Devil Take Me Down, page 22
part #2 of Clementine Toledano Mystery Series
They walked to the end of the path.
“Gluttony,” he said, opening the large wood door with a bang.
A long banquet table was set on the left. Mounds of food were piled before a dozen well-dressed actors. Faces of starving people were projected on every wall in an unending rotation. The actors wept as they ate like automatons, staring wide-eyed at the faces around them, blood pouring from their eyes.
Q rubbed her forehead trying to keep the growing panic attack at bay, grateful as they approached the end of the gently climbing path.
“Greed,” Derek announced, sliding open a golden doorway.
They climbed upwards as they entered a dark vault. A stack of money and gold sat on a pedestal to her right, illuminated by a single spotlight. Actors in business suits knelt before it, reaching their hands up to the unattainable treasure. Q felt hands grab at her ankles and she let out a yelp of surprise. She looked down to find actors dressed as homeless people, grabbing at them from beneath the walkway, begging for help.
Q steadied her breathing, feeling her heart rate escalate.
It’s not real. Breathe. It’s not real. Breathe.
As Derek moved them down the sharply descending walkway, Q said, with as much annoyance in her voice as possible, “Look, can we speed this up, please?”
“It’s not supposed to make you comfortable, Q,” he said. Before he opened the black metal door in front of them, he whispered, “Rage.”
He pushed opened the door and loud frenetic electronic drums and distorted guitars assaulted her ears. Strobe lights flashed on images of riots and angry faces. Over the music, which Q vaguely recognized as a decade old Dark Harm song, was a cacophony of angry voices from various news outlets strung together.
Q covered her ears, and focused on the white door ahead. As they walked through the door, the music vanished and he said, “Heresy.”
They stood at the back of a small chapel with a simple stone floor. A golden altar stood beneath a crucifix at her left. A woman knelt in prayer before it. Q noticed a priest in the corner. He strode to the woman and stood behind her, praying over her, before pushing her violently down onto the floor, shoving her onto all fours. The woman started to cry, begging him to stop.
Fury and fear filled Q’s ears.
It’s not real. Breathe. It’s not real. Breathe…Fuck it.
She broke away from Derek’s arm and screamed, “Get the fuck off of her.”
The actor playing the priest stopped and gave Derek a confused look. The woman kept weeping, refusing to break character. Derek grabbed Q’s wrist as she started to leave the path and walk towards them.
“It’s art, Q,” he said.
“No, Derek, it’s rape. And I’m not going to be a part of anything that makes money from rape. Mock rape, arty rape, or otherwise. Change it,” she demanded.
“You’re in no position to dictate what I do with my art installation,” he replied.
“The hell I’m not. I’ll walk,” she said and folded her arms to stand her ground.
“I’ll sue you into oblivion,” he replied calmly. “Contracts, my angel. Contracts.”
“Go right ahead. My fiancé’s been accused of multiple homicides. My private life has been splashed across the five o’clock news. I'm rocking a tequila hangover. And I’m pretty sure I’m coming down with a cold. So, oblivion sounds glorious,” she pushed back.
He looked at her for several minutes waiting for her to crack. She didn't.
“God damn, I like you,” he said, flashing a manic smile.
He snapped his fingers at the actors. “Alright, change of plans. Let’s make it consensual. Silence, prayers, then fuck on the altar or something. Figure it out as long as it’s not too rapey.” He pointed his finger at the woman, “You, make sure everybody knows you’re enjoying yourself. No ambiguity."
He turned to Q. “Happy?”
“Thank you, Derek,” she said, meaning it.
“I live to serve you, my angel,” he replied in a low voice.
A chill crept down her spine.
“Moving on, into Violence.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” she muttered.
They walked through another red door into a black room. Bird calls and forest sounds emanated from all directions. A lush forest scene faded into view, projected on the walls around them. As they moved forward, a distant sound of thousands of marching feet became louder and louder until the forest sounds were gone. The images around them morphed into moving pictures of war footage and screaming people. On the wall at the end of the room were thousands of names and ages scrolling by at a dizzying speed, all with same word after the age, ‘fallen.’
The path ended at a wall made of a stretchy fabric. Derek pushed through a small slit, providing the illusion that the entire wall was tearing.
“Fraud,” he explained.
They were in another church. This one full. Instead of an actor on the pulpit, there stood a large screen. A man’s face appeared. Q recognized him as a television preacher from her childhood who had a massive fall from grace. After being caught with prostitutes, it had been discovered that he’d also embezzled millions from his charities and churches. He started his recorded sermon, asking for money, promising salvation. The actors in the church mindlessly stood up, walked to the altar, deposited money or jewelry or clothing below it, and sat back down, repeating the action in a seemingly endless circle.
Derek and Q walked beside the line to the end of the room. When they reached the two sets of double doors and the end, she asked, “Now what?”
“Your domain, my angel: Treachery,” he replied.
They walked into an enormous room. A ten-foot-tall stage stood in the center. Technicians were finishing up line check. Michael Lopez's voice echoed through the empty venue with instructions. Two riggers were in the trussing overhead adjusting lighting. Q looked up in awe. “Dang, Cincinnati.”
He smiled, pleased with himself. He walked her backstage and opened the door to a small room with a couch and a small refrigerator. Q sat down on the couch and accepted the bottle of water Derek handed her. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why is Treachery my domain?”
“Because, you’re the archangel that betrayed god,” he explained.
“Thought that was the devil?”
“Not in my imagination. And really, it’s all made up bullshit anyway to keep the sheep in line,” he replied smugly.
“I wouldn’t let my grandmother hear you talk like that,” she scolded.
He shrugged. “Don’t think there’s much of a chance of that. Unless you're making more permanent plans for us, angel.”
Before she could protest, JJ burst into the room, breathless under his own weight. “Day-em, white people crazy. What is this place?”
“Hell,” Q and Derek replied at the same time.
JJ perched delicately on the edge of the arm rest and mopped his forehead with the pristine white handkerchief he always kept neatly folded in his back pocket. “All I know is if my mama saw what that priest and that lady were doing up in that church, and knew I saw it? She’d have my hide.”
Derek clapped his hands together and rubbed them excitedly. “Oo, they must have figured out something good. I’ve got to go see.” He held out his hand to Q, “Would madam like to confirm it meets her standards?”
Q glared at him and turned to JJ. “Did it look consensual?”
JJ nodded. “That lady was having a damn good time from what I saw. Kept screaming ‘more’ and some ‘our father’s,’ even. It may have been that priest’s idea, but she looked into it to me.”
Derek’s eyes widened. “This is so awesome!” he yelled happily and left the room.
“That’s one weird dude.” JJ looked disgusted. “Why can’t people just be normal?”
“I’ve been wondering that for weeks, kiddo,” she replied, leaning her head back against the couch and closing her eyes.
A few minutes later Charlie arrived.
“This place is fucking awesome!” he exclaimed. “Did you see that priest and that chick in the church?”
He began relentlessly pelvic thrusting and lisping, “Our father who art in heaven, oh fuck me. Oh, our father, fuck me.”
Q closed her eyes and turned her face up to the ceiling. “Oh lord, what have I done?”
~~~
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” she exclaimed as the technician helped her into her harness.
Derek’s disembodied voice spoke into her inner ear through the monitoring system. “I’ve done it a thousand times. The hooks come down and mate with your harness, then up, up, and away.”
She argued with the voice inside her head, feeling like a crazy person, unable to see its source through the blinding lights. “Yes, yes, so you’ve said, but I am me and not you and I have never tried to sing anything while being suspended thirty feet in the air.”
She heard her own voice echoing around the room through the line array and was instantly self-conscious.
Holy Lead Singer Syndrome, Batman.
One of the background singers held up her hand and said, “Umm, Mr. Sharp? I’m not at all afraid of heights. I’ll do it.”
“See?” Derek’s voice whispered into her ear only. “Someone else will gladly take your place. Just trust me.”
Q held out her arms in the Jesus Christ crucifixion pose she was instructed to hold and heard the mechanical motor overhead whirring to life. A metallic clank hit home and she felt herself being lifted above the stage.
“We're going to have do something about those scrawny arms of yours. You need to look like you could actually wield a sword and cut a man's head off,” said Derek’s voice inside her ear.
"Keep talking, Cincinnati, and I'll cut yours off," she said, her voice reverberating through the empty room. She glanced down at Charlie and rolled her eyes. Charlie sniggered.
"That's my archangel," Derek whispered into her ear, making her skin crawl. "Now sing."
She obeyed, singing:
I peel back my skin
To slither through the world of men
They made my flesh a victory feast
I am the forgotten beast
Hearing her voice echoing through such a large space all by itself was disorienting. Hearing her voice without the Beasts behind it was downright disturbing. As if feeling her discomfort, JJ played a simple rhythmic pattern on his bass. Charlie picked up his thought and played a long, mourning high counterpart to her melody. As the percussionists began to play, Q felt dizzy and disembodied, Derek’s verses flowing from her mouth unbidden.
Q closed her eyes, enjoying the weightlessness and the melodies her throat was creating. Weariness and fatigue fell away as she opened her arms, feeling her own strength making her body disengage from gravity's pull, singing:
I wallowed in their glory
As the earth, it pulled me in
I searched for those who once adored me
I am the hidden sin
I am the vagrant soul
I am the order
I am resurrected from the coals
Abandoned by their wisdom
Suffocating in the mud
My blood begins to burst with rage
I am the awaiting rampage
I am the vagrant soul
I am the order
I am resurrected from the coals
I battled my desires
Saw my flesh consumed by flames
Turned wretched was the sacred fire
I am the public shame
Through the mob I saw you screaming
That my place is at your stake
I arise, now it’s your turn
Be ready to be burned
I am the vagrant soul
I am the order
I am resurrected from the coals
When she landed back down on the stage, her body quivered with nervous adrenalin. Derek stood up and began to clap slowly and very loudly. Q shrugged off her harness in discomfort.
“Brava, my archangel!” he called from his position at front of house. He walked into the center of the empty warehouse floor carrying a wireless microphone with him.
She pulled out her in ear monitors, grateful to feel the ambient sounds around her. Charlie walked over to her, squinting at Derek. He whispered into her ear, “Say the word, Q. This shit is fucked up.”
She pulled off her headset microphone before replying, “Fucked up enough to deal with for thirty days or fucked up enough for all of us to go bankrupt.”
Before he could reply, Derek’s voice came out of the floor from all around them, patched into every monitoring speaker on the stage. His critiques flowed in a disjointed diatribe jumping from percussion to background vocals to trumpet to lead vocals to staging to bass to lighting to guitar to front-of-house mix. When he’d exhausted his mental laundry list of changes, tweaks, and insults, he ordered, “’Archangel,’ from the top.”
After the first run-through of the complete set, they rehearsed it backwards from closing song to opening number. Q recognized the technique from years of classical piano lessons. Whenever she’d struggled with a complicated phrase or song, she’d been instructed to play the last measure over and over until it was easy to play, then add the measure before, building each phrase from back to front. Because each song in the set flowed into the next, using the same technique was a way to keep each number self-contained, while making the transitions more seamless from one song to the next. It was effective, but mentally exhausting.
After the fifth run-through of the last three songs only, they were all ready to call it a night and were relieved when Derek finally agreed that continuing was a zero-sum proposition. Q rubbed her ribs where the harness chaffed her as it levitated her above the stage. JJ and Charlie walked with her backstage. They found Ethan waiting for them in the green room. He gave Q a tight hug.
“How are you holding up, sweetheart?” he asked, uncharacteristically overt in his kindness.
She awkwardly hugged him back.
“About as well as you’d imagine,” she replied in an attempt to keep her response as vague as possible, not knowing how fast the bro-net gossip was flowing today.
“Well, that nasty woman on the news can’t be helping. I had no idea Ben was seeing someone else. I mean, he considered it a few times when you kept breaking it off, but….” he started to say.
“Jesus, prick, what the fuck is wrong with you?” Charlie interrupted, pulling Q away from him.
Damn it, Charlie.
“It’s alright, Charlie,” she said. “He’s right. I may as well accept that. How else would his, you know what, be on that woman. It’s not like he was cheating, and it’s not like I didn’t know he was seeing other women. I just wish he wouldn’t have lied about it.”
Charlie gave her an inquiring look before holding up his hands and turning to finish packing up his trumpet.
“Well,” Ethan said. “This may help, at least a bit.”
He handed Q an envelope and she opened it to find a check for ten thousand dollars. “Thanks, Ethan.”
“If there’s anything you need,” he said, leaning down to kiss her on the cheek before he left.
JJ whined, “Hey, how come you got paid already? Charlie and me don’t get paid until November first.”
“It’s not for the gig, JJ, it’s for something else,” Q hedged.
“Derek must be pretty desperate to pay you ten g’s for a little head,” Charlie said.
“Fuck you, Charlie. He needed help finishing the set, alright? He paid me to finish the music,” she explained.
“You wrote this fucked up shit?” he asked in horror.
“Just the music, not the lyrics,” she explained, defending herself.
Derek appeared in the doorway, saying, “And the music is perfection. We make an amazing team, my angel.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. Q could feel the disdain radiating off of him.
Derek held out his arm to Q. “Come. I’ve made us dinner reservations; you must be starved.”
“That’s nice of you, Derek, but I’m beat. I’m going to catch a ride home with Charlie,” she said.
“We still need to discuss the rest of the staging,” Derek said. “We can either do that here or while eating a steak. You pick.’
“Steak,” she said and started to leave the room.
Charlie pulled her to him and said into her ear in a low voice, “Q, that man wants you in his bed. You watch yourself.”
She turned and kissed Charlie on the cheek, replying, “I know, Charlie. I’m pretty sure I can handle him, but thanks for looking out for me.”
They left the warehouse and drove the short distance to the CBD Steakhouse in Derek’s black Porsche. It was after the final seating by the time they arrived, and there were few other diners still eating dinner. They sat at a white linen covered table in the back of the restaurant, side by side against a mirrored wall on an extravagantly upholstered bench.
As they waited for their meal to arrive, Derek explained his staging ideas for the rest of the set, using their table wear as visual aids. Q listened, trying to make her weary brain conceptualize how this was going to work with the music. She sipped her wine and mostly pretended she understood what he was talking about, just to speed things along.
When their dinners arrived, Q quickly cut a slice of her steak and took a hungry bite.
“I love watching a woman eat a rare piece of steak,” Derek said, watching her chew.
She swallowed her bite and took a sip of wine. “Derek, can I be candid with you?”
“Of course you can, my angel, I don’t want any secrets between us,” he replied, sipping his own wine.
“I live with a man. A man who isn’t you. A man who I am going to marry. Again, who isn’t you and to whom you can never measure up. So, whatever this is…please stop,” she said. She cut another piece of steak and put it into her mouth.
