The December Special Guest Story is by
W.D. Gagliani and David Benton
A SOLID TIME OF CHANGE
by W.D. Gagliani and David Benton
Dale's fingers danced over the fretboard, his eyes studying the sheet music on the stand in front of him.
Ten feet away behind the glass, Joel glanced at the digital display flickering on the flat monitor mounted over the console.
It was a busy Chris Squire-like bass line, more of its own melody than an accompaniment. It was challenging, but Dale had practiced the piece at least a hundred times. He had it memorized, but looking at the music seemed to give him a sense of security, distracted him so his hands could do their job.
Twenty-three minutes, twenty seconds. The song's length. This would be Dale's fifth take. Joel hoped his friend would nail it this time around, since it was getting late and he would be pushing paper around at his real job, altogether too soon in the morning. Dale, too, would be hitting his limit any time now. Making music was hard work. Making lasting music was well-nigh impossible, a Holy Grail forever to be sought but never to be achieved. At least, not in today's musical climate.
Dale struck the last note and looked up to see Joel's reaction.
Joel, now acting as engineer, slid off his headphones and nodded. "That's a keeper."
Dale stood up off the wooden stool, stretched his aching back and sighed with relief. "Then I'm outta here. I can come back tomorrow and help you with the mix."
"Sure. Let me show you out," Joel said. He pushed away from the desk and stood. He ignored the stiffness of his old bones and pretended some sort of satisfaction for his friend's sake.
They climbed the dimly lit stairs leading from Joel's basement recording studio to the first floor hallway. Then through his tiny and cluttered house, which could have doubled as a museum of fantasy-inspired art, where flights of the imagination sprang from every flat or wall surface. Framed Roger Dean prints warred with reproductions of Hypgnosis album covers and the occasional original painting, several pieces of which had settled Joel into a fairly deep debtor's hole he might never climb out of.
At the front door, Dale rested his hand on his friend's shoulder. "Take it easy, man! You look like hell, so get some sleep." He turned and walked swiftly into the night.
Joel just smiled and nodded, closing the door after mumbling some inane comment of noncommittal agreement.
He knew he wouldn't be able to sleep, not until the recording was done, not until it was perfect. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a hot cup of strong, burnt coffee and, after snatching a stale cupcake from a plastic container, made his way back downstairs and to his computer.
He placed his cup beside the mouse pad, where a brown ring denoted its proper resting place, then shoved most of the cupcake into his mouth. He nudged the space bar and the black screen was replaced by a complex layout of windows and numbers. In the main open window were graphic wave signatures for each of the six recorded tracks: drums, bass, two guitars, and two synth and keyboards.
Sleep, Joel thought and he smiled to himself. He had only drifted into that black oblivion for about two hours in the past two weeks, since his father had finally succumbed to the disease that had ruined him physically.
Since then, Joel had become obsessed with two things.
One was the tribute song he had written for his father just hours after he had held his hand for the last time, his bruised body curling into itself just before the final relaxation. Joel remembered all too well how his father looked, how he was nothing like he had been, how the hospice nurse had wiped the dark, diseased blood emitted from his nostrils almost right up to the end.
A strange thing had happened, right during the worst time, when his father's body had begun its death struggle, flinching and bending as if trying to stand. Joel had heard a melody in his head. Right then, just as his father took the last difficult breaths on this earth, Joel's thoughts had lost any semblance of speech, or the constructs we call words, and coalesced around a grouping of musical notes he had never heard before in this combination. They repeated, and he heard nothing else – not the ragged, hitching breaths, not the moaning of the mattress, not the gasping tears he himself emitted.
And then his father had just stopped.
Just ended.
Joel's melody somehow seemed to accompany his father, and as he caressed his father's hands one last time, it had seemed to him that the music somehow also accompanied his motions, as if his father's death had written itself a soundtrack.
The other obsession hadn't begun until after his father's body, an empty vessel but one more peaceful than Joel would have imagined, had left his parents' modest bungalow on its way to the crematorium (his father's wishes, no arguments!). Only after the house was empty had Joel realized something that made him literally seek the support of a nearby wall. He lowered himself, shaking, into an armchair (it was his father's favorite chair, and he barely noted this because his heart rate had just shot up and he needed a perch fast). He had suddenly realized that nowhere in the roomful of recordings he had made, engineered, mixed, and edited – nowhere in any of those recordings was his father's voice to be found.
The agony of that realization haunted him out of sleep for days, now weeks, and he was nowhere close to succumbing to the physical imperative that would someday overtake him. Not yet.
No recording of his father. No video, no mpeg, no reel to reel, no cassette, no mp3 file. Nothing on his answering machine. Nothing.
His father's voice was gone forever.
And Joel wept bitterly for his own selfishness at lavishing so much care on the voices and sounds of others, but not on his own father.
When Liz had left him, Joel had continued working, sharpening his craft, producing music that appealed only to a niche market, but a fiercely loyal niche. His recordings on the Musea and Magna Carta labels, though not great sellers by U2 and Metallica standards, had kept him in just enough royalties that he could afford to take only occasional day jobs or recording work. Still, he lived from royalty check to royalty check.
His depression over the break-up of their long relationship hadn't quite settled in when his father's cancer had taken over every aspect of life and slashed his creativity like a guillotine. Because of physical distance, Joel's mother had assumed the mantle of daily caregiver for her husband, relegating Joel to a phone-call-a-day and a consuming need to somehow improve his parents' lot in life given his modest means.
Now Liz was gone, his father was gone, and undoubtedly the music would soon follow.
Of that, Joel had become certain.
Gone. One day here, vibrant and alive on the other end of the phone line. Then the next day, gone to a place inside his head, hanging on for hours to allow a final goodbye. But gone, nevertheless.
And why?
Why-why-why? What was the point of asking, but how could he stop?
The questions were on Joel's mind constantly, almost as much as the melody that would not go away until he sat behind a keyboard, rolled digital tracking, and tried to lay it down as he heard it.
The rest of his band had given him time and space, hoping he would take a vacation, find his center of pain and conquer it (as Dale sometimes put it, as if he'd taken a pop-psychology course), and then come back to them fresh for new recordings and local gigs, which they had allowed to lapse as Joel had descended into the depths of a depression he claimed sapped his creativity.
Jim had almost thrown his guitar into its case the night Joel had played them the tape of his composition. He thought of it as his father's song.
"What the fuck is that?" Jim snapped his head up, his long curly hair swishing around his face. "It sounds like Topographic Oceans, Joel! Who's gonna buy that in this day and age?"
Frank Munz (the Munz-ter) had held the sticks loosely, waiting to see if there would be a fight. Everyone was on eggshells since Joel's dad had passed, and everyone wanted him to get past it for their own selfish reasons. Not that Joel didn't understand – the world did not stop for anyone's death.
But, Jesus, couldn't the world at least pause with respect?
Jim had been far more than just a lead guitarist to Joel. Jim was his hero, the band's soul, the main music writer for Anubis, the band they had both nurtured for so long. They'd played together for nearly thirty years.
Joel had tried to explain. "It's this melody I can't get out of my head, Jim. It's been stuck there since – since my dad died, man, since I held his hand."
Everybody had backed off, again. "Okay, whatever, I understand it's personal." Jim had smoothed his long locks gently. They were thinning on top, so he had begun to treat his hair more carefully.
In fact, they had all sensed a little of their mortality as they watched Joel navigate his life while preoccupied and despondent.
*****
Jim had played guitar almost straight from the nursery, managing a firm grip on classical finger-style before junior high. Jim's prodding had led Joel to the piano and Dale to the cello and later the bass.
It was in '74 that Joel had first heard Yes, King Crimson, Genesis and ELP. The three friends had bought records with money they earned in paper routes, disgustingly apple-pie America, except the music they heard wasn't anything like what their friends were buying. They listened over and over. They emulated, played along, learned complex time signature changes without even realizing what they were doing. The exciting, challenging music bound them together more tightly than anything could have.
In high school they had become Manticore (a tribute to their ELP influences), Joel and Jim and Dale, plus tough-guy drop-out Frank Munz (already calling himself the Munz-ter) on drums, and Danny Johnson on vocals. Danny had quit when his family found Jesus, but the others had managed to hang together with many replacement vocalists until Jim had realized that they didn't need a singer since they preferred instrumentals anyway. They needed a new name in the wasteland electro-Eighties, and they settled on Anubis after Joel had read a novel, The Anubis Gates.
Anubis the band was never lucrative, at least not monetarily. Joel sighed whenever he thought of what it had cost him, the practice time, the money for new gear and recording equipment (twice, because the digital revolution had required all new set-ups and computers to control the recording process), even his relationships, most importantly that with Liz – the only woman he had loved, not that he knew it at the time.
Of course, it had hurt his relationship with his father, too. Joel remembered the lectures on how his chosen path would be arduous and most likely not pay the bills.
He remembered how he responded, with calculated disdain.
Now Joel had lost Liz, his father, his mother was ailing and had withdrawn after her husband's death, and his band – well, he was recording them separately, overdubbing the parts. The very definition of "musical differences." He knew the band was doomed.
Joel feared the music itself would now desert him. The way a lover's consoling touch could turn into the cold empty space beside you, or your boyhood heroes could become men and from men turn into ghosts, relegated to the confines of memory, which itself would falter over time. The music would be gone, leaving him with a hundred thousand dollars' worth of equipment debt, a handful of recordings for posterity, and...
One last song.
Joel swore the song would turn out perfectly. It had to, or he would give up his tenuous hold on sanity.
Maybe it would make up for the voice he could no longer hear, the one which faded a little more every day.
The melody he had heard from that day was simple, but the song itself had become almost anthemic – not unlike the Yes masterwork, "Awaken," yet also not at all like it. The grandeur was there, and the rising tension leading to a high-flung climax and the sad, nostalgic coda. It just needed...what did it need? An indefinable element.
He slipped the sweaty headphones back over his ears and pressed the Play button using the mouse. Jim's guitar work stood out prominently, finger-picking on one track accompanied by harmonics on another. Joel's own keyboard work – subtle synth colors – washed a melancholy chord beneath these, and then blended into upward spiraling arpeggios rising one octave, then another, then another. Under that the syncopated drum line in 5/8, and then Dale's bass accentuating the off-beats in every other measure. The effect was a hypnotic elegant beauty that belied its musical complexity and brought tears to his eyes. Maybe because whenever he heard the melody he was transported back to that room, and his father's bent body releasing for the last time.
Joel listened intently, forgetting his post-production work and easing into the heart of the melody, dreading its effect on him but craving it all the same.
Until he heard the birds.
Somewhere, behind the music Joel swore he could hear the sound of birds – gulls, it sounded like seagulls – calling. Something else...wind, a continuous roar.
But he had added no such effects to the song.
No samples, no extraneous waveforms. He had considered revving up his ancient Mellotron, recently revived with a new motor and tape frames from Streetly in England. But he hadn't done it.
He lifted the cans away from his ears to see if the sounds came from inside the studio, or the house itself. Had someone broken in?
No, he could hear them in the Koss earcups.
But it couldn't be.
God, I'm so tired I'm hallucinating.
Can you hallucinate sounds?
He stopped the tracks' playback, clicked Rewind, then listened again. And again there it was, unmistakably, the sounds of a raging ocean, or waves breaking on a shoreline layered, almost hidden, among the barrage of notes. It resembled white noise, the famous wind sound, except for the seagulls. White noise didn't generate that screeching.
The net effect was of standing on a beach in fall. And it was impossible. This was a digital recording, so there could be no tape bleeding or ghosting.
Could there?
He broke the song down, and one by one he listened to each instrument, every track of the song individually, and he heard nothing unusual. There was the guitar part, still beautiful but disconnected. There was the synth, his own characteristic chord progressions in evidence. And Dale's crisp, clean bass. Frank's full drums. Each individual track played back exactly as it should.
But when he listened to the song as a whole, he became surrounded by the sounds of a faraway shoreline.
It took him nearly an hour of comparison and analysis, and he hypothesized that it was not a hallucination as he had first thought, but some kind of auditory illusion created by the perfect alignment of rhythm and melody. Joel smiled to himself. It almost made sense – the song was so perfect, it was too perfect. He would have to subtract something, manipulate volumes and tracks, until the effect disappeared.
But then he clicked the Play arrow again.
He closed his eyes and let his imagination lead him by the hand, taking him down a long, craggy hillside through tall trees (cypresses?) to a rocky beach he could almost see in a vague, foggy haze. The sun shone behind the haze, alighting it with a golden inner glow that warmed and soothed him. Or was it his soul? The illusion, if that was what it was, achieved perfection when his olfactory sense kicked in as if his nostrils were suddenly widened, awakened, stimulated by a sort of natural ammonia, except that it was sweet and pungent. It was all so real that he could swear he smelled the peppery fragrance of the sea air and felt the cold, wet breeze sneaking long, narrow icicles down his back.
Joel shivered suddenly, fear shooting up his spine and down into his chest as he opened his eyes with a painful jerk.
*****
He was no longer in his basement studio. The room had become the rock-strewn beach of his vision, except the haze was gone, replaced by a crystal clarity unlike any he had ever seen. Screeching gulls wheeled overhead while gentle white breakers folded like mantles at his feet. On the horizon a great wall of clouds had massed like pink cotton candy glowing in the late afternoon sun that caressed his shoulders and neck with warmth that battled the cool breeze off the water.
Breath suddenly hitching in his dry throat, Joel felt his chest for the pain he thought should be there. Wasn't he dying? How else could he be in a room one second and on a beach the next? And why this beach?
This was his father's beach.
This was the beach near his father's house, the same flat sandy beach he walked every day, the one he sat on and contemplated his life and death as his time came to an end, hastened by disease after a life too harsh and unrewarding to allow an easy end.
It was impossible. It was unbelievable. His breath still came, quicker and shallower, but he didn't feel the chest pain he had come to expect – the twitch that had him often thinking he should see a doctor, but who had time?
Joel bowed over the soapy water that grazed his feet and saw his own reflection, except the sadness that lay on him darkened his features. But his eyes – somehow his eyes gleamed with the knowledge of a thousand lifetimes: his father's, and his father's before him, and on through an interminable chain. A chain for which he had become the final link.
Around his outline was a shimmer, a sort of heathaze (he found himself thinking, though it wasn't hot).
He heard a quiet step behind him on the sand and whirled, frightened again though he somehow knew he shouldn't be. The sun's brightness seemed to increase, and he squinted at the man who approached him. The gait was familiar.
"Hello, son," the man said. "Where have you been?"
"Dad! Dad? What...?" The light in Joel's eyes burned and he couldn't focus, but the voice...it was his father, and yet...how could it be? He opened his mouth to ask that very question.
But then something even stranger happened. Something stranger than having a conversation with his dead father on a beach a thousand miles from his home. What happened was that Joel felt memories locked somewhere in the back of his brain click together like puzzle pieces, forming a picture of sorts from out of fragments that in and of themselves meant almost nothing.
He...he remembered. The memory grew in size in his brain until it began to swallow up other memories, and they faded, slowly but inexorably as if he had never owned them at all.
"I dreamed that I was...someone else. I was becoming old and I was tired and lonely. And frustrated. And terribly sad because someone was gone...you, I think it was you. There was much pain and sadness."
His father smiled, a younger man's smile. "Well, I'm glad you're awake. Now we should head inland a ways."
"Inland?"
His father pointed to the sky over the water. "There's a storm coming in, and your mother will be worried. Dinner will make you forget that dream. Sometimes dreams are best forgotten."
Joel – the part of him he remembered as Joel – started to argue. "No, dreams should never be forgotten. Didn't you teach me that?"
But his father was already moving away, and Joel followed. It seemed they would have a lot to talk about, he and his father.
The wind picked up and propelled him inland, and on the crest of the suddenly chilly breeze was a melody, something familiar yet just out of memory's range. Where had he heard it before?
"Wait for me, dad," he said, then shuffled faster over the sand.
*****
Dale barged into Joel's house through the unlocked front door. Dale read that as a bad sign, since Joel's equipment was his life and worth a fair sum – and the neighborhood wasn't what it had been. Dale had worried and fussed about Joel's state of mind since he'd returned, somehow diminished without a father whose approval he could try to win (and which he seemed to need to win), from his parents' house.
Dale and his father had been on the outs for years, so he hadn't been able to completely relate to Joel's new, late in life obsession. But now, almost as if from nowhere, the thought hit Dale that maybe he should check on his dad, too. Make sure he was okay. Maybe patch things up before it was too late.
Dale shook his head. He and his old man would never see things the same way. That was just how it was. But he sensed a certain wrongness about his flawed relationship. Screw it, bad or not, he'd at least make an effort.
He headed through his friend's art-lined hallway straight to the basement where Joel would undoubtedly be, working on his song, his magnum opus – as Dale had jokingly tagged it (an inside joke) – but there was no sign of him.
The headphones lay on the chair in front of the computer, but there was no sign of Joel. He called out, but there was no answer. Dale shrugged, then slipped on the headphones and slid into the chair, which seemed still warm. He pressed Play.
The song started and Dale listened to the seductive and haunting melody of Joel's anthem, the song with which he had become obsessed. Behind the music he swore that he heard the sounds of...waves? A breeze, working up the water as if a storm were brewing. And somewhere between the music and the sounds of the ocean, two voices. Talking quietly.
Dale felt a chill. One of the voices was Joel.
He clicked Stop, Rewind, Play. Again. And again.
An hour later, it hadn't changed.
Somehow, he knew his brain would accept this. The song was finished now. It was perfect, the way Joel had wanted it. Joel had somehow captured the quality of his father's voice, and now he had become the song. They had both become the song.
Dale closed the program and stared at the highlighted file icon.
He managed a smile. He had lost a friend, but Joel had found his father. Somewhere. There was happiness in the voices, discussing something Dale couldn't make out.
He reached out and slowly pressed the Delete key.
About the authors
W.D. Gagliani
W. D. Gagliani is the author of the horror/crime thriller Wolf’s Trap (Samhain Publishing), a past Bram Stoker Award nominee, as well as Wolf’s Gambit (47North), Wolf’s Bluff (47North), Wolf’s Edge (Samhain), and the upcoming Wolf’s Cut (Samhain). Wolf’s Trap was reissued by Samhain Publishing in 2012. Gagliani is also the author of the hard-noir thriller Savage Nights (Tarkus Press), and Shadowplays collects 18 of his short stories. Mysteries & Mayhem (Tarkus Press) is a collection of collaborations between David Benton and W. D. Gagliani, some of which were previously published in Masters of Unreality, Dark Passions: Hot Blood 13, Malpractice: An Anthology of Bedside Terror, as well as the zines Splatterpunk and Dead Lines. His short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Robert Bloch’s Psychos, Undead Tales, More Monsters from Memphis, Wicked Karnival Halloween Horror, The Midnighters Club, The Asylum 2, and others. He has published book reviews, articles, and interviews in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Chizine, Cemetery Dance, Horrorworld, Paperback Parade, Cinema Retro, Hellnotes, The Scream Factory, Horror Magazine, SF Chronicle, and others. In October 2011, The Writer magazinepublished his article on writing werewolf epics. He is an active member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and the International Thriller Writers (ITW). He lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He can be found on Facebook and on Twitter.
See a review of Wolf's Edge HERE
David Benton
Outside of his writing, David Benton has worn many hats, finding employment as a warehouse worker, landscaper, printing press operator, cheese maker, brick layer, and janitor (long nights, impossible odds...). He is also a musician. Current projects include a collaborative novel with Bram Stoker Award winning author John Everson and W.D. Gagliani, and a mid-grade novel series (also with W.D. Gagliani, written under the pen name A.G. Kent), as well as playing bass guitar on tour with the heavy metal novelty act Beatallica.