Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (13 page)

Willie was pacing back and forth in front of
the sofa in a tight little line, so fast he made Ellie dizzy. She
wanted to grab him by the belt and make him sit down and be
still.

Instead she bopped him with a stuffed bear
and grinned up at him, thinking he'd take it as a joke and get the
hint. He didn't say anything and didn't smile, just headed for the
door.

"Where are you going, Willie?" Julianne
asked. "We have to decide about some important issues—"

"You just go ahead and decide then, darlin'.
I'll be fascinated to know what it is you come up with. I need me a
little space right now."

"Willie, come on back here. We've got things
to discuss—oh, of all the adolescent, unproductive—" Anna Mae
growled, but she was talking to his back.

* * *

"What a sad way to end," Shayla sighed.
"After all that running around, collecting songs, and so on, to
just fall apart like that. But that's been my experience with
movements too—internal dissension, politics . . ."

"Well," Barbara said, "they were dealing
with a very minor issue after all. I'm assuming, Ute, that the
devils in your story, and the ghosts for that matter, are
metaphorical devices. I mean, it truly doesn't matter if anyone
remembers little jingles or not, does it? Except to advertising
people. I'm sure at one time in the distant past such
entertainments were very important, but that sort of music is a
relatively simplistic comfort in an astonishingly complex world.
When you say that all music was gone, you don’t for instance, mean
to imply that all of this has anything to do with the reason one
never hears classical music anymore, or why it is impossible any
longer to attend symphony performances or the opera?"

He cleared his throat. "Actually, ma'am,
some of the great classical pieces derived their basic
inspirational melodies from little folksongs, and most of the
operas and ballets are celebrations of common myth and folktales so
I'm afraid that yes, in the United States, just in the seven years
that Willie and his pals have been away, all music except that
specifically permitted to filter through, has become kaput. The
symphony halls and opera houses have closed down—even music schools
went out of business. Country music, which had its origins with the
people as much as with Nashville, and rock and roll, and jazz,
which originated in black slave music—so did swing and big band
music to some extent—everything except the stuff put out by Duck
Soul and other devil-sanctioned acts disseminating the kind of
messages the devils had in mind has simply ceased to function as
part of our culture. Even rap has gone out of business, because it
was folk music too, although it came from its very own roots. The
roots behind it though were jump-rope chants and hunting chants in
Africa, for Caucasians, Gregorian chants and further back, the
magic chants of European tribes—the magic chants of the Indians.
When the folksongs were killed, the root songs, the rest of it all
dried up like a South Texas river during a dry spell. With every
song that died, you see, it's been easier for the devils to erase
ten more. Just as when Willie and his friends recovered one song,
they retrieved it with seven more as interest. As soon as they, and
the songs they learned and Lazarus came back in the country, the
songs that have been lost became available to memory again, but
meanwhile institutions had been destroyed.

"Really," Barbara said. "Someone should have
organized those people. And you aren't seriously trying to tell us
that all of this happened supernaturally?"

"Not all of it, no ma'am.
A lot of it was jus
t
purely
the cussed-ness of human nature."

CHAPTER 9

"Oh, now I've gone and depressed poor
Willie. Or was my singing really that bad?" Molly asked when Willie
had left. She was partly teasing to relieve the tension but partly
serious. She was uncharacteristically shy and a little sensitive
about her singing, especially in front of all these professional
musicians. Even when all she was singing was a long-forgotten
childhood singsong.

Julianne shook her head. "Of course not.
Something happened in a bar on the way here that upset Willie, and
he's been acting like an asshole ever since."

"Well, I know my voice isn't the greatest,
but—"

Dan unfolded his long body and stretched. "I
bet he just needed to walk. I'm pretty tired of being folded up
myself. I think I'll go walk too."

"Me too," Terry said.

"You kids be careful now," Barry told them.
"This end of town can get pretty rough. It seems to have gotten
rougher since they recruited the Neighborhood Militia to patrol for
drug traffic. It's like martial law around here sometimes. Reminds
me of the sixties with the National Guard called in to control the
looting during the race riots, except that everybody was pretty
much minding their own business."

"We'll watch ourselves," Dan promised
breezily as they left.

Julianne returned to the topic at hand,
saying earnestly, "No, really, Molly. Look, the whole point of our
trip was to bring back old songs so everybody could remember
them—not just so we would be, like, musical anthropologists or
something. Where we've been, people have been singing and playing
everywhere just because they can, just because they know songs,
just for the fun of it. You're embarrassed now because people don't
do that very much here. It's like everybody's a specialist. We were
the song specialists, and if anybody else tried to sing or make
music who wasn't a bona fide musician, it was somehow or other
wrong. Like you were invading our territory. I've certainly talked
to musicians who got all pissy because somebody was singing along
and spoiling their act—not necessarily because it sounded bad. They
could just be mouthing the words."

Barry nodded. "Well, everybody likes to have
something that makes them special, and a lot of people tend to see
anyone else who does the same thing as competition to be
squashed—not just people in show business either. And if the person
horning isn't as good, it can kinda devalue the whole effort for
insecure performers who've put a lot of sweat into developing the
one thing about themselves they consider to be worthwhile." Barry
and Molly were social workers and sometimes it showed.

"On the other hand," Juli said, "the person
who's devoted so much energy can't know everything about it, and
the person who's just chiming in might know something useful. Like
just now, with you, Molly."

"You know what I think?" Anna Mae
asked in a tone that said she was fixing to tell them. "I think
this hang-up about being embarrassed to sing unless you've got a
license or something is just another way for
them
to get at us. You notice they didn't have
that kind of attitude in Scotland and Ireland. The best singers
lead, but everyone is
expected
to contribute—though I'll admit it was kind of hard to sit
through a bad voice singing fifty partially remembered verses of
some ballad."

Faron, Ellie, and the Curtises exchanged
amused looks. "Sounds like a filk-sing," Faron said.

"A what?"

"A filk-sing.
Kind
of like making up new verses to old songs,
only the new songs are all about the stuff you find in science
fiction and fantasy stories and shows. But some people used to
write their own whole new songs, and some of them were
great."

"That's how I met Faron," Ellie said with a
sigh and a smile at her husband. "At a filk-sing. He was the
cleverest one there."

"Hmph," Brose said. "Never heard of it.
Where'd all this happen?"

"At science fiction-fantasy conventions,"
Barry answered. "We used to be real involved in one here in Tulsa
every year in late summer."

"Used to, Dad?" Ellie asked, sounding
stricken.

"Oh, everybody lost interest about the time
you kids left. You know, we couldn't get the books anymore except
at used bookstores when all the major publishers shifted to
strictly nonfiction. And filking got ridiculous—everybody started
thinking they were some kind of star and bein' snotty to everybody
else, and there were big feuds going on. It just wasn't any fun
anymore. We still have our meeting once a year to sort of reminisce
and see if anybody's interested in starting it up again, but so far
it seems like too much trouble."

"Umm," Molly said. "Lots of things that used
to be fun seem to be too much trouble anymore. Nobody's interested.
Seems like no matter what kind of stuff is on TV, people'd rather
watch that than do anything they could do themselves. Listen to me.
Do I sound like I'm getting old or what?"

"I feel like I'm gettin' older by the
minute," Brose said, heaving himself out of a man-eating armchair
with a great sigh. "I think I need me a little exercise. Gonna go
jog. Find me some of that rough company y'all was talkin' 'bout."
He didn't want to hear about anybody else's problems. He had plenty
of his own just then.

"Maybe we're all just tired and overwhelmed
by what's ahead of us. I know Willie's pretty discouraged right now
too," Juli said. "He was doing so much better, and then, I don't
know—I think if I had any money, I'd be tempted to go back to
Britain."

"Hmph," Gussie said. "I don't think they'd
let you in again, money or not. Now I think we ought to do
somethin' about collectin' some more instruments. Even though you
can all sing perfectly well a cappella, you look a little naked
with nothin' in your hands. I reckon if those damned devils are
tryin' to license all instruments, we'd better get ours before they
succeed. If nobody's played music in a long time, the pawnshops
should be real glad to see us."

"Can you bring back six more banjos just
like Lazarus?" Faron asked.

"That would solve a few things, wouldn't it?
You'd better come with me. No matter how liberal anyone chooses to
be about who sings and who doesn't, I'm still, if not tone deaf,
tone impaired when it comes to choosing instruments."

"We'll tune them to Lazarus," Faron said,
picking up the banjo, which was jingling a refrain to "There's a
Meetin' Here Tonight." "The most magical thing about this banjo
really is that it's always in tune."

* * *

The devils were all gathered around their
big table at the board meeting. The Chairdevil looked sharp in his
black suit with the narrow red pinstripes, his black silk shirt and
red tie, his black hair slicked back like a gangster's. Actually,
of course, it was gangsters who had originally slicked back their
hair in imitation of the Chairdevil, but most people didn't know
that.

The Debauchery Devil wore big black
sunglasses and drummed her long red fingernails on the table.

The Chairdevil grinned. "Fellow devils, I
want to thank you all for your enthusiasm and cooperation. We are
well on our way to establishing our own rule here, and our various
strategies are proceeding brilliantly. Our control of the
television stations, computer networks, and radio stations is well
established. They broadcast news of our triumphs constantly.

"Sports are pretty much tied up with
litigation and corruption, so people can't enjoy their favorite
stars anymore.

"By cleverly playing on people's fears
of the hereafter, we have managed in a very short time to elevate
health to god-hood on its own. Ill health is, if not actually more
sinful than screwing your neighbor's wife, at least socially less
acceptable. I think we've pretty much managed to convince people
that if they follow the correct regimen, they will not become
diseased or die, and that if they do, they have somehow fallen from
grace.
Then
, once we have
them convinced that they have to follow the straight and narrow, we
change what that is.

"They are only supposed to read about real
things and real people, and we keep only enough fiction in these
accounts to keep them always feeling like they're fairly scruffy by
comparison and somehow or other not doing something right. Can't
have the unwashed masses getting all cocky and uppity on us now,
can we?

"Schools have cut out their music programs,
thanks to our campaign to eliminate first the old music and then
other kinds from the consciousness of the livestock out there. Our
censorship programs have been very successful in cutting out any
but the dullest and wimpiest kind of pap that bears no resemblance
to what the kids learn from each other in school, never mind in the
real world.

"And of course, the Debauchery Department,
led by our own DD"—he waved acknowledgment to the redhead, who
bobbed her foot in acknowledgment so that her high-heeled shoe fell
away from her sole and snapped back again—"has chemically created a
generation liberally sprinkled with children who can't think, can't
concentrate, and are easily irritated. They should be malleable
tools when it comes to our other plans.

"We have put our drug programs on the back
burner and elevated health at the expense of our other addiction
programs to bring as many people as possible back to the reality we
have lying in wait for them—and if you think it's good now, wait a
few years.

"By the time these irritable children
and their little friends grow up to a world full of disillusioned
elderly people living in the literal, brutal reality we intend to
keep rubbing their noses in every single day, they won't know who
they are, where they came from, and what it all means,
or
have a clue why they ought to
continue. There will be nothing for them to do but to give us our
ultimate dream and blow the whole damned thing up! And we don't
even have to create a button-pushing minion. They'll do it
themselves, just for something to do."