There is darkness everywhere, and a noisome dampness thickens the air. To breathe is to pull wisps of wet air through sheets of molding gauze. Johnny can’t see, but he can feel mud squishing between his toes, and the leaves and stalks of strange, fleshy plants crunch and burst beneath his bare feet. He’s walking. Where? Forward. Every few steps, his foot plunges into a puddle, soaking him with stinking water up to the knee. He feels rather than hears a door open in front of him, and he walks through.
On the other side, an ocean gleams oily under moonlight. Out in the deeps, vast pale shapes move below the surface, and Johnny averts his gaze, knowing with a deep certainty that to look is to invite
something
to look back. The abyss, maybe, he thinks without a trace of sarcasm.
At the shore, the water is still, smooth as glass, like no ocean he’s ever seen or heard of. The moon, too, is strange—too small, too distant, its patterns unfamiliar and foreboding. Its light is green and foul. Johnny is swept with the sense that he does not belong here, no more than a house dog belongs in the jungle.
This is the back of the world,
he thinks, and while that makes no sense from any geometric or cosmological perspective he knows of, he also knows it is true.
“The back of the world,” a voice says behind him, echoing his thoughts. He doesn’t need to turn to know there is a man, or something like one, back there, cowboy hat and ironic grin masking something horrible. “Where cold and hungry things scratch to get in like scratching at the back of a picture in a frame. Watch.”
Johnny watches the shore, careful not to look out too far. The water stirs and breaks open, and a figure, a man-shape, emerges, hunched and shuffling. Again, Johnny turns his gaze. This is not the awful presence he senses churning and roiling in the depths, but it would be similarly unwise to invite its attention.
Others follow, and soon a crowd flaps and shambles up the shore. Johnny doesn’t want to look, but there are too many, and he catches glimpses. He sees pale flesh, glistening eyes, and ribs and knobbed spines punching out from their thin, almost skeletal bodies. They pass by him in their hundreds, and their stench is an atom bomb of dead fish and decaying things.
The last one passes, then stops. It turns, and Johnny is thankful that its face is buried in shadow. It gestures to him, unmistakably beckoning him to follow.
He looks down and sees his own pale flesh, his own ribs pushing out through stretched skin, and hunger fills him, hunger itself
consumes
him. He has known privation before, especially at the end of the month with the bills unpaid and the cash gone. He has skipped meals for two and three days at a time, but he has never known hunger so deep or so pervasive, and he knows that he has been hungry forever. He would eat the plants from the ground if they weren’t poison. He would eat the dirt if it would sustain him, grind the rocks between his teeth if it would only stop that vast, hollow ache.
The creature beckons again, and Johnny follows. Up the beach, he can see a squat structure, no more than a dark suggestion from here, but he knows what it is. Dread coils in him, but it is a small thing next to the hunger.
He walks.
The creatures have gathered in front of the structure—a high platform, much wider than it is tall, built of wood the color of bone.
A stage.
Case stands on it, stage right as always. She’s tuning up, twiddling the pegs on her guitar and tapping one foot impatiently. Danny’s in back, in front of the drums. He’s stamping his foot, pounding the bass drum over and over, just like a particularly slow sound check. Quentin stands at stage left, and again Johnny is grateful for the dim light that hides all detail, for Quentin is dead as can be. His eyes are sunken and dark, and tangled shapes spill from his belly, slopping over his legs.
Case stops tuning. Danny stops kicking. Quentin stands there. They are all waiting.
“They are waiting for you, Johnny,” the man behind him says. “It is time for you to take the stage and call your hungry brothers forth.”
Johnny turns around. The thin man in the black silk shirt is there, just as Johnny had known he would be. A wind kicks up, blowing the scent of burning metal off the ocean.
“This wasn’t the deal,” Johnny says.
The man says nothing, but Johnny can see the faint crescent shape of his grin widen beneath the hat.
“This wasn’t the deal,” Johnny repeats.
“Too bad.” The man crosses his arms.
“You’re not the devil,” Johnny says.
“I never said I was. But you asked for fame, fortune, and a voice to move millions, and I gave it to you. Do you doubt it?”
Now it’s Johnny’s turn to stay silent.
“Ah. So you want to welch on the deal? Be my guest. I won’t stop you. Go back to pouring coffee and scrubbing dishes. Maybe one day you’ll make assistant manager. One day, when your short span of years winds itself down, you’ll look back at the opportunity wasted and weep—but that’s your choice. You can always be proud of that. Making your
choice.
“Those lofty goals of art and immortality? They’re yours to throw away.”
On the stage, the band plays a long, ugly chord.
***
“Wake up! Showtime!”
Johnny woke with a start. The surroundings were foreign yet familiar, and he remembered. Another green room. Sacramento this time, he thought. Or maybe San Diego. Somewhere a million miles away from that otherworldly beach under its baleful moon. Or a billion. He blinked, trying to clear his head.
“Jesus, Johnny, wake
up
! You can’t go onstage like that.” Danny shook him again.
“Knock it off, I’m coming.”
He found his feet somehow, but they felt strange, and he shuffled and shambled behind Case with Danny guiding him when he started to weave. He waved Danny off when they reached the stairs. “I got it,” he said, but he stopped. Dread held his feet to the floor. He could hear the crowd muttering and chuckling, and he wasn’t sure he could take another show like the last one. He wasn’t sure he could go up those stairs and face that indifference again, that effortless verdict from the mob that declared him worthless.
What do you say, Johnny?
the voice in his head asked. It had never called him Johnny before.
Shall we give them what they came for? Something to remember?
Unsaid was the alternative—humiliating himself onstage one more time to an audience of people that would put a finger in one ear and talk to their friends a little louder. Letting Allen and Case down. Letting Danny down. Most of all, letting himself down.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Let’s do this.”
The thing—“
Johnny
”
—
swept forward like a plague of locusts swarming through his mind. Johnny didn’t resist, and he felt it in his head, spreading throughout his body, tingling in his fingertips and feet. Dark thoughts swirled elusive in his brain. His hand flexed of its own accord. He felt it move and wanted to look, but his eyes pointed ahead, refusing to obey.
That’s okay,
he thought, oddly calm.
Easier this way.
“Come
on
,” Danny said.
“Fuck yeah,” answered something that spoke with a voice that was not quite Johnny’s.
Johnny watched himself take the stage. The others followed.
***
Run,
Case thought. It was the same instinct that caused her to look for exits in some of the rougher places she’d been, the same one that told her when it would be a bad idea to cut through an alley to get to her car. It was usually right—but where was the threat here? She was onstage, in full view of a thousand people. Burly security guys, bored and probably looking for an opportunity to bust some heads, stood around everywhere. The crowd wasn’t even rowdy—just gratified that somebody was finally going to play some music and relieve their boredom for a few minutes before Crashyard came on.
There was nothing to be afraid of, yet her skin prickled and her heart pounded like a piston in her chest.
Fuck that. I’m here to play.
Her hands, at least, weren’t shaking when she started the first song. She played it automatically, fingers moving where they were supposed to with the ease of long practice while her eyes scanned the crowd. There were the familiar faces—the Fan Club, Johnny called them, and there were now more than twenty of them packed in close to the stage. They watched Johnny with an almost religious ecstasy, their expressions so like the Pentecostals she’d grown up around that she expected them to start speaking in tongues at any time. Surely they weren’t the threat her body was screaming at her to run from?
Johnny sang the first line of the song. A collective shudder passed through the Fan Club, and the girl with the blue mohawk made a loud shrieking noise that sounded suspiciously like she just came, right in front of God and everyone.
Case shuddered, too, but for a different reason—she knew what she was afraid of, now.
Johnny.
His voice was deeper than ever. Deep, and commanding. It thundered through the auditorium, drawing cheers and enthusiastic screams from people in their hundreds—but it was not Johnny’s voice. There was no way to fool herself about that any longer. It was the voice of an angry god cracking the sky open to bellow at his wayward flock.
Either I’m cracking up, or something bad is happening.
That’s what Erin had said, and Case felt it, too. She checked the Fan Club again. Sure enough, a thin man with a spiral notebook binding wound into his ear stood next to the girl with the blue mohawk. He grinned at Case, his tongue curling out to touch his lips. The girl with the blue mohawk was grinning at her now, too. Then the biker and the tattooed woman.
Case fucked up the next chord. Nobody seemed to notice, except for the Fan Club, many of whom laughed. The biker pointed and leered. Case moved to the back of the stage. Their eyes followed her, but they all looked away when Johnny started singing again.
The whole third verse was gone, replaced with a horrifying sequence of nonsense syllables that made Case’s legs weak with terror. Danny dropped one of his sticks, though he was quick enough with the spare that there was scarcely an interruption.
What the fuck is going on?
***
The sense of outright terror faded rapidly after Johnny stopped singing and Case got off the stage. Still, she remembered Erin’s words:
You don’t remember the bad parts very well later.
Case thought there had been some bad parts, some very bad parts indeed, but Erin was right—they seemed indistinct and unimportant, as if she’d watched them on TV or they’d happened to somebody else. That worried her. It had seemed
very
real at the time, she reminded herself.
She turned to check out Johnny, suddenly unnerved at the idea that he was behind her.
He wasn’t behind her. He wasn’t anywhere.
“Hey, where did Johnny go?” she asked.
Danny pointed at a side door they’d just passed. It was slightly open.
Case pushed it open the rest of the way—it was a door to the loading dock. Johnny was standing in the midst of the Fan Club. There were dozens of them, all gathered around with hands outstretched, seemingly desperate to touch him. Their faces were flushed and avid, their eyes fevered.
“We’re hungry,” one of them complained. Others echoed him. “Come with us.”
Johnny grinned at Case and ran his hand over his greased hair. “You coming?” he asked with a sleazy wink.
“Are you insane? You don’t know any
of these people.”
“Sure I do. We go
way
back.”
Several of the Fan Club looked at Case with interest. She backed away. “Have fun,” she said, and she went back inside.
She made sure the door closed behind her.
***
“Johnny has lost his fucking mind,” Case said.
Danny was sitting up in the hotel bed next to her. He looked old, she thought. Even in the low light from one lamp, the lines on his face were dark and pronounced. She doubted she looked any better. The tour was taking its toll on everyone.
“I don’t know,” Danny said. “He’s taking that alter ego of his a little too seriously, but I wouldn’t say he’s lost his mind.” The words lacked any conviction, and Danny’s eyes kept drifting to the window.
“Are you kidding? Did you see that pack of crazies he left with? They’re like some kind of cult, and he just wandered off with them, happy as a pig in shit.”
“Yeah,” Danny whispered. “He’s worked hard, and I know he likes the attention, but those people make me nervous. They’ve been following us.”
“I know. Erin noticed them, too. They’re part of the reason she left.” Case thought of Erin’s story about the man with the earrings, and of the bad vibe she got onstage sometimes. All the time, lately. She thought carefully before speaking again.