wired

‘It was as if the blood had just soaked into the wood, been absorbed. He bent closer to inspect the spot where the blood had been, but the wood was dry, bone dry.’

WIRED

By L.H.Maynard & M.P.N.Sims

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Jeff Goldman buried his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders resignedly, and followed his wife into the dingy interior of the antique shop.

A bell tinkled as they entered. Behind the counter a large woman in a floral-print dress and lilac rinse was busy with a duster and an ozone-friendly spray-gun of furniture polish.

Jeff wandered out to the back of the shop, through a doorway half-hidden by a moth-eaten silk curtain. Behind the curtain was another room with even more junk. He sighed and was about to turn back when something buried under a pile of yellowing fishing magazines caught his eye. It was a guitar case, well-worn, dusty, the black leatherette cracked and peeling back to reveal the fibre-board beneath.

He shifted the magazines, drew the case out from its hiding place and laid it on the floor. Common sense told him it would probably be an old heap, an old Japanese copy of a famous make guitar, with cheese cutter action on the strings and dodgy electrics, but his fingers still fumbled nervously with the catches. The case opened on stiff hinges and Jeff drew in his breath sharply. When he let it out again his wife’s name was carried out with it. “Marie! Out here.”

Seconds later the curtain drew back and Marie came through from the shop. “What is it?” Her eyes travelled from the guitar lying in its case, to the idiotic, infatuated grin that was spreading over her husband’s face. “No,” she said. “Don’t even consider it. You’ve got two guitars and an amplifier sitting in the loft, and you haven’t had them down, even to blow the dust off, for the last five years.”

“Yeah, I know all that, but this one’s different. Just look at it.”

Marie hung back but the childlike, almost pleading look in Jeff’s eyes finally weakened her resolve and she took a step forward and stared down into the case. “Is the body aluminium?” she said. “And all that engraving. Are they snakes?”

Jeff lowered his voice. “Snakes and vine leaves, and no it’s not aluminium…” He cast a furtive glance back at the doorway. “It’s silver.”

“Silver!” Marie’s voice climbed an octave. Jeff shushed her.

“Yes, silver, laid over a base of Honduras mahogany. The fingerboard’s ebony, strengthened with carbon fibre, the position markers are inlaid mother-of-pearl, the machine-heads are Schallers and the pick-ups are DiMarzio’s, custom wound. It’s based on a basic Gibson Les Paul shape, a single Florentine cutaway, but its sustaining power knocks the Les Paul into the proverbial cocked-hat.”

“It sounded as if you were reading that.”

Jeff grinned. “I was.” He tapped the side of his head. “Up here. It’s all up here. I know this guitar. It belonged to Eddie Bond.”

“That name rings a bell.”

“The Seventies and early Eighties, American session guitarist. Played with Springsteen, Clapton, sat in with Toto and Steely Dan once or twice. In fact he played with just about anybody who was anybody. Died, in 1984.”

“And this was his guitar,” Marie said sceptically.

“He put his own band together, 1983 I think, and came to London. The guitar was stolen at the airport. I remember the stink it caused at the time, because he just turned tail and flew back to the States, claiming he couldn’t play without that guitar. The promoters were furious. They lost a bundle on refunds. He did a sort of black magic bit in his act. When he died people started to claim it was for real, you know what the publicity is like.”

“I see you’ve found something you like.”

Jeff and Marie turned, startled, to see the lilac rinse standing in the doorway. Jeff wondered how long she'd been standing there, how much she’d heard.

“I like this,” he said. “Though I can’t see a price anywhere.”

“It’s rather expensive,” the woman said. “I couldn’t take less than a hundred pounds for it.”

Jeff’s heart skipped a beat or two, but his face remained impassive, giving nothing away. The guitar was worth ten times that, probably more. “Do you know its history?” he said.

The woman shook her lilac hair. “I’m afraid not. My husband bought that one in, and he’s been dead these last two years. I run this place as best I can, but I haven’t a tenth of the knowledge he had. Lovely man, and so clever.”

“And you wouldn’t let it go for less than a hundred.”

“Jeff,” Marie said warningly.

“I could perhaps go to ninety-five,” the woman said, seeing the set of Marie’s face and fearing the loss of a sale.

“Done,” Jeff said, and avoided Marie’s glare, until they got home.

The burning dust on the valves of the amplifier gave off a reassuringly acrid smell as Jeff switched on the amp, and waited for it to warm up. The Vox AC30 was probably one of the finest valve amplifiers ever made. Small, about the size of a large suitcase, but powerful. The Beatles used them at Shea Stadium, and you didn’t need a finer recommendation than that. And now he, Jeff Goldman, was about to play Eddie Bond’s famous silver guitar through it. The whole thing had an element of fantasy to it, like a dream come true, only he would never have dreamed of anything so wild.

He strapped up the guitar, slung it over his shoulder, and reached for the red coiled lead snaking out from the amplifier.

“Are you going to play that thing now?” Marie asked, as she came into the room.

“That was the plan.”

“Then I’m going into town to do some shopping as I don’t think my eardrums will take the strain.”

Before the front door had closed behind her he was wired up to the amplifier again. He checked the volume level on the amp, and decided that as they lived in a detached house he could afford the luxury of another notch on the scale. He could feel the adrenaline start to flow through his veins. Just standing here, holding the guitar was enough to give him a buzz. Playing it would be something else. He positioned his fingers on the fretboard, gripped the plectrum between his thumb and forefinger, took a breath, and hit an E major power chord.

The resulting sound nearly made his ears bleed. He was convinced he saw the amplifier lift an inch from the floor as the power surged through it. “Jesus Christ! ” he said to himself, needing to hear himself speak, just to prove that he could still hear. He reached across to the amp and turned the volume down to 1. He knew the pickups had been custom wound, but he wouldn’t have believed such power was possible from a guitar, any guitar.

He started again at a more tolerable volume level. Scales at first, just to limber up his fingers, but he was soon surprised to find they didn’t need any limbering. He found each note accurately and quickly, his fingers moving across the strings with a fluidity that he’d never experienced before. He couldn’t remember it ever being as good, or as easy as this. It was as if he could feel Eddie Bond in the room with him, guiding his fingers, showing him the way around the guitar, the delicacy needed to get the sweetest sounds from the instrument.

He lost himself in the music and it was two hours later before he stopped. He un-strapped the guitar and went out to the kitchen to get himself a drink of water. His shirt was soaked with sweat, clinging to his back, and his hair was damp, falling down in a crow’s-wing across his forehead. He took a glass from the drainer, but as he reached out for the tap he stopped and stared down at his fingers. The tips of his fingers on his left hand were bleeding.

He turned on the tap and held his hand under the flow to wash the blood away. There was bound to be blood all over the fretboard. He opened the cupboard under the sink and after a short search emerged with a duster. He needed to clean the neck of the guitar before the blood could do any damage. He wasn’t sure what damage blood could do to ebony but he was taking no chances.

He went back to the lounge and across to where he'd left the guitar, leaning up against the couch. He sat down on the couch, laid the guitar across his knees and inspected the fretboard minutely. At first he was puzzled, the fretboard was dry, not even any sweat stains. His stinging fingers told him they had been bleeding for some time, and yet there wasn’t a smear of blood on the jet-black wood. And then he saw it. A small bead of blood up by the fifth fret. He picked up the duster to wipe it away, but even as he did so the bead vanished. Evaporated? He shook his head. No, it was as if the blood had just soaked into the wood, been absorbed. He bent closer to inspect the spot where the blood had been, but the wood was dry, bone dry.

He wiped the neck of the guitar with the duster and laid the instrument back in its case. The last rays of a dying sun trickled in through the window and played on the silver surface of the guitar as it lay in its case. The instrument glowed like warm honey, more gold now than silver. Jeff sat for a moment, content just to sit and admire the workmanship of the engraving.

The sound of the key in the door startled him and broke his reverie, but for a moment he’d been convinced that the engraving had come to life, that the vine leaves were rippling as though caught in a breeze, while the snakes slithered around them. Marie’s voice from the hall, calling hello broke the spell entirely and he reached across, flipping the lid of the case shut.

“You look hot,” Marie said as she breezed into the room.

Jeff stared at her in disbelief. Her fair hair which had hung to her shoulders had been cropped short, like a boy’s. She stroked her near naked neck self-consciously and said, “Do you like it?”

He could feel a dark surge of anger swelling inside him. She’d had her hair shorn to spite him, he was certain. “No, I don’t like it,” he said, his voice tightly controlled. “I don’t like it at all. Why didn’t you tell me you were going to get it cut like that? I would have tried

to stop you.”

Marie looked crestfallen. “It was supposed to be a surprise. I thought you’d like it.”

Jeff sprang to his feet and gripped her shoulders, bringing his face to within inches of hers. “You thought…you thought,” he said mockingly. “That’s the trouble with you, you bitch, you never think.” He pushed her roughly to one side and stormed from the room.

Marie stood shaken in the middle of the floor. In all their years of marriage Jeff had never spoken to her like that. He’d rarely even lost his temper. She reached up and brushed a tear away from her eyes. She was about to run after him when she heard the front door slam and the sound of his car being driven away at speed. Instead she collapsed onto the couch, buried her face in her hands and cried.

Jeff began to smell. He had stopped shaving a week ago and dark stubble hung on his chin like a layer of soot. Marie suspected he had stopped washing at around the same time. Nor had he been to work, and it wouldn’t be long before the bank grew tired of his excuses about being sick and took some disciplinary action. What if they suspended him without pay? Or worse still, sacked him? She had her own job in town as secretary to a firm of solicitors, but her salary barely covered the mortgage payments. If Jeff lost his job they might keep the house, but they wouldn’t be able to eat.

The only thing Jeff did now was to stand in the lounge, strapped to that bloody electric guitar and play it all day. Jeff had changed. Since he had bought that guitar he had changed out of all recognition. But then so had his guitar playing. She had never heard him play so well. It was almost inspired. Inspired or not, the man she had married was no longer visible, and if that was the price to be paid for being a brilliant guitarist then she wasn’t prepared to pay it.

That morning she tried to reason with him again, tried to make him stop playing the guitar and go back to work. She had walked out of the house when he had raised the guitar like a pickaxe above his head. She was quite sure he would have used it against her.

Jeff switched on the amplifier and started to play. There was something niggling at the back of his mind. Something about Marie. He could vaguely remember her being in the room with him. Had they rowed? He couldn't remember. His thoughts were fuzzy. Trying to remember what had passed between them was like trying to remember a dream.

He called her name but the house was silent except for the sound of his playing. He should go and find her, if only to satisfy himself that she was all right. He stopped playing and tried to lift the guitar from his shoulder, but it wouldn’t come. The strap was caught somewhere behind him, perhaps snagging on his shirt. He yanked at it and yelped in pain. It felt like someone had torn a strip of skin from his back. He reached behind him, his fingers tracing the line of the smooth leather. And leather was all he felt, leather merging with skin. The material of his shirt gone altogether. Leather and skin, bonded, as one.

He started to shake, and he was sweating. He couldn’t remove the strap. It was now part of him. He tried uncoupling it at the guitar, but the strap buttons had transformed themselves into razor sharp discs and all he succeeded in doing was slicing his fingers to ribbons. The blood from the cuts dripped onto the guitar, and even as the drops landed they were absorbed into the silver. And the engravings were truly alive now. He could hear the vine leaves rustling, hear the hiss of the snakes as they twisted and writhed. He gripped the body of the guitar trying to wrench it free, but his fingers were like putty, and the silver body of the instrument yielded to his touch, soft and malleable.

One by one the strings began to snap, the bottom E string lashing upwards and twisting round his throat. Other strings coiled themselves about his wrists, their needle sharp ends burrowing beneath his skin, searching out the veins. With a sound like the wind whistling through the eaves of a house, the strings lashed about him, bonding him to the guitar. The ebony neck and silver body of the instrument were getting softer, moulding themselves against his form as his skin and flesh melted like hot cheese to accommodate them.

He started to scream, but his voice had a metallic ring. The scream became a perfect C minor chord.

Marie slid her key into the front door lock. There was the sound of music coming from inside the house. Guitar music, a sweet beguiling sound. She closed the door quietly behind her and stood in the hallway listening. She couldn’t remember ever having heard anything so beautiful. Although she was eager to confront Jeff, to get this rift healed, for the moment all she wanted to do was to stand here and listen.

The piece moved on, heavier chords being brought to bear on the melody. A repetitive bass riff thrumming through the house, at once making her head throb, her stomach feel hollow. The sound deepened further, the earlier sweetness gone, to be replaced by a deep, hypnotic pulse. She felt herself being drawn towards the door of the lounge from where the music issued. And suddenly she was frightened. She didn’t want to go into that room.

The pace of the music was increasing, high treble notes keening out, piercing her eardrums, driving into her brain like hot needles. She felt her feet move, one in front of the other, each step bringing her closer to the lounge door. Nausea swept over her in thick dark waves, and the rhythm of the music quickened. Excited now, excited and insistent. Her hand reached out to the door and it opened slowly. She screwed her eyes tightly shut. She didn’t want to see what was in that room. But sharp staccato notes battered against her closed lids, forcing her to open them.

She opened her eyes and saw the thing in the middle of the room. An abomination of ebony and skin, of silver and bone. From its centre, snaking out like a red umbilical cord was the lead to the amplifier, and the amplifier itself was juddering, bucking as wave after wave of obscene sound coursed through it.

The thing that was once her husband turned and looked at her with glowing silver eyes. A clawed metal hand poised above strings made from what looked like strips of human intestine.

“A song for you, Marie,” the thing sung out in a harsh discordant voice. “Just for you.” Then the hand swept down for one last power chord and Marie’s world exploded in a chorus of scarlet and black.

*****