Pocket Dungeon 2, page 15
The far back wall of the store was covered from floor to ceiling in guitars and basses, and there were a few amps on the ground nearby that were ready to be plugged in at any moment.
On another wall were rows and rows of keyboards, pianos, and cases filled with the sorts of instruments I would expect to see in an orchestra. I could pick out the sight of a few flutes and some clarinets, as well as a fucking gigantic saxophone amongst them. There was even a set of drums with a few more drum heads mounted on the wall like hunting kills above them.
The center of the store was filled with shelf after shelf of records and CDs that seemed to follow an alphabetical organizational system, but the displays were so jam-packed that I wasn’t sure how helpful that even was. The entire place seemed to be seconds away from exploding with song.
Across from the wall with all of the various instruments was a checkout counter. A register sat on a glass display case that was filled with even more musical merchandise, like guitar picks and strings, reeds for wind instruments, and other bits and bobs that made instruments playable. On the ground next to the counter was a stack of boxed record players also available for purchase.
A beaded curtain hung at the back of the store next to the wall of guitars and basses, and there was a paper sign hung above it that read “EMPLOYEES ONLY” in a hasty purple scrawl.
“This is your store?” I asked the man in surprise. I hadn’t taken him for a business owner, much less a reputable one, but he nodded nonetheless.
“It is,” he confirmed. “I’m Monty. I guess I didn’t say that earlier.”
He double-checked the lock on the door before nodding once to himself, and then he turned and started to make his way through the store with a purpose. It was clear to me that he spent much of his time here, because he didn’t seem to have any issues navigating the organized chaos of his merchandise.
“Come on,” he called over his shoulder. “We can talk in the back.”
I looked at Yasha and shrugged my shoulders. “Let’s go.”
The two of us followed in Monty’s footsteps and through the beaded curtain. The back room he had led us into was clearly some sort of glorified storage space more than it was a break area.
There was a rickety fold-out table and a set of mismatched chairs surrounding it, as well as a fridge barely larger than one that would have fit in a college dorm, and a microwave sitting on top of it. Two doors filled the only clear space on one of the walls, and the rest of the space in the back room was filled with boxes upon boxes of stuff.
The first of the doors had a sign that advertised it as the bathroom plastered across the front, and the other didn’t have anything on it at all. There was a doorknob that looked like the sort I’d have seen in a private residence, and not a commercial building, and there was a deadbolt fastened just above it.
“Do you live here?” I asked in surprise.
Monty turned and looked back at me from where he had stopped next to the rickety little table. He followed my gaze over to the door before he nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “Hard to beat the commute to work. It leads to a little apartment upstairs. It isn’t much, but it’s mine.”
As he spoke, Monty started moving boxes around with a clear purpose until he stopped and pulled something out from behind one of the many towering stacks. It looked like a mini first aid kit in a bright red, plastic case. He set it on the table and shrugged off his jacket.
For a moment, I wasn’t sure what I should do, but finally, I motioned that Yasha should go ahead and take a seat. I was more comfortable standing, because I wanted to be ready if something were to happen.
“Do you want me to wait to ask my questions or…” I trailed off as I watched Monty rifle through the box and pull out a small, mostly used roll of gauze, a set of alcohol swabs, and a pack of dental floss?
“No, no,” Monty said and shook his head. “I’m fine. Ask away. Now that I’m pretty sure you aren’t trying to kill me, I’m downright chatty.”
He had to bite back a laugh, and I found myself enjoying the change in his tone. I could handle sarcasm over piss-inducing fear.
“What were you doing inside Harper’s building?” I asked. “And why are you so afraid of him?”
Monty lifted up his shirt with one hand and then held it in place with his teeth. He then ripped open the pack of alcohol swabs without much patience.
The sight of the gash across his abdomen was enough to make me gasp. I wasn’t one to flinch away from gore in horror movies, and I’d even had my fair share of nasty injuries growing up, but there was something particularly gruesome about the wound.
It started on Monty’s side and cut in a straight line from his ribs to just above his belly button. It looked as if it had been made with some sort of serrated knife. The skin had been all but flayed from the area, and the entire wound seeped an unhealthy-looking yellowish ooze. It was crusted around the edges, like it had started healing only to be reopened. The entire cut was about two inches in height at its widest, and it tapered out to uneven points.
Yasha looked like she might actually gag at the sight.
“Shit, dude,” I gasped. “Are you sure you don’t want any help with that?”
“I’m fine,” Monty mumbled. His voice was muffled around his shirt in his mouth. He gripped the table with one hand until his knuckles were white from the strain, and with the other, he started to dab at the wound with the alcohol swab.
His face contorted in pain as he swabbed at the pus-oozing injury, and his hand tightened even more around the edge of the table. He might not have been able to say much with his shirt in his mouth, but he didn’t need to for me to know he was in a world of pain.
He tossed the first alcohol swab onto the table and grabbed the second to repeat the process on the rest of the wound. The discarded pad was covered in crusted blood and whatever substance was seeping from his cut. Both of the substances were intermixed with dark red blood.
“Jesus,” I mumbled as he tossed the second pad onto the table as well and dropped the shirt back down to cover the injury.
His face had broken out into a light sweat that made him glisten under the artificial light of the back room.
“Harper’s building,” he repeated to me, like he needed to refresh himself on the question I had just asked.
“Yes, but–” I paused to get my bearings. “You can finish dealing with that first obviously…”
“No, no, I need a second to breathe,” he said. “It’s sort of a long story anyway. Do you want a beer? I think I need a beer.”
He turned and opened the mini fridge to pull out three cans of Hamm’s which was practically worse than not having a beer at all, but I felt like I was going to need a drink to have this conversation. He tossed me one can, set another on the table in front of Yasha, and finally popped open the tab on the third as he lowered himself into the empty chair with a groan.
The can itself was surprisingly warm for having just come from the fridge, but I didn’t complain as I opened my own and took a sip.
Yeah. Just as gross as it had been in college.
Monty pushed a hand up through his mop of brown hair and sighed. “When I found out that Harper’s record label, WC Records, was coming to Chicago, I was thrilled. I mean, it’s a big fucking name in the industry, and this is the first time he’s ventured to the Midwest. He’s got operations in New York and Los Angeles, obviously, but the labels in Chicago can’t really boast as strong of a foothold in the industry.”
“So, you’re in the music industry,” I said. “Not just a store owner.”
“Not quite,” Monty said. “That’s the whole reason I went to the label in the first place. I wanted to get into the industry. Sure, I love my store, but it isn’t what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, you know? I wanted to make music, not just sell it to other people.”
Yasha opened her own can of beer and took a sip before I could warn her that she probably wouldn’t like it very much. After her first sip, her nose wrinkled in disgust, and she made a slight gagging noise.
“That is very bad!” she exclaimed. “I do not like that. How do you drink it?”
“It’s better than nothing,” Monty said with a shrug and pulled her unwanted can toward himself.
“Sorry, Yash,” I said.
“Even the fermented gretzuk on Arcadio is not nearly as terrible,” she muttered and shook her head in disdain.
I had no fucking clue what a gretzuk was, and I made a note to ask later when we had time.
“So you wanted to make music,” I got us back on track. “And you got in contact with the record label.”
“Yeah,” Monty said between sips. “About two weeks ago. It was right when the move was announced to the public, but I was able to find that they had actually been stationed in Chicago for about a month before they went public. I didn’t really think much about the secrecy behind the move, because it didn’t really seem like my business, you know? I don’t know why multibillion dollar corporations do shit.”
“What happened after you reached out to them?” I asked. I had managed to drink about half of my beer without even realizing it as we spoke. I wasn’t feeling any effects from the alcohol, though, and that was probably because it was closer to really bad water than anything else.
“They got back to me right away. I mean, I was shocked,” Monty said. “I think my demo is pretty great, but I didn’t really think I would get a response, much less right away. But it happened. A day after I sent it into the new Chicago branch, I had a message on my phone telling me to come in for an appointment to meet William Harper himself.”
That got my attention. “Harper himself was here?”
I must have sounded surprised, because Monty nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah! It was fucking weird to me, too. I mean, I guess I didn’t really think he would be, even though it’s his company, because billionaires usually like, delegate and stuff, but I had a meeting with him.”
“And what happened in this meeting?” Yasha asked. She was glaring at the can of Hamm’s resting on the table in disdain, like it had done something to personally affront her, other than just tasting like shit.
“I went in with another one of my demos ready, and like, it sounds so stupid now, but I sort of thought I was about to get my life on track,” Monty explained. “Like this was the beginning of a whole new chapter for me. But that’s not what happened. I get to this meeting and the first thing I notice when I go into the building is that it’s not like any record label I ever imagined.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Like, I don’t know what you think a record label looks like, but I was thinking it would be really high-tech and super cool, like the sort of stuff you see on television and Instagram. The sort of place where people would want to be seen and record their music because it’s cool as hell,” Monty said. “But it wasn’t like that at all. It looks like some sort of warehouse inside. Like, it looks like a normal high rise from the outside, but the ceilings are crazy high, and it’s all industrial inside.”
I frowned. “That doesn’t sound normal.”
“That’s what I thought,” Monty agreed. “The building just seemed… sort of unfinished, I guess? But I figured that was normal if they hadn’t even announced that they were newly opened yet. Of course stuff wasn’t done. The floors were concrete, and I could see the beams in the ceiling, but not in a cool way. It was also cold as fuck inside, and the only other people I saw were a bunch of guys dressed in all black standing on either side of the exits.”
My mind flashed back to the men I’d seen earlier in the day with the automatic rifles.
“Did they have weapons?” I asked and leaned up against one of the towering stacks of boxes. “And if so, what kind?”
Monty blinked. “How did you know that? But yeah, they were all fully armed, and I’m talking some serious military firepower and shit. They weren’t even hiding it, either, it was like they wanted me to know they were packing.”
“What happened after you walked inside?” I asked. “Keep going.”
The record store owner exhaled a slow breath and nodded. “Right, well, like I said, I was supposed to have a meeting with Harper, so I started wandering around trying to find somebody who could help me, because I wasn’t about to start talking to the dudes carrying around the AKs.”
“Reasonable,” I agreed.
“Finally, I found an actual room in the place, and when I went inside, it was some sort of office or something,” Monty said. “It looked like the only actual finished place in the entire building. There was an old guy sitting behind the desk, and I knew from seeing him in the news and stuff that this was Harper.”
“What next?” I said and fought the urge to take a step closer to Monty now that the story was getting to the hypothetical good part.
“He had me sit down, and he started asking me some questions, like who was I, what was I doing there, all that stuff, and he seemed friendly but, like, weird friendly,” he said.
“Weird friendly? What does that mean?” Yasha asked. “I do not understand.”
“Like he was being nice, but it didn’t feel genuine,” Monty explained. “And I told him he had asked to meet me about my demo, and then his entire vibe changed. He was super excited and told me he had a really great opportunity for me, and that he was so excited I’d sent it in and reached out.”
The alarm bells started going off in my own mind at his words, and before I asked the question, I already had a feeling I knew what was going to happen next.
“What was the opportunity?” I asked with a sense of dread opening in my stomach.
Monty sighed and lowered his newly emptied can of beer from his lips. He dropped it onto the ground and crushed it underfoot until it resembled a metallic puck before he finally looked at me.
“He said,” Monty began, “if I did something for him, he would make me a star.”
Chapter 11
As soon as the words were out of Monty’s mouth, I was immediately reminded of Iris and what she had gone through at the hands of William ‘Billy’ Harper, but that wasn’t information I was about to reveal to this man. I wasn’t entirely certain I could trust him yet, and also, it was one thing to trust another person, and it was something else entirely to dump on him the fact that I was currently housing someone who had disappeared off the face of the Earth fifty years prior but hadn’t aged a single day.
That seemed more like the kind of information to share after our third weird interaction.
“Shit,” I said instead.
Monty pressed his lips into a thin line and grabbed for the second can of Hamm’s. My own was almost empty by now, too, but I wasn’t glutton enough for punishment to ask for another.
“Shit indeed,” he said and followed up with a swig of beer. “You clearly can guess what he wanted from me in exchange for giving me all the fame and fortune I could ever want.”
“He wanted you to go into a crystal, right?” I asked. “He wanted you to do a dungeon for him and then give him the profits.”
“Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner.” Monty’s face was twisted in pain once again, and it was clear his injury was bothering him far more than he was willing to let on. “At the time, though, I didn’t know any better. I mean, I had no reason not to trust him. Sure, I thought the entire thing felt a little weird, and I wish I could go back in time and tell myself to get the fuck out of there, but I didn’t. Instead, I essentially told him I’d do whatever he wanted me to do so long as he held up his end of the bargain.”
“So, what happened next?” I asked.
The man across from me let out a long, tired sigh. “Well, he said I should come back the next day, and that he would have one of his men take me to his personal recording studio in the city.”
I frowned. “What do you mean, personal recording studio? I thought you had gone to the record label?”
“I did,” Monty said. “And I was just as confused as you are. But apparently, he has a residence just outside of the city itself, and he has a personal studio there. The record label just off the Mag Mile is the public operation, and that’s where business is conducted, but I was led to believe that he was so excited about my music that he was willing to let me use his personal studio.”
“Did he tell you anything about what you had to do for him yet?” I asked.
“Nope,” Monty said, popping the ‘p’ in the word. “I should have asked, I know that, but I was so wonderstruck that I didn’t think to do anything but thank him.”
My own disbelief must have shown on my face, because Monty sighed loudly and nodded, like he welcomed my shock.
“I know, I know,” he said. “I ignored every single fucking red flag. But I mean, what would you do if someone waved all your hopes and dreams in front of you and said ‘just do what I ask’?”
I paused. “I mean, I’ve been to grad school, so I guess I can’t pass too much judgment here.”
Monty snorted. “Right, well, I did what he wanted and showed up the next day, and sure enough, one of his guys with the guns was waiting for me outside with some big black car. He told me to get in and that he would take me to Mr. Harper’s private studio, so I did.”
“Did he actually take you to a studio?” I asked curiously.
“Yeah fucking right,” he said. “I got in the car, and as soon as I did, another guy I hadn’t even noticed was in the car practically jumped me and slapped a blindfold on me. I thought I was going to fucking die. I don’t even know how long we were driving before we stopped and they started to drag me out of the car.”
“Jesus,” I exhaled.
“They take me inside some building, and already, it doesn’t feel like a private studio,” he said. “I was still blindfolded, but I could tell I was in some sort of big space. It was drafty and there was an echo, and I obviously know now that it was a big fucking warehouse.”
