“I could get used to this,” Allen joked.
The only worry they had afterward—unvoiced, but clear in the nervous eyes of all five of them—was that they’d get another nocturnal visit from the nutjob patrol. Danny drove them to a spot that was well clear of the venue and equally far from Crashyard’s hotel, and though nobody slept well, they weren’t bothered.
After that, they fell into a routine. Arrive early, get a couple hours of rest. Then sound check and a few hours of waiting. The thirty minutes they got onstage seemed terribly short for all the effort, but it was anything but anticlimactic. Each night, the crowd seemed more fired up than it had before.
“Some of the same people keep coming back,” Erin said after one show.
“Are you sure?” Case asked. “These venues are hundreds of miles apart.”
“Yeah, I’m sure. The tall girl with the blue mohawk is hard to miss. There are others, too, but she’s the most obvious.”
“Friend of the band? Die-hard Crashyard fan?”
“Maybe,” Erin said skeptically. “I don’t see them up front during Crashyard’s set, though.”
“Huh. Diehard Ragman fans. Who’d have thought?”
“Yeah,” Erin said. She didn’t sound like she thought that was a good thing.
After each show, they’d party with the guys from Crashyard and then go find a place to park for the night—always somewhere with lots of lights, always far away from both the venue and Crashyard’s motel. There were no further nocturnal visitations.
The shows were getting creepier, though. After Erin’s comment about the girl with the blue mohawk, Case started paying more attention to the crowd. That very night, she saw a tall girl with a blue mohawk over on Johnny’s far side, staring raptly up at him and licking her teeth in a decidedly hungry-looking manner.
By the seventh stop—Boston—Case had identified no fewer than half a dozen recurring showgoers. The girl with the blue mohawk was keeping some very strange company. There was a middle-aged guy in a tie, with his white shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. A biker, complete with enormous beer belly, bushy black beard, and Harley Davidson T-shirt. A heavyset woman covered in tattoos. Two college guys who typically showed up in polo shirts with their hair combed up in idiotic-looking fauxhawks. Case wanted to deck the both of them, and she was baffled by the fact that the girl with the blue mohawk hadn’t already done so. The group seemed to travel together, though, and each night when Case spotted one of them, the other five were nearby. The lot of them seemed to have eyes only for Johnny.
“Is it normal for groups of people to follow you from show to show?” Case asked Kerry one night.
He shrugged. “It happens sometimes. I haven’t had to get a restraining order yet. If you’re worried, just give their descriptions to security. They’ll keep an eye out for anything weird.”
Case did just that, but she wasn’t reassured. It didn’t help that the whole vibe surrounding Johnny was getting weirder and weirder. He talked to himself constantly, and she didn’t think he was aware of it at all. His voice was getting deeper, too—not lower, exactly, but
deeper.
He sang the same songs night after night at the same pitch as always, but his voice sounded larger than it used to somehow. It worked, she couldn’t deny that, and the audiences loved him, but it unnerved her. His voice got better and stronger every night—it was unnatural.
It would be easy to dismiss it as paranoia, but paranoia was itself part of the weirdness around him. Ever since the episode in the parking lot in Atlanta, Case felt like she was being watched. Each night that Johnny sang, casting his eerie spell on the crowd, the paranoia intensified. She didn’t smoke much pot anymore, but she had spent most of the year after she graduated high school stoned out of her mind, and this paranoia felt worse than a bad high—far worse, and much longer-lasting.
In Philadelphia—the twelfth show, maybe? maybe the thirteenth?—Johnny substituted a whole line of ominous-sounding gibberish for one of the lines in “Changing Gears.” Those strange, crackling syllables made Case shudder, and when she looked at Allen, his eyes were wide with alarm. He’d heard it, too, then—it wasn’t just paranoia.
She accosted Johnny moments after they got off the stage.
“What the hell was that?” she asked.
Johnny was grinning, still bopping his head to the music. “That was a good motherfucking show, that’s what that was. What’s your problem?”
“In ‘Changing Gears’—what were you singing?”
Confusion flickered across his face, replaced a moment later by an uneasy grin. “Just singing the song,” he said.
“My ass. Those weren’t words. That wasn’t English. What the hell were you singing out there?”
His grin got steadier. “Oh, I just forgot some of the lyrics. Brain freeze. I faked it, but I don’t think too many people noticed. Looked like they were having fun, anyway.”
She glared at him but she let it drop. Living in a van with five people, you learned to pick your battles.
She wasn’t the only one who had noticed, though—and not everybody was willing to let it go.
***
Erin got the new shipment of CDs in Chicago as planned, and it was a good thing, too—they were down to only a dozen CDs. The good news was that they were making way more money than expected. A quick review of band funds told them they were far enough ahead that a night in real beds would fit comfortably in the budget. They got a couple of rooms in a Motel 6 off I-90, and Erin gave them a complete update on the state of their finances while they lounged in beds and chairs in the guys’ room.
“At the current rate, you’ll be able to make Danny whole on the recording costs and even make some money by the end of the tour,” she said. She looked edgy, and Case didn’t miss the pronoun—
you’ll
instead of
we’ll
. That wasn’t like Erin.
“So that brings me to the last item of business,” Erin said. Her voice wavered on the last word, and Case could see tears shining in her eyes.
Oh shit.
“This has been wonderful, guys, and I’m so glad you brought me with you. But this was my last stop.” She let out a long breath. “I’m going home.”
There was an outcry from everybody in the room—except, Case noted, Johnny. He merely sat up and looked at her with narrowed, suspicious eyes.
“Why?” Danny asked.
“Yeah, what’s up with that?” Allen chimed in.
Erin’s eyes darted to Johnny and then away. “This is just too intense for me,” she said. “I wasn’t made for sleeping in a van, waking up in a new city every day, eating french fries nonstop. All this chaos. It was fun for a while, but I’m completely fried, guys.”
“Come on,” Allen said. “You know we can’t run this traveling circus without you!”
“I’m sorry. I just can’t do it anymore.”
A somber silence greeted this pronouncement.
“We’re gonna miss you,” Danny said finally. “Like you can’t imagine.”
At that, the first tears fell from Erin’s eyes. “I’ll see you when you get back to Dallas. The show’s been confirmed, by the way—I’ll make sure everybody’s waiting for you when you get back.”
There were hugs all around, then, and a proposal was put forward to get sloppy drunk. Erin begged off.
“I get an actual bed tonight. I think I’ll enjoy it.” She smiled thinly. “I’ll see you guys at breakfast. My bus leaves at ten.”
She left, still wiping tears from her cheeks.
Case followed.
Once the door to their room was closed, Case went over and sat on the chair by the window.
“I can’t say that was the best surprise I’ve gotten lately,” Case said.
Erin sat on the edge of the bed. “Yeah. Sorry.” She brushed hair out of her face and wiped her eyes again. “I was gonna talk to you first, but then I thought if I did, I’d lose my nerve. I thought you’d talk me out of it.”
Case nodded. It stung, but she understood. She probably
would
have tried to talk Erin out of it. “So what’s the real reason?” she asked. “That line of crap about this being too intense for you might go over with the guys, but you’re not fooling me.”
Another weak smile. Case noticed for the first time how tired Erin looked—she had dark smudges under her eyes, and there were lines on her face that Case didn’t think were there when they’d left Dallas.
“Don’t laugh,” Erin said.
“I’m not even smiling.”
Erin took a deep breath. “This tour is scaring the hell out of me.”
Case watched her face carefully. “That night in the parking lot?”
“That night in the parking lot was plenty bad, but there’s more. Did you watch the crowd? Have you seen the people I told you about?”
“The girl with the blue mohawk,” Case said.
“Yeah.”
“There are others, too. Five or six more, I think.”
Erin shook her head. “Guess again.”
“Huh?”
“I think there are about fifteen now.”
All at once, that lurking paranoia intensified. They were on the third floor, but Case got up and closed the curtains. When she sat back down, Erin was drinking from a cup of water. “Fifteen?” Case asked.
“Yeah. Something like that. There are a lot of them, anyway.”
“Kerry told me that was kind of normal.”
“Do you believe that?”
Case shifted her shoulders. “I didn’t give him all the details, exactly. I’m not sure it’s normal. Not at all.”
“That’s not all, either.” Erin lowered her voice to a whisper. “Johnny’s starting to really give me the creeps.”
“Me, too,” Case admitted.
“Yeah?” Erin said without much surprise. “Did you hear that weird—I don’t know—
chant
or whatever it was he slipped into one of the songs the other night?”
“Yeah. I didn’t like the sound of it. Neither did Allen.”
“You should have seen the crowd. Most of them got real nervous about then, but Johnny’s special followers looked like they had a collective orgasm.” A dark, cryptic expression spread across Erin’s face. “I almost left after that show. I should have.”
A sudden insight bloomed in Case’s mind. She leaned forward, studying her friend’s face. “Erin, what happened tonight?”
Erin smiled sadly. “It’s that obvious?”
“
What happened?
”
“You’ve never been in the audience, so maybe you don’t feel it. Johnny—he’s got a gift. The real deal. Sometimes when he sings, it’s like he pulls you into this trance, and all you can see is the spotlight on him, and all you can hear is his voice. You catch yourself thinking strange thoughts, and sometimes you feel that everyone around you has
changed
, but you don’t even care. There’s Johnny, and there’s the music crashing down like waves. Sometimes it makes you feel bad, but mostly it’s intoxicating—and you don’t always remember the bad parts very well later.”
“I get paranoid,” Case admitted, fascinated. “I feel like there’s something watching us—something besides the audience.”
“I get that sometimes, too.”
“What happened tonight?” Case asked, though she was no longer sure she wanted an answer.
“Johnny was singing, and the light got brighter around him—it was so bright that Johnny was all I could see from the back of the room. As the light got brighter around him, it got darker in the rest of the room. Scary dark. I was half in that trance, but I tried to move away.
“There wasn’t far to move, though—I was already at the wall, back behind the table with the merch. I pushed against the wall, but I could still feel something watching me, something
behind
me, even though I knew that was impossible. You ever do too much coke? It was like that, only worse.
“Then something touched me.
“It brushed against me.
It
touched my face
. It was cold. Cold and awful. It was like, I don’t know—it was like it was
pressing
on me. Somehow I broke free of the trance enough to push back at it. I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel it move away.
“A moment later, it was gone. But a guy standing in the back row turned around and looked at me. I remember the light glinting off the rings in his ear—so many rings it looked like he’d wound the wire from a spiral notebook into the outer part of his ear.
“He winked at me, Case. He turned around, looked directly at me, and winked. Then he went back to watching the show.”
“Jesus,” Case said.
“You know what the worst part was? The worst part was that part of me wanted that
thing
to touch me—wanted it so bad I almost reached out for it.” Erin rolled the plastic cup between her hands. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop myself next time.”
“Are you okay?” Case asked.
“Do you mean, am I nuts?”
“No. I believe you.” She did, mostly. She wanted to chalk all this up to Erin freaking out from stress, but too much of it matched her own experience. Too much of it lined up with things she was already worrying about. “I mean, are you okay?”
“I don’t know. I do know that I need to get away from this. Either I’m cracking up, or something bad is happening.”