“It’s okay, Kyle,” the kid’s mother said from the doorway. “Just try it and see what you think.”
“No! They’re shit. I can already tell.” He pointed at Jen. “Just look at her. Bet she can’t solo worth a damn.”
Little prick.
“Don’t be like that, kiddo,” the father said. He stepped past his wife into the room and instantly Jacks turned, eyes blazing.
“Get the fuck out. You know the deal.”
Jen fully expected the guy to take three strides into the room and punch Jacks in the face, but instead he bowed his head and backed out. “Sorry. Sorry, I just—”
“And close the door.”
Jen looked at Levon, waiting for some explanation of this insanity, but the drummer just shrugged with a “Hey, takes all kinds” sort of look. The kid—Kyle—apparently found it all hilariously funny.
“Did you see that?” He looked at Jen. “Daddy’s got no balls. Mom says it all the time to her friends.”
The level of disfunction in this household was terrifying in its ordinariness. Jen blocked it out by focusing on retuning on her acoustic and waiting for Jacks to tell her what the first song would be.
The singer paced the length of each wall of the room like a panther looking for gaps in his cage. When he got to the kid’s bed, he looked down at Kyle. The boy shrank under his blankets, which was a perfectly natural thing to do when faced with an emaciated, corpse-like old man in skinny jeans, with long gray hair hanging wild, and eyes looking like something from an old Iron Maiden album cover.
“Don’t,” the boy said.
“Shut up, motherfucker,” was Johnny’s reply.
“Hey man, come on,” Jen said. “Don’t.”
He turned his head and shot her a look that made her slightly more afraid for herself than the kid. “Did I tell you to talk?”
The wad of cash in her pocket was telling her to pack up her guitar and walk, but Lucy put a hand on her arm.
“It’s okay, just go with it.”
Five minutes, she told herself. One song. Then if this shit didn’t get real normal real quick, she was out of here.
Jacks left the kid’s bedside and came to stand with the rest of the band. “Grave Digger,” he said. “The Joe Cocker version.”
Not actually the worst choice in the world, Jen thought, waiting for Levon to count in with his drum sticks. Cocker’s version of Procol Harum’s barely known B-side love song was slow and soulful, a little on the raspy side, but that would probably suit Jacks’s voice. She got her fingers into place to play the opening riff, but Johnny started without waiting for the count or for her to play.
With a thick, deep and dirty voice, he began. “Where… did we bury… those kisses… long entombed…”
And then everything went straight to hell.
It’s hard for the human voice to overcome even as small a PA system as Jacks had brought, but the kid in the bed had no trouble doing it. The scream he unleashed on them made Jen’s ears feel like they were going to start bleeding. She nearly dropped the guitar, figuring for sure the kid was having some kind of seizure. But Levon kept the beat going steady, and Lucy, still holding down the bass line, jostled Jen with her arm to tell her not to stop playing.
“Please!” Kyle wailed. “Make him stop! Make him stop!”
“Lend… me your hand…” Jacks went on singing, with all the intensity and preposterous rock poses as if the tiny bedroom was filled with fifty thousand screaming teenage girls throwing their panties at the aging rocker.
If the chords hadn’t been so dead simple, Jen would’ve dropped the rhythm for sure, because at this point, she couldn’t decide whether to keep playing or call the paramedics. Or the cops. Why the fuck were the kid’s parents not kicking open the door?
The band hit the first chorus and Kyle started shaking, his scrawny hands gripping the sides of his mattress. Soon the whole bed was rattling, and foamy spit dripped out the sides of his mouth. Still Jacks kept singing and the band kept playing.
“I’m your gra-ay-ay-ve digger…”
The screams got worse, like an insect burrowing deep inside Jen’s ear canals. The kid hurled himself up and down on the mattress, the bed’s metal legs carving scratches into the wood floor. She looked around, hoping to see the solution to all this insanity even as her fingers kept finding the chords on the guitar neck.
Stop playing, she told herself. Nothing’s worth whatever the hell these cult psychos are doing to this kid.
Jacks lifted a fist high, then jammed his elbow down—the sign to end the song. Had they gotten past the last chorus? All she could hear was the sound of the kid shrieking his lungs out. Her eyes were blurred from tears she hadn’t realized she was shedding.
“Scream out the Demon,” Jacks called out.
“What?”
“Motley Crüe,” Lucy whispered fiercely.
Jen couldn’t remember that tune, so she had to wait for Lucy to start it up on the bass and followed along as best she could. Levon kept a heavy beat going on the kick drum, punching in with the background vocals.
“Yes. Shout. Scream the demon out!”
If she had any doubts about this being some perverse form of child abuse, they were gone when Johnny Jacks started dancing wildly about the room, grinding out the lead vocal in some mad, gesticulating performance that freaked Jen out so much it took until the second verse before she found something else that freaked her out even more: the kid.
Kyle stopped shaking and sat up in his bed, a grin on his face as wide as if he’d just shoplifted his first nudie magazine. His eyes had gone milky white because the eyeballs were rolled up into his head and he was laughing so hard she could hear him over Lucy’s bass line and Levon’s drumming.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked Lucy when she couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Hell is what’s going on. Now shut the fuck up and keep playing if you don’t want to end up there yourself.”
Kyle bobbed his head back and forth, as though lost in an ecstatic trance. Jacks sang louder and harder, like the two were locked in some sort of deadly struggle and trying to prove who was in control.
They hit the end of that song. Without even calling it out, Jacks started singing Ramble On by Led Zeppelin. Fortunately, this was a tune she knew, and so kicked in smoothly with Jimmy Page’s riffs.
Jacks turned to her, eyes blazing, and shouted, “Not the acoustic, you idiot. Switch guitars!” Jen let Lucy and Levon hold up the rhythm as she put the acoustic down and reached for the Ricky. “Not the Ricky!” Jacks shouted. She put that down, grabbed the Strat, and kicked into a solo.
Kyle was on his hands and knees on the bed, right near the bottom edge like a dog getting ready to leap off. His eyes looked nowhere in particular but he sniffed the air as if he could smell her playing.
“Bitch got no soul,” he whispered.
Whispered?
How in hell could she possibly hear the kid whisper over the music?
“Play faster, slut,” he growled, and it sounded as if he stood on a stool right behind her, his lips touching her earlobe. Jen shivered and the ring finger of her left hand missed the fret. The buzz it produced was like a thousand wasps stinging her face, swarming inside her mouth and over her eyes.
“Keep your shit together, Axe Girl,” Jacks said. He stood right in front of her, making her feel trapped. Caged. Still, she pushed through the solo until Johnny picked up the vocal again. By the time the song was done, she was dripping sweat. Her shirt clung to her chest and torso, her jeans were soaked and too tight around her waist, as though her body had turned into nothing but sagging layers of skin and fat.