Voice

• Prologue
  
• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Chapter 10
  
• Chapter 11
  
• Chapter 12
  
• Chapter 13
  
• Chapter 14
  
• Chapter 15
  
• Chapter 16
  
• Chapter 17
  
• Chapter 18
  
• Chapter 19
  
• Chapter 20
  
• Chapter 21
  
• Chapter 22
  
• Chapter 23
  
• Chapter 24
  
• Chapter 25
  
• Chapter 26
  
• Chapter 27
  
• Chapter 28
  
• Chapter 29
  
• Chapter 30
  
• Chapter 31
  
• Chapter 32
  
• Chapter 33
  

Published by Ragman Press LLC

Copyright 2011 Joseph Garraty

http://www.josephgarraty.com

Cover Art by Robin Ludwig Design, Inc.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

This one’s for Matt Watson, for more than ten years of slogging it out with me in seedy dives, coffee houses on the edge of going out of business, and the occasional respectable establishment. This book wouldn’t exist without you, man.

Special thanks to Evan Grantham-Brown, who reads all these things and makes them better.

The recording from the last Ragman concert is one song long. Half that, actually, since the song never reaches completion. The recording should have disappeared, should have been cleaned up by the police in the aftermath and filed away as evidence and never been heard again. It leaked out into the world, though, the way these things do, and the diligent and the curious can still dig up a copy if they want. Many do. Dumb kids at slumber parties, playing it like a game of Bloody Mary, trying to see who chickens out first. College kids, drunk or stoned at 3 a.m. Fans who followed the band from the early days and one day can’t shake the need to
know
.

Most listen to it one time, and they turn it off before the end.
Well
before the end. Then they burn it, bury it, delete it from their hard drives or their iPods and go to sleep troubled and trying to forget that any such thing ever existed.

You can hear the crowd first. Rumblings, and a few shouts. It sounds like a good-sized crowd, maybe a couple thousand people. One voice—a woman’s voice, high and clear—starts the chant: “Johnny! Johnny! Johnny!” In a matter of moments, everyone is chanting. There’s a faint sound, maybe the drumsticks brushing the snare, and then a huge cheer goes up, dissolving the chant in a rush of noise.

Four clicks and then the rhythm section comes in—Danny T layin’ it down on the skins, and Allen Sorenson on bass. It’s a fast chromatic riff, low and rolling, and more than a little disorienting. You don’t get a clear sense of whether the song is in a major or minor key, just a seasick feeling of rumbling motion. You can hear Danny’s metal snare drum, a little too hot and with too much biting treble, cutting through the mix like steel teeth, and the scrape and rattle of the strings on Allen’s big old Fender P-Bass are driving like a runaway eighteen-wheeler. It’s impossible not to get caught up in the motion of the thing, even with no idea of where it’s going.

Case comes in after a couple of bars. In the studio version of the song, the guitar tracks were doubled, but she’s doing solo duty live. It doesn’t matter. Her guitar sounds
huge
, even with just the one track—a Les Paul through a hundred watts of Marshall amplification, like the fist of God coming through a speaker cabinet. The sound is mean, distorted, heavy on the mids and snarling like a wild beast. She follows the bass part for an eight-count with the drums driving the tension up higher and higher, moves the figure up into an ugly harmony to make the tension even worse, and then there’s a sleazy little run down into a slow, bone-crushing riff that comes from nowhere, like one of those grinding Black Sabbath steamroller riffs that destroys everything in its path. The transition is shocking, like plunging into a lake of cold, cold water or the sun being suddenly masked by brewing black thunderclouds. It raises gooseflesh on you when you hear it on the recording, and it must have had the same effect on the crowd experiencing it at the time. If you listen closely, you can even hear Danny say “
Fuck
yeah,” just loud enough for his vocal mic to pick up.

The guitar drops out, and there’s a lull. Then, just before where you’d expect the vocals to come in, there’s this awful sound. A quiet, plaintive voice, desperate, and half-whispering, half-pleading: “Oh, God, please no.”

Johnny Tango’s voice. It cracks on the “e” in “please.”

Then a quick inhalation and the vocals come in, and that’s when you realize something is not right here, not right at all. The voice that comes out is nothing like a human voice, singing nothing like human words. It’s vast and deep, oily and ravenous, and it pounds into your brain like a meat hammer. The pressure is crushing, mounting, thunderous, and you forget that this is a recording and you can turn it off at any time, you forget everything except that your brain is being pulped by a godawful, godless sound that shouldn’t even exist, a sound like tectonic plates grinding corpses into fields of broken glass, and then, incredibly, the sound gets
worse
, and you open your mouth to scream, and—

Suddenly the noise stops and there’s screaming everywhere. You haven’t made a sound yet, but the air is thick with screams. The music on the recording has stopped, but the screams have only just started, and you listen in horror with your mouth gaping stupidly. These, too, are sounds that shouldn’t ever come from human throats, but you can imagine all too well how they might. There’s the sound of something exploding—for some reason you picture racks of lighting blowing apart—and a distant voice screams, “My eyes! Ah, my fucking eyes!” It’s impossible to tell who it is, or even if it’s a man or a woman, the voice is so distorted by pain and fear.

About then, somebody usually comes to their senses and flicks the Off switch, pulls the power cord, or simply yanks the headphone jack out of its socket. There will be a long moment of shocked silence. Maybe the guy who brought the weed to the party will wipe his mouth with a shaking hand and, face pale and eyes staring, say, “Dude, that’s . . . that’s sick.” Nobody will argue. Nobody will say a word. The party is over. Everyone will leave without making another sound.

It’s the screaming that gets everyone to pull the plug, and, in the bright daylight, if they ever bring it up again, that’s what they’ll talk about. Those awful screams.
God, wasn’t that horrible? Oh, those poor people.

They talk about the screams, but those are the easiest to forget. It’s that voice, that VOICE, that sound of unthinkable speech in an impossible tongue that keeps them up night after night, driving some to the bottle and others to sleeping pills or religion. People scream every day. It’s horrible, but screaming seems like a perfectly rational way of dealing with a difficult—but sane, you understand, definitely sane—world. It’s
understandable.
It’s
normal
.

That voice, though . . . No sane world would harbor such a thing. No rational world could accommodate it. And if it really exists, then there are cracks in the foundation of reality that no thinking being dares to contemplate.

Some rare individuals let the recording go to the end. There are another four minutes of screaming, pleading, shouting, and awful, maniacal laughter. After another thirty seconds, the crackle of flames begins.

If you listen closely, and turn the volume on your stereo all the way up, you can hear, at about seven minutes and twenty seconds, Johnny Tango’s voice.

“Oh, God, I never . . .”

The recording ends there.

“This band fucking
sucks
,” Case yelled over the noise. Another night—another band—and maybe some of the fans would have shot her dirty looks, but this place was dead. Deader than dead. Probably nobody would have come out to hear this piece-of-shit band to begin with—just like the piece-of-shit band that was coming after them, Case thought bitterly—but the holiday guaranteed an empty room.

The bartender shrugged and put her glass down. “It’s new band night. What do you want me to do about it?”

Case tossed back half the drink and coughed. New band night on Easter Sunday. What kind of dumbass would play new band night on Easter? Who would book such a stupid show? She shot a dirty look over at the ratty leather couch near the door, where the three other members of her own band were sitting, watching the current act with bland, glazed-over expressions. Damon was pulling on his goatee absently, which made Case want to go over and yank the damn thing out by the roots. The whole idea of new band night was to put asses in seats, prove to the club you could get people in the door so that they’d book you for a
real
date. So naturally, Damon had booked Easter fucking Sunday, ensuring they’d be playing new band night again next month. If the club gave them another chance.

She downed the rest of her drink. She felt like throwing the glass against the wall, but she put it on the bar instead. She turned around and put her elbows on the bar, watching the band onstage with her face screwed up in disgust, as if she were watching open-heart surgery. Or maybe a massacre.

Yep, they sucked. They had all the stage presence of limp pasta, and they couldn’t play worth a fiddler’s fuck, either. The guitarist watched his fingers stumble over the fretboard with the kind of intense concentration usually reserved for advanced math problems, and even the instrument itself was a horror show, some kind of godawful fifty-dollar pawnshop Charvel. The bass player at least looked comfortable on his instrument. It was a pity he didn’t seem to know what key the song was in. As for the vocalist . . . Good God, the vocalist. He looked to be made entirely out of bones, so skinny Case thought she could see his ribs right through his shirt. He had a voice to match, too—thin, tiny, and scratchy, warbling like an anorexic basset hound. Case couldn’t hear him very well, and she wasn’t sure if that was because he wasn’t projecting at all, or if the sound guy had turned him down to do him a favor. Save him some humiliation. It didn’t much matter. Aside from the staff and Case’s band, the only people in the bar were a bored-looking woman who had come in with the bass player and an aging ex-rocker guy in the corner who watched the band so seriously, sipping from a half-full glass of whiskey, that Case just knew he was somebody’s dad. Empty room, and the vocalist still looked like he was trying to hide behind his mic stand.

She thought the band was supposed to be playing hard rock of some kind, but the guitarist and bass player were shitting all over the changes, and the singer had no balls. The only thing they had going for them was the drummer. If Case just tuned out everything else, the drummer had a tight little groove going. She found herself nodding her head along with that until the song ended.

“Two more songs, guys,” the sound guy said. The singer flinched like he’d been shocked, and the band laid into something that sounded like a version of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” that had been knocked down, stomped on, and finally kicked in the head for good measure.

At least everybody got a short set on new band night. Jesus.

Case got up to get her guitar. It wouldn’t hurt to warm up a little before her set, she supposed. She slipped around the sound booth and went back to the “green room,” an oversized storage closet that was packed with so much shit it was barely possible to walk in, let alone get your stuff out without a catastrophe. The little room was covered in peeling stickers and smelled distinctly of piss. She picked up her guitar case from the corner, extricating it from behind a stack of toms, and started to leave.

Damon met her at the door. Alcohol fumes and the scent of marijuana wafted off him, strong enough to burn her eyes. “Gonna rock this place, Steph?”