Greg Smith: The Killing Floor-ch1

"No---damn it---you can't have another cigarette. And I'm done getting your goddamn coffee, too. It's time for you to talk."

"Bullshit. I've got a truckload of bodies out there---and a whole lot of people who won't stop screaming. The whole festival site is a mess. This town is gonna have lawsuits for years because of this. And I'm betting you know exactly what happened."

Lieutenant Eisley Timberlake slammed his hands on the desk and stared eye-to-eye at the tired, pale, shock-ridden suspect. He reached in his pocket and took out a small tape recorder.

The Lieutenant looked hard at the man. His shoulder-length brown hair shielded his lean hard-planed face from any real scrutiny, but Timberlake could see the man's sharp brown eyes well enough. They were the kind of clear alert eyes that couldn't possibly remain passive when an untruth was passing from the lips below them---perfect for this interrogation.

And right now those eyes were filled with despair and resignation. There was very little fight left in the man.

"Uh-huh." Timberlake glanced down at the man's sheet, though it wasn't necessary. He'd already memorized it. "Then why weren't you running with all the rest? Why were you just standing there on that stage, surrounded with rubble and dead musicians, with tears running down your face, like you'd just seen God? What the hell was that all about?"

Glen Garrison, male Caucasian, twenty-eight years old, from Detroit, Michigan, occupation musician, here in Tennessee by means unknown, didn't say a word. But the defeat in his eyes seemed to swell, drowning whatever fight the man still had left in him. Timberlake could see that this session wouldn't take long. The suspect was too shocked, too shaken, to duck and weave around the truth. Getting that truth out of him would be as easy as catching a crippled dog.

Lieutenant Timberlake looked at the big white-faced clock on the cinder block wall of the interrogation room of the station house, and then looked back at the suspect. He stared right into his eyes.

"Forget it, Garrison! I can hold you for seventy-two hours without charging you with shit---and I don't have to give you anything but a hard time if you don't cooperate."

"Wrong again. You haven't been charged---yet. This is a fact-finding process, protected by state law and federal statute. And I don't need a long-haired, Yankee, smart-ass, guitar-player to tell me how to do my job."

Lieutenant Timberlake sucked his cheek to bury a grudging smile and calmly plugged in the AC adapter. He switched on the small chrome Sony tape recorder, grinned a triumphant, humorless, grin, and set the recorder on the table in front of the suspect with perfect confidence, as if he were placing a winning poker hand, face-up, in the middle of the table.

"No more bullshit. I want the whole goddamn story, and I want it now. Don't leave anything out, and don't even try to lie to me. I can smell a lie from a block away, mister. And don't you forget it."

Glen Garrison sighed. He watched the spinning reels of the recorder, and his thoughts began to spin with them.

The rare and wonderful combination of musical inspiration, technical luck (I didn't pop a string, fry a tube, or step on my guitar cord all night), and raw crowd enthusiasm had removed me to that other place. The place beyond time. The place of the peace of the soul. My favorite place. I can't tell you about that place if you've never been there. But once you've gone, you know. There's no place better.

I'm sure it's true that such strange ecstacies must imply their ultimate antitheses. But I only consider philosophy when I'm depressed. So when I arrived home, ears ringing toward a migraine, stomach complaining, but still happy in the afterglow of the Muse's touch---I was in no way prepared for the brain-busting experience awaiting me.

I keyed and shoved the door to my humble flat, flicked the light switch, and greeted Occupant, my mild-mannered tabby cat. He cooed and sharpened his face on my ankle, making more of a fuss than usual. Believing I could interpret his actions, I stooped to pet him. He padded past me, turned with a look in his eyes that told me I had missed the point, and marched purposefully down the hall to my bedroom.

"What's the matter, boy? Is the barn on fire?" I said with a nervous grin. I kicked my shoes onto the faded carpet, yawned and stretched, noticing the approach of loneliness.

I went to the kitchen and frowned at the pile of unwashed dishes in the sink. I reached past them to the cupboard over the sink, grabbed the bag of cat food, and shook it. That always worked. Pouring the food into his bowl, I glanced behind me to the empty doorway. A mild uneasiness at the cat's continued absence forced a sigh. I thought of mice.

I rolled up the bag and shook it again. Ignoring my own hunger, I focused on the feelings in my hands. Four hours of wringing hot blues from heavy gauge guitar strings had left my fingertips still warm---yet here was a feeling I knew and loved: my hands wanted a guitar.

Tossing the cat food bag back into the cupboard, I winced away from my strain-drawn reflection in the glass of the night-darkened window. The sight of my long-cheeked, sharp-eyed, stubborn-chinned face is usually unamusing to me---now it was downright difficult to look at it. I looked like warmed over shit. I turned away from the window, shaking my head.

I've been accused of dangerous obsession concerning my favorite guitar. The accusations are delivered with concern and love; they are received with belligerent pride. I admit it: there's magic in it; it's a wonder of wire and wood. And I felt an approximation of romantic anticipation as I bent to reach under the bed for the battered guitar case I kept there.

I pulled out the form-fitted case, put it on top of the bedspread and unlatched the lid to take my 1958 Gibson Les Paul Standard for another musical tour of the relative joys of solitude. It always made me feel good to play that guitar.

The Gibson was not in the case. That alone was enough to alter my body chemistry beyond recognition. But it was not only gone---it had been replaced by the strangest instrument I had ever seen.

I blinked a quick double-take. Anger and despair over the apparent loss of my irreplaceable Les Paul slowly gave way before the encroaching awe inspired by the bizarre instrument resting in its place.

A deep rose in color, its polished surface striated like marble and intricately carved in a dazzling display of bas-relief, the six-stringed object refused classification among any type of guitar I had ever encountered. And it was utterly beautiful.

Occupant hopped up on the end of the bed. He sat with his front paws together in Egyptian statue mode, staring at me with a weird look in his yellow-green eyes. He hummed an impatient note. I started at the sound, instinctively moving away from the gorgeous mystery waiting on my bed.

The cat moved nearer to the strange guitar. I moved to stop him, my unexplained fear refusing to let him near the thing.

Only once before has he ever hissed at me, the time I foolishly shut his little head in the door in an attempt to keep him from running outside into the rain. When I followed him to a corner to make sure he was all right, I had frozen at that sound.

Then, as I stared, Occupant rolled lazily to one side, stroking the lower bout of the guitar with one fuzzy cheek. One paw reached out and touched the golden strings.

At his touch, the instrument's strings vibrated. My spinal column vibrated in response. The incredible sensation made me gasp.

He stretched, one paw extending, toes spread, and swept his claws across the strings again. They sounded more loudly.

My whole nervous system sparked to life from that sound; the rush of tingling electricity shot up my spine and sizzled inside my skull. My fists clenched. My mind raced, evaluating insufficient data to no satisfactory resolve, running it over and over in my mind like a computer caught in a loop.

Occupant purred, nuzzling the guitar's body as if it were an old friend. I slowly leaned over and petted him. He raised his chin to accommodate me.

"Good boy," I said. I sat on the edge of the bed, stroking his neck. His eyes still shined with the same strange glow as I moved my hand from his neck to the face of the guitar. The elaborate bas-relief that covered its curved top from end to end was a mural of figures: men and women, beasts and winged things, carved impeccably into the polished stone-like surface.

All forms led the eye to the center of the thing. There, beneath the stirring strings, was a likeness that made me shiver. The figure held an instrument identical to the one I was observing. Its face portrayed perfect bliss, yet the expression hinted at strength in the face of terrible adversity, as well. It was my face.

I realized I had stopped breathing. I filled my lungs and emptied them slowly as my fingers traced the finely detailed figure of myself. The urge to play this instrument grew until there was no alternative but to pick it up.

Occupant rolled lazily to lie with his front paws tucked under him. I glanced to the door and windows, shaking off a feeling of being watched by many eyes. My heart hammered in my ears. My hands trembled.

The first tentative chord I coaxed from the golden strings sent a jolt of power through me that made me wonder if I'd been struck by lightning. The chord became a progression, my hand ascending the slim unmarked fingerboard of the instrument in time with the accelerating beating of my heart.

Part of me cried out to drop the thing; this was too much. But my hands gripped the guitar as if to hold it to this world.

I had unconsciously chosen a rolling twelve-bar blues. But as my hands danced through the cycle of turnarounds, I prickled, noticing for the first time the alien strains of music in my mind.

Closer. Louder. The music was as unlike anything I had ever heard as was this instrument to anything I had ever seen. And it was every bit as beautiful. Insistent and commanding, the music grew, moving closer to me as I played.

My hands took flight in new shapes, my mind merely observing, hypnotically drawn into the music's domain. I was only a bystander, the music coursing through my hands by no volition of my own.

My eyes closed. I relinquished all will to that which led me, and the spell intensified. Like eagles riding thermal currents into the sky, my hands lifted into more intricate patterns. I forcefully suspended the impulse to drop the guitar and run, allowing my fingers to follow that strange impetus.

The anthem rang in my mind, filling my thoughts with its beauty and power. My hands were its slaves; I thought no more of resisting.

In the next few moments, the singulary most bizarre and unexplainable experience of my twenty-eight years took place. A well-practiced pragmatism took a brutal beating and fell. I was left in shuddering awe, faced with the impossible.

Simply put, my world began to dissolve. My cramped but comfortable flat, the sleepy Michigan suburb beyond---all that was familiar unraveled like a worn carpet and I fell through it.

Consciousness reached to hold a widening sphere. I became aware of everything within that sphere, even as it faded away---

---Beth (ah, sweet Beth), my lover of two years, her soft-planed face beautiful as she slept in her tidy apartment.

---Boz and Bernie, my Blues Express rhythm section, bound by blood and impeccable timing, their bearded faces focused on pre-dawn poker hands, an Elmore James record filling the room with furious slide guitar.

---the always friendly staff of Tampy's Lounge, stacking chairs and sweeping the dance floor in front of the silent stage.

---my parents' graves, devoid of the flowers that I am still too shaken by their car crash to bring them, five long years after their deaths.

By now the music had grown fully from its burgeoning birth. I was sure I had never heard it before; it was music from another world, beckoning me across dimensions. How I knew this, I couldn't say---but I had no doubt of it.

For a time I drifted in a featureless void; the thick gray around me suggested indistinct movement just outside my range of sight. My fear for air to breathe was dispelled with the next few breaths. I traveled that bleak corridor, pulled forward by the magic of the music under my fingers.

Then the gray dissolved, and the alien anthem drew me forward. Unreal vistas cloaked reality about them. Time suspended, holding its breath, as I was drawn through a tingling membrane into a world that looked like the dream of a god.

A reverse of the widening of the mind that had extricated me from my world integrated me into this one. I saw it all in fleeting glimpses: the distant horizon; the seemingly natural landscape, possessed of an unsettling symmetry; the sunless sky, its color-strewn depths dotted with flying things; the dizzying proportions of the Amphitheater, its bulk standing like a sentinel before a formlessness from which the colors of the sky retreated.

Vertigo gripped me as the alien landscape seemed to rush upward. In less time than it took to brace myself, I had materialized on the floor of the Amphitheater.

They awaited me there: Shaimura, Elos, and the rest, their faces of mask-like beauty all turned to face me, their bodies clothed in flowing white robes. Those I would come to know as the Ancients---souls of a younger Earth, born by virtue of a magically-augmented will into a world beyond Earth, into a world of their own making.

The Amphitheater reared like a mountain above the edge of a bottomless chasm. I looked around me, my hands still slaves to their music, my eyes still trapped by their stares. I felt like a frightened child.

Shaimura raised one hand, palm toward me. Her eyes burned within the frame of her flowing dark hair. My hands stopped at that wordless signal, my right damping the guitar's strings. In the sudden silence, I could hear the rapid double-beat of my heart.

In a sweeping glance I took in the row of silent robed figures, the curving wall of the Amphitheater, and the empty space beyond.

Shaimura took a step forward, attracting my attention away from the sky. Concern, or warning, shaped her too-perfect features. Her expression held my eyes for a moment, but then something drew my eyes back to the empty sky beyond the Amphitheater. I turned to face it.

A voice commanded me to look away---my whole being responded to that voice the way it had responded to the vibrations of the golden strings. Yet whatever held my eyes refused to let them go. I felt inexorably drawn into that murky space, no more able to resist than to understand why.

There were shapes there, floating in the sky. More and more as I stared. It was alive. And it was hungry. Angry. Full of inhuman rage.

That first contact with the Nemesis remains clear to this day. No instinct warned me---no instinct is sufficient to guard against such horror.

The voice sounded in my mind again. Shaimura's voice, near to panic, commanding me to look away from the Nemesis with enough force to make me shiver. But I couldn't obey her.

In one horrendous instant the Nememis funneled through my eyes and filled my skull. All the fear I had ever known focused into one needle-sharp rape of my mind. I think I screamed; I don't know.

Hordes of images crowded to possess me. Madness seemed one tick of time away. I spent an eternity within that moment, writhing in a hell that would no doubt have sent Dante searching for the nearest blade to cut his throat.

Throughout it all, Shaimura struggled to reach me. Her hand touched my shoulder---a touch like the burning jolt of a live wire.