Dave Butler Writes

“What is that stuff?” Mike panted, and pointed at the ceiling.

Eddie ran his flashlight across the overhang again.  “Writing,” he said.  “And pictures.”

“No kidding.”  Mike’s side ached.  “But I mean… who wrote it?”

“Someone who’s dead now.”  The guitar player ran his light over the structure.  A sort of ladder, consisting of a single straight tree trunk with rungs lashed cross-wise to it, leaned up against the side of the building.

“Not necessarily,” Twitch contradicted him.

“Looks similar to proto-Eblaite,” Adrian squinted.  “Or Reformed Egyptian.  My guess is it’s one of the Primals.”

“Yeah,” Eddie agreed.  “This is the place.”

“What do you mean, one of the Primals?” Mike felt dizzier with each new rush of information, though he was well through the looking glass and this point and no longer questioned anything he was told, not really.  With the Hellhound and Baal Zavuv on his tail, doubt wasn’t worth it.  “What place is this?”

“The Primals are the three original languages spoken on this planet at the moment of the Fall of Adam,” Adrian said.  “Really, they’re dialects of the same language, but you say potato, et cetera.”

Mike groped for understand.  “What do you mean, like, Latin?” he asked.

Eddie laughed sourly.  “Latin is a late arrival on the scene.  Latin is practically modern.”

“I mean Angelic,” Adrian said, “and Infernal, and Adamic.”

“You speak these languages?”

Adrian chuckled.  Mike thought his laugh sounded a little condescending, and he hadn’t been so exhausted, he might have bristled a little.  “Oh, no.  No human being has been able to speak or understand the Primals for thousands of years.  Not since the Tower of Babel.  We’re not capable of it, since we were cursed.”

“Nor are we,” Twitch added.  “For entirely different reasons.”

“We?” Mike fumbled.  “Who’s we?”

“As for what this place is,” Eddie said, “this is the place we came looking for.  This is Dudael.”  He cleared his throat and spoke again in his recitative chanting voice.  “And the Lord said to Raphael: bind Azazel hand and foot and throw him into the darkness!”  And he made a hole in the desert which was in Dudael and cast him there; he threw on top of him rugged and sharp rocks.  And he covered his face in order that he may not see light; and in order that he may be sent into the fire on the great day of judgment.”

“That in the Bible again?” Mike asked.

“Nah,” Eddie said, “but it should be.”

Follow

Mike squeezed the grip of his pistol once to reassure himself that he still had it.  “You’re not a rock band.”

“Sure we are,” Eddie said.  “We’re a hard-working rock band, too.  It’s how we pay our way, limited engagements, strictly cash.  Hell, we’re even good, in our fashion.  New name for the band every gig, of course, so we’re harder to track, and that makes it impossible to build up a fan base, as does the fact that we can’t record.”

Mike rattled down stone steps.  “And what’s with the tambourine?”

Eddie was quiet for a moment.  “Everyone in this band,” he finally said, “has a bone to pick with Satan.  The tambourine is mine.”

Mike almost laughed out loud.  “Do you have any idea how silly that sounds?” he asked.  “What does that even mean?”

“It means I’m the best damn tambourine player in the whole damn world,” Eddie said gruffly.  “Bar none, nobody else is even close.”

Mike remembered the agent at Butcher’s and the pleading look in his eyes.  “I still don’t get it.”

“What I wanted to be was the world’s best guitar player,” Eddie said.  “I was okay, starting to make a name for myself in some of the bars around Chicago, but I needed to get much better, and much faster than I could on my own.  I needed it for my kids, you understand?  For my family.  It wasn’t an ego thing, I didn’t want screaming fans or limousines or coke to snort off the backs of expensive hookers.  So I did like all the songs said.  I let a hoodoo woman take me down to the crossroads.”

Mike stumbled and almost fell.  “You mean you sold your soul to the devil?”

“Keep running!” Eddie was quiet again.  “Yeah,” he continued, “only I screwed up.”

Mike said nothing to that.  He’d screwed up plenty, himself.

“I told Old Scratch—or his errand boy, anyway, you hardly ever get to meet the poobah himself in person—that I wanted to be the world’s best rock and roll musician.  Damn me, if I’d just said guitar player, it would have been all right.  Instead, I sold my soul and just about lost my sanity, and all I got for it is that I’m the world’s most amazing genius at the tambourine.”

Mike gulped.  “Lost your sanity?” he was ahead of Eddie, and after the story he’d just heard, didn’t feel really comfortable looking back.

“Out of my left eye,” Eddie said, in a voice that sounded like gravel and razor wire, “I see Hell.  All the time.  And when I sleep, I dream my death.”

“Mierda,” Mike muttered.  He thought of Chuy and shuddered.

“One thing you’ll learn quick in this band,” Eddie added somberly, “if you ain’t learned it already, is that Satan’s got game.”

Follow

“Anyone got anything long and thin?” Mike asked, cold sweat bursting out all over his body.  He regretted losing his switchblade in the melee at Butcher’s.

“Not at the moment,” Twitch snickered.

“No, I mean like a bobby pin or a knife.”  It had been a long time since Mike had picked a lock, but the keyhole was huge, a keyhole for an old-style warded lock rather than a modern tumbler, which probably meant that the lock was easy.

Eddie slapped a pocketknife into Mike’s hand.

“Thanks, Eddie,” Mike said.  While he snapped the blade open, he heard a ripping sound from where Eddie stood.  He shone his light on the guitarist and saw Eddie strapping his Maglite to the underside of his shotgun with a strip of duct tape.

“You carry a lot of stuff in those pockets,” he observed.

“Man of action has to be prepared,” Eddie sniffed.

“Maybe you should MacGyver open the door.”

“You MacGyver the door,” Eddie chuckled.  “I’m gonna MacGyver a little Baal Zavuv.”

Follow

“Are you alright, son?” he heard Twitch say in the dark.  He thought she smelled a little horsey, this close.

Adrian groaned, lying under Mike.

“You can see?” Mike asked.

Then a light snapped on above Mike, and after he blinked away the sting of it he realized it was a flashlight beam.  The beam jogged down the stairs to Mike’s level as he stood up, and then a second beam snapped on near the first, and Eddie materialized in the white beams of light, pressing a crosshatch-gripped Maglite into Mike’s hands.

“I don’t know how far we have to go,” Eddie muttered, “but I know that dawn ain’t nowhere near close enough to save us.”

“What is that, just a bit of random encouragement?” Mike touched the back of his neck—the skin there felt crisp like cooked pastry dough, and stung fiercely at the contact of his fingers.  “Just want to make sure my hopes are set at the right level?”

“Exactly,” Eddie agreed.  “I’ve got the back, Jim will carry Adrian and Twitch can lead the boy.”

“The boy?” Mike swiveled around with his flashlight and found the kid, staring with big brown eyes at the rock band from out of town that had burned down his synagogue.

“We’re not leaving the boy,” Eddie explained.  “Jim wouldn’t have it.”

“The boy’s got the Left Hand on him?” Mike gulped, wondering what the kid could have done to be in such bad spiritual shape.

But Jim shook his head no before he turned and bent over to pick Adrian up and sling the organist over his shoulders.

“Nah,” Eddie chewed out the words while stretching his shoulders and neck.  “Jim just likes pissing off anything and anyone associated with the Infernal powers.”

“You mean Hell?”

“I mean Hell,” Eddie agreed.  “You take point.”

Follow

“Will he talk to us?” Eddie asked.  The guitarist held his shotgun at the ready and kept looking around the mezzanine.

“Sure he will,” Adrian said.  He put away the lens, unscrewed the cap of the gas can and began to back around the man on the chest, pouring a trickle of gasoline on the floor as he went.  The petroleum stink snapped Mike out of his reverie.

“How did you lose the last bass player?” he asked.

“We didn’t lose him,” Twitch said.  “He died.”

Mike gulped and tightened his grip on the M1911.  “Drug overdose?” he asked hopefully.

Eddie shook his head.  “Impaled on his own bass.”

“Stand back or get gas on your shoes,” Adrian warned.  “I need a perfect circle.”

“Or what?” Eddie asked.  “You might fall asleep?”

Mike stepped back and watched Adrian finish his circle, then light it with a matchbook he produced from his pocket.  Flames rose from the circle of gas, and when Adrian waved his hand over them, they rose even higher.

“Makes you feel better about the tambourine, though, don’t it?” Twitch asked.  “I mean, when was the last time you heard of a tambourine player murdered with his own instrument?”

“A tambourine could be sharpened,” Eddie said sourly.

“Murdered?” Mike asked.

“Of course,” Eddie snapped.  “What kind of idiot would impale himself on a bass guitar?”

“If there was such an idiot,” Twitch observed, “he’d surely be a member of this band.”

Follow