Midnight Grinding (21 page)

“It wasn’t an easy row to hoe, I’ll tell you that.” Reb lost his smile for the first time since he’d picked her up. “Started out as a guy who was long on good looks, but mighty short on talent.”

“I can’t believe that,” she said in disbelief.

“Well, it’s the God’s honest truth, sugar-pie. I saw all those fellas out there making records and money by the fistfuls, and I figured to get in on the action. And I thought I had a good chance, too, but there were others who thought otherwise. I went up there to Sun Records once, and you know what old Sam Phillips told me? He said, ‘You got the look, boy, and you got the moves, but ain’t got a lick of natural-born talent. You can’t pick a guitar, can’t tickle the ivories, and can’t sing a note without sounding like a year-old calf with its privates hung up in a barbwire fence.’ I must admit, it was pretty darned discouraging, that trip to Memphis.”

“But he was wrong, wasn’t he?”

“No, Ruby, dear, that man was right on the mark. I had no talent at all, except for looking pretty and grinning like a happy jackass. I figured I’d have to just face the fact that I wasn’t gonna make it in the music business. Then, when I was drowning my sorrows in a honky-tonk on Union Street, I made the acquaintance of my present manager, Colonel Darker.”

“You mean Colonel
Parker
, don’t you? Elvis’s manager?”

“No, Darker is the complete opposite. He’s an oily little rat of a fella, but he has a good head for business. He sat down at the bar and asked me what was wrong. I told him, and he made me the strangest offer I ever heard. Said he’d make me a bona fide rock and roll star if I’d sign my soul over to him. I thought it was pretty darned funny at the time. I mean, I’d heard of such corny lines before, but only on spooky radio shows and in those EC comics before they were banned. Well, since I was half drunk and didn’t figure I’d need that no-account soul of mine anyway, I agreed. I signed the contract on the spot, and then he took me out to the parking lot. He gave me the keys to this apple-red Cadillac, as well as the costume you see me wearing and the guitar I’m holding here. He also told me what I’d have to do to get the talent to be a star. At first, I didn’t want to have no part of it, but soon my hunger for money and fame got the best of me.”

Ruby felt her skin crawl with a sudden shiver. “What…what did you have to do?” Something deep down inside her wanted to know, while another part didn’t.

Rockabilly Reb smiled, and this time it possessed a disturbing quality; a quality that had been there all along, only hidden. “Tell me something, Ruby,” he said in a voice that was barely a whisper. “Do you believe what all those hellfire preachers say about rock and roll? Do you believe that it’s unwholesome and unclean? That it’s the Devil’s music?”

“No, of course not,” stammered Ruby. “That’s just silly talk by a bunch of holy rollers. Rock and roll is just plain fun, that’s all.”

“I’m afraid you’re wrong about that, dumpling. Rock and roll
can
be safe and fun, but it can also be dark and dangerous. The grown-ups, they can sense something is basically dangerous about the music, but they can’t quite put their finger on it. Most of the time the music is sung by decent, God-fearing boys like Elvis and Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins, to name a few. I don’t know about Jerry Lee. That old boy has a mean streak a country mile long.”

Ruby said nothing. She just pressed her back against the passenger door and listened to him ramble on. Inconspicuously, her chubby hand fumbled for the door handle, but, strangely enough, she couldn’t find it. The inner panel of the door was smooth…and warm to the touch.

“I’m one of the first of the truly dangerous ones,” he told her. His pale blue eyes blazed with the madness of desperation. “My talent wasn’t a gift from God, but from Satan himself. Colonel Darker likes rock and roll because it reminds him of hell. All those girls screaming and hollering, well, that’s just how the Bible describes purgatory
—
weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

“The Colonel, he’s given me fortune and fame…as well as power. And when someone gets in the way of my success, I get riled up. I went up north recently and auditioned for a winter tour that’s coming up with Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. But they turned me down. Said I was too much of a vulgar hillbilly to appeal to midwestern teenagers. Well, they’ll learn their mistake soon enough. Me and the Colonel are gonna cook up a little surprise. Those boys are gonna climb to the top, only to fall…and fall mighty damned hard, too.”

Ruby believed every word he said. She watched in growing horror as Reb’s eyes lost their natural blueness and took on a muted crimson hue, like a smoldering coal wavering between living fire and dying ash. Behind her back, her hand continued to search for the door handle, but still she was unsuccessful in finding it.

“You know where I get my talent?” asked the rocker. “The human soul. But not from my own… no, the Colonel has my own damned soul under lock and key. That was stipulated in the contract. Instead, I must have the soul of an innocent, the truly beautiful essence of an unsoiled virgin to give me the power I need to rock and roll.”

It was at that moment that Ruby noticed that the head of the electric guitar was not like that of other instruments. It was wickedly pointed at the end and honed to razor sharpness. Reb gripped the neck of the guitar and began to lower it, directing it toward the center of her broad chest. She screamed and tried to push up on the movable roof of the Caddy. Her hands recoiled in repulsion. The underside of the roof was sticky with warm, wet slime.

“Let me sing you a song,” Rockabilly Reb rasped.

Then the blade of the guitar was inside her, slicing through her blouse and the elastic of her bra, then past soft flesh and the hardness of her breastbone. As her heart exploded, Ruby heard the song Rockabilly Reb had sung to her only moments before. But this time it came with a savage ferocity that originated from a realm commanded by the notorious Colonel Darker.

“RUBY, RUBY, BE MY FOREVER BABY…RUBY, RUBY, BE MY FOREVER LADY…RUBY, BABY, TELL ME YOU’LL BE MINE!”

“No!” she screamed. She watched in mounting panic as her life’s blood flooded the floorboards of the car in great, sluggish pools. It was instantly absorbed by Reb’s red suede shoes, which pulsed with a life of their own, bulging with dark veins as they drank in the crimson fluid. Reb’s costume took on a new brilliance, sparkling with an unholy inner fire. His face lost its pallor. His skin grew tanned and robust. The head of lifeless hair grew fuller and lighter in hue, until it blazed like white-hot steel.

“TELL ME!” shrieked the singer. “TELL ME, RUBY! TELL ME YOU’LL BE MINE!”

Ruby could feel the guitar strings strumming within her body, sending sonic notes of utter agony throughout her tubby frame. She opened her mouth to scream in protest, but she no longer possessed a tongue to vent her awful terror. The vibrations from the hellish instrument racked her spine and blossomed with deadly force into the chamber of her skull. There was a moment of incredible pressure and then her ears and mouth gave explosive birth to her brain. She felt her eyes shoot from their sockets with such force that the lenses of her glasses shattered.

Rockabilly Reb’s demonic song grew in intensity and her empty skull became the guitar’s makeshift amplifier. Waves of trebled sound flowed from the orifices of her head, turning the inside of the Cadillac into a concert hall for the damned. Then, as the ballad came to an end, she felt her soul being siphoned from her body, channeled through the strings, into the wooden body of the Les Paul.

As unconsciousness took her into its dark and comforting folds, Ruby knew that there was no longer any use in struggling. She mouthed a single word in answer to Reb’s evil chorus…a silent
yes
. And, although she could neither see nor hear, she knew that the rocker’s voice was rising in a howl of triumph and his grin stretched wide with a renewed power born of a spirit that was not his own.

***

Colonel Darker was right. It
was
like hell.

The screams, the writhing bodies, the pressing heat of the spotlights and the crowd—it filled the high school auditorium like a crazed purgatory confined within four walls. And she and Rockabilly Reb were at center stage, engulfed in the dancing flames of youthful passion.

She sensed the Colonel standing in the wings, watching the show. She loathed the man as much as she loathed her treacherous lover. She could sense his eyes upon the crowd, enjoying the thrashing of young bodies and the shrill shrieks of females torn between teenage infatuation and womanly lust. She had been among them once, but that seemed like an eternity ago. She had not been beautiful like most of these squealing girls. She had been burdened with an ugly and cumbersome body, but at least it had been one of flesh and bone, and not one constructed of gleaming steel and polished wood, like the one she now possessed.

Rockabilly Reb finished the song and stood before the microphone, letting the screams of wild adoration engulf him. He glanced at his manager and gave the man a wink. Colonel Darker nodded and, with a wolfish grin, merged with the backstage shadows.

“Thank you very much,” said Reb, sending the crowd into a renewed frenzy with a flash of his smile. “Here’s one of my biggest hits and one of your favorites.”

He began to sing,

***

“Ruby, Ruby, be my forever baby…

Ruby, Ruby, be my forever lady…

Ruby, baby, tell me you’ll be mine.”

It was her song and she had grown to despise it. During the past few weeks it had thrummed through her new body, bringing pangs of disgust and despair rather than the rapture of undying passion. The promise of eternal love was a lie. Others had shared the song before her and there would be others afterward. It was only hers until the essence of her captured soul faded like a faltering flame.

As Rockabilly Reb’s nimble fingers caressed her taut strings, bringing forth the hot licks of demon rock and roll, she could restrain herself no longer. She screamed out in tortured anguish, hoping that at least one of the teenyboppers in the crowd would hear the cry and recognize it as a warning.

But her torment fell on deaf ears. It emerged as the piercing squeal of feedback, then was swallowed up by the blare of the music.

And the damned rocked on.

TYROPHEX-

FOURTEEN

The current state of the earth’s ecology is questionable at best. We’ve all heard the warning cries on the evening news concerning the depletion of the ozone, global warming, and the wholesale polluting of air, earth, and water.

For the most part, the hills and hollows of my native Tennessee have been minimally impacted by man’s inhumanity toward his earthly home. The streams are still fresh and flowing, the earth still prime for crops, and the forests are teeming with wildlife. But it wouldn’t take much at all to change that. It would only take a fool (or a corporation of fools) to dump some type of chemical agent into the nearby fishing hole and start a downhill spiral that would be impossible to contain.

You might consider this a cautionary tale of sorts: a story of evil men and an equally evil substance.

Jasper Horne knew something was wrong when he heard the cows screaming.

He was halfway through his breakfast of bacon, eggs and scorched toast when he heard their agonized bellows coming from the north pasture. At first he couldn’t figure out what had happened. He had done his milking around five o’clock that morning and herded them into the open field at six. It was now only half past seven and his twelve Jersey heifers sounded as if they were simultaneously being skinned alive.

Jasper left his meal and, grabbing a twelve-gauge shotgun from behind the kitchen door, left the house. He checked the double-aught loads, then ran across the barnyard and climbed over the barbwire fence. It was a chilly October morning and a light fog clung low to the ground. Through the mist he could see the two-toned forms of the Jerseys next to the Clearwater stream that ran east-to-west on the Horne property. As he made his way across the brown grass and approached the creekbed, Jasper could see that only a few cows were still standing. Most were on their sides, howling like hoarse banshees, while others staggered about drunkenly.

Good God Almighty!
thought Jasper.
What’s happening here?

A moment later, he reached the pasture stream. He watched in terror as his livestock stumbled around in a blind panic. Their eyes were wild with pain and their throats emitted thunderous cries, the likes of which Jasper Horne had never heard during sixty years of Tennessee farming.

The tableau that he witnessed that morning was hideous. One cow after another dropped to the ground and was caught in the grip of a terrible seizure. Their tortured screams ended abruptly with an ugly sizzling noise and they lay upon the withered autumn grass, twitching and shuddering in a palsy of intense agony. Then the sizzling became widespread and the inner structures of the Jerseys seemed to collapse, as if their internal organs and skeletal systems were dissolving. A strange, yellowish vapor drifted from the bodily orifices of the milk cows, quickly mingling with the crisp morning air. Then the black and white skins of the heifers slowly folded inward with a hissing sigh, leaving flattened bags of cowhide lying limply along the shallow banks of the rural stream.

Numbly, Jasper approached the creek. He walked up to one of the dead cows and almost prodded it with the toe of his workboot, but thought better of it. He couldn’t understand what had happened to his prime milking herd. They had been at the peak of health an hour and a half ago, but now they were all gone, having suffered some horrible mass death. Jasper thought of the stream and crouched next to the trickling current. He nearly had his fingertips in the water when he noticed the nasty yellow tint of it. And it had a peculiar smell to it, too, like a combination of urine and formaldehyde.

The farmer withdrew his hand quickly, afraid to explore the stream any further. He stood up and puzzled over the dozen cow-shaped silhouettes that lay around the pasture spring. Then he headed back to the house to make a couple of phone calls.

***

“I don’t know what to tell you, Jasper,” said Bud Fulton. “I can’t make heads or tails of what happened here.” The Bedloe County veterinarian knelt beside one of the dead animals and poked it with a branch from a nearby sourgum tree. The deflated hide unleashed a noxious fart, then settled even further until the loose skin
—
now entirely black and gummy in texture
—
was scarcely an inch in thickness.

“Whatever did it wasn’t natural, that’s for sure,” said Jasper glumly.

The local sheriff, Sam Biggs, lifted his hat and scratched his balding head. “That goes without saying,” he said, frowning at the closest victim, which resembled a cow-shaped pool of wet road tar more than anything else. “Do you think it could have been some kind of odd disease or something like that, Doc?”

“I don’t believe so,” said Bud. “The state agricultural bureau would have contacted me about something as deadly as this. No, I agree with Jasper. I think it must have been something in the stream. The cows must have ingested some sort of chemical that literally dissolved them from the inside out.”

“Looks like it rotted away everything: muscle, tissue and bone,” said Jasper. “What could do something like that?”

“Some type of corrosive acid, maybe,” replied the vet. He squatted next to the stream and studied the yellowish color of the water for a moment. Then he stuck the tip of the sourgum branch into the creek. A wisp of bright yellow smoke drifted off the surface of the water and, when Bud withdrew the stick, the first four inches of it were gone.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” said Sheriff Biggs. “That water just gobbled it right up, didn’t it?” He took a wary step back from the stream.

Bud nodded absently and tossed the entire stick into the creek. They watched as it dissolved completely and the ashy dregs washed further downstream. “I’m going to take a sample of this with me,” said the vet.

The doctor opened his medical bag and took out a small glass jar that he used for collecting urine and sperm samples from the area livestock. He lowered the mouth of the container to the surface of the stream, but dropped it the moment the glass began to smolder and liquefy. “What the hell have we got here?” he wondered aloud as the vial melted and mingled with the jaundiced currents, becoming as free and flowing as the water itself.

The three exchanged uneasy glances. Jasper Horne reached into the side pocket of his overalls and withdrew a small, engraved tin that he kept his smokeless tobacco in. He opened it, shook the snuff out of it, and handed it to the veterinarian. “Here, try this.”

Bud Fulton stuck the edge of the circular container into the creek and, finding that the chemical had no effect on the metal, dipped a quantity of the tainted water out and closed the lid. He then took a roll of medical tape, wrapped it securely around the sides of the tobacco tin, and carefully placed it in his bag. “I’ll need another water sample,” he told Jasper. “From your well.”

Jasper’s eyes widened behind his spectacles. “Lordy Mercy! You mean to say that confounded stuff might’ve gotten into my water supply?” He paled at the thought of taking an innocent drink from the kitchen tap and ending up like one of his unfortunate heifers.

“Could be, if this chemical has seeped into an underground stream,” said Bud. “I’m going to make a special trip to Nashville today and see what the boys at the state lab can come up with. If I were you, Jasper, I wouldn’t use a drop of water from that well until I get the test results.”

“I’ll run into town later on and buy me some bottled water,” agreed Jasper. “But where could this stuff have come from?” The elderly farmer racked his brain for a moment, then looked toward the east with sudden suspicion in his eyes. “Sheriff, you don’t think
—
?”

Sam Biggs had already come to the same conclusion. “The county landfill. This stream runs right by it.”

“Dammit!” cussed Jasper. “I knew that it would come to something like this when they voted to put that confounded dump near my place! Always feared that this creek would get polluted and poison my animals, and now it’s done gone and happened!”

“Now, just calm down, Jasper,” said the sheriff. “If you want, we can drive over to the landfill and talk to the fellow in charge. Maybe we can find out something. But you’ve got to promise to behave yourself and not go flying off the handle.”

“I won’t give you cause to worry,” said Jasper, although anger still flared in his rheumy eyes. “Are you coming with us, Doc?”

“No, I think I’ll go on and take these water samples to Nashville,” said Bud. “I’m kind of anxious to find out what those state chemists have to say. I’m afraid there might be more at stake here than a few cows. The contamination could be more widespread than we know.”

***

“What are you saying, Mr. Horne?” asked Alan Becket, the caretaker of the Bedloe County landfill. “That I deliberately let somebody dump chemical waste in this place?”

Jasper Horne jutted his jaw defiantly. “Well,
did
you? I’ve heard that some folks look the other way for a few bucks. Maybe you’ve got some customers from Nashville who grease your palm for dumping God-knows-what in one of those big ditches over yonder.”

Sheriff Biggs laid a hand on the farmer’s shoulder. “Now, you can’t go making accusations before all the facts are known, Jasper. Alan has lived here in Bedloe County all his life. We’ve known him since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. That’s why we gave him the job in the first place: because he can be trusted to do the right thing.”

“But what about that stuff in my stream?” asked the old man. “If it didn’t come from here, then where the hell did it come from?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Sam Biggs. He turned to the caretaker. “Can you think of anything out of the ordinary that might’ve been dumped here, Alan? Maybe some drums with strange markings, or no markings at all?”

“No, sir,” declared Becket. “I’m careful about what I let folks dump in here. I check everything when it comes through the gate. And if someone had come around wanting to get rid of some chemicals on the sly, I’d have called you on the spot, Sheriff.”

Biggs nodded. “I figured as much, Alan, and I’m sorry I doubted you.” The lawman stared off across the dusty hundred-acre landfill. A couple of bulldozers could be seen in the distance, shoveling mounds of garbage into deep furrows. “You don’t mind if we take a look around, do you? Just to satisfy our curiosity?”

“Go ahead if you want,” said the caretaker. “I doubt if you’ll find anything, though.”

Sheriff Biggs and Jasper Horne took a leisurely stroll around the dusty expanse of the county landfill. They returned to the caretaker’s shack a half hour later, having found nothing of interest. “I told you I run things legitimately around here, Sheriff,” Alan said as he came out of the office.

“Still could be something out there,” grumbled Jasper, not so convinced. “A man can’t look underground, you know.”

“We can’t go blaming Alan for what happened to your cows,” Biggs told the farmer. “That creek runs under the state highway at one point. Somebody from out of town might have dumped that chemical off the bridge. We can ride out and take a quick look.”

“You can if you want,” said Jasper. “I’ve pert near wasted half a day already. I’ve got some chores to do around the farm and then I’ve gotta run into town for some supplies.” He cast a parting glance at the barren acreage of the landfill. Although he didn’t mention it openly, Jasper could swear that the lay of the land was different somehow, that it had changed since the last time he had brought his garbage in. The land looked
wrong
somehow. It seemed
lower
, as if the earth has sunk in places.

Alan Becket accepted the sheriff’s thanks for his cooperation, then watched as the two men climbed back into the Bedloe County patrol car and headed along the two-lane stretch of Highway 70.

After the car had vanished from sight, a worried look crossed the caretaker’s face and he stared at the raw earth of the landfill. But where there was only confusion and suspicion in the farmer’s aged eyes, an expression of dawning realization shone in the younger man’s face. He watched the bulldozers work for a moment, then went inside his office. Alan sat behind his desk and, taking his wallet out of his hip pocket, fished a business card out of it.

The information on the card was simple and cryptic. There were only two lines of print. The first read TYROPHEX-14, while the second gave a single toll-free phone number.

Alan Becket stared at the card for a moment, then picked up the phone on his desk and dialed the number, not knowing exactly what he was going to say when he reached his contact on the other end of the line.

***

It was about six o’clock that evening when Jasper Horne left the county seat of Coleman and returned to his farm. After catching up on his chores that afternoon, Jasper had driven his rattletrap Ford pickup to town to pick up a few groceries and several gallon jugs of distilled water. He felt nervous and cagey during the drive home. He had stopped by the veterinary clinic, but Bud’s wife—who was also his assistant—told him that the animal doctor hadn’t returned from Nashville yet and hadn’t called in any important news. He had checked with Sheriff Biggs too, but the constable assured him that he hadn’t learned anything either. He had also told Jasper that he and his deputies had been unable to find any trace of illegal dumping near the highway bridge.