somewhere deep within her body, tugging at her guts. Was that music? It wasn’t the way she normally thought about music, but it was true there were songs that felt like they took place inside of you instead of outside. Maybe it was a little like that, but a negative version of that. It didn’t feel good exactly. It had made her feel almost nauseous.
But once she’d started to feel it, she’d been unable to stop herself from reaching out and turning up the volume. And then the moans had started and Whitey could hear them, too. But from there, things had gotten strange.
She couldn’t remember exactly what the music had been like, simply knew that it was strange. But what she did remember was seeing something. And not simply seeing it—experiencing it almost. There
was blood; she remembered that. Blood everywhere, and flashes of bare flesh, but they were so distorted it was hard to see. And that symbol on the box as well, but not carved in wood, instead drawn on flesh in something dark. Maybe paint. Or maybe blood. Or maybe not drawn exactly but cut into the flesh. Hard to say—it all had come in bits and pieces, in flashes, and was hard to put back together again. She groaned. There had been something else, a fire, and women swaying, their bodies naked and grimy, moaning and clutching at one another and—
Maybe I’m getting confused,
she thought.
Maybe that fucked-up black-metal video we watched earlier had some subliminal shit in it, and now that I’m tired it’s rising in flashes to the surface.
Again, just like earlier that day, she felt the craving for a fix. She pushed it aside. She sighed, again rubbed her temples.
Best thing you could do for yourself,
she thought,
is crash and go to bed.
The apartment was dark throughout, or almost so, the only light being the television’s pulsating blue glow. Heidi lay in bed, trying to fall asleep, half watching the program in spite of herself and despite her own exhaustion.
On-screen, a man in a black hood was discussing his time as a hit man for the Mafia.
“You indicated you used a shotgun,” said the interviewer from somewhere off-camera.