Lords of Salem (9 page)

And then suddenly the stage disappeared, to be replaced by news footage of a church burning. The music continued.

“What’s this?” asked Herman. “Video’s over? New video?”

“History of the struggle,” said Dr. Butcher. “Now please be quiet.”

Herman raised his hands in mock surrender.

The footage suddenly cut out, going back to the concert again. The singer had run the spikes on his wrist along his side until he started to bleed.
Watered down Stooges
, thought Heidi dismissively. Then it was back to the burning church. Or another burning church, she realized, not the same one. What was the story there? she wondered. She remembered vaguely a controversy in the nineties surrounding the burning of a series of churches in Norway, and the assumption that it had been tied to black metal, maybe even had been done by members of a black-metal band, but she couldn’t remember the band’s name and she wasn’t really sure what the whole story had been. Herman had said something about it on the way over, but she hadn’t really been listening. She’d failed to do her homework for the interview, and there’d never been any question of Whitey doing much—he did better just playing off of whatever Herman said, harassing him mildly. Which meant Herman would have to carry them.

When they shifted back to the concert again, the lead singer’s demonic singing had deteriorated into a series of screams. Heidi winced. The lights flashed on and off faster and faster as the music crescendoed into something that Heidi did have to admit sounded like what she imagined the shrieking of the damned would sound like.
And then with a burst of fire, the stage lit up all at once and all four members of the band were finally revealed, their faces now dripping with what looked like blood. The last chord was cut off abruptly, and the stage was plunged into darkness again, leaving Heidi unsure whether the video had ended or if they’d run through the end of the recorded tape.

“That’s it?” said Herman. “We’re done now.”

“Again there is silence and darkness,” said Count Gorgann. “We have returned to the primordial chaos.”

“So wait,” said Herman. “Is the song over or not?”

Count Gorgann shrugged.

“I think it’s over,” said Heidi. “For us, anyway.”

Herman shook his head. “I’m with you, girl,” he said. “If you’re just tuning in, we are here with Leviathan the Fleeing Serpent and the song you just heard and we just saw was ‘Crushing the Ritual.’ ” He turned to Count Gorgann. “I must admit, I’m a little…”

Whitey pretended to cough. “Old,” he said.

“… more into the classics,” said Herman, giving Whitey a dirty look. “Led Zeppelin, Motörhead, Black Sabbath, that sort of thing when it comes to heavy stuff. So I don’t exactly understand your music, but I do understand your passion. I see the passion… I get the passion. Can you explain the philosophy behind your music?”

“Yes,” said Count Gorgann, in his heavy accent. He leaned his elbows on the table and tented his fingers, a posture that clashed oddly with his makeup and manner of dress. “It is very simple,” he claimed. “Our philosophy is to expose the lies of the whores of Christianity and Jesus, the true bringers of death. We believe this way of life should be erased from the earth. More souls have been lost because of this war… God’s war. We fight this in our music.”

Herman looked like he’d swallowed something that tasted awful. “Whoa, all right,” he said. He glanced down at the handful of notes he’d brought. Heidi could see they were largely Internet printouts, most of them from the band’s own Web page. “So, are you for or
against the church burnings that were taking place in Norway back in the early nineties?”

Dr. Butcher leaned forward. “We believe all churches should end in smoldering ashes,” he said.

“You do?” said Herman. “Really?”

“We are not of the cowering flock,” he said, his voice thick with contempt. “We are not the crying sheep of God. We are the mighty goat.”

“But we can agree that you’re a farm animal?” asked Whitey.

“Pardon me?” asked Count Gorgann.

Herman looked flabbergasted, unsure of what to ask next.

“The goat,” said Heidi, trying to help Herman out. “That’s interesting. Why the goat? What makes the goat different from the sheep?”
Do I really want to know?
she wondered.

“The goat has free will,” said Count Gorgann, smiling his bloody smile. “For this reason, he will always be punished by the oppressor God… God must die. God is the unholy pig. We serve the butcher.”

Wow, sheep, goats, and pigs, too
, thought Heidi.
Pretty soon we’ll have a whole barnyard. And wait, why would the goat gang up with the butcher? How did people get like this?
she wondered.
What made them go wrong?
If they just reeled time back a decade or so and stripped away the body paint, would they see innocent, ordinary kids, like her and Griff in high school? She saw Whitey smiling, preparing to make some joke, and motioned him off. No need to get the two black-metal guys ranting any more than they already were.

She looked to Herman, waiting for him to pick the interview up, but he was staring over the heads of the band members and at the window of the booth. She followed his gaze, saw Chip standing there looking even more frazzled than before, his remaining hair on end, drawing his finger repeatedly across his throat in an effort to get them to stop the interview.
Yeah, figures,
thought Heidi.
Talk of burning churches and killing God isn’t likely to go down well with our sponsors.

Herman gave a brief nod to Chip. “Okay, well,” he said. “There you have it. Again the band is Leviathan and the Fleeing Serpent and the album is called ‘Possessed by the Master’s War with the Knights of Korgaron.’ Any particular track you want us to hear?”

“Track four…,” said Dr. Butcher. “ ‘Cleansing the Skin of the False God.’ ”

“Okay, track four it is,” said Herman. “I know you have to head over to sound check, so thanks for coming in and good luck with the show.”

Whitey queued up the DVD to track four and it started again. At first there was only silence. Heidi glanced at the screen; again everything was black. Maybe they always started with darkness and silence, she thought. And then death metal started pouring into her headphones, even more frenetic than before. Herman, she saw, was wincing. He didn’t keep the headphones on for long.

Chip was already opening the door and ushering the pair of ghouls out of the studio before they could do any more damage. He was nodding and smiling, telling them how much he appreciated them coming and he was so sorry they had to go so soon.

“But we don’t have to go yet,” said Count Gorgann. “We are happy to stay and speak more of the goat.”

Chip just politely ignored him and moved them down the hall and out until they were gone. It was something that Chip was surprisingly good at, considering how easily he stuck his foot in his mouth on other occasions. Heidi took her headphones off, looked at Herman. Behind them, Whitey was still listening and watching the video, rocking his head slightly up and down.

“What was that all about?” asked Herman. “That what passes for music these days?”

Heidi shrugged. She hadn’t liked the ghouls any more than Herman did. There was something about them, Dr. Butcher especially, that was creepy. Not white-makeup creepy but much more serious than that, something deep and dark and mangled. Why had they
been staring at her the whole time? Or had she just been imagining it?

“What happened to the good old days?” asked Herman. “I remember this one time, Marc Bolan was here, must have been just a year or two before his death, back when I was first at the station. All of T-Rex was here, in fact. They must have—”

“Track’s nearly over, dude,” said Whitey from behind them.

Heidi put her headphones back on again and was surrounded again by the screams of Leviathan and the Fleeing Serpent. She tried to ignore it, ready to go on with the rest of the show.

Chapter Fifteen

It was late now, the Big H shift winding to a close. Cerina sighed. Hardly made any sense for her to wait around until the shift ended; nobody ever came in this late, but that was the way Chip wanted it. And what did she care? She was getting paid, wasn’t she, and paid basically to do nothing.

She was flipping her way through the latest
Cosmo
. Not really her thing, but hell, someone had left it in the reception area and it was something to do, better than the
Highlights
the ghouls had been leafing through. After they’d left she’d gone through the issues of
Highlights
to make sure they hadn’t left satanic messages for children to find later, but no, they were clean. At least there was that. She shivered. She was glad to have them out of her hair. Couldn’t hardly focus with them staring at her.

The reception area was empty and quiet. Sometimes at night it felt almost a little too quiet, but tonight the problem was different. She kept hearing things, a noise, a rustling here and there, nothing she could quite put her finger on, but it made her jumpy.

When the phone rang, she nearly fell out of her chair. It was the babysitter telling her that her son had said that it was okay with her to order the sports package.

“Say what?” said Cerina.

“The sports package,” the sitter said. “He said just go on and
order it up. I thought I better call you first. But that boy, he definitely loves his hockey.”

She felt herself getting angry. “I don’t care how much he loves it,” she said. “I am a working mother and I work my nails to the bone and I am
not
paying extra for the sports package. My goddamn cable bill is high enough. You should know better.”

“What about HBO?” said the babysitter. “He told me to add that on, too.”

“It’s already on,” said Cerina.

“So I should get rid of it?” asked the sitter.

“Oh no, HBO stays,” she said. “You know I love my
True Blood
.”

“
True Blood
,” said the sitter. “That’s hardly a vampire show at all. It’s more a show about men taking their shirts off.”

She sighed. “I know… I know,” she said. “It’s all garbage anyway. I don’t even know why I own a TV.”

A moment later she had hung up the telephone.
Sports package
, she thought, shaking her head.
Any babysitter worth her salt would have known better.

She had flipped to the end of the magazine while on the phone. She was turning it back to the beginning again when she caught something out of the corner of her eye and realized that there, on the edge of the reception desk, was an antique wooden box.

Now where did that come from?
she wondered. It hadn’t been there a few minutes ago, and she’d been at her desk all night. She hadn’t heard anyone come in or go out, and she hadn’t seen anyone. Didn’t make any sense that it would be there at all, and yet there it was.
Weird
, she thought.

There was a note on top of it, which she moved aside for a closer look at the box itself. Carved into the lid was a strange symbol. A circle, in the center of which was a cross, the head of it surmounted by a U to form an empty horned head. At the bottom was an upside-down U, the tail of the cross splitting its center. It looked like a humanoid
figure, the kind of thing you might find on the wall of a cave. In addition, at the extremes to either side of the crosspiece were two dots, which gave the symbol the appearance also of being a strange face. So either a crude figure within a circle or a face or both.

Weird
, thought Cerina. Probably some publicity stunt by some band, but how they smuggled it in without her seeing it, damned if she knew.

She picked up the note, opened it. It was written in old-timey script, long spidery letters.
For Adelheid Elizabeth Hawthorne
, it read.
From THE LORDS
.

But how did it get here?
she wondered.

Easy enough to figure out, she decided, and used her laptop to access the station’s security cameras. There was one in the reception area that showed most of the room, including the desk. All she had to do was take it back a few minutes and all would be revealed.

And why not? She didn’t have anything better to do. It wasn’t like she didn’t have time to spare.

She went to the digital files and ran them back a few minutes, to a place where there was no box on the desk, and then watched. No box, no box, no box, and then suddenly a box. She must have blinked, must have missed it. She took it back again, and watched it slower this time, making sure she was paying attention, but again the same thing happened. The box wasn’t there and then, suddenly, and inexplicably, it was.

She watched it frame by frame. Same thing.

That’s impossible
, she told herself. And then began to justify it.
Somehow the digital file has a flaw in it, skipped over a bit of time. I’m just not getting the whole story.
But there was nothing about the image to suggest that that was the case, no flash or cut or break to indicate a time shift.

It creeped her out a lot, particularly coming as it did on the tail of those two ghouls. It was as if the box had simply appeared out of
thin air.
No,
she told herself firmly.
There’s always an explanation, even if I don’t know what it is.
It was ridiculous to think the box could have come out of nowhere.

She looked at the card again.
Adelheid Elizabeth Hawthorne
. Must be for Heidi.
Oh well,
she thought,
not my problem,
and made a conscious effort to go back to her magazine.

Chapter Sixteen

Herman sighed. It had been a long shift, and what they’d been given to work with made it seem longer. First the ghouls from that death metal band show up and start spouting nonsense about the goat. The goat, what was that? And then Chip ushering them out only to come back later and lecture them.
Wasn’t my fault
, Herman had started to say.
I didn’t set up the interview. You or one of the publicity people did
. But that wasn’t what Chip was saying. He wasn’t accusing them of setting up the interview, only telling them that any time somebody started going off about Satan or destroying God or burning churches they should have the good sense to pull the plug on the interview.