Faery Worlds - Six Complete Novels (73 page)

“Hey, hands off!” Dred shouted. She'd entered the room, and she used both her drumsticks to beat back the reaching hands of admiring fans. “Where did all these people come from, Mitch?”

“
Mick.
This is our fan base! Like 'em?”

“I don't know.” Dred whacked a hand from her sleeve with the end of a drumstick. She pushed forward until she was standing in front of her drum kit. “Who moved my drums?”

“We were running out of time.”

“And who's this guy?” She jabbed a drumstick at Tadd, who was following her with the camera. He barely dodged it.

“Tadd's shooting the video,” Jason said.

“I know you said you didn't want this, but I brought it out just in case.” Mitch handed the little fairy drum to Dred, who scowled at it for a second, then put it aside on the tchotchke shelf, among porcelain cats and glass angels.

“Don't need it,” Dred said. Then she crossed her arms and stared at a freshman girl who sat on the stool behind the drum kit, gazing in admiration at Mitch. “Hey, shove off, creampuff!”

The girl jumped, looked at Dred and the sticks in her hands, and scurried off, though she couldn't go far in the dense crowd.

“Hey, everybody?” Mitch said, waving his arms. “If you could just back up a step or two, we can get warmed up here.”

“Come on, make room for the band!” Tadd said, waving his camera. “And me! Lots of room for me!”

“Hey, what's the band called, anyway?” a girl asked Mitch.

“Yeah, what's it called? What's it called?” more girls asked, grabbing at Mitch's hand and arm.

“We're the Assorted Zebras,” Mitch said.

“That's a great name!”

“Awesome name!”

“The Assorted Zebras! I love it so much!” the first girl said, leaning close to Mitch and gazing at his chin.

“Well, we call it that because the zebra can't be tamed,” Mitch said. “You can't ride a zebra, or make it pull a plow, or anything. The zebra is the Mick Jagger of the equine world. If you look into the history of sub-Saharan Africa, you'll find that the wildness of the zebra as compared to the horse was actually a major economic setback for thousands of years—”

“Just play already!” a guy shouted.

The crowd closed in tighter around the band.

Mitch played a few notes on the keyboard, and the crowd quieted a bit. Jason strummed his guitar, and Erin took out her harmonica and warmed it up. Jason didn't need to touch his golden tuning pegs—the instruments tuned to each other automatically, and an electric resonance crackled through the room.

“Okay, everybody, thanks for coming out!” Erin shouted. “We are the Assorted Zebras.”

The crowd applauded.

“I guess we'll start with 'Cinderella Night,'” Erin said. “That's the one from the video you all saw.”

The crowd cheered like it was an old favorite.

Dred tapped out a four-count, and then the rest of the band jumped in. As before, the sound was powerful with the three magic instruments working together. Jason felt alternating chills and blasts of heat rushing up his spine. His hands became very loose and relaxed, and the guitar strings almost seemed to bend up to meet his fingertips and his pick, as if the guitar were eager to make music.

The crowd thrashed to the song, screaming along with Erin's lyrics. It sounded like they'd all memorized the words.

The music worked its magic on Jason, too, so that soon he thought of nothing, but lost himself in the playing.

At the end of the song, the crowd applauded and cheered and stomped. The people gathered at the windows pounded their hands against the screens and window frames.

“Go easy on my house!” Mitch shouted. Then he pointed at a group of senior guys across the room, who were opening brown bottles. “Hey, no beer! I'm serious!”

The guys toasted Mitch as though he'd greeted them.

“Okay, here's a song I wrote for my boyfriend Zach here.” Erin touched Zach's shoulder, and he gave the crowd an annoyed half-smile.

Erin sang, and the crowd went wild. They were dancing everywhere: on the coffee table, the stairs, up against the walls, knocking down the framed pictures. Mitch shook his head, but he kept playing. He slowly closed his eyes, and it looked like he was getting lost in the music like Jason.

Jason smiled and closed his eyes, too, letting the song direct his hands and fingers. Playing the guitar was effortless. He somehow never missed a beat, never got a chord wrong, but it felt like all he was doing was listening and letting the music flow through him.

Erin moved on to “Remember,” which had everybody crying and holding each other by the final verse.

“Okay, sorry, let's pick things up a little,” Erin said, wiping tears from her face. She played the opening for “Roller Coaster” on her harmonica. It was a much faster song and at least sounded upbeat, unless you listened too closely to the lyrics about being thrown around by your emotions.

Jason and Mitch played along, but there was no drumbeat. Jason looked back at Dred, and she was swaying as if hypnotized by the music, her eyes closing.

“Dred!” he said in a loud stage whisper. “Dred, wake up!”

“Huh?” Dred's eyes fluttered open, but they had a blank, empty look. She gazed around the room, then saw the drumsticks in her hand. “Oh! Sorry.” She started tapping the rhythm.

A pair of uniformed police officers elbowed their way into the crowd. One of them pointed to the kids drinking beer, and both the cops started in that direction. Jason looked at Mitch, then Erin, but they were both deep into the music, their eyes closed.

The drumbeat stopped—then resumed, but stronger and deeper than before. Jason looked back.

Dred had placed the little fairy drum in her lap and started hitting it with her fingertips. It grew larger as she played, and the sound became more thunderous.

It swelled into a full-size snare drum, inscribed everywhere with fairy runes, with some kind of animal hide stretched taut across the top.

Jason looked back at the two cops, but they'd both joined in the dancing, their eyes closed, drawn into the music like everyone else. Jason smiled.

Dred stopped playing long enough to lift the original snare drum from her kit and toss it aside like a piece of garbage. She replaced it with the fairy drum. She resumed playing, and the drum kit slowly changed. As with Mitch's keyboard set-up, the fairy instrument seemed to infect the other instruments. The two toms slowly shifted form until they resembled the fairy drum, wooden with runes. The cymbal and hi-hat turned to gold. Finally, the big bass drum shifted its appearance, too.

On the front of the bass drum, a hieroglyphic image of zebras appeared. The zebras were animated, and they ran faster as Dred accelerated the tempo. Words appeared above the moving images like twisting smoke: THE ASSORTED ZEBRAS.

The crowd cheered at the special effects. Jason felt his guitar grow hot. With all four instruments playing together, a kind of magical haze seemed to fall over the room, charging the air with energy. The dancing audience synced up with each other so that they appeared almost choreographed.

Jason felt the crowd's growing energy course through him like fire.

Erin lowered her harmonica and sang new lyrics he'd never heard before. His fingers played a tune that matched it perfectly.

Let tonight last forever

Capture my sound and song

Share it with your world

Pass the song along...

As if Erin's words were a spell, everybody took out their phones and began recording the show.

There is no pain

We'll always stay young

Forget your past

And the days to come...

Erin's new song was like a lullaby for the mind. The words and music filled Jason with a deep, warm bliss, blanking out his brain.

Erin reached the end of her verses and starting playing harmonica again. Dred's drumming grew faster and faster—bass, toms, cymbals, snare, all somehow ringing out at once. Her eyes seemed to glow with a kind of mania as her hands and drumsticks flew everywhere. Sweat soaked the kerchief tied to her head and drenched all of her clothes.

Jason, Erin, and Mitch gave up trying to follow her. They surrendered, letting Dred tear off into a wild, loud, crashing drum solo.

The floor rumbled under their feet. Each time Dred hit the cymbal, a window shattered, or a porcelain cat exploded with a sound like a gunshot.

The house shook as Dred's tempo accelerated to an inhuman speed. Deep cracks spread up the walls. Puffs of plaster rained down from the ceiling—but she didn't stop playing, nobody stopped dancing, and the rest of the band was just as enthralled as the audience.

The house shuddered like it was caught in an earthquake. The stairway railing splintered and broke into pieces. Light fixtures and lamps blew out, and the ceiling fan swung wildly. The plaster ceiling cracked and fell in big chunks.

As Dred hit her crescendo, the entire house bucked and heaved, seeming to lift up from the ground—and then with a final crashing sound, the interior walls came tumbling down, exposing the wooden frame of the house and all the pipes and wiring.

Dred threw her sticks at her snare drum, where they bounced off and whirled away through the air.

There was a long beat of silence.

Then the entire crowd erupted, cheering and screaming their heads off, clapping and stomping and banging their fists on everything in sight. It was deafening.

It lasted several minutes. When the crowd finally died down, Erin said, “Thanks for coming everyone! We're the Assorted Zebras. Good night!”

Mitch and Dred stood up and joined Jason and Erin in a bow, and the applause reignited.

“Did you get all that?” Mitch asked Tadd.

“Oh, yeah,” Tadd said quietly, shaking his head. “We got it all.”

“Come on, let's mix the video on my desktop. I want this uploaded tonight!” Mitch led the way upstairs, past confused-looking kids who crowded the steps.

Dred sat down, leaned against the wall, and closed her eyes in exhaustion.

Jason and Erin looked at each while little bits of the house continued to drop around them.

“Uh...do you think Mitch noticed what happened to his house?” Erin asked.

“I'm pretty sure he'll pick up on it eventually,” Jason said.

“That was completely wild!” Zach grabbed Erin and gave her a long kiss. “I didn't know you could really sing.”

“I told you,” Erin said. “You don't listen.”

“Let's get out of this place before it falls on our heads,” Zach said. “We should all get going, for safety.”

Dred groaned.

“Do you need some water, Dred?” Jason asked.

Dred raised a finger without opening her eyes. Jason took it as a “yes.”

“It actually might be dangerous here,” Erin said, looking at the exposed ribs of the house, the deteriorating ceiling. “Maybe we should go.”

The crowd was dispersing. Clumps of quiet, exhausted, confused-looking kids wandered outside, not talking very much. The two cops were among them, their eyes drooping as if they would keel over asleep any second. Jason remembered the kids who'd been brought down to Faerie for the night so the fairies could drain their energy with music.

“Wait a second.” Jason hurried into the kitchen, which looked like it had been struck by a tornado. The cabinets sagged forward from the walls with their doors hanging open. The dishes inside had crashed all over the counter and floor. Two large cracks, each more than an inch wide, ran all the way across the floor, breaking it into three uneven levels.

Jason stepped carefully to the counter. He found a plastic cup, shook fragments of coffee mug out of it, and filled it with cool water.

By the time he returned to the living room and handed the water to Dred, Zach and Erin were stepping out the front door. The rest of the guests were leaving, too, with dazed, zombie-like looks on their faces.

“Hey, wait, Erin.” Jason ran after her. “Why don't you stay? We can look at Tadd's video.”

“I'm really just worried about this house collapsing,” Erin pointed to the sagging, broken ceiling overhead.

“We have to meet Gustav and Muppet Boy at the coffee shop, like, thirty minutes ago,” Zach said.

“Just stay here,” Jason said.

“Um...” Erin looked at the broken ceiling and walls again, then at her boyfriend.

“Let's go.” Zach jingled his keychain as he walked out the door.

Erin backed out the door, still looking at Jason. “You'll let me know when it's done, right? Send the link to my phone?”

“Yep,” Jason said.

“Thanks.” Erin looked past him and waved. “Bye, Dred!”

Dred, still sitting against the wall, raised her empty cup and shook it. Jason walked over to get her a refill, but he kept his eyes on Erin.

“Bye, Jason.” She gave him a tired smile. Her blonde and green and blue hair was dark with sweat, plastered against her head. “That was a great show, wasn't it?”

“A great show,” Jason agreed, and he tried to smile as he watched her leave.

Jason watched the last stragglers stumble their way across Mitch's front lawn and off into the night. The cars drove past, each one bouncing as it hit a huge chasm that spread across the front yard and out into the street. It ended in a spiderweb crack of asphalt in the center of the street. Jason shook his head at the destruction.

Up and down the streets, neighbors had come out onto the porches and driveway, gaping at Mitch's house.

Jason ran inside and went upstairs, careful to avoid the splintered handrail, and walked into Mitch's room.

Mitch and Tadd were hunkered over Mitch's desktop, whispering excitedly to each other as they cut and rearranged the video file. Snips and snarls of music thumped over the speakers as they mixed the sound from the different microphones.

Two Claudia Lafayette posters hung over the bed. One showed her with sea-green eyes and a matching dress, soaking wet on a rock in the ocean, the green dress clinging to her legs to suggest a mermaid's tale. In another poster, she had violet eyes and a leather jacket, and leaned against a black motorcycle with an ornate violet painted on the engine.