The Devil of Echo Lake (11 page)

“Why are you going to India, Tim?” Billy asked on a sunny August afternoon as they sat on the deck, rocking gently back and forth on the big wooden swing seat, listening to the chiming sound of ice cubes knocking against the sides of their glasses of lemonade. “What’s there?”

“Yogis, young Will.”

Billy wrinkled his nose. “What’s a Yogee?”

“A very wise man. Some of them can even do miracles.”

“Like walk on water?”

Uncle Tim nodded, “Mmm hmm.”

“And fly?”

“Maybe. In a way.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“That’s okay. You don’t have to. That’s why I’m going, to see for myself. I’ll let you know if it’s true.”

“What else can they do?” Billy asked, knowing that believe him or not, indulging Uncle Tim was always more entertaining than dropping a subject.

“Oh, all kinds of wondrous deeds.”

“Like?”

Uncle Tim leaned forward, turned the palm of his hand up at the sky and wagged his index finger back and forth. Billy leaned in closer.

“I saw a picture of one of these fellows balancing the weight of his entire body on the tip of his dick.”

Billy sprayed lemonade out of his nose and bounced up and down on the swing, laughing until his eyes watered. Uncle Tim raised the calloused, nicotine-stained finger in front of his mouth like the big hand of a clock pointing at midnight. Billy could see the indentation of a guitar string running a dirty gray groove across the tip of that finger.

“Don’t tell your mother I said that.”

While Billy caught his breath, Tim put his glass down on one of the wooden deck planks at their feet. Perspiration spread a dark stain through the sun-bleached wood in an instant.

Tim took his acoustic guitar from its case and strummed a chord.

“So you’ve been listening to the Beatles, kiddo?”

“You bet.”

“You know that song ‘Falling?’”

Billy shook his head.

“Sure you do. You know, ‘Falling’.”  Billy’s expression turned serious, almost reverent as Tim sang the lines and struck the chords, but his eyes also lit with a measure of joy.

“That’s ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face,’” Billy said.

“Yeah, ‘Falling.’”

“You can play that?”

“Sure.”

“The whole thing?”

“Yup.”

Billy looked uncomfortable for a moment, as if searching for the words or the courage to ask his uncle for the keys to his rusted Camaro. Then he raised his eyebrow and said, “Can you teach me?”

Tim laughed, “Fuck yes, kemosabe. I mean, yeah, I can teach you, just—“

“Don’t tell my mother you said that. Got it.”

That late-summer day on the deck swing had been an unexpected awakening. His idea of what he could become instantly expanded. Through all of the chaos and trials that would follow in the years spent becoming, there would be so little of the easy clarity of that one afternoon when all of his life’s ambition was handed to him in the shape of wood and steel. That had been the real beginning of his ‘overnight’ climb to stardom. But when had he started falling? Where was the beginning of that?

He laid the guitar back on the chair, undressed and slid into the queen bed, surprised and pleased by the softness of the sheets. He lay there for some time but sleep did not take him. Even after the long trip out of the city and into the mountains, the recording, and drinking, he felt restless. God knew he was tired and half in the bag, but despite the comforts of this place, he remained unsettled. Something was most definitely wrong. He rolled over and lay there listening to the memory of the groove they had demoed, looping round and around in his head. It was mixed with a strange droning sound that he recognized, when he focused on it, as a symphony of crickets or cicadas. He tuned into the texture of their sawing rhythm. And then he knew what was disturbing him. The insect drone was the
only
sound he could hear at all. No cars, no planes, no people on the other side of the wall fucking, no urban techno chatter. No voices on the street. This was the quietest place he had been in at least a year.

He rolled back over, stared up at the shadows in the high wooden beams and fell into sleep.

He was going down the spiral stairs, but now there were many more of them. He kept going down and around in the darkness. On and on. He had to get to the ground floor to answer the door. Someone was ringing a bell. It was a chime, a chime-sequence doorbell, like the one his mother had at the house where she now lived alone. Four notes, a common pattern for a doorbell but something about it was strange, a little odd, a little dissonant for a doorbell, not very welcoming. What uninvited guest did that melody herald? Down he went and around. The bell chimed.

It was dark—very late or very early. Was there a faint light growing in the stained glass windows above? He couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was moonlight. Who could be calling at this hour? He stepped down and down, his shinbones aching, and at last he came to the bottom. Behind him were the oak doors. He went to them, grasped the handle of the one on the right, clicked the catch with his thumb and pulled it open. The dark air was cool and still. Even the insects had quit for the night. There was no one there.

The doorbell chimed again.

Closing the door, he turned and walked across the room. His computer equipment was gone from the floor along with the oriental rugs. Where the cables and rack cases had been there were now rows of pews. He walked past them down the aisle, up the few steps to the drum riser, where now there was an altar. Purple and yellow flowers spilled over its white-linen draped surface. Beyond it, the glass doors of the control room were gone. In their place, he found red curtains covering a little alcove with a floor made of flat paving stones. At the back of this space, a crumbling brick-and-mortar stair led down… to what? The answer floated up from nowhere: a
root cellar
.

The bell chimed. Could it be coming from down there? He listened. There was a slapping sound like a bare foot or a fish jumping in a puddle of water. Again the doorbell. Someone wanted in. Someone was persistent. But it was dark down there in the stairwell. He thought of lighting his Zippo, but it was upstairs in his jacket pocket with his smokes. He urgently wanted one now.

Billy stepped down the stairs. There were only five, and at the bottom he stepped into a shallow puddle. The smell of dusty earth filled his nose and mouth. And something else underneath. The something else reminded him of the time his father had recruited him to help take the bathroom sink apart because the drainpipe needed replacing. He had been fourteen at the time, and his father had decided he would make a good enough flashlight holder. The stench that flooded his sinuses when the sink trap was opened had been a putrid brew wafting up from black muck bound in tangled hair and clotted mucous. His father said the clog had probably been building up for forty years or more. Now that smell was here in this earth cellar, just below the cleaner scent of dirt.

Unable to stop it, he watched his hand floating out before him into the murky darkness. He expected to touch a tumorous façade of dirt, roots, and cobwebs. Instead, he felt wood under his fingertips. Sliding his fingers down the surface, he felt the grooves of spaces between the planks and at last, a cold metal latch that hooked down in an L-shape, pointing at the floor. It felt rough and rusty in his hand and he could picture orange residue staining his palm.

The chimes rang again. He lifted the handle and the latch popped open. The door swung toward him on shrieking hinges, a muted blue-gray light flooding the space around him. Somehow this was no cellar but a door to the outside. It was almost dawn beyond the threshold and the light delineated the figure of a man just a few feet in front of him. The brackish odor was overpowering now, and Billy wondered if it came from the figure in the doorframe or from the puddle at their feet—the puddle that encircled both his own Doc Martens and the black and tan sneakers on the other side of the threshold.

He knew those sneakers, had seen them toe to toe with his boots like this on more than a few plywood stages in Boston, amid stomp boxes and battered floor monitors.

Billy swept his gaze up the shadowy body over the dark brown corduroy jeans, feminine hands, red-and-white plaid shirt unbuttoned to reveal a faded KISS concert T. A shirt worn so often that it had become speckled with little holes in the thin fabric, the black cotton bleached to light brown here and there from too much cheap Laundromat powder. Jim had loved that shirt; Billy had hated when he wore it to gigs—and emerging from the ratty collar, the head of a dog, a Japanese fighting breed, its fawn-colored dewlap soaked with dark, syrupy blood, its muzzle dripping thick loops of saliva, ears pricked forward, lips curled back to reveal long, red-stained, incisors.

The dog-man cocked his head to one side and sniffed Billy’s neck.

Billy's flesh crawled, and his testicles tried to climb up inside of him. Then the sound of a piano lid slamming down jolted him awake.

Moonlight illuminated the long white curtain beside his bed. The church was silent. What had woken Billy? A piano lid? Were there mice in this old building scampering over the equipment at night? Or had it been a car door?

He rolled out of bed, fully alert now, and looked at the small, unstained window at the end of the loft through which the moonlight cast a milky square on the floor. He went to the window and looked down at the needle-covered ground where studio staff parked their cars. The lot was empty. He scanned the landscape—the brook, the dark line of the woods beyond, and in the other direction, the dirt road running up the hill to the main building.

A figure stood at the edge of the road.

Fear flushed through his chest like ice water when he registered the shape as a human form. Someone was standing down there, gazing up at his window, motionless. How long had the figure been there watching and waiting? Everything was painted shades of indistinct gray in the thin moonlight, but Billy knew the posture and stature of this man, the cut of his clothes and hair, well enough to identify him without the details. It was Trevor Rail.

Billy didn’t know if his own face was visible in the window, but he took a small step back, his eyes trained on the watcher the way a deer might focus on a wolf.

Rail slowly raised his left hand to chest level, palm up, as if weighing an invisible fruit. Fire bloomed in the palm of that hand, a ball of searing flame tumbling skyward and vanishing in the cool air. Billy took another step back. Rail mirrored the move, merging into the ground mist and shadows. Gone.

*  *  *

Jake was maneuvering his car around a series of potholes filled with coffee-colored mud a quarter of a mile from the church when he heard the first gunshot. He wasn’t sure of what it was until the second report crackled through the woods. He wondered if it was deer season. The morning was cold and bright beneath the brilliant blue dome of the sky. Jake parked under the pine stand and got out.

He was just setting his foot down on the second step up to the studio doors when another shot made him jump, this one so loud and close that he looked down to make sure he wasn’t hit. Scanning the tree line, he saw Trevor Rail perched on a large boulder at the edge of the forest, aiming a pistol into the dense foliage. Rail pivoted in a smooth sweeping arc, holding the gun with both hands. Jake didn’t know the first thing about marksmanship, but based on what he’d seen on TV, Rail’s form looked perfect.

Jake pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and tried to glimpse what the producer was aiming at. He couldn’t see any animals in the trees but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. He hoped Rail was just shooting wood.

Rail fired again and this time Jake saw a mist of blood floating between the trees for a second in a little clearing on the other side of the gurgling brook. It almost blended in with the autumn colors of the leaves. A buck with a full rack of antlers leapt into view and bounded off into the heart of the forest.

Rail swiveled, apparently keeping a bead on it for another seven seconds or so, but he didn’t fire again. When the sound of the buck’s retreat across the dry leaves had ceased, Rail examined his gun for a second, the first time he had taken his eyes off the woods since Jake's arrival. After this brief moment of admiration, he slipped the weapon into the pocket of his black wool overcoat and jumped down from the lichen-speckled boulder onto a litter of skeletal leaves.

“What the hell was that?” Jake said.

“Do you like venison, Jake?”

“
What?
You can’t just shoot deer around here.”

“I asked you a question. Do you like venison?”

“I’ve never tried it.”

“Oh, but you simply must. You've no idea what you're missing.”

“I don’t see a hunting permit on the bumper of your Beemer.”

“
Touché
.” Rail nodded at the church steps and waited for Jake to precede him. When Jake took the cue and stepped up, he half expected to feel the muzzle of the gun in the small of his back. His inner voice had almost refuted the irrational expectation when a fresh wave of fear surged over him in response to an altogether different stimulus.

As he opened the door, Jake heard the little melody that had come from the playerless piano the previous night.

Except now it didn’t sound like a piano. It was the same phrase, no doubt, but it was being played on some sort of bells—big, dark bells, like Malaysian temple gongs. He imagined heavy discs of hammered bronze, dirty and ancient. The flesh on his arms prickled, and he almost expected to smell ozone in the air as he stepped into the big room. Then he saw Billy, seated at his Kurzweil synthesizer, playing the phrase over and over again on the plastic keyboard.

“What’s that?” Rail asked.

Billy seemed not to have heard the question. He continued playing the little melody, slowly, meditatively. Rail stood beside him, hands buried in the pockets of his coat, eyes fixed on the keyboard and Billy’s fingers, one of which bore a plain platinum band.

Billy stopped playing, letting the last note die out in a long wash of reverb through the room monitors. He looked at Rail and said, “Just a little scrap I heard in a dream.” His eyes remained fixed on Rail’s face, which Jake couldn’t read as he walked to the control room, as slowly as possible, listening to the two men.