The guy put out a pale hand. "Call me Douglas. I"ve been looking for you for a long time, Johnny. You"re going to do great things."
John reluctantly shook the man"s hand, then pulled away, fighting the urge to wipe his hand on his pants. The wind picked up, and without the cigarette masking the smell of decay, John"s stomach rolled over. "Yeah, I"m off to a h.e.l.l of a start."
"Everybody was n.o.body once."
"Most of them stay that way."
"Come with me, and I promise you won"t." The man"s words hung heavy in the air, the whisper seeming to echo and sc.r.a.pe in John"s ears. This seemed like such a crock of s.h.i.t, and yet- The door to the student union swung open behind him, letting the yammering of the small crowd out into the night. It seemed to violate the silence somehow, and John clenched his fists.
"Hey, there you are." It was Quentin. "We"re going to a party, come on." Quentin"s eyes glanced over at Douglas, then quickly back to John. "Come on," he repeated.
Douglas spoke before John could answer, his nasty whisper carrying on the night air. "You having a good time, Quentin? Meet some nice girls in there?"
"Come on, John."
A lurking green anger flared to life in John"s heart. "Answer the man"s question," he said. "You meet some nice girls in there?"
Quentin reached one hand back and rested it on the door handle. "Yeah, I guess so. You coming or what?"
"Nope. You have a good time." He turned to Douglas. This is crazy! part of him thought. You don"t know this guy from Adam! But it was burned raw by the sudden release of anger. "All right. Let"s go."
Douglas nodded and started walking. After a moment"s hesitation, John followed.
Quentin rushed forward and grabbed his arm. "Are you nuts? Who the h.e.l.l is this guy? What do you want with him?"
John shook Quentin"s hand away. "Just business. Go have a good time. I"ll call you later."
Ahead of him, Douglas was still walking, boots tapping a regular rhythm on the sidewalk. John rushed to catch up.
He could feel Quentin watching them until they turned the corner.
"Get in," Douglas said.
John stared, openly gawking at the sleek black car parked at the curb. He didn"t know from cars, but this one was forty years old if it was a day, and yet it was so pristine it glistened in the moonlight. It had a hungry look to it, poised to leap though it wasn"t even running yet. "This is your ride?"
"Yeah. Nineteen-seventy Charger. They don"t make "em like this anymore. Get in."
The car started with a throaty growl, and John barely got in before Douglas peeled away from the curb. The lights of Wichita Falls, Texas, faded in the rearview mirror, and in a surprisingly short period of time, they were in the middle of nowhere. No streetlights, no house lights, no lights of any kind other than the stars and a fat, pale moon. This country seemed somehow slippery in time. Away from the road and the power lines, it could have been yesterday, or a hundred years ago. Maybe two hundred. Perhaps the illusion would disappear in the daylight-there"d be a tractor in the fields, airplanes overhead, something-but right now he couldn"t shake the feeling that he had invaded an earlier era. The few houses they pa.s.sed with their electric porch lights seemed to shrink against the surrounding darkness.
John"s cell phone rang, and he jumped. He took it from his pocket, looked at the small screen. Danny. John turned the phone off.
"Where are we going?" he asked at last.
Douglas"s face was ghostly in the light from the dash. "You"ve heard of Robert Johnson?"
"Yeah. Blues guy."
"The blues guy. He inspired Muddy Waters and Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix-all those guys. You know the story they tell about him?"
"Sure. Everybody knows that one. He went down to the crossroads and sold his soul to the devil." John tried to laugh, but it died in his throat.
Douglas nodded. "He was n.o.body once, just like everybody else. Just a kid living on a plantation who wanted to play the blues more than anything else. He worked like h.e.l.l, but it came slow." His mouth twitched in a smile that was gone a second later. "You know how it is.
"He heard stories, though. If you wanted something bad enough, you went down to a certain crossroads at night, and you waited. There was a price to pay, of course, but there"s always a price to pay."
"n.o.body gets out alive," John muttered.
"Yeah." Douglas pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, separated one from the pack, and stuck it in his mouth. He offered the pack to John, but John waved him off. Douglas pushed the round k.n.o.b of the car"s cigarette lighter into the dash. Wow, John thought. You don"t see those anymore.
Douglas continued, his hoa.r.s.e voice sharp over the rumble of the engine. "So, one night, Robert put his guitar in the case and went for a long walk. Down to the crossroads. He waited around, and before too long he heard the sound of footsteps on the packed dirt behind him.
"He turned around, and there was a man there-a big man, in a black suit. The man didn"t say anything. He simply held out his hand. Robert put the case on the ground and took out his guitar. He looked from the guitar to the big man"s hand and back, and then he handed the guitar over.
"The man in the black suit tuned the guitar. He played just six notes, one for each string, and twisted the tuning pegs until each string seemed to sing all by itself. Then he handed the guitar back and walked off down the road."
The lighter popped out of the dash, and Douglas lit his cigarette. The tip glowed redly in the darkness.
"When Robert woke up the next morning, he was the best blues player the world had ever known."
"Cute," John said. "He didn"t exactly live happily ever after, though."
"Nope. He died when he was twenty-seven."
"Like Kurt Cobain," John said.
"And Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin."
"And Jim Morrison."
The man grinned. John shuddered and stared out the window. A possum glared up at him from the side of the road, its eyes reflecting an eerie, baleful yellow-green, its thick, grotesque rat tail curling around behind it. What the h.e.l.l am I doing here? he asked himself without much conviction. This guy"s nuts.
The possum slipped off into the ditch. The car streaked by, and Johnny tried not to look into the darkness after the creature. He was suddenly convinced there would be other things out there looking back.
"So we"re going to Mississippi," John said. The sarcasm tasted like dust in his mouth.
"No. There are other places where the world is thin. I think I know all of them by now." Douglas stared forward still, his eyes shrouded and blank. "But we are going to the crossroads. How"s that grab you, Johnny?"
John turned back to the window. Douglas was nuts, he knew. But suppose John took him seriously. Suppose they were headed to the crossroads. How did that grab him?
The coffin was inevitable. Even at twenty-two, John knew that. You lived your allotted span and then they dumped you into a hole. And after that? He found it difficult to credit an eternity full of harps and angels and hosannahs. Nothing in the world he"d seen suggested that such was likely, while the alternative seemed evident in every headline, every atrocity, and every petty act of duplicity around him every day. John had never believed much in G.o.d, and he didn"t see any reason to start now. The devil, though? That guy had his hand in everything. Might as well take it when it was offered and get the most you could out of your threescore and ten.
Or even one score and seven?
Yeah. Even that.
"Just drive," John said.
It was nearing midnight when Douglas slowed the car and turned onto a poorly marked side road. A sick tension hummed to life in John"s head, not exactly audible but just at the edge of sensation, like the shrieking noise he sometimes heard when somebody left an old television on.
Ahead, in the headlights, he could see a line perpendicular to the road, halfway up a low rise. A road.
Douglas slowed the car down as they approached. The road crossing theirs was another badly kept asphalt road. Aside from the drainage ditches to either side and the slight rise ahead, the ground was featureless. High gra.s.s, wet with dew, rippled in a slight breeze.
The tension in John"s head ratcheted up a notch. This place felt really bad in a way he couldn"t adequately describe, but it also felt . . . not quite right. Like two notes that were supposed to be in harmony, except one of them was out of tune.
Douglas turned the key in the ignition, and the car growled once before going to sleep. "Here we are."
"I . . . think this is the wrong place," John said slowly. "It doesn"t feel right."
"Smart kid. But this is as far as I go." A spasm of something-pain? sorrow? regret?-crossed Douglas"s face, and then it was gone. "What"s up ahead is . . ." He exhaled heavily. "It"s not for me. Not anymore."
John waited for an explanation, but Douglas stared ahead, silent and waiting.
There seemed to be no more delays to be had or excuses to make. It was time to go on ahead, or tell Douglas that, sorry, this had all been a waste of time, and can we please go back now?
John grabbed the door handle and pulled. The door swung open smoothly, and he got out. Stones ground into the pavement under his shoes. He took half a step, then turned around. "Hey, kill the lights, would you?"
The headlights went dark.
There was no noise here. Nothing. No crickets, night birds, or even wind. He couldn"t bring himself to slam the car door in that oppressive silence, so he pushed the door until the dome light went off and left it like that, unlatched. Now that he was out of the car, he could see that the high gra.s.s here looked strange, wrong. It was too dark, almost black, and oddly twisted, with ragged edges along the blades. It seemed to conceal something horrible, and he moved to the center of the road.
He took another step, and that faint, awful dissonance ratcheted up in intensity, humming in his head, in his belly, in his chest. Two notes, sickeningly out of tune, pulsing and thrumming. It set up a resonance, an ache in his bones, and he thought if he stayed here for any length of time, it would slowly tear him apart. His heart would rupture; blood would blossom in his brain, seeping into his tissues even as his life drained away.
Don"t do this! the rational part of him begged. Or was it the frightened part? He couldn"t tell (maybe because there"s no difference right now), but it didn"t matter. The decision was made.
He started walking rapidly, almost running. He had to go, had to get where he was going before he lost his nerve. He had no doubts anymore, or at least none he dared contemplate, but he thought that if he slowed down for one second, if he flinched from the task he"d set himself, fear would set in, wrap its crooked, clutching fingers around his brain stem and squeeze. He"d slow down, stop, and turn around without ever consciously giving his body instructions or permission-fear would do that for him.
That kind of fear had been his secret reason, the reason he"d never told anybody, for dropping out of school. That, and Danny. He remembered Danny and all his rock star dreams from high school, the fire he"d had then. Danny had practiced like h.e.l.l, night and day, until their father had finally told him he"d have to soundproof the garage or knock it off entirely. Danny had taken a break for three weeks while he figured out how to do the soundproofing, and then he"d done it-roping his little brother in for a.s.sistance, naturally, helping him hold up big sheets of heavy five-eighths-inch drywall and trying to nail it in place while keeping it from slipping. Once that job had been complete, Danny had gone right back to practicing like h.e.l.l.
Then Danny had gone to college. There were bands, but there were also girls and schoolwork and a part-time job, and each time John talked to him, it seemed a little of the fire had gone out. Danny still played-still loved to play, maybe more than anything-but all those other considerations, all those other demands on his time added up. When he graduated, he found a job and moved to Dallas with Gina, and the drums had still been in storage when John visited four months later. He"d gotten them out eventually-"I still gotta play!" he"d told John one day-but he moved from one lackl.u.s.ter band to another without seeming to care whether they had any prospects or not. He needed to play, he said, and play he did, but there wasn"t anything special to it.
When John had begun the slow crawl out of his introverted coc.o.o.n in college and started singing, Danny"s lesson for him couldn"t have been clearer. It would have been so easy to finish the degree, get a nice, safe, cushy day job that took care of bills (and luxuries, like hot water), and play music on the side, just like his big brother. But then, too, John had known that if he compromised even slightly, he would have flowed like water down the path of least resistance. With the rent paid and food on the table, would he have ever pushed himself to get onstage, to face down his stage fright night after night, or would he have simply gotten used to it? It"s okay, he would have told himself. I"ll work on it later. No rush. He had known the outcome of that, thanks to Danny, and so, before the fear could paralyze him and guide him back to the path of least resistance, he had swept away all other options.
His parents had screamed blue murder, of course, and even Danny had called to ask him what he was thinking. He"d tried to respond with calm a.s.surance-"This is my calling. This is what I"m supposed to do"-and while he believed that was true, it wasn"t the whole reason. Truth was, he didn"t want to let the fear get its hooks in, let that time slip away as if it were of no real importance-that"s what made the decision for him. And no matter how much his parents yelled and protested, once the decision was made, he took the next step and the next without daring to stop and reconsider or even talk about it.
His actions now were just a logical consequence of that first decision. Well, he thought, sort of a logical consequence. If he really stopped to think about it, his destination didn"t seem all that logical at all. In fact, it seemed more likely that he was rushing toward a dream, a nightmare that had taken root more deeply than it should have instead of being flushed out by his subconscious in the usual house-cleaning process dreams were supposedly part of. It seemed very likely.
It didn"t matter. The decision was made. Perhaps this was a waste of time-but perhaps it was not.
This isn"t worth it! That thought nearly got him to stop, it seemed so out of place. What had all his sacrifices been for, if this wasn"t worth it? What did his life mean? He thought of the shouting crowds of his dream. It would be madness to give that up, to walk away, to go back to a dysfunctional band where he would always be in danger of being abandoned, of being left to carve out his future by himself, talentless and afraid, of singing to empty rooms and trying like h.e.l.l, breaking himself against nature and the inevitable, trying and failing and failing and failing to reach somebody, anybody.
His foot hit the ground, and the other one after it. As he walked, the dissonance coalesced into a terrible, gut-sc.r.a.ping sort of harmony. There was a slight rise ahead, and he pounded up it without slowing or looking back.
The strange tension got worse as he crested the rise, more dissonant and wrong, and yet . . . it pulled, too.
He reached the top of the rise, and he saw it.
"There," he said, and his breath went out of him in a rush.
The crossroads were ahead, marked by an old, dead tree, gnarled and crooked. It hung over the smudge of road, black on grey, a lone sentinel watching over this haunted place, shielding itself from harsh moonlight with outflung limbs. The tree looked ancient, and the bark had fallen away, leaving only smooth wood that gleamed like bone in the moonlight. Hadn"t they executed criminals at crossroads? Or had they buried them there? He couldn"t recall, but the stout branches of the tree stretching over the road looked plenty strong enough to support a hangman"s noose. How long had that tree grown there? He didn"t want to think about it.
The awful tension fell off as John got closer, but it resolved itself into an even greater sense of wrongness. It was, he thought, as though the notes were now tuned correctly, but they made the ugliest chord imaginable.
He walked on, and the strange chord screamed and wept, weird harmonies humming somewhere not above or below his normal hearing but just outside it somehow. He"d never experienced anything like it, and as he stood in the moonlight at the center of the crossroads, he understood that there was power here-strange and unearthly power, something that transcended normal human experience. Something that demanded not just respect but awe.
The wind gusted, and the branches in the old tree clattered together like a handful of teeth. John turned. He didn"t like having his back to that tree. Anywhere else he looked, he could see as far as the moon would let him, but anything could be hiding behind that tree. He stared at it. It was only fifteen feet from the edge of the road opposite where he stood, but the thick crosshatched shadows thrown by the moon through the branches shrouded much of the tree in darkness. Was that a humped figure pressed up against the trunk, dark in the deep shadows, or was it simply a burl or a sawn-off branch that had long since healed over? It couldn"t be a person. Surely he"d have seen them when he walked over. Surely, he thought, surely, but his heart pounded harder all the same.
"h.e.l.lo?" he asked. His voice sounded small and flat out here, out in this open s.p.a.ce with nothing to reflect it back at him. He took a hesitant step toward the tree, never taking his eyes from the hump. Another step, and the wind picked up again. "Is someone there?" He chided himself for asking such a stupid question-if someone was there, they"d already shown that they weren"t going to answer. He suddenly found the presence of mind to wonder that if someone was there, and they weren"t the type to answer, then what possible good could they be up to? Why the h.e.l.l was he approaching? If someone was lurking there, he ought to be running back to the car as fast as his skinny legs could carry him.
Nonetheless, he took a few steps closer. Now he stood at the edge of the road near the tree. That was as far as he would go. He felt a strong reluctance not to step off the road. He was tempted to laugh at himself-this wasn"t a fairy story, for G.o.d"s sake!-but he couldn"t find it funny at all.
"h.e.l.lo?" he said again, stupidly. He didn"t speak loudly, though, and he couldn"t hear his voice over the pounding in his ears, the hammering of his heart.
The wind gusted again, harder. It pushed some of the branches aside, and for one split second, the moon shone on the sawn-off branch that came off the tree"s main trunk, the branch that John had gotten all worked up over.
He let out all the air in his lungs in one rush and almost started laughing. Then he heard a sound, faint over his own pounding heart, and he froze.
A footstep.
That"s your imagination, John. You worked it a little too hard in the last few minutes, and now it"s f.u.c.king with you.
Another footstep from behind him, sand crunching on the asphalt. Closer this time.
Don"t turn around, part of him begged. Please don"t turn around.
John turned around. There was somebody standing there, not ten feet away. John tried to scream, but terror had frozen his throat. He stared, eyes bulging and mouth open.
"Nice night," the man said. His voice was deep and warm, good-humored and somehow calming. John"s scream dissipated, turned into regular, if somewhat rapid, breathing. The man waited patiently. He stood with an easy slouch, his black shirt open to the third or fourth b.u.t.ton. In his left hand, he carried a battered guitar case, and silver rings glittered on his fingers. Dark hair spilled from beneath a cowboy hat and curled across his cheek. The brim of the hat cast his eyes into deep shadow.
"Uh. Yeah. Beautiful." John"s voice was hoa.r.s.e, his mouth dry. He seemed to have recently swallowed a pound of ash. He coughed.
"You okay?" the man asked, grinning.
John nodded.
"Didn"t mean to startle you," the man continued. "You looked like someone I used to know." Had John thought his voice pleasant? Maybe it was, on the surface, but something oily churned and slithered underneath it.
"I, ah, I get that a lot."
The man just grinned again. He was closer now, close enough for John to see the neatly trimmed, pencil-thin line of beard edging his jaw, flowing into a tidy, short goatee. The man put down his guitar case. John"s eyes darted to it, then flicked away.
"You play?" the man asked.