The Devil of Echo Lake (26 page)

It had been a career forged from nothing but gut instinct and the sheer force of charisma. Now that he was a legitimate professional, he saw that many of his peers, producers and entertainment moguls alike, could claim to have invented themselves in similar fashion, but none with the degree of existential heft and artistic flair he had employed in using Billy Moon as a foothold. Perhaps it was akin to the intuition a brilliant stockbroker employed to make a fortune out of a volatile investment.

When Rail had discovered Billy playing scummy dives in Boston, the kid had been a fractured rung at the very bottom of the ladder he intended to climb. And that very fragility (in combination, yes, with the talent of a diamond in the rough, but those were scattered everywhere) had made him perfect—malleable. The kind of diamond that could be cracked from a shell of blackest coal, set ablaze in the heavens as a beacon to a generation of lost souls who felt the same, and then hurled to the earth in a tragic flash to live on forever as legend.

But it had been work. An honest trade would have been easier by far, but what honest venture could contend with the exhilaration he felt in this game that was more than work, this art that was more than game? His great opus: The Rise and Fall of Billy Moon.

Other men could claim to be self-made, but only one in a generation could claim to be the Prince of Lies.

He had created the persona of Trevor Rail for himself and had inhabited that form to guide Billy in the creation of another persona: a dark rock god. He had known from the start that his ultimate aim was not merely to make Billy famous but to make him immortal, like Cobain, who had reminded the world so recently that it could still happen.

Immortality could still happen, even in this transient culture, even among the legion of jaded cynics who hungered for something, anything, authentic, be it even authentic nihilism in a wasteland of calculated marketeering. Billy could be both. The suffering was real in him, the voice true, but the Life and Times, the Rise and Fall, the Final Act could be larger than life in the hands of an artist. Why leave anything to chance, when you could manufacture fate?

Looking around this beautiful room, the state of the art crucible in which he was forging that final act, Trevor Rail brimmed with pride and delight. The end was near indeed, and events were falling into place with a curious grace and symmetry. Some of these auspicious circumstances were part of his plan, but even the random elements could be tethered to his will. The unexpected arrival of the girl, solitary representative of the masses Billy spoke to, showing up at just the right time to put him back on track—that was serendipity.

Rail laughed aloud as he rounded the top of the stairs and strolled down the catwalk toward Billy’s sleeping quarters. He idly dropped his left hand into the pocket of his overcoat and felt the small device he kept there at the ready. His ring finger slipped it on with fluid, practiced ease, and for his own amusement he swept his hand from the pocket, licking up a thin sheet of nitrocellulose flash paper with his thumb as he did so. He waved his apparently empty hand through the air, admiring it, then flicked the ignition wheel of the finger-flasher and watched as a ball of fire drifted from his splayed fingers, incinerating into thin air in the gulf between the catwalk and the polished floor below.

Ah, the tools of the trade. The right clothes, the right car, a ten-dollar trick from a magic shop in Brooklyn. Satan at your service.

The primary tool in this game, though, was more difficult to manipulate. If Trevor Rail was an artist, for he felt certain that the creative fire informing his game was the self-same impulse that drove any artist, then Billy Moon was his instrument. Experience had taught him how to put that instrument through its paces: when to push it to a triumphant crescendo, when to detune it with despair and self-loathing, when to tighten the strings to near breaking with anxiety and fear, and when to play the minor key motifs of remorse and regret. Now was one of those times.

In the curtained-off bedroom, Rail found the sort of disheveled mess he had been expecting—clothes, papers and gadgets cast about at random, most of Billy’s personal effects spilling out of a suitcase beside the bed. It took some discrete digging to find the prescription bottle of Zoloft. He dropped it into his pocket, patted the black wool and said, “It’s no wonder you misplaced your medicine, Billy, living like this.”

Billy had once confided in him that he occasionally experimented with going off the antidepressants in order to feel his emotions more acutely, and as a consequence, write more songs. But these trials invariably resulted in unproductive meltdowns. The pills were a necessary evil, Billy had decided long ago.

Now that the album was ninety-percent recorded, a little meltdown would be just what the doctor ordered.

From another pocket, where he also kept the Ruger SP101 Snubnose, Rail took a pair of 3x5 photos and two votive candles. There were two small nightstands in the room, one on each side of the queen bed, each topped with a small lamp. Rail placed one photo on each table, leaning them against the lamps to stand them upright, handling them with the handkerchief they had been wrapped in. Then he took the votive candles by the wicks and set them down in front of the photos, lit them and stood back to admire his work: two faces glowed in the dark room, seeming to sway in the dancing light.

He had acquired these photos in a basement in Boston years ago, had discovered them in a cardboard box that had been packed up by Billy’s old friends and roommates after he abandoned them. Maybe Billy's friends had imagined he'd return someday. Rail had known better and saved these two photographs from the fire that would consume the house. The fire that would take three lives, including the two whose faces were preserved here: Jim Cassman and Kate Wilson.

Rail had approached Billy on a bridge. And on the night he found these photos, he had burned Billy’s bridges.

He turned to go. The pills rattled in his pocket as he walked. It was unlikely he would cross paths with anyone who would notice the sound, and almost certainly no one who would connect the small tell to Billy, but he couldn’t be sure of that. Billy might enlist a runner to try to have the prescription refilled. Small chance of that working out so far from home and without the bottle label, but if said runner remembered the rattle of pills… It was the kind of loose end he found unnerving. He had not come this far by being cavalier about such things.

He went to the little bathroom adjacent to the sleeping area. It smelled of cedar planks and Pine Sol. He took the prescription bottle out, unscrewed the cap, and dumped the little pink pills into the toilet. The empty bottle could be discretely disposed of back at the Mountain House, tucked deep in a trash bag. He flushed the toilet and stood meditating for a moment on the downward spiral. Billy’s downward spirals had always ended with him finding his level again. Slowly but surely, equilibrium had returned. Not this time.

He turned to go and heard the voice of Ron Gribbens, the idiot assistant. “Yo, Billy, came back to fetch my bag. You wanna smoke up?”

The curtain parted and the young man’s clueless grinning face emerged, framed by those ridiculous sideburns and Buddy Holly glasses. The grin flatlined instantly as their eyes met.

“Trevor,” was all the kid could think to say.

Now it was Rail’s turn to grin. “Hello, Ron. I would suggest that you learn to knock before barging in, but I suppose one can’t knock on a curtain.”

“S-sorry. I heard the can flush. I thought it was Billy.”

“Billy is not at home.”

Gribbens’s eyes ticked to the candle-lit photos and back to Rail, then straight down to a spot on the floor. “Sorry,” he said again, “I’ll go. I just… forgot something and came back for it, that’s all.”

“Of course, your bag of marijuana. Because we all know how vital it is to the success of a million-dollar project that the technician and record keeper be adequately stoned,” Rail said. He stepped forward, his grin widening to the point where he just might burst into giddy laughter, sharing a joke with the class clown.

Gribbens stepped backward, away from the slit in the curtain as Rail glided through it. He waved his hand in the gesture of warding off, of signaling innocence. “No, no, no,” he said, “Not on the job. Only after hours.”

Rail drove him out onto the catwalk, one slow step after another. Gribbens walked backward, his eyes fixed on Rail, his hand running over the waist-high wooden railing.

“Do you like getting high, Ron?” Rail asked, breaking his predatory stare and casting a theatrical glance over the expanse of space between the catwalk and the floor below. “Because we’re pretty high right now, wouldn’t you say?”

Gribbens’s panicked eyes darted downward and Rail used the diversion to sweep his thumb through his jacket pocket before the frightened little creature could refocus on him.

“I don’t smoke on the clock,” Ron said. “Please don’t tell Eddie I do, because I don’t.”

“It’s alright, Ron. I would be the last one to judge a man’s vices,” Rail said, dropping his voice to a low drone, barely more than a whisper, as he leaned in closer. “It’s not about that.”

Gribbens swallowed. “Is it about those pictures in Billy’s room? ‘Cause I didn’t even see them. I didn’t see
you
here. How about that?”

“It is
about the photographs, Ron. About what I’m doing here. It is very much about that. You see—catching a little runt like you sniffing around my territory is something I do have a problem with.” Rail’s voice twisted with an anger that hardened the seductive tone like cold water quenching molten steel.

“I swear I didn’t see you here. I didn’t see
anything.
Just let me go home.”

“Maybe you forgot you were here at all. Is that it?”

“Yeah.”

“They do say the Devil’s weed impairs the memory.”

Gribbens giggled, nodding his head, but still walking cautiously backward, matching Rail step for step.

“Perhaps I should encourage your habit then, help you forget.”

Gribbens’s face darkened with confusion at this new tack.

“Need a light?” Rail asked, waving his hand at Gribbens’s chest, a flower of fire unfolding from his fingertips, flaring up in the tight space between them, and rising toward the interloper’s astonished eyes with a gentle roar.

Gribbens arched backward away from the fire, threw his arms up to shield his eyes and lost his balance. He tumbled over the railing with a wild cry and fell toward the floor, toward the mic stand that held the upward pointing
tanto
.

Rail watched the body twisting in the air, listened as the cry became a shriek cut short when Ron Gribbens had the wind driven out of him. The blade impaled him through the gut so cleanly that the boom stand followed, running right through the gash.

Rail watched as thick, round globules of blood leapt up toward him from the tip of the knife and then rained back down like hail on the varnished wood floor, pattering and exploding in exquisite starbursts. The spatter was a gorgeous thing to behold from above. The beauty of that knife just continued to unfold. If only Eastman were here to capture it.
Ah, well,
he thought, looking at his wristwatch,

Time to find that Pine Sol.

Nineteen

Billy fumbled with the key for a moment, finally got it in the slot, and tumbled through the church doors with Rachel draped around him. She was singing his own lyrics in his ear—not a real turn on—and attempting to undress him with less than nimble fingers. For his part, he didn’t feel particularly horny tonight, at least not on a conscious level, but his body was showing signs of voting yea anyway as her hands roamed and plucked, chipped black nail polished digits flitting in and out of his shirt and jeans. Then she stopped.

“What’s that smell?” she said, suddenly distracted from the task at hand. They were staggering across the floor, which was cleared of the couches and guitar stands that usually covered it, all moved aside for the photo shoot. Billy had noticed the chemical bite in his sinuses immediately upon entering the room. “Some kind of cleaner,” he said. They usually come in the mornings before I get up. Looks like they took advantage of the empty floor and gave it a polish while we were out.”

“Stinks like a darkroom,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Lez go upstairs. You can carry me, like Dracula.”

“I don’t think so, baby. It’s a pretty tight spiral. How about the control room couch?”

“Fine, be a wimp. I'll climb it myself. Couch sex is pretty lo-fi after a nice dinner,” she said, sauntering away from him with a weave. It had been good wine, no doubt, but he was a little surprised to find she had such a low tolerance. Well, she was petite.

He noticed that her trajectory had put her on course for the sole object on the empty floor: the mic stand that still held his Japanese dagger. “Ho!
Rachel
, watch the knife, girl.
Jeez.
” He stepped forward to remove it from the clip and tuck it away somewhere, but now that she was focused on it, she beat him to it and had it in her hand before he could get there.

Holding the knife seemed to sober her. She turned it this way and that, watching the light play over the blade, transfixed. When she met Billy’s eyes again, it was with a whole new intensity. “You ever play with this in bed, Billy?”

 His heart beat a little faster. “Not really my cup of tea,” he said.

She held the tip of the blade to her lips as if to shush him, then gently pulled her lower lip down with it. “I used to cut sometimes,” she said. “Acshully, all the time. Not so much anymore. Used to
need
it. Now it’s more of a treat.”

“That thing’s super sharp, Rach. Lemme put it away.”

She ran her tongue along the unsharpened spine of it in reply.

“Come on,” he urged, “Lemme have it. You’re kinda drunk. You shouldn’t be playing with knives.”

“I can teach you things,”
she almost sang. Then the knife was behind her back, held tightly in her right hand, the wrist of which she gripped with her left. She solemnly marched up the stairs, grasping the knife that way, where he could see it.