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Sweaty

pervy

flanked by ever plotting clouds, Martin arrived at the industrial warehouse in Burbank and was immediately denied entrance to the pizzeria-stroke-music studio.

The band, according to porn queen turned heavily-clothed band manager stroke triangle artist stroke pizzeria owner, Lindsey, had gone and had enough.

‘Of…?’

She groaned, held out four black fingernails.

‘Can’t run a pizzeria and wait for lyrics that never come. Can’t pretend I Wanna Be Adhered To is original. Can’t keep turning a blind eye to the pepperoni pizza peephole shit. Can’t…think of a fourth right now…but there definitely is one.’

Martin glanced left at the entrance stairwell, saw the ghost of a panicked face, clutched his sleeve to stop himself from shaking, and looked back at Lindsey. Then got anxious and shifted down to her Barbarella hoodie instead.

‘Sorry, but you’re not a lead singer, you’re not a lyricist, you’re not a good guitar player, and we need someone who’s all three.’

‘Greg, Jake, Jonny?’

‘All too cowardly to say it to your face.’

Edging left, Martin peered round the point of Lindsey’s elbow and caught three silhouettes receding into the background. ‘But I like coming here, being in the studio. It helps me to…’

‘You cannot stay, sleazeball.’

‘…deal with things.’

‘We’re not in the mood.’

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Vowing to come up with a new song, a good song, within the next two hours, Martin took the stairs back down and wandered out onto the streets in search of an incident that could provoke something in his brain to attach this madness to that, conjure up at least one workable verse as a starting point, but all he encountered were roadwork signs and smoking Empire of the Dark extras with their masks down.

As he traipsed into a nearby mall under a corporate office that forced boxed tissues on the world, he took one look at the plastic café opposite and walked right back out again.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

That’s what I should’ve said, he thought, re-entering the industrial warehouse through the loading bay and taking the elevator back up to the traitors. That or fuck off.

Or, what is a studio?

Or, had enough of me? You play the fucking triangle, bitch.

Or, I never even wanted you to-

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On the fifth floor, Martin stood a while, working out the measurements, the building layout plan, his lack of songwriting talent, the drainpipe placement. Satisfied that he was right, he walked to the end of the corridor on the left and charmed his way into a carpentry unit called Mok Wood God Design, telling the owner, a Haitian woman covered in cheap crayon, that he was a juggler looking for work, and the place he needed to go for rehearsal was one floor above, so if he could just climb out the window and crawl up, that would be ideal.

‘You juggle?’ asked the woman, a ceremonial dagger in her non-hitting hand.

‘When I’m not in the mood.’

‘Kisa?’

‘The window, where is it?’

The Voodoo queen, who now that he really thought about it looked a bit like his grandma’s favourite singer, Toto Bissainthe, used the dagger to point to a dark zone just beyond a Fulci poster and Martin headed over, the faint sounds of electronica seeping through the floor above.

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What I really need is clarity, he decided, taking out his phone to cut into the shadows that couldn’t possibly be this dense but somehow were. Lyrics that aren’t poetic but aren’t unpoetic either…feral perhaps…some type of ancient vibe that could let me burrow all the way down into zaum madness. Cos I do have talent, someplace, in some dimension. I know I do. I’m not just a pervert. I have real fucking talent. More than they’ve ever had. I just need to access it, force it out, drag it up the stairwell.

From within the dark, a window materialised, green light swirling beyond the glass.

Nothing is permitted, everything is-

In druid times, there may have been dread, but Martin didn’t really know what a druid was, or how they produced music, and one leg was already halfway through the window that appeared to be constructed of ether-glass, his brain and body obeying the siren call of nebula-like luminosity matched with keyboard residue from the studio above, and what felt like a second later, he was standing in a dimly-lit ante-chamber, with pagan cloth draped over the pillars to the side, and some kind of shrine-collage-altar thing dead ahead.

‘Hello?’ Martin tried, glancing back and flinching when he saw the window had gone.

In its place, a message at first in scruffy Creole, then blurry Creole, then English.

WE’VE GONE TOO FAR HAVEN’T REALLY GOT ANYWHERE

Pivoting back to the shrine, Martin bowed [shakily] and said, ‘I want to get somewhere.’

The monochrome, half Toto Bissainthe, half Nosferatu skull at the tip of the collage stared down at his crotch, its features caught in a sinister state.

No, past sinister.

Past abject too.

In an object-reality that had created a self and possessed it, ritualised it, conjured up this little space to bring in and subjugate a real physical subject that-

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Martin dug nails into the back of his trembling left hand, blocking out the Kristeva shit he didn’t fully understand, whispering different versions of a next line that he could say to convince this impossible thing to a] not terrify him to death, and b] help him create lyrics better than those of his predecessor.

Superior lyrics, said a voice without sound, from nowhere.

‘Sorry?’

If that is what you seek, it shall be offered

Martin eased out his nails and checked the walls, the abstract shrine, the text behind and then the shrine again, determining that it didn’t matter where he looked if telepathy was involved.

A venue too

‘Sorry?’

And a fixed audience

‘Is this real?’

With your former band supporting

‘Are you-…what-…you can do all that?’

The antechamber trembled in response, drawing a crack through the heart-line of the shrine-altar-thing then cutting it open to reveal a swirly green cloud that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with human-style physics.

Maybe druid craft, thought Martin, shaking again as the swirls intensified, forming and deforming and reforming and counter-forming and coalescing until the whole process turned in on itself and blasted out towards the human staring at it all with blank apathy.

But not apathy at all, just lowered expectations that any of this would lead to something good, that he would finally be able to go back to the studio on the sixth floor and show them something insane, lyrics that would make them forget all about that talentless fraud and his whiny-

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The swirling merged with generic white light and then imploded into a room with black and white sci-fi posters covering every last inch of the facade.

Martin blinked, then blinked a few more times as the light dissipated.

‘Is this a-…is it the venue?’ he asked, covertly scanning his own limbs, body, veins, neck scar and, finally, the posters.

For a reason that had to exist somewhere, they were all in foreign languages, some of the text so esoteric that he didn’t even recognise which country it was from.

But the ones he did understand, they were-

Don’t want any more bums in my beautiful basement, cut in the voice, this time calling on strips of paint to detach from the ceiling and entangle with the frozen human shape below, giving him time only to straighten out his faded Nitro t-shirt.

‘What’s happening?’ Martin whispered, too overwhelmed now to instil any real panic.

You’re the lone ranger

‘These strips…’

He’s the horror show

‘…they’re fondling me.’

Collage season

The voice cut out with a shriek of static, the abruptness of its end distracting Martin from the strips piercing the scar on his neck, the skin pockets of his temples, then elevating him until he was five feet off the floor.

Surprisingly, there was no pain, just obscene lightness, as if the tentacles had taken over his body in totality and all he needed to do was steer the brain. Or not even that. Cos his head felt light too, and there was an insistence, a nagging chain of bossa nova pushing him to absorb the text of the posters and reform it into something deranged, to a point at which beauty could intervene.

Intervene?

Martin didn’t understand, how could an abstraction do that, something so intrusive, yet at the same time the melody was soothing and constant and what was an abstraction really, if not a form that actively evaded image-death and-

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Philosophy died [thank gods] and text from the posters jumped out, re-arranged itself into abstruse forms; quotes on the depravity of Lycan Colony became a love line to a forgotten witch, film titles with a dominant 2 morphed into white hole dada, tiny strands of Vincent Price’s red face evaporated and returned as Alienator, and then the finished form, one infinite verse hovering in the air of the room, self-mutilated so Martin could bottle it in the unconscious of his long-dead interzone.

‘This is insanity,’ he muttered, slouching a little as the strips decoupled, then collapsing onto the floor below as they abandoned him completely.

He stayed down, whispering the floating text back to himself.

But it was already fading, so he scrambled upwards, grabbed a pen and notebook from a table that may or may not have been there earlier, jotted everything down.

‘Am I dead?’ he said to the ceiling when the task was done.

They enjoyed their work

‘Sorry?’

Your angels will come, carry you to your audience

‘My angels?’

Questions are an irritation. Please stop. From this point on your name is Angel Martin. YOU ARE Angel Martin. He is you, you is he. Prepare for transfer

Martin Angel Martin opened his mouth to say transfer to where and then kept it open as the room split into triangles of pale green light and…carried him…transported him…positioned him in the centre of a deserted warehouse he half recognised, with several rows of faceless mannequins laid out on plastic chairs, most of them directed at the two-inch high stage he was propped up on.

‘Sing,’ said three voices in unison from the side of the stage.

He looked right, capturing a trio of beautiful women who felt both familiar and not, who may have said fuck off to him in a laundrette before, or been spied on through the peep hole, or a dozen other perverted scenarios.

You know them

‘What…’

Your brain is slow, but you do know them

Cutting off a second ‘what’, the names Monique, Michelle, Marilyn transmitted themselves into his [slow] brain along with scenes of three individual fucks on the same double bed, with him on top and them yawning, and him vomiting up breakfast and them explaining that it was normal, Toto had made it this way, and him trying to-

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‘Sing, Angel Martin,’ the three sirens said again, this time more insistent, more cleavage.

He swayed left, almost tripping on a microphone cable, and then gripped the stand in void horror as he caught sight of the rest of his band.

Jake on drums, throat cut.

Greg on bass, cheeks hollowed out.

Lindsey on triangle, eyeless, skin porpoise grey.

Jonny, not even there…unless the pile of ash on the tube top was him?

No, it can’t be them, he told himself, too shocked to either retch up bile or perform the act of doing so.

Yet deep down, beyond the Id of the Id, he knew it was them cos this voice was capable of anything, had teleported him through three different realms, and now this warehouse, in front of this plastic audience, supported by three trafficked glamour girls, with the rigged-to-stand corpses of those who had expelled him ready at their instruments.

Not that they deserved this fate but, if you’re cruel enough to-

He cut the thought, distilled it in shame, examined the residue.

They’re not really dead, it’s a show, a performance.

Yes, a performance…of madness.

The lyrics I’ve made.

He turned to the mannequins, and abandoned them instantly as a new figure drifted down from the floor above. Not the shrine-collage thing but an emissary, perhaps, as stretched over its face was a Toto Bissainthe mask. And hanging from black mist that should’ve been a hand, a curved, bloodied knife, which appeared to be expanding in size and then contracting and then expanding again and contracting again and expanding and-

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Perform, said a voice from nowhere.

‘Me?’

Well

‘But…my bandmates-’

Now

The Toto Bissainthe black mist thing tilted left and kept going until it was almost horizontal. Then held its position right there, a metre above the audience, licking blood from the curve of the knife.

‘Okay,’ muttered Angel, holding up the creased piece of paper gripped tight in his left hand. ‘This is a new song that I wrote about two minutes ago. It’s about a guy who wants to have sex eight times a day, but he can’t get the girl…’

Perform

‘…who he peeps on to go on a…

Or cease to exist

‘…date with-…okay, okay. I’m performing. I’m performing.’

His eyes went down to the paper, the first verse in scrawled cursive.

Drums started up behind, trailed by bass, punctuated by the occasional ding from Lindsey’s triangle.

He was not a great singer, had never truly intended to play that role, yet the words managed to crawl out. Bizarre, manic, indulgent, insane. Demanding of praise and that’s exactly what they got when it was done, the three sex workers from Hell hollering from the side, then pointing out and hollering a little bit more at some of the mannequins tumbling over as they attempted to stand and clap more aggressively.

Gradually, the noise faded into the depths of the warehouse and the exterior beyond, leaving the dummies to flicker-shift back to their original positions and peer up towards the floating Toto Bissainthe creature.

Next song, it transmitted, running the curve of the knife around the bottom edge of its mask.

‘Another one?’

Perform

‘We need a quick break,’ Angel shouted past the judge, into the emptiness of the higher floors.

Madness is beautiful and infinite

‘Fifteen minutes, okay?’

You have twenty

‘Err…thank you.’

Angel looked around the oblong windows and the plastic audience and the three girls with green glowing eyes and the escalators with UNDER REPAIR signs propped up in front and then turned back to the rest of the band, cupping a hand to his mouth.

‘Where do we go?’ he whispered.

Lindsey dropped the triangle and lifted a hand, scratching her eye cavity.

‘Can you speak? Do you understand me?’

Greg flicked a string on the bass and snapped it.

‘Diu. How did this happen?’

Jake ran the drumstick halfway across his gaping neck wound…

‘Who brought you here?’

…poked it inside and drew out a stream of blood.

‘That Toto Bissainthe thing…was it her?’

Somewhere in the distance, a tannoy sounded, emitting four loud beeps.

Angel waited for a message, directions to a green room or backstage den that he could plot an escape from, then closed his eyes to deflect the pale emerald light creeping in from the sides and up through the cracks in the floor.

‘Wah…my eyelids, it’s-’

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When he opened them again he was in a room with a ludicrously long couch, a third of it playing host to the other three band members.

‘I think we just got teleported,’ Angel muttered, jumping a little and knocking over a full-size Toto Bissainthe cut-out as Lindsey’s head dropped forward. ‘Wah, are you okay?’

The corpse did not respond, vocally or telepathically. Nor did the cut-out, thank gods. Though, he thought, it could be a warning, from the creature levitating outside in the warehouse, licking that fucking knife. Don’t try to escape or I’ll-

‘Pokkai. Fuck everything. This is all my fault.’

The other two slumped onto the laps of each other, a stream of fresh blood creeping out from Jake’s neck slit.

‘To a degree.’

But not really, he edited, forcing back the band, the cut-out, the general feeling of debilitating dread, and moving slowly over to the pile of books that had just materialised on the table.

None of this is real. Apart from the songs. The performances. All that stuff is real. Has to be. Focus on that, you coward. You genius. You beautiful not perverted lyricist. God, Lindsey looks hot. Even with her eyes poked out. Especially with them poked out. I wonder if I could get close enough to put my-

Whiplashing back to the lyricist part, he moved eyes to some of the book titles, breathing theatrically loud to block out the squelching blood noises coming from the couch.

Beyond Fulci – Steele.

Beyond Freddy – Englund.

Beyond What You Think Is Abject – Kristeeeeeva.

The Reddest Book – Jung.

Phantasm IV: A NOVELISATION – Bley

Beyond Quetta – Aziz

He skimmed over the covers [all red] and then the blurbs [all capitalised], opening up the ones that were in Chinese or English, nodding at the pusher inside telling him to start cribbing.

‘This is where the madness lies,’ he mumbled to himself, reading through a paragraph in Phantasm IV and quickly changing lies to pinballs, then reading a little bit more and shifting to pulsates.

‘I pulsate too,’ he said quietly to the sphere sketch, picking up a grape from the table. ‘Enough not to get stabbed by that monster. Don’t I?’

The sphere sketch did not reply.

Just kept cruising towards the morgue assistant.

Nothing is still, everything is-

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Tannoy static broke in.

From the walls, the voice again, this time husky and male.

The audience is expectant

‘Just a sec,’ blurted out Angel, vomiting up the grape then quickly grabbing a pen and frantically scribbling on the inside cover of Phantasm IV.

They’re not in the mood

‘Almost done…’

Prepare for transfer

Angel gave a nod of the head to nothingness and kept his eyes wide open as the green light filtered in and the mannequins re-inserted themselves. Only this time they had been shifted to the sides, clearly to accommodate the Toto Bissainthe lunatic who was now sitting on a plastic chair, legs stretched out two, three metres towards the stage, curved knife picking at the fringes of its own mask. Behind her, the three sex workers, eyes luminescent green, tops zipped down to the belly button.

Play the song, the voice commanded as the left leg of its avatar rose up and prodded at the base of the microphone stand.

‘No warm up?’ asked Angel, refusing to look down at the eldritch shit below.

I never wear hats

‘Never wear ha-…wait, that’s one of my-’

Play the song

‘How did you know that line?’

Play the song

‘I just wrote it down, how-’

A burst of static from the tannoy, followed by a wave of recorded boos from the mannequins. The Toto Bissainthe figure lifted the knife and brought it back down with tempering motions. The booing died out. Except for Michelle, Monique and Marilyn, who, either out of defiance or death wish, booed a second longer.

‘My girls,’ muttered Angel, sensing the punishment.

All used up

‘Please don’t…’

Obsolete

The blade turned, slashing wildly at the three sirens behind who raised not a single hand to defend themselves.

Not a word either

 Eyes dimmed, and all fell silently, empty of sex.

The Toto Bissainthe figure nodded approvingly, then, knife dripping blood, swirled its whole form up off the plastic seat and began to insinuate its face forward and forward and forward and forward until it was floating Thing-like half a metre from Angel’s shaking mic hand.

The song, juggler.

‘Okay, okay…the song. Just give me a-’

Sing it.

Checking that the band was set up behind, Angel gave a raised finger to each of them, clutched the stupid thing when it wouldn’t stop trembling, closed his eyes and then took hold of the mic.

Not there, not there, not there, he told himself, picturing a black hole with blacker hole eyes.

It is not there.

Not. There.

Not.

The black hole faded slowly and, a few seconds after that, maybe longer, the lyrics started to trickle in, each line and phrase pulsating on its own terms, pulsating until the entire thing turned quantum, blurring away from its designated form into a scene played out long ago, a scene tainted red at the fringes that he had no wish to see yet on some level he must have cos there it was, a cowardly version of his own self standing at the top of the stairwell, looking down at not only the corpses of the band and the three girlfriends but another one too, a darker one, a crumpled mess that he hadn’t pushed, couldn’t have-…that he would never have pushed if the liar hadn’t tried to push him away from the pepperoni pizza peephole, and his voice was shit anyway, so were his lyrics, nowhere near the level of his own and…he didn’t push him, it was-…he tripped, fell by his own hand…and it was pure chance that he was there at all, on those stairs, it wasn’t-…the whole scene was a lie, the stairwell, the blood…a punishment his own brain had invented to try and-

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Play the song

Angel blinked out of his trance and looked around the warehouse simulacrum, at the shadows creeping in from all sides.

The mannequins silent in their plastic chairs, expectant.

The three M girls slaughtered, leaking blood.

The band re-animated, working.

The blank, demonic face floating in small loops, staring into the backrooms of his soul…Id…wretched consciousness…judge of all the things he-

You deserve this Martin

This is what you deserve

It is deserved

Play the song, deserver

He cleared his throat, closed his eyes, opened them again, otherised the shadow arms wrapping themselves slowly around his waist and focused with all remaining strength on the giant pizza exhibit nearby.

Behind him, the drums, the bass, a triangle.

Inside, the lyrics, bursting out feral:

‘Yo voodoo do do witch, I’m not in the mood la

Reggie the night at abandoned motel la

He is the horror show, I never wear hats la

Vanquished you think yet another through the gate la

You witch, you’re the miscreed grey artophagous grave la

Tall man tall man tall man TALL MAN

Red! Red! Dye red dead red RED

 just the wind wind wind wind wind dynamic

 enjoy it yeah they enjoyed their work

Oh brother they enjoyed their work work work WORK

[chorus]

Don’t say sphere cos you canna pronounce it

Don’t say sphere at the top of the stairs

Don’t say sphere cos you canna pronounce it

Don’t say sphere if you wanna-

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