I began carefully, only a downbeat at first, building the pattern one stroke at a time - simple to complicated, less to more. Then, just before it got too crowded, I slipped sideways, subtracting one stroke for each I added, gradually shifting the music around us, but leaving it still tenuous, directionless.
For a moment I thought I'd made a mistake. These were just kids. Maybe they needed to be pushed in one direction or another, or maybe they'd wanted a drum machine, after all.
But then the junkie girl came in.
There were no words, though she held one of the notebooks open in front of her. With the microphone pressed close to her lips, she was humming, but the melody emerged from the speakers sharp-edged and keening, cutting through the mass of intricacies we'd built.
Suddenly the music had focus, a beating heart. She wrapped the rest of us around herself, piercing my gradual shadows with a single ray of light.
I smiled, having a rare moment of absolute comfort in my own skin, every compulsion satisfied, the clockwork of the whole world clicking into place around my drumming. Even if they were young and flawed, these four had something. Maybe a happy accident was happening here, like the first time I'd ever noticed the echoes from the street matching my footsteps...
Then the strangeness began, something I hadn't seen since I was little. The air started to glitter wildly, my eyelids fluttering. This was more than ripples of heat from summer asphalt, or the shimmers I saw when someone was angry at me.
Shapes were forming on the cable-strewn floor, and faces materialized in the patterns of the soundproofing: I glimpsed expressions of hurt and fear and fury at the edges of my vision, as if my medication was failing.
I imagined dropping my sticks, reaching into my pocket, and spilling out my pills to count them. But I was positive I'd taken one that morning, and the labels always warned that they built up slowly in the bloodstream: weeks to take effect, weeks to fade away. Never stop, even if you think you don't need them anymore.
Minerva was glowing, her pale skin luminous in the darkness. Her movements had smoothed out, no longer insectlike. She was singing now, teeth jammed close to the microphone, her incomprehensible song sputtering for a moment as she turned a page of the notebook.
The practice room was seething, phantasms filling up the spaces between objects, demons with long tails riding the sound waves in the air.
I was afraid, but I couldn't stop. I couldn't bring my drumming to a halt any more than I could smother the tapping of my foot or the twitches in my face. I was trapped here, caught in the pattern I'd helped shape.
Then reality shifted once more, like the sprockets of a film finally catching, and I saw something I'd almost forgotten... what music looked like.
Moz's guitar notes were scattered like Christmas lights across the ceiling, shimmering in and out, Pearl's sinuous melody linking and electrifying them. The dog-boy's riff spread out underneath, solid and steady, and my drumming was the scaffolding that held it aloft, all of it pulsating at ninety-two beats per minute, alive and connecting us.
I stared at the apparition, awestruck. This was the way I'd been born to see music, before the doctors had taught me to separate my senses, to grab objects and faces and hold them in place. Before they'd cured me of these visions with therapy and pills.
How had this other reality returned? Every sense conjoined, complete and undivided...
But then my eyes dropped to the floor, and I saw Minerva's song.
It was tangled around our feet, twisting its way through cords and cables, plunging in and out of the floor, like loops of Loch Ness monster in the water. It was a worm, blind and horned, its rippling segments pushing it through the earth, rearing up a hungry maw teethed with a ring of knives.
And suddenly I knew that Minerva's curse was something a thousand years older than heroin or crack.
I let out a gasp, and she turned her head toward me, saw me seeing it. She dropped the notebook and pulled off her glasses in one brittle motion, her song dissipating into a long, furious hiss. The architecture of the music shattered overhead, my drumsticks spinning from my hands.
The rest of them stumbled to a halt. Pearl was staring at her friend, alarmed. Moz was staring at Minerva too, and for a moment his expression was unmistakable: the boy was dripping with desire.
"Why'd you two stop, man?" the burly dog-boy cried. "That shit was paranormal!"
I blinked, looking down at empty hands. No trembling, just like after any good session. I felt no need to tap my feet or touch my forehead. There was nothing in the air but the hiss of amplifiers, a barely visible ripple in the corners of my eyes.
But I still felt it in the soles of my feet, the beast we'd been playing. Something was rumbling in the earth, deeper than six stories below. Answering Minerva's song.
"You can smell it too, can't you?" she whispered to me.
"No... not smell. But sometimes I see things I shouldn't." I swallowed, clutching at my pill bottle through my jeans, by reflex spilling out the speech they made us memorize at school, in case the police ever thought we were on drugs: "I have a neurological condition that may cause compulsive behavior, loss of motor control, or hallucinations."
Minerva raised an eyebrow, then curled back her lips in a sneer that showed too many pointed teeth. "Spasticus... autisticus."
I nodded. That was more or less me.
But what the hell was she?
12. THE TEMPTATIONS
- MOZ-
Her uncovered face was radiant, shining with a brilliance that liquefied me.
She'd worn her shades until that moment - a total poser, I'd figured. But I could see now that she had to wear them, not for her protection, but for ours, to shield us from her eyes.
What she had wasn't beauty, it was something a thousand times scarier, something that gnawed at my edges. I'd already heard it in the music, felt it in the way she'd wrenched us all into her wake - the whole band sucked up and totaled by her magnetism, or whatever you'd call it. Something charisma was too small a word for.
Something overriding, bottomless.
Suddenly, this was her band, not mine or Pearl's. And just as suddenly, I didn't mind.
Minerva put her sunglasses back on.
I picked up her notebook from where it had fluttered to the floor.
What covered the open pages wasn't writing, more like the scroll from a lie detector, or one of those machines that inscribes the shapes of earthquakes. Ragged black lines undulated in impenetrable columns, smeared and spattered with drops of water. A few smudges were rusty brown, like old blood.