We were so dead.
I swallowed, waiting to begin...
"Zahler!" Pearl hissed.
Oh, right. We were doing the Big Riff first. I was supposed to start.
My fingers groped for the strings, and I heard the amps squeak with the sweat on my fingers. I tried to remember what to play.
And I couldn't.
No, this wasn't happening...
I'd been playing this riff for six years, and yet it had somehow disappeared from my brain, from my fingers, from my whole body.
I stood there in silence, waiting to die.
25. MASSIVE ATTACK
- MOZ-
Zahler had frozen up.
Perfect.
My head was burning, sweat running into my eyes, heart pounding like something in a cage. But it wasn't stage fright; it was the beast gone wild in me. I'd been anxious all day, too nervous to eat, and now the hunger had caught up with me all at once.
Garlic and mandrake tea wasn't cutting it. I needed flesh and blood.
"Play, Zahler!" I heard Pearl hiss, trying to get him going.
The crowd was growing impatient, a restless hum building before us, but at least the delay gave me a few more seconds of darkness. My vision had been doing weird things all day: I hadn't been able to look at Min, as if her face were made of sharp angles that cut into my eyes. Even the smell of her clothes and perfume was making my head spin, as if living together had somehow given me an overdose of her.
But here in the darkness I felt alone, almost under control.
Zahler still wasn't starting the Big Riff, though, which left only me. I could play his old guitar part and wait for him to come in. But once the music began, the lights would pop back on, so bright, so sharp...
And then the hunger would take control again.
I could run offstage right now, slip out of the club and into some all-night store, wolf down a slab of raw meat. Probably a better idea than taking a chunk out of someone right here in front of a thousand witnesses.
But even with the beast ravenous inside me, I had to stay. I couldn't let Zahler live forever with the shame of having blown it tonight.
I took a deep breath, and just as my fingers moved... Zahler finally began to play.
Six years of practice took over: the Big Riff grabbed me, coiled around my spine and out my fingers, my nervous system responding as automatically as breathing. Pearl followed, then Alana Ray came in, the echoes of her paint buckets making the space huge around us.
The lights came up, and the crowd was suddenly cheering.
Good move, Zahler, I thought. Making them wait for it.
Minerva kept them waiting too, left the Big Riff grinding for a solid minute before she brought the microphone anywhere near her lips. But you could tell she hadn't frozen up - her whole body moved with the beat, drawing every eye in the crowd, gulping in their energy.
She played with them, drawing the microphone close, then pushing it away, grinning behind dark glasses. The Big Riff could hypnotize you, I knew all too well - Zahler and I sometimes played it for hours at a stretch. When Minerva let it flow through her body, she was as spell-binding as a swaying cobra.
Then she pulled off her glasses, braving the spotlights to peer into the audience, to fix them with her gaze. I saw their faces ignite with the light reflected from her, as if somehow she'd made eye contact with everyone.
That was when she started to sing, and when I started to feel really funny.
The words that Minerva had scrawled down in her basement tumbled out of her, as lunatic as the first time she'd played with us - incomprehensible, ancient, and wild. They dredged up weird pictures in my mind, the skulls and centipedes carved into the iron lock on her bedroom door.
The ground began to rumble.
Maybe it was just my stomach, the gnawing hunger changing into something sharper. It felt as if all the raw hamburger I'd consumed over the last few weeks had gotten to me at last, my iron gut finally succumbing to food poisoning.
The sight of Minerva with her glasses off made my head spin, the spotlights flashing from her face like crystal. I felt the garlic leaving my body in a hot sweat, as if giant hands were squeezing me, wringing out every protection I had against the beast inside.
Disgust was leaking into me, a loathing for everything that had put me on this stage: Minerva, this band, the Stratocaster in my hands. The whole insane idea of fame and adulation and even music itself...
I wanted to throw it all away, to run from all these pointless complications and let the beast inside take over. To hide in some distant, shadowy place and gnaw on nothing but flesh and bones - perfectly sated, an animal.
But my fingers kept playing. The music held me there, balanced between love and hatred.
I stared down at the stage, not looking at Minerva, but I couldn't keep her song out of my ears. It kept pouring from the amplifiers, echoing back and forth across the club, building like feedback in my head.
The cables at my feet were moving, shivering like dizzying snakes across the floor. I tore my eyes from them, glaring out into the darkness of the nightclub.
I saw it start out there.
A shape moved through the crowd, a swell of hands thrown up into the air, like a stadium wave carrying itself along, traveling toward us from the back of the club. It broke against the stage, shattering into wild cries of surprise.
The ground rumbled under my feet.
Then the swell appeared again, moving from right to left this time, carrying screams along with it. That's when I realized this wasn't something innocent, like upraised arms at a baseball game... Reality was bending before my eyes.
The floor itself was surging up, the bulge moving like a rat scurrying under a rug. More violent this time - the people in its path were thrown into the air, tossed up to fall into the outstretched arms of the crowd, like stage-jumpers.
My sharp ears caught a thin scream behind me, and I glanced back to see Alana Ray crying out, "No, no, no...," unheard in the booming beat of the Big Riff. But she kept playing: the music had also captured her, locking her hands into their fluttering patterns.
The moving surge of floor turned again, growing stronger. As I watched, the ground began to split, the earth opening like a huge zipper, vomiting up black water and cracked pieces of concrete. A choking smell filled my nostrils.
It was headed toward the stage, but none of us stopped playing.
A few people began to scramble away from its path, trying to run through the crowd, but most were staring raptly up at us, too mesmerized by Minerva to move.
It was the enemy, of course, the same beast I'd seen down in the subway. She had finally called it up.