Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (25 page)

Sloane distributes party favors, plants a backup web cam, changes the music. Growls and groans are squashed as His livid, vivid voice shakes the walls, a jilted Moses ranking out God and all his pagan poser predecessors to the empty heavens for their impotence. The room freezes, every mourner trembling as if in the throes of a nitrous trip. Then the epileptic 909 kicks in, and the bodies slam into each other like boiling molecules of nitroglycerin in a paint-shaker, like the Maenads ripping Orpheus to shreds.

She weeds out fakes, collaring a wayward frat boy, some high school kids, tourists in their mom’s mascara. “I’m trying to do you a favor, morons. Get the fuck out of here.” Checks tattoos—all of the real ones are permanently marked, somewhere, with His name. Her favorite, on a cadaverous scalpel of a girl in black mesh and plastic body armor: His eyes, billboard god-sized, gaze implacably out of her bony white back, framed in silver 8-gauge rings, by which the girl hangs from hooks, like any proper piece of art.

The eyes, one milky blue, one green, unmistakably His, gaze out of a smoking hole in her milky skin; a banished demiurge, burning to break out of this tiny vessel and wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world. Sloane wants to show it to her companion, but he’s waiting at the door, tapping the face of his watch.

In the car, swooping down the onramp to the city’s aortic east-west freeway, they hear a news spot on the local alternative station. Squeezed in at the end, after two minutes of boilerplate about CD release dates and upcoming concerts, a few sentences sum up His career, noting His “small but intense cult following among the industrial Goth club scene,” and predicting that “his influence will continue to be felt for years to come in releases by far more successful mainstream artists.”

Only a few bone shards were found in the wake of the explosion that flattened the reclusive artist’s New Orleans studio, but they have been tentatively identified as His. A note recovered at the scene confirmed that the explosion was intentional. Rumors abound on the Internet about a final recording made hours before the explosion, and downloaded to His fan club’s servers as a farewell message. Authorities could neither confirm nor deny what many had already dismissed as a hoax, or, at best, a publicity stunt.

A house in the Hollywood hills, blotter acid and fine wine, dope-heads and wilting Goth-girls, hothouse flowers who would be ground to pulp by the rougher fans at the motel. He was so many things to so many wasted husks of people…

Languid layers of deep ambient music and opium smoke make a syrup of the air inside. Amorphous Androgynous and Autechre vie with Coil and layers of chanting monks and whale song, the DJ behind a bamboo bar across the Olympic-sized pool playing nasty games with the mix, a rogue air traffic controller orchestrating a slow-motion collision.

It takes a while to find Sylvie among the shrouded apparitions drifting like shopping bags in a breeze, lolling on beanbags and hassocks, floating in the pool. Sloane goes from room to room, lifting heads by their matted hair, peeling back sheets, disgusted to find three already growing cold.

Even among this crowd, Sylvie is a flake. When she ran the fan club, the site was never updated, chat rooms were rife with petty warring factions, and fans strove to outdo each other with extravagant suicides. It was merely a fan club. All that energy wasted… Under Sloane, it has become everything it’s going to be tonight. All she has to do is ride herd on these posers for a few more hours.

She finds Sylvie in an upstairs bathroom, half-heartedly trying to staunch the flow of blood oozing out of a snow-white girl in a tubful of red. “Stupid bitch,” Sylvie says over and over, and the girl smiles at her elegy.

“This is out of control,” Sloane grumbles, but sets to bandaging the twiggy white wrists with their mute, bubbling mouths. “Yours are checking out early. You can’t serve Him like this.”

Sylvie’s eyes are all fuligin pupil, but even the apocalyptic hallucinations she must be having can’t make her pretend to like Sloane. “They’re too sad, Sloane. Or they’re too happy…”

“I want to go with Him,” the girl in the tub moans.

“Not yet, idiot,” Sloane barks in her face. “He’s waiting for us, but we all have to go at once, to force the door open, or it’s just a waste.”

“I had this dream, He was a Pharoah, like in that video, and we built His pyramid, and when He died, they sealed us up inside, and it was dark, and we died, but when we were all dead, a door opened up and this beautiful black light poured in over us, and we carried Him into it—”

Sylvie’s eyes glisten, and if possible, get even bigger. Sloane sends her away. She kneels and whispers in the girl’s ear, “We’ve all had the dream, but it’s not time, yet.”

“And I wore a crown,” the girl says, “and He called me to His side to be His queen—”

“It’s alright,” Sloane looks around, gently pushes the girl’s head down under the red water, and goes looking for Sylvie.

Downstairs, the hostess has snapped out of her daze long enough to deliver an address. The crowd of heads and wasted waifs that gathers to hear it is still encouraging in its size and exotic range. Somewhere, He is watching, and she knows He must be pleased.

“He taught us not to be afraid of the dark,” Sylvie says. “He showed us in song that
we
are powerful, and the dark should fear us!

“He told us that there is no heaven but the one we create with our imaginations and our desire. He showed us a world of eternal, moon-silvered night that He built for us with His dreams. We have all given Him our love, and the strength to live and work in this world, for as long as He could stand it. Tonight, the power of our love will give us the strength to live forever in
His
world.”

Almost to the door, when Sylvie’s girlfriend draws Sloane aside and leers glassily at her passenger, slouched on her bumper, smoking a cigarette. “Who’s your friend?”

On the 101, going downtown, he says, “This is idiotic. It’s not going to work,” and she almost stops the car. This is all she needs, right now.

“Do you really believe that?” she shouts, rolling up the windows. “Because if you do, I’ll call it off. It’s going to happen, if you will it, but if you’re going to be a pussy, then all those people are just going to die.”

He lights a joint, inhales deeply. “I think I’m dead enough already.”

“You’re just a fucking coward, then.” She gets her cell phone out, hits Evelyn’s speed-dial.

When Sloane took over the fan club five years ago, he had already tried four times to kill himself. After the band broke up, he overdosed twice and blew off a major solo contract. She rose meteorically through the ranks, not because anyone liked her, but because she was a missile, seeking communion with him, and woe unto anyone who stood in her path. She reached out to him in carefully crafted e-mails that cut through all the noise, drawing him out as no one else could, because she, of all his legions of bungled and botched sociopathic fans, seemed to understand what he was trying to do.

He used the tropes of Goth and industrial music and the aesthetics of the French Decadents and slasher movies, but the ideas at the core of the whole—the artwork and the music and the image, the cryptic interviews, the drugs, the suicide attempts—were older and more powerful than even he knew.

When men did not pray to gods, but used magic and will to command them, there was an afterlife, but only those who could build a door could find their way in. The Egyptians and the Aztecs knew how to travel the Black Road, but only a few sorcerers and philosophers had discovered the way in modern times, men and groups whom history had branded as monsters: the Zodiac, Jim Jones, Aleister Crowley, Adolf Hitler, Solar Temple and Heaven’s Gate. And all the times it almost opened on its own, when men of vision were snuffed out, and broken little people leapt or stumbled after them into the dark: JFK, MLK, Elvis, Kurt Cobain…

But they were only half-formed fantasies, until Sloane came to him with the mandate of the newly reformed fan club. His followers already had one foot in the next world, and needed only His light to follow. If He was serious, and not just flirting with them, she could make it happen.