Rock On (32 page)

Charlie’s voice had the keening edge of a far-off railroad whistle. “Hell hound on my trail . . . Hell hound on my trail . . . ”

I’ve heard that song ten thousand times, played it a thousand times, know every inflection of the original, but I never, ever heard it like that. Charlie absolutely expanded the melody into outer space. I don’t remember anything after that, just being swept away. The song went on forever, slow and ominous, and floated above the ground like the ghost that it was.

I wasn’t aware of time passing, but it must have been a while because when the song finally ended, and I opened my eyes, I was surrounded by people. I looked down at my guitar case and saw that it was filled with money. At least a couple of hundred bucks. I tried to speak, but could only cough. I closed the case, slung the guitar over my shoulder and walked away. Charlie followed.

My feet took me back up Broadway, to the alley. Charlie stood on the edge of the shadows and held out his hand. I stared at it. “I ain’t takin’ your hand, man. You can forget that shit.”

Charlie laughed. It sounded odd, like he hadn’t laughed in a long time. “Fair enough. Why don’t you count the money?”

“I’ll count it later. Why don’t you take some? Probably a couple hundred in there.”

“What am I gonna do with money?”

“What else is there?”

“Remember when I said that you could do something for me later?”

I nodded. I’d been waiting for this.

“Well, I want you to use some of that money and buy a pick ax and open up that tunnel.”

As soon as he said it, I shuddered. I dreaded something like this, and wanted nothing to do with it. Opening the tunnel, with whatever remained of Charlie’s corpse inside, was an unbelievably gruesome idea. I had a weak stomach. “No way, man. Ask for something else.”

Charlie responded by playing his harp. The music tugged at my heart. I knew that what Charlie had requested would be damn near impossible for me, but at the same time, I somehow felt like I could do it. It would be a hell of thing. Knock out some bricks, stand back, and let Charlie’s spirit go free. Suddenly, it didn’t seem that hard. I didn’t have to go inside the tunnel. I could accomplish the whole job standing in the alley, with my feet firmly planted in this world.

And Charlie seemed like such a sweet guy. Plus, he was the best harp player I ever heard, living or dead.

“I’ll see what I can do. There’s no guarantee or anything, but . . . what the hell, I’ll give it a shot.”

I went to the hardware store and bought a heavy pick ax and returned to the alley. It was dark by then, so I also bought a cheap flashlight.

Charlie waited for me at the tunnel. He pointed at the patched bricks. “There.”

I took a hard swing and the ax met the wall with a ringing crunch. I’d expected it to be hard, but the old mortar was soft and the unreinforced brick crumbled like wallboard. Within five minutes I’d knocked a sizable hole in the masonry.

I turned to Charlie. “Well?”

“There’s second wall a few feet inside.”

“Hey, man. I’m not goin’ in there.”

“There’s nothing there. Go on, have a look with the flashlight.”

I shined the light into the hole and saw the space was empty. “I don’t know, man . . . ”

“It’s perfectly all right. Come on, now. You’re almost there.”

I reluctantly knocked away a few more bricks to enlarge the opening, then stepped inside. The smell was unpleasant, but not overwhelming. The walls were covered with moss, the floor with slime. I didn’t stop to think, I started swinging the pick ax as soon as I had clearance. The second wall was a bit tougher, double bricks. Once again, time and San Francisco moisture had softened the mortar. I grunted and swung the ax, bashing the antique terra cotta bricks. Now I could hear echoes of my demolition inside the tunnel. The old bricks fell into the enclosure. I hurried, not wanting to stay one extra second in the dank entrance to Charlie’s tomb.

A large section of brick collapsed inward, and for the first time in many decades, air swept into the tunnel. I could hear the whoosh of escaping gases, and a low moan as the new air was drawn deep into the tunnel. It sounded like breathing. I turned to Charlie and his face seemed luminescent. “Almost done,” he said.

“I hope so, man. This is a bummer . . . ”

I hacked at the wall and felt a mini avalanche inside as a new section of bricks tumbled. The hole was big enough for a man to step through now.

I turned to see what Charlie was doing, but he was gone.

“Hey! Charlie! Where are y—”

I never finished the sentence. I was shoved violently into the tunnel by unseen hands. I screamed, and tried to grasp the moldering bricks, but the force was irresistible. I staggered into the inky blackness. The entrance to the tunnel, a faint rectangle of gray light, seemed far away, as if the tunnel itself was elongating. Then Charlie reached out and grasped my shoulder with his hand.

“What are you doing?” I shouted. “Get out of my way!” I dove for the opening, but something happened I couldn’t believe. My eyes saw it, but my mind refused to acknowledge it. The rectangle of faint light contracted. It shrunk, like a mouth closing, pinching off the last rays of the outside world. In a heartbeat I was enveloped by darkness. I lunged for the place the opening had been and clawed frantically at the rubble. “Let me out of here! Damn it! Let me out!”

Charlie stood over me, his skin glowing in the absolute darkness. “I can’t. It’s closed.”

“Well, open it!”

“I can’t. It can only be opened from outside.”

“Is this the thanks I get for helping you?”

Charlie shook his head. “I’m sorry . . . ”

“You’re sorry? You asshole!”

“I’m lonely. I need someone to play music with. I thought . . . because we played so well together . . . ”

I was furious. “You thought, what? That you’d lure me in here and seal the entrance?”

Charlie’s voice echoed in the tunnel, somewhere behind him water dripped. “It’s not right, I know. It hurts me to do it. But, it’s the only way I could find somebody to play music with. You see, eternity is a terrible thing to face as a solo. In a few minutes the air will become unbreathable. Then, we’ll have all the time in the world.”

“No!” I panicked and beat my fists against the bricks. “No! I don’t want to die! Please . . . Charlie, please.”

Charlie held out my guitar. “Let’s jam.”

Greg Kihn
has been a professional songwriter, musician, and performer for over thirty-five years. As leader of the Greg Kihn Band, he has released eighteen albums, scored top hits with “Breakup Song” and “Jeopardy,” as well as worldwide notoriety and regular airplay on MTV. Kihn has written four novels; the first,
Horror Show
(1996) was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. It was followed by
Shade of Pale,
Big Rock Beat,
and
Mojo Hand.
Kihn also edited
Carved in Rock: Short Stories by Musicians,
an anthology of short stories written by rock musicians. Kihn currently is the morning DJ at San Jose, California classic rock radio station 98.5 KFOX. As part of the Jones Radio Network he also does a late night show on classic rock radio station WKGO-FM (go106.com). Greg Kihn was inducted into the San Jose Rock Hall of Fame in 2007. He blogs at www.kfox.com/Greg-Kihn-s-Blog/9573650.

The Feast of Saint Janis

Michael Swanwick

Take a load off, Janis, And You put the load right on me.

—
The Wait
(trad.)

Wolf stood in the early morning fog watching the
Yankee Clipper
leave Baltimore harbor. His elbows rested against a cool, clammy wall, its surface eroded smooth by the passage of countless hands, almost certainly dating back to before the Collapse. A metallic grey sparkle atop the foremast drew his eye to the dish antenna that linked the ship with the geosynchronous Trickster seasats it relied on to plot winds and currents.

To many the wooden
Clipper,
with its computer-designed hydrofoils and hand-sewn sails, was a symbol of the New Africa. Wolf, however, watching it merge into sea and sky, knew only that it was going home without him.

He turned and walked back into the rick-a-rack of commercial buildings crowded against the waterfront. The clatter of hand-drawn carts mingled with a mélange of exotic cries and shouts, the alien music of a dozen American dialects. Workers, clad in coveralls most of them, swarmed about, grunting and cursing in exasperation when an iron wheel lurched in a muddy pothole. Yet there was something furtive and covert about them, as if they were hiding an ancient secret.

Craning to stare into the dark recesses of a warehouse, Wolf collided with a woman clad head to foot in chador. She flinched at his touch, her eyes glaring above the black veil, then whipped away. Not a word was exchanged.

A citizen of Baltimore in its glory days would not have recognized the city. Where the old buildings had not been torn down and buried, shanties crowded the streets, taking advantage of the space automobiles had needed. Sometimes they were built over the streets, so that alleys became tunnelways, and sometimes these collapsed, to the cries and consternation of the natives.

It was another day with nothing to do. He could don a filter mask and tour the Washington ruins, but he had already done that, and besides the day looked like it was going to be hot. It was unlikely he’d hear anything about his mission, not after months of waiting on American officials who didn’t want to talk with him. Wolf decided to check back at his hostel for messages, then spend the day in the bazaars.

Children were playing in the street outside the hostel. They scattered at his approach. One, he noted, lagged behind the others, hampered by a malformed leg. He mounted the unpainted wooden steps, edging past an old man who sat at the bottom. The old man was laying down tarot cards with a slow and fatalistic disregard for what they said; he did not look up.

The bell over the door jangled notice of Wolf’s entry. He stepped into the dark foyer.

Two men in the black uniforms of the political police appeared, one to either side of him. “Wolfgang Hans Mbikana?” one asked. His voice had the dust of ritual on it; he knew the answer. “You will come with us,” the other said.

“There is some mistake,” Wolf objected.

“No, sir, there is no mistake,” one said mildly. The other opened the door. “After you, Mr. Mbikana.”

The old man on the stoop squinted up at them, looked away, and slid off the step.

The police walked Wolf to an ancient administrative building. They went up marble steps sagging from centuries of footscuffing, and through an empty lobby. Deep within the building they halted before an undistinguished-looking door. “You are expected,” the first of the police said.

“I beg your pardon?”

The police walked away, leaving him there. Apprehensive, he knocked on the door. There was no answer, so he opened it and stepped within.

A woman sat at a desk just inside the room. Though she was modernly dressed, she wore a veil. She might have been young; it was impossible to tell. A flick of her eyes, a motion of one hand, directed him to the open door of an inner room. It was like following an onion to its conclusion, a layer of mystery at a time.

A heavyset man sat at the final desk. He was dressed in the traditional suit and tie of American businessmen. But there was nothing quaint or old-fashioned about his mobile, expressive face or the piercing eyes he turned on Wolf.

“Sit down,” he grunted, gesturing toward an old overstuffed chair. Then: “Charles DiStephano. Controller for Northeast Regional. You’re Mbikana, right?”

“Yes, sir.” Wolf gingerly took the proffered chair, which did not seem all that clean. It was clear to him now; DiStephano was one of the men on whom he had waited these several months, the biggest of the lot, in fact. “I represent—”

“The Southwest Africa Trade Company.” DiStephano lifted some documents from his desk. “Now this says you’re prepared to offer—among other things—resource data from your North American Coyote landsat in exchange for the right to place students in Johns Hopkins. I find that an odd offer for your organization to make.”

“Those are my papers,” Wolf objected. “As a citizen of Southwest Africa, I’m not used to this sort of cavalier treatment.”

“Look, kid, I’m a busy man, I have no time to discuss your rights. The papers are in my hands, I’ve read them, the people that sent you knew I would. Okay? So I know what you want and what you’re offering. What I want to know is why you’re making this offer.”

Wolf was disconcerted. He was used to a more civilized, a more leisurely manner of doing business. The oldtimers at SWATC had warned him that the pace would be different here, but he hadn’t had the experience to decipher their veiled references and hints. He was painfully aware that he had gotten the mission, with its high salary and the promise of a bonus, only because it was not one that appealed to the older hands.

“America was hit hardest,” he said, “but the Collapse was worldwide.” He wondered whether he should explain the system of corporate social responsibility that African business was based on. Then decided that if DiStephano didn’t know, he didn’t want to. “There are still problems. Africa has a high incidence of birth defects.”
Because America exported its poisons; its chemicals arid pesticides and foods containing a witch’s brew of preservatives.
“We hope to do away with the problem; if a major thrust is made, we can clean up the gene pool in less than a century. But to do this requires professionals—eugenicists, embryonic surgeons—and while we have these, they are second-rate. The very best still come from your nation’s medical schools.”

“We can’t spare any.”

“We don’t propose to steal your doctors. We’d provide our own students—fully trained doctors who need only the specialized training.”

“There are only so many openings at Hopkins,” DiStephano said. “Or at U of P or the UVM Medical College, for that matter.”