“We are not of the cowering flock,” he said, his voice thick with contempt. “We are not the crying sheep of God. We are the mighty goat.”
“But we can agree that you’re a farm animal?” asked Whitey.
“Pardon me?” asked Count Gorgann.
Herman looked flabbergasted, unsure of what to ask next.
“The goat,” said Heidi, trying to help Herman out. “That’s interesting. Why the goat? What makes the goat different from the sheep?” Do I really want to know? she wondered.
“The goat has free will,” said Count Gorgann, smiling his bloody smile. “For this reason, he will always be punished by the oppressor God… God must die. God is the unholy pig. We serve the butcher.”
Wow, sheep, goats, and pigs, too, thought Heidi. Pretty soon we’ll have a whole barnyard. And wait, why would the goat gang up with the butcher? How did people get like this? she wondered. What made them go wrong? If they just reeled time back a decade or so and stripped away the body paint, would they see innocent, ordinary kids, like her and Griff in high school? She saw Whitey smiling, preparing to make some joke, and motioned him off. No need to get the two black-metal guys ranting any more than they already were.
She looked to Herman, waiting for him to pick the interview up, but he was staring over the heads of the band members and at the window of the booth. She followed his gaze, saw Chip standing there looking even more frazzled than before, his remaining hair on end, drawing his finger repeatedly across his throat in an effort to get them to stop the interview. Yeah, figures, thought Heidi. Talk of burning churches and killing God isn’t likely to go down well with our sponsors.
Herman gave a brief nod to Chip. “Okay, well,” he said. “There you have it. Again the band is Leviathan and the Fleeing Serpent and the album is called ‘Possessed by the Master’s War with the Knights of Korgaron.’ Any particular track you want us to hear?”
“Track four…,” said Dr. Butcher. “ ‘Cleansing the Skin of the False God.’ ”
“Okay, track four it is,” said Herman. “I know you have to head over to sound check, so thanks for coming in and good luck with the show.”
Whitey queued up the DVD to track four and it started again. At first there was only silence. Heidi glanced at the screen; again everything was black. Maybe they always started with darkness and silence, she thought. And then death metal started pouring into her headphones, even more frenetic than before. Herman, she saw, was wincing. He didn’t keep the headphones on for long.
Chip was already opening the door and ushering the pair of ghouls out of the studio before they could do any more damage. He was nodding and smiling, telling them how much he appreciated them coming and he was so sorry they had to go so soon.
“But we don’t have to go yet,” said Count Gorgann. “We are happy to stay and speak more of the goat.”
Chip just politely ignored him and moved them down the hall and out until they were gone. It was something that Chip was surprisingly good at, considering how easily he stuck his foot in his mouth on other occasions. Heidi took her headphones off, looked at Herman. Behind them, Whitey was still listening and watching the video, rocking his head slightly up and down.
“What was that all about?” asked Herman. “That what passes for music these days?”
Heidi shrugged. She hadn’t liked the ghouls any more than Herman did. There was something about them, Dr. Butcher especially, that was creepy. Not white-makeup creepy but much more serious than that, something deep and dark and mangled. Why had they been staring at her the whole time? Or had she just been imagining it?
“What happened to the good old days?” asked Herman. “I remember this one time, Marc Bolan was here, must have been just a year or two before his death, back when I was first at the station. All of T-Rex was here, in fact. They must have—”
“Track’s nearly over, dude,” said Whitey from behind them.
Heidi put her headphones back on again and was surrounded again by the screams of Leviathan and the Fleeing Serpent. She tried to ignore it, ready to go on with the rest of the show.
Chapter Fifteen
It was late now, the Big H shift winding to a close. Cerina sighed. Hardly made any sense for her to wait around until the shift ended; nobody ever came in this late, but that was the way Chip wanted it. And what did she care? She was getting paid, wasn’t she, and paid basically to do nothing.
She was flipping her way through the latest Cosmo. Not really her thing, but hell, someone had left it in the reception area and it was something to do, better than the Highlights the ghouls had been leafing through. After they’d left she’d gone through the issues of Highlights to make sure they hadn’t left satanic messages for children to find later, but no, they were clean. At least there was that. She shivered. She was glad to have them out of her hair. Couldn’t hardly focus with them staring at her.
The reception area was empty and quiet. Sometimes at night it felt almost a little too quiet, but tonight the problem was different. She kept hearing things, a noise, a rustling here and there, nothing she could quite put her finger on, but it made her jumpy.
When the phone rang, she nearly fell out of her chair. It was the babysitter telling her that her son had said that it was okay with her to order the sports package.
“Say what?” said Cerina.
“The sports package,” the sitter said. “He said just go on and order it up. I thought I better call you first. But that boy, he definitely loves his hockey.”
She felt herself getting angry. “I don’t care how much he loves it,” she said. “I am a working mother and I work my nails to the bone and I am not paying extra for the sports package. My goddamn cable bill is high enough. You should know better.”
“What about HBO?” said the babysitter. “He told me to add that on, too.”
“It’s already on,” said Cerina.
“So I should get rid of it?” asked the sitter.
“Oh no, HBO stays,” she said. “You know I love my True Blood.”
“True Blood,” said the sitter. “That’s hardly a vampire show at all. It’s more a show about men taking their shirts off.”
She sighed. “I know… I know,” she said. “It’s all garbage anyway. I don’t even know why I own a TV.”
A moment later she had hung up the telephone. Sports package, she thought, shaking her head. Any babysitter worth her salt would have known better.
She had flipped to the end of the magazine while on the phone. She was turning it back to the beginning again when she caught something out of the corner of her eye and realized that there, on the edge of the reception desk, was an antique wooden box.
Now where did that come from? she wondered. It hadn’t been there a few minutes ago, and she’d been at her desk all night. She hadn’t heard anyone come in or go out, and she hadn’t seen anyone. Didn’t make any sense that it would be there at all, and yet there it was. Weird, she thought.
There was a note on top of it, which she moved aside for a closer look at the box itself. Carved into the lid was a strange symbol. A circle, in the center of which was a cross, the head of it surmounted by a U to form an empty horned head. At the bottom was an upside-down U, the tail of the cross splitting its center. It looked like a humanoid figure, the kind of thing you might find on the wall of a cave. In addition, at the extremes to either side of the crosspiece were two dots, which gave the symbol the appearance also of being a strange face. So either a crude figure within a circle or a face or both.