The end of "Dollhouse Blues" was triumphant, as it always was, as it was the day it had appeared to Alex fully formed: a cathedral of loud. Alex and Xander were locked in, mind-melded. What they made together was majestic and terrifying, awesome in the original sense of the word. Alex was awed by his own creation, afraid of what would happen if it ever slipped its bounds. We are become rock, the destroyer of worlds.
But even this mighty hymn, this edifice, this colossus, paled in comparison to the scream that issued from the girl in the doorway. Alex and Xander both turned their heads toward the sound, perfectly in sync, like the opening of automatic doors. God, they could be so beautiful sometimes.
--Dude. You hear that? We should get her in the studio, do some backup vocals.
--Dude I think I know her.
--Oh shit that's Audrey's friend. What's her name, Jenny? Joey?
--Joanie I think.
Screaming in a crowded room was just about the worst thing a person could do, in terms of keeping things from absolutely breaking the fuck down – because things were now absolutely breaking the fuck down. Audrey freaked out, dropped her bass with a KLONG and jumped off the stage, right into a crowd that, Alex noted, was a little bigger than he expected. Pretty frickin' sweet, all things considered.
Alex and Xander stopped playing. The feedback looped between them and around them, binding them together.
--You're thinking of the Force, dude.
--Yeah but what if feedback was like our version of the Force, dude? It's all just energy, right?
--Also dude the Force penetrates you. Are you saying you just got penetrated?
Patrick kept drumming, oblivious. The crowd didn't know what the fuck was happening. They thought this was part of the show, maybe. Fucking freshmen, don't know the difference between what's real and what's a show.
--Though, dude, what if this was part of the show?
--I like where your head's at, dude, but now is probably not the time to discuss it? Let's talk about it next rehearsal.
Joanie was still screaming in the doorway, and you'd have to be a pretty fucking dense freshman by now not to dig that something was not right here. Clark, the door guy, he was trying to calm Joanie down, but he didn't really have a plan and you could tell he wasn't too comfortable just grabbing up on her, plus Joanie was like eight feet tall and strong as shit (she was on the basketball or volleyball team or something, Alex remembered), so she kept screaming while Clark just kind of waved his arms.
Audrey was trying to force her way through the crowd, a bunch of drunk children whose fight-or-flight instincts were short-circuiting. Some of them were starting to scream now, figuring that was the thing to do. Tiny little Audrey was getting swallowed up the crowd. Things were getting, like, Lord of the Flies, real quick. Patrick's fucking drumming wasn't helping.
Alex took off his guitar and handed it to Xander. He jerked his head at Patrick. "Could you make him fucking stop?" Alex jumped down off the stage and elbowed through the crowd to Audrey. He found her and put his arm around her shoulder. "Dude, you okay?" Audrey nodded. This felt good, in a way. Natural.
With one arm around Audrey, Alex stiff-armed his way to the doors. Behind him Patrick was going insane, just full-on tribal. A real fucking shame they had to stop playing, because this would have sounded totally sweet with him and Xander shredding on top of it. Then you get Joanie wailing in the background like "Gimme Shelter" or something – that would be totally fucking sweet. That's that, like, apocalyptic wasteland sound he was telling Xander about – just the other day, he was telling Xander. First you build the cathedral, then you burn it down.
Alex pushed past the last dude and there she was, Joanie, right in front of him, her screaming turning ragged. Her eyes were wide open – solid black. Just then the drumming stopped, with one final cymbal crash on the 4 that Patrick immediately caught with his fingers, clipping it off sharp and tight. What a total fucking pro.
Joanie stopped screaming. She looked down, right at Alex. He craned his neck to meet her gaze. "Joanie?" Audrey said. "Joanie, what's happening? What's wrong?" But Alex knew what was happening. He'd seen it before, but never this bad. Joanie wasn't here right now. Joanie was communing. She'd taken some gunpowder, and she'd taken a whole fucking lot of it.
Joanie opened her mouth to speak, and a thin stream of black liquid trickled out of the side of her mouth. She didn't seem to notice.
"You aren't supposed to be in here," she said. Then she ran out the door.
"What the fuck just happened?" said Audrey. That was a decent question. A better question, to Alex's mind, was Where did Joanie get the gunpowder? Also Does she have some more? And Can I have some please?
One of the more persistent legends that gets passed around campus – much like the syphilis that killed Griffin Weston, despite the truly staggering amounts of shredded wheat he consumed to combat it – is the existence of a rare, powerful entheogen called "gunpowder," so named for the black, granular form it usually takes. The alleged effects of the drug are so patently ludicrous that, out of respect for your intelligence, we shall refrain from even mentioning them. Suffice it to say that gunpowder, like most of the ridiculous rumors that sprout like mushrooms around UNWG, is tied to a secret society – in this case, the Living Creatures, purported to be the distaff counterparts to the Nine Dead Men. Who can even keep all these clandestine clubs straight, is what we say. Just join a frat or a sorority like a proper young gentleman or lady. It is the opinion of this Handbook that the myth of gunpowder was invented sometime around 1967, when an enterprising hippie sold a bag of ordinary black pepper to a desperate acid head and told him he'd "see things, man." It's just a scam, as are most things purporting to show you a hidden truth.
With no more screaming or drumming, the crowd started to settle back down, all the kids faintly embarrassed for getting so riled up. Shawn and that girl he was making out with all night came up to Alex and Audrey.
"Dude, what the fuck just happened?" said Shawn.
"Dude, that's what she said," said Alex. Shawn and Audrey made like these weird little faces at each other. Whatever was going on between them just bored Alex so much. Like, it's not that hard to move on. Plenty of fish in the barrel.
"Where'd she go?" said Shawn's girl.
"Who are you?" said Audrey, too hard, but the girl either didn't catch it or didn't care. She stuck out her hand: "Sarah." As Audrey limply shook it, Alex caught sight of something weirdly familiar on her wrist, a tattoo maybe, but it was quickly covered up by one of her many bracelets. "We have to go after her," Sarah said. "She could be in trouble."
"Search party, dude!" Xander and Renee had joined them. Patrick had already returned to the bar. "We're getting a posse together!" Xander slid his arm around Audrey's waist, and Alex was surprised to see that she let him do it.
"We don't need twenty people to find her," Sarah said. "Alex, Audrey, you come with me." Whoever this Sarah was, Alex dug the decisiveness. He wondered if she'd ever thought about getting into artist management. There were a couple bookers around town he wouldn't mind seeing on the receiving end of some assertive, no-nonsense directives. Alex shrugged at Xander.
--Sorry bro. You can be in the next posse.
--Bummer.
--You and Patrick can pack up the gear, right?
--Fuck
Alex expected to hear Joanie still screaming a block or two away, but all he heard were your usual downtown Thursday night noises. Some kind of jangly bullshit was wafting out of the Corner Bar. Sounded like Brown Thrasher to Alex; those dudes were stuck in 1983. A low, almost sub-audible rumble of bass came from somewhere, probably the Dip over on Creeker. The homeless guy they called John the Revelator shouted about the Beast and the Serpent from his nightly post under the awning of McConnell's Newsstand. Every few seconds, a "Woo!" came from one corner of the map or another, frat boys and wannabe frat boys released from their cages and gone full Nature Boy. A little shy and sad of eye. Snatches of shouted Marx, some sort of poorly-conceived street performance art, joined in confused three-part dialogue with the frat guys and the homeless preacher. A saxophone line drifted above everything, dipping in and out of tonality, giving it the illusion of coherence. A handful of freshmen sat at a table in front of Hallowed Grounds, clutching cappuccinos like holy charms to ward off evil. They were terrified of falling into temptation, terrified even more of not being tempted.
Alex remembered that feeling. He hadn't always been the jaded, inscrutable rock god he was today, object of desire and envy, a revelator in his own right. He had been there with the fancy coffee he didn't even know whether he should add sugar to, he had goggled like a child at the zoo when he first saw Stephen Brick in line at McConnell's, he had let loose a full-throated "Woo!" at least once. He had made his way out of the nest one faltering step at a time, while Xander had closed his eyes and jumped. Xander had always been the fuck-up, the self-described Evil Twin, but when they got to campus Alex saw how that could be an asset, at least in the short term. He wanted to fuck up a little. He'd done his best to become Xander there, for a little while, and after that Halloween party at the Dollhouse (oh shit, that's where he'd met Joanie, he finally remembered) he'd had to make some changes, set some rules, get some distance. Acquire a few secrets. But he and Xander were a part of each other now, like they had never been before. They made each other stronger.
"Where'd she go?" said Audrey. Sarah paced a few steps ahead, like, scanning the perimeter or some shit. Where did that pretentious loser Shawn meet this girl?
Alex walked over to the table of freshmen at Hallowed Grounds. "Hey, did y'all see a, like, really tall blond girl go by here?" A couple of them, soft little dudes in nearly matching polo shirts, nodded vigorously, as if relieved to receive confirmation that they hadn't hallucinated her.
"Yeah, just a minute ago," said the clear leader, an Indian girl with long black curls.
"Did you see where she went?" They all pointed east, in the direction of campus.
Alex, Sarah and Audrey jogged the three blocks to Delmonico Ave. and crossed over it into West Campus, the original college, a vast green tree-pocked quad bounded by ancient red-brick buildings. Alex remembered from a long-ago campus tour that they were in the Georgian style, which, kinda obvious, right?
It was quiet here, the magnolias planted along Delmonico seemingly blocking all the noise from downtown. Alex could hear the squirrels scrabbling on the branches of the trees. Some kind of low murmuring came from the widow's walk of McHolden, over to his right. "Where is she?" said Audrey.
Alex shushed her. Time to put those golden ears to work. He was a musician, after all, finely attuned to even the slightest fluctuations in pitch and tone—
"That's her," said Sarah. Well fuck me, you didn't even let me—
And then he heard it. Not screaming, not anymore, but wailing. Keening. That thin that wild mercury sound rose to the top of Alex's brain – something he'd heard before, he couldn't remember. A ghost sound, a mountaintop sound. Post-postapocalyptic, when nature reclaims the works of man. When the world begins again, and spirits and wild things haunt the earth. When every river and hill and stone has its own god, with its own desires, and its own need for appeasement. Alex remembered reading about a place called the moors. In England maybe, who knows. This was the kind of shit you'd hear on the moors, under a cloudless sky, moonlight glinting off the heather. What the fuck is heather? Strange where your mind goes, when something unlocks the doors, when you get a glimpse of the thing behind the thing. For the past year, Alex had made it his goal to keep those doors from ever closing completely, no matter what could come through.
"I think it's coming from the Garden," said Sarah, and they ran, toward the sound of warning.