Word Jumble Junkyard

Went down to Tin Pan Alley 

See what was goin’ on

Things was too hot down there

Couldn’t stay very long 

                            -Stevie Ray Vaughan 

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord…

                -Leonard Cohen 

Me and the Devil

Was walkin’ side by side 

                           -Robert Johnson

A Little Extra Twang

Originally Written August 2023

That Carson Beaumont was missing from his hotel room came as no surprise. When the pair had checked in the afternoon before, Darla had asked the clerk for her own key to Carson’s room, a request he had never protested. It was rare for Carson to object to anything she said, often he’d just lounge around, fingerpicking whatever guitar was handy, nodding along to any order, and his complacency had allowed for one of the more stable client/manager relationships Darla had experienced in years. It had become a tired cliche in her business just how quickly clients thought they were climbing the stairs to fame and success, and could so then balk at any precautions to keep them in check. To them she was  “Mother,” and not in any endearing way. It hardly bothered Darla, as she was always quick to throw it back in their faces, she wouldn’t need to be “Mother” if they could just act like damn adults themselves. Give some of these musicians just a sprinkle of recognition and suddenly they think they’re The Beatles on that first trip to America, and who was she to talk to them like that? 

They were in New Orleans for a week long Jazz and Blues Fest at Lafayette Park where Carson was set to take the stage later that afternoon. Carson asked very little of her, but the one thing he was insistent on was the annual trip to The Big Easy. It was where he’d got his start, posting videos on YouTube, performing his one-man band songs in shoulder to shoulder bars that glued fifty sweaty people together under the power of Delta Blues. Theses videos had been sent to Darla, and had impressed her so much that she’d gotten in contact with the twenty year old, and out of her own pocket flew him up to New York for a meeting.

Three years, one album and a Grammy snag for “Best New Artist” later, Carson Beaumont still insisted that every summer she squeeze him in the show at Lafayette to test whatever new brew he had cooking. “It’s where I got my start Darla, I owe it to those people,” he would tell her and she happily agreed, his star now shinned so bright that it required no effort on her part to push him in to wherever he wanted to play. 

The first year they had traveled down from New York together, Carson was in the middle of writing his first album, the self titled Carson Beaumont, and having already been signed to a label without even a single being released, the record company was hesitant about what he might play because they had yet to hear a single note of anything. The Suits knew from his YouTube videos that he could play and sing, and Darla maintained constant updates that he wasn’t making a waste of his studio time, but by then there was twenty-four seven heavy breathing down her neck to hear something, anything! Darla did her best to simmer them down, saying that when he played at the Jazz and Blues fest all fears would be put to bed; something new, something fresh and exciting. It was almost a lie, because even though she’d been so good at maintaining the illusion that Carson was hard at work, she’d never actually heard anything he was working on either. He’d turned out to be intensely private in his creations, giving her only a title to work off of, Everyone Sings More Sadly Here. 

The window was open and the hotel room was pungent with the aroma of steaming gumbo, tastes of the Caribbean, sugary dough pulled fresh from bubbling oil and chimneys of cigarette smoke. The queen size bed was as neatly made, untouched, and Carson’s suitcase was resting closed on the edge. Darla closed the window, shutting out the sounds of the city’s symphony of automobiles, music and endless chatter, and cranked up the A/C unit just below the sill. There was no use in being indoors and having to endure the summer’s offensive humidity. New York had made her no stranger to the brutality of heat, but she was easy to sweat and would put off ruining another shirt with pit stains for as long as she could. 

Darla sat on the edge of the bed next to the suitcase and pulled out her phone. There was nothing from Carson. She dialed his number and it went straight to voice mail. Either turned off or dead. She opened her Find My Phone app and saw the little icon. It wasn’t live but it told her where he had last been, and staring at the little icon on the map sent a a shiver down her spine. He was on the street with no name, the place that didn’t exist. 

Three years ago, before he’d first played live Everyone Sings More Sadly Here, she had tried to go looking for him there. Two years ago, she had found it. 

Darla looked at the clock by the bed, saw that there was still four hours before Carson was to take the stage. It wasn’t enough buffer time to put her at ease because depending on when he decided to come back and what state he might be in, she might have to pull up her sleeves and show him just where the nickname “Mother” came from.

She was off the bed and about to leave the room to head down to the lobby to request extra coffee and Advil when she heard the plucking of an autistic guitar down the hallway. Darla let out a sigh of relief. “That little bastard,” she said sitting back down on the bed. 

The notes of the guitar hummed louder and stopped, replaced by the beep of the door lock outside and the metal rattling of the doorknob.

Carson Beaumont kicked the door open and strode into the room, his key card clenched between his perfect white teeth, continuing to pluck the guitar strapped over his shoulder. The aviators he wore must have hid his eyes from the stink eye that Darla immediately shot at him, either that or he didn’t care, because when he saw her he just walked right by, playing along, giving her the slightest of nods, and sat in the wooden chair at the room’s desk. He swiveled himself around to face her and started strumming the 12 bar blues. 

Darla regarded the instrument, it wasn’t one she had ever seen him play before. To her it looked old, like something you would find in the corner of an antique store. The body held on to faint traces of the amber finish it had been born with, and patch pimples on a face that were worn ragged and faded. The neck was stripped of most of its paint and the frets were rusted down. The headstock had a chip on the top right that looked as sharp as a dagger. The only thing that looked new were the strings, as if Carson had picked up a new set on his way over and restrung the thing on his way up the elevator. Darla didn’t know much about guitars and wondered if it was like talking to someone who liked old cars when they would always say, “they don’t make’em like they used too,” older is better. 

Carson grave a final strum and let his hands dangle from the instrument. “Good morning.” 

“Take off your sunglasses,” Dara said.

Carson smiled and obliged, setting the aviators on the desk. Darla was relieved to see the red rims over his eyes were from exhaustion and nothing else. If she wasn’t going to have to spend the afternoon detoxing him, he might be able to catch a catnap before they needed to start making their way towards the square.

“Where were you?” she asked.

“Someplace magical.” Carson began stroking the neck of the guitar, pushing down strings at random. “I’ve figured it out though.” 

“Figured what out?” 

“What was missing from A Little Extra Twang,” he flashed Darla a smile.

Again some more good news. Carson’s stubborn refusal to play A Little Extra Twang, the title of his second, and highly anticipated, new album unless it was exactly perfect was starting to get Darla in hot water with the label. To them he was starting to gain a reputation as a primadonna, and those were a dime a dozen and easily left on the streets to rust, with not enough catalogue to back up the behavior of an artistic genius. Darla knew better though, she had seen what happened to audiences whenever he would play Everyone Sings More Sadly Here, she’d felt it’s impact herself the many times she heard it performed, but the Suits thought he’d ridden Everyone into the ground and if he didn’t preform the new single he promised at the festival, that he so adamantly demanded being a part of, it wouldn’t be long before they took creative control away from him and handed whatever he had to ghost writers, producers and session musicians to finish it up.

“I’m really happy to hear that,” Darla said, “you know what would have been better though? If you had figured it out here in the hotel or somewhere where I goddamn knew where you were.”

“I’m here now,” Carson said and began finger picking a tune. 

“That’s not the point Carson. You can’t just go gallivanting off wherever you want without telling me. I mean your a known person now, you get recognized on the street and everyone and their phones could just be waiting for to be a little too drunk and little too reckless. ” She could feel the heat rising in her face, felt embarrassed now that her skin was probably turning the rose red of blossoming frustration. “What happens if you get thrown in jail and I can’t find you, and also keep your damn phone on when we’re together.” 

Carson kept on picking, giving no sign that he’d heard what she was saying other than that little nod that she was quickly starting to detest in it’s cockiness.

“You know where I was,” he finally said. 

Carson slid his hand dawn the neck of the guitar and began fingerpicking some notes, something that Darla had never heard before. Watching him rock gently in the hotel chair while he played, she remembered his icon on the map, frozen on the street with no name.

“I ever tell you why it’s so important for me to come back here every year,” Carson said continuing to pluck the guitar.

“This is where you got your start, you said you owed it to the people,” Darla said.

Carson nodded, his fingers slid up the neck a little higher. “Yes, this is where I got my start, it’s where everything I’ve ever wanted came from. I am grateful to the people here but I don’t owe it to all of them, just one person in particular.”

“Who’s that?”

“The man I went to see last night, the man I come to see every time I’m here.” 

PlinkPlink PlinkPlink Plink Plunk Plunk Plunk sung the guitar.

“Your father,” Darla asked. Plunk Plunk PlinkPlinkPlnikPlinkPlinkPlink EEEEWAAWAA. 

“No,” Carson said, “someone who gave me something more than a father ever could. You met him once you know, last time we were here.” 

Darla leaned back a little on the bed, resting on her elbows, the slightest bob to her head as she listened to the music, the little private concert Carson Beaumont was playing to her. She felt the pleasant lightheadedness that came from taking two shots of whiskey one after the other.

And so her mind came to drift back to the memories of the first year’s trip when she was in a similar situation, where Carson was nowhere to be found. That wasn’t exactly true though, as like this morning, she had, on that night two years ago, found herself staring down at her phone and seeing Carson’s icon on the street with no name.

It was the first time he had disappeared on her and it was her first time ever in New Orleans, at a moment when Carson had yet to make any name for himself other than a video, the video that had caught Darla’s attention, of a teenager in a basement strumming his guitar with only one-hundred thousand views and change. 

“The first time we were here was right before I first played Everyone Sings More Sadly Here,” Carson said to her now, picking away as Darla nodded along on the hotel bed. “I told you that it didn’t work, that it needed something else to be just right.” 

That night of their first trip, Darla had gone out looking for him. Following the map on the Find My Phone app she wondered through the city completely clueless to where she was going. Sitting on the hotel bed now, starting to feel a little drunk, she could remember the night clearly. The sun had gone down but the texture of the air was one that if she stuck her tongue out she would taste something hot and sticky. Somewhere a man was howling like a wolf at the moon, it didn’t seem to mater how far she progressed down the bustling sidewalks, she could still hear him as if he were right next to her: moaning, groaning, blurring the lines between pain and pleasure. Even late, the streets were crowded with people, reminding her of New York and other cities that never went to sleep. Passing by a one bar she heard Flamenco as tangy and loud as the sizzling fajita smoke it was served with it. Walking along the alleyways of open clubs was like plugging in to a random play-list, as soon as she passed one bar, the songs would fade and the music from the next joint would strike up. Bourbon fueled jazz, Mowtown crooners, she passed along one place and heard a band in the middle of a screaming rendition of Muddy Water’s Streamline Woman. It was the kind of music Carson Beaumont played and she was growing more and more accustomed to hearing it that it was becoming pleasurable. These songs born on the Delta, plucked in to existence by the bleeding, withered hands of a slaves, traveling down the rivers, like a vagabonds, looking for a place to stay before leaving their marks and moving on. She’d poked her head in to the bar, saw the band on the stage sweating under a bright orange spotlight. A black man in a purple suit as dark and round as a plumb sat on a barstool before a mike, making his electric guitar grumble and scream, unleashing through the strings the hell of a fifty year grudge.

“That first year I found you before you found me,” said Carson PlinkPliiiiiiiiiinkPlinkPlink, “standing outside of The Roulette.” 

“Mhm,” Carla said.

It was true, how long he’d been standing behind her in the bar she didn’t know, but he’d tapped her on the shoulder, his regular acoustic strapped to his back and had said “let’s go, I got a show tomorrow.” Darla remembered looking at her phone and seeing his icon right next to hers.

The next day in Lafayette Park Carson unveiled Everyone Sings More Sadly Here to a crowd of over thirty-thousand people. The song was about a man finding solace in playing at a dive bar where all the miserable and depressed came to drink themselves to death, there was something in it about a shared woman too. The Lyrics were fine but it was during the seven minute solo that closed out the song when things started to happen. The crowd, who had been swaying along, stood still, silent, with their eyes focused on the stage, their beers growing warm. Phones recording videos, popped above eye line and zoomed in on the twenty year old, alone on stage playing notes that seemed to be speaking directly to them. Darla was backstage watching the whole performance in awe. Lounged back on the hotel bed now, she remembered the solo, it was as if life had stopped for seven minutes and nothing existed beyond the message of the guitar. The message was simple; Carson Beaumont was going to go far.

When the final note dissolved from the amplifiers the phones slowly went down and the crowd was as silent as if told they’d be shot if they spoke. Darla was silent too and she remembered looking out to the sea of people feeling the comfort of close family, that they had all experienced something together and were forever bound because of it. Carson walked off stage, gave her a little wink and they didn’t speak of the performance the whole trip home.

Everyone Sings More Sadly Here closed with it’s seven minute solo even on the studio recording. Upon release, Darla scrolled through social media to track the public response. There were dozens and dozens of videos, people in their rooms, at their computers reacting to the song, silent and focused, under the same trance that Darla and the Blues Fest crowd were under. When it was played on the radio or over the speakers in the grocery store, people couldn’t help but stop in the middle of the isle and listen. Cover videos started popping up online to comment sections riddled with hostility over the players ineptitude, not knowing what the fuck they were doing, you couldn’t recreate it. Carson netted a Grammy for the record and played it live for a viewing audience in the millions.

Pliiiiiiiiiiiiiink Plink Plink Pliiiiiiink “And when we came back the next year, you couldn’t help but follow me again.”

“Hmmm,” Darla said. Two invisible fingers were on her eyelids, gently pulling them down. With all the traveling, how long had it been since she’d laid down for a proper sleep?

“I had to come back to say thank you,” plink plink plunk, “I was given a gift here and I needed to show my thanks, and you know what I got for that?”

“Hmmmm?”

“Another gift.”

Last year, Carson was missing again. Darla wondering the streets, the howling man was gone but the music never left, following the map on her phone towards the icon that was guiding her towards the street with no name.

That night there had been no distractions to deter her, and Carson Beaumont hadn’t shown up behind her to pull her away and tell her they needed to get going. Darla found herself starting down an alleyway between two buildings, a bakery closed for the day with a sign saying not to worry, that fresh donuts would be in the oven by the time the beer started to wear off, and another building that seemed abandoned; looking in by daylight you’d be able to see crumples of dry wall scattered along the floor, half empty buckets of paint and a serpentine tangle of electrical cords in a corner, but by night’s light the tinted windows only reflected the neon rainbow of attractions across the street. The moisture in the air stuck to her like a dog’s tongue. Darla looked down at her phone and saw that Carson’s location had last updated two hours ago. She peered down the space between the two buildings and wished she had brought some kind of weapon; a pocket knife, a can of mace, the pen from the desk in her hotel room, anything. It wasn’t just the darkness that disturbed her, it was that whatever was down this alleyway had been important enough for Carson to venture to and in the heart of a city this modern, had found the one area where he couldn’t be accounted for. Her imagination flashed to old gangster movies, guys the shape of squares huddled around a table, their faces hidden by clouds of bitter cigar smoke, and Carson tied to chair, blood running down his face, a dirty dish towel shoved down his throat because whatever the reason he needed to be there, he’d gone and gotten himself in too deep. It wasn’t uncommon in her clientèle. Gambling debts, drug debts, promises that after the next gig a clean slate could start. That was usually when Darla dropped them. Despite talent it was hardly ever worth the risk. 

She thought then to just walk away from the whole thing, go back to her hotel room with a bottle of wine and just let Carson deal with whatever he had to do. There was even still a chance that he wasn’t down there, that space between the buildings, that lead to nowhere her GPS couldtrack. The more she tried to tell herself that, the more unlikely it seemed, and soon curiosity trumped fear and she surprised herself by leaving the crowded street and crossing the threshold into the darkness of the alley.

“I want you to do something for me,” Carson told her. Plink plink plink plink.

“Hmmm.” 

“You’re not going to like it.” Plunk…Plunk

“Hmmm?”

“I need you to cancel the show today.” 

It was hard to say just how far she had been traveling down the alley when Darla noticed the sounds of the street behind her had gone completely silent. When she did notice it, she turned around and saw nothing but the same blackness that she had walked into. Darla reached out a hand hoping to feel the rigid bricks of the buildings, but what she felt was something hot and wet like the steam that fills up the bathroom during a scalding shower. She pulled out her phone for the flashlight, to see just where the hell she was going but when she pressed the power button on the side, the screen stayed black. She held the button down a few seconds. Nothing. She was certain she’d had a full charge when she left the hotel room, how could it have died so suddenly? Then she remembered Carson’s icon, last updated two hours ago, and her heart dropped to the bottom of her stomach.

Was it too late to turn around? Hell no it wasn’t. The only way she’d gone was forward, so to turn back would be a straight shot. She doubted that though, and that same surprise bravery that lead her down here to begin with kept pushing her forward. The hot shower steam was closing around her, percolating through her hair and running down her face. She stepped on something that made a squishing sound and with each step the ground began to lose solidity. 

Fuck it. It was time to go back. If her feet wouldn’t listen she would just have to gnaw them off with her teeth and hope her hands allowed her to crawl away from whatever tunnel she’d foolishly found herself in. 

Then came the light and the echo of music. The light as distant and dim as candle at the end of a football field, the music as soft as cotton, but both there none the less.

Despite her brain screaming for her to turn back, Darla continued forward. Forward, until the light widened and the music grew and she parted through a curtain of warm mist and saw the house on the bayou.

Built of rotted wood, the whole structure slanting down and to the left, the light of a fire flickered inside. Darla took a step forward and her feet met solid ground again. She looked down and saw she was standing on a wooden dock that stretched from her feet up to the front of the house, parting the still black water on either side. 

Darla started down the dock towards the house. Her shirt, drenched, stuck to the contours of her chest. Around her, sticking up through the water, were the silhouettes of Cyprus trees whose weeping foliage dipped down to skim the surface. 

When she reached the door to the house she recognized the music playing inside. It was a Geeshie Wiley record, The Last Kind Words, a song she’d never heard before meeting Carson. Darla took it as a sign that he must be inside. 

Even as she was knocking on the door she didn’t consider the impossibility of where she was, the pungently warm mist that was more and more enclosing was seeping into her, casting a fog over rationality and control in the same way her feet had chosen to disobey her attempts to leave.

The door to the house swung open. Over the shriek of a rusty hinges a different, less aquatic warmth escaped. 

“Come on in then,” a voice said from inside.

Darla stepped into the house and was exposed to a wide open space. There was a wood stove fire in the middle of the room, a log snapped and started crumbling to ash. Next to the stove was the gramophone from which Geeshie Wiley sang out the worn down horn. In wooden rockers and stools, a group of people encircled the stove, the shadows under their chins dance across their faces from the flickering fire tails. 

Darla came deeper in to the room. Despite someone having called her in, no one in the circle seemed to acknowledge that she was there. Closest to Darla, on her right, was a young looking black woman with her neck bent over the top of her rocking chair with her face pointed towards the ceiling. She was topless and the beads of sweat running down her chest over her heaving breasts looked like pearls in the fire’s light. Her hair fell behind her chair like chains, her eyes were open but turned inside her skull so all there was to see was cue ball white. The man next to her seemed a decade older. He sat on a stool and was eating a mountain of shrimp that he chewed with a toothless mouth, dropping the empty tails to the ground in a pile that covered his feet. What was to her left was something that Darla could not confidently call a man, resembling more of a department store mannequin, a bright white, featureless body, there was a plume of feathers, like the tail of a peacock turned upside down, sprouting from it’s back presenting smears of a black and red and purple color. The thing was hunched over, it’s blank face resting on it’s intertwined fingers, drops of white falling from him and pooling at the ground like a slowly melting candle. At the far end of the room was Great Dane who, seated, was as tall as Darla stood, and as black as the shadows the fire couldn’t touch.

“He’s in there.” 

Darla recognized it as the same voice that bid her welcome but it hadn’t come from anyone in the room. She looked over to the round man on the stool shoving down shrimp, swallowing more of his spit coated fingers than crustaceans, his eyes intent on his plate. The woman next to her had not moved a muscle but her wheezing breaths were at least some sign that she was alive. Drops dripped from the melting man and plopped to the ground in time with a ticking clock.

Something touched her chin and guided Darla’s head away from the group, towards a hallway at the other end of the room. She moved through the group in the living room, mindful of her steps thinking that any abrupt creak of the floorboards would sound an alarm and they would all come to attention and attack the intruder. But they paid her no mind, even the black Great Dane kept his rheumy eyes to the fire.

Darla went down the hallway that was lit by a single candle flickering from a rusty sconce in the wall. The burnt orange light revealed smooth, solid walls. There were no bedrooms or bathrooms; just the hallway. From the living room the record fizzled out. The vinyl crackled as it continued to spin. Another log split in the fire. Then came another sound at the end of the hallway.

Plink Plink Plink Plink.

Darla turned her head back towards the living room. They were all staring at her now. The woman with the cue ball eyes sitting up right and alert. The Man eating the shrimp had paused his meal but had not spat out the pink tail that dangled from his lips. The Great Dane’s ears pointed to the ceiling and it’s jowls flapped as it huffed. Even the melting man had moved, whatever his waxy body was made from continued to drip causing the hollow spaces where his eyes should be to seem like he was crying. Darla looked at them, the candle flickered next to her. A chill tickled her spine.

Plink Plink Plink Plink Plink.

She turned towards the sound of the singing guitar strings. She could see the end of the hallway. There was a door frame without a door, instead a red translucent curtain draped down the frame, the bottom of the curtain was shredded. 

Darla reached for the curtain, there was another fire burning behind it, one much weaker, and she heard a shuffling behind her. She turned around and saw all the inhabitants of the living room standing at the entrance of the hallway. The fire behind them silhouetting their figures.

“Come on in,” the voice invited.

Plink Plunk Plunk Pluuunk.

Darla passed through the curtain keeping her eyes on the figures in the hall. 

PLINKPLINKPLINKPLINK SKREEEEEEEEEEE

Carson Beaumont was sitting on a wooden barstool, he feet planted on a the lower footrest, plucking away at an old acoustic guitar. He was wearing tattered, sun-bleached blue jeans, a white button up with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a black vest over that. His chocolate hair was dripping with sweat. The aviators shielded his eyes.

“Carson?” Darla said.

“Shhhhhhh,” whispered the voice.

They were in a bedroom. There was no furniture except the stools and a similar wood stove held a few dying logs that were more ash than ember. On the other side of the room, across from Carson, sat a Man.

The sight of the Man nearly caused Darla to gasp but she held it in by biting the inside of her lip. Aside from a burlap loincloth, he was completely naked with skin a dark yellow that suggested severe jaundice. Each of his limbs were as shriveled and seemingly boneless as raisins, his bald head was such a maze of wrinkles and flaps of skin that it was hard to tell if he even had eyes. Like Carson, he too was plucking a guitar and Darla saw that the ends of the man’s fingers had been shredded of skin, pointy tips of white bone poked out from yellow stumps to press down strings and pluck notes.

They took turns playing back and forth. The man would play a few bars and Carson would mirror it back, at times they seemed to play the same melody over and over again and then the Man would always be the one to switch it up and begin something new. Darla felt like a fly on the wall watching their back and forth, there was something about it that reminded her of the Banjo scene in Deliverance, the music might be pleasant, even exhilarating to listen to, but there was something sinister growing beneath the notes that she could not define but her body felt. 

As for how long they played, she couldn’t tell. Time seemed not to exist in this room. Neither men ever stopped for a break and no words were ever exchanged, if there was ever a pause in the music it was never longer than second or two before the Man began fingering something different. Thick beads of a sweat traveled down the wrinkles of his face and pooled at  his jutting cleft chin, until it could no longer be contained and spilled on to the floor like a stream of drool. Every so often Darla would look back through the curtain down the hallway, where at some point, everyone in the living room had taken their seats again. There was nowhere for her to sit in the room, and as far as she could tell her presence was disregarded completely by the two players. Her legs began to quiver in exhaustion. She leaned up against the wall and started to slide down. Before her bottom could hit the the ground though, the music halted. Darla couldn’t help but pause herself too, halfway down the wall looking as if she were seated in an invisible chair.

“Darla.” 

The suddenness of of Carson’s voice startled her and when she looked to him she saw herself reflected in Carson’s aviators,flickering orange from the dying fire.

“Yes,” she said.

“Go back to the hotel room,” PLINK PLINK PLINK, his fingers danced down the frets, “and pretend that this was all a dream.

PLINK PLINK PLINK PLINK PLINK PLINK PLINK PLINK PLINK PLINK PLINK PLINK PLINK PLINK PLINK PLINK

The following morning came with what felt like the worst hangover in Darla’s forty-one years. She woke up with her feet buried under the pillows and her head nearly dangling off the end of the bed. She hadn’t bothered in trying to pull the sheets up from their constricting hotel tuck in, and she was still wearing the clothes from last night; they smelled of B.O. and her socks in particular felt hard and crusty. The morning sun cooked her eyes. She went over to the window, drew the curtains and cranked up the air conditioner. In the bathroom she leaned over the sink and splashed some cool water over her face. Already the headache was beginning to simmer down. This was not the result of alcohol. Darla was familiar with the vengeance of her hangovers, which left her bedridden and useless for the whole day until the sun started to set and she’d have to force herself from bed to find something greasy to eat. Just a normal headache then? She’d never suffered from migraines before and even if that was what this was, she didn’t think any of the symptoms were blackouts one might experience after a tequila bender. No, this was something else.

Darla closed her eyes and splashed some more water over her face. In this darkness, with the feeling the water gliding down her forehead down of the curves of her lips, Darla had a vision of water dripping down skin, not her own skin, this skin was wrinkling, diseased looking. She turned the faucet off. Looking at herself in the mirror, beads of water fell from her chin and dripped down to the porcelain. Seeing the water fall from her face conjured the image of her skin melting from her skull, her eyes, nose and lips falling first, leaving the rest of her face a blank canvas. 

The vision was interrupted by a knock on the door. Darla ran a towel over her face and debating throwing on the hotel robe to cover up her dirty clothes. She decided against it when the next knock came much more forcefully.

Carson Beaumont was on the other side of the door. He was wearing ripped up light blue jeans, a tucked in white button up with a black vest and a black fedora. His aviator glasses dangled from the collar of his shirt.

“Well, look at me being the one to wake you up,” he said smiling. 

Darla pulled her phone from her pocket and looked at the time. “Shit,”.

“Rough night?” 

The look on his face gave her pause, holding no traces of humor or irony to suggest that he might have any information regarding the time that had passed over her like a blank space between last night’s dinner and right now.

“Headache,” she said, “but I’m fine, it’s passing. Sorry, I’ll be ready in a sec and I’ll meet you downstairs.” She started to close the door but Carson leaned against it. For a moment, and it was something that had confused her then, Darla felt a fear that had been foreign to her since the beginning of her professional relationship with Carson. In a flash she saw him throwing the rest of the door open, her falling to the ground and him straddling over her with his calloused fingers gripping her neck screaming through gritted teeth, “who the fuck do you think you are,” tendrils of angry saliva filtering through the cracks and dripping down to her purpling face. 

“Hotel’s got a killer buffet,” he said instead, “if you hurry you might be lucky enough to scrounge some bacon.” 

Darla offered him a smile and the closed the door on him. 

Backstage with an empty stomach and thumping head, Darla watched as Carson performed a set list of a handful of songs from his first album and couple of old blues covers that he was able to play solo without any backing band. The cloudless sun offered an unrelenting heat that played tug of war with her appetite. She became nervous that she might throw up or pass out. She downed over half the bottle of water and it sloshed uncomfortably in her stomach. Carson only had one more song left to play and then she’d be free to return to the air conditioning of the hotel room and nap off whatever weird games her body was playing with her.

Across the stage, standing next to the curtain, she saw a large man in a Colonel Sanders white suit talking with one of the technicians. The man with the suit withdrew a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed his leaking forehead. In his other hand he held a leash. A midnight black Great Dane was staring across the stage directly at Darla with old, yellow rimmed eyes. 

On stage Carson thanked the audience and wished that they would stick around for just one more song. This was met with uproarious cheers and Carson went in to the first few notes of Everyone Sings More Sadly Here. 

Darla looked at the dog, whose penetrating gaze had not left her. If it weren’t for the stream of drool dangling from it’s jowls Darla would have thought that the thing wasn’t even real, it didn’t even blink. 

Carson belted out the final verse and went in to the song ending solo.

The crowd went completely still and silent. Not one eye was focused on anything but the man playing on the stage. Except for Darla. She was lost in her own trance. Looking at the dog. The dog was sitting in the corner of a dark room, a fire in a wood stove burning, an old record playing music somewhere. She was in the room too, with others but she couldn’t see who they were. In that dark room the dog barked and Darla was startled from her trance. She blinked, furiously rubbing her eyes. When she looked across the stage there was no one there, animal or man. Jesus Christ, she thought, I need to get out of here. She looked past Carson on the stage and out to the crowd. Thousands and thousands of people frozen in time, with their eyes open and mouths dropping. Carson played on like a General addressing his troops for battle. It had been just like this last year when he played the song, the screaming strings commanded focus in a way that blotted out the rest of the world.

Carson finished the song to a crowd reaction of total silence. Darla watched them come out of it in groups as if someone was skirting through and tapping each of them on the shoulder to bring them back.

Carson brushed passed Darla and a stage hand offered him a bottle of water. Darla heard the aggravated voice of one of the event organizers behind her. “I thought you were going to play something new.” 

She heard Carson chuckle, then gulp down a large sip. “ I got something new. It just ain’t ready yet. 

For almost a year after that second show Darla saw very little of Carson. Back in New York she was sometimes lucky enough to receive a monthly phone call in which Carson always assured her that he was working on something new. From what she could infer he’d spent a great deal of money converting his apartment in to a space where he could write and record on his own. He would send her demos of new stuff that she would pass along to keep the label at bay. It was all fine stuff, and she told him that over the phone, but he would always pause, long enough for her to think he might have hung up before coming  back on the line and in a sullen voice would say, “I’ll get there, I got the music, I just need the words.” He’d canceled all live shows and told Darla to not bother booking any new ones. In her eyes he was teetering on the edge of becoming a bonafide hermit. When he called her up one early summer day and told her to get him to New Orleans for the Jazz and Blues fest, Darla was relieved to hear from him, telling him it was pretty late notice, but she could make it happen. He’d already hung up the phone. 

–

“What do you mean, cancel the show?” She could hear her words slurring but she hadn’t touched a drink since the previous day. 

Carson continued plucking on the guitar. The more he played the more familiar it started to sound to Darla, but there was something about it that sounded off, like he was only playing one part of a duet. She had heard this piece before but there had been two players, going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

“Pick up your phone and cancel the show,” Plink Plink Plink Plunk Plink, Carson said.

To be able to look back, the next several minutes felt like the worst nightmare one could ever have, but it had all happened.

The phone was in her hand and she was dialing a number and holding it up to her ear. There were several rings before the line clicked and on the other end she could here the ambiance of congested chatter and music. A man’s voice came through, out of breath, “yeah?” 

Darla felt her lips moving without her control, could hear the sound of words flowing from her, but like an adult in a Charlie Brown cartoon, she had no idea what she was saying. The man on the other end must have understood her because he swiftly launched in to a frustrated tirade, the kind of which “fuck” and “shit” were littered between every other word.

“Just tell him I’m sick and need to get home as soon as possible,” Carson said from the other end of the room, continuing to pluck away at the guitar.

Again her lips were moving and words were coming out, but it was nothing that Darla had formulated on her own. Carson told her to hang up and she ended the call mid rant of the man on the other line.

“Drop the phone on the bed,” Plink Plink DOOO Waaa

Her fingers opened with the quickness of gripping hot metal and the phone fell to the mattress. 

“What the hell is going on?” Darla asked, her breath shaking.

Ignoring the question, Carson continued to play, “Go and open that sliding door,” he said.

Without hesitation Darla’s body began to move against her command. She stood up from the bed, her bare feet tingling on the warm, rough carpet. Then she was walking across the room towards the sliding glass door that lead to the balcony overreaching the city street. 

“Carson,” she said. Moving along. On the tips of each of her fingers and toes, around every joint and part of the body that bends she could feel an invisible string pulling her along.

“You can ask any artist why they choose to do what they do and the answer they always give is that it isn’t a choice at all. I didn’t choose to write or choose to paint, or to make music; it chose me.” 

In an effort to brake herself, Darla curled her toes under the balls of her feet. Her skin burned dragging against the carpet and the bones in her toes sounded off in a string of arthritic cracks. 

“It chose me too, that I believed for the longest time, but the question I could never really figure out was why? I didn’t have anything to say.” 

Darla’s arm rose from her side at right angle, the more she tried to resist the movements the more it felt like she was fighting against the pull of a thick elastic bands. Her fingers found the handle for the sliding glass door. Beads of a sweat dripped over her eyes as she swung it open, letting in a rush of warm, sticky summer air. Behind, she could hear Carson getting up from the chair, walking towards her, the plucking of his guitar growing louder until she could practically feel the vibrations traveling up her spine.

“Talent is nothing without something to say because then people have no reason to listen. Go ahead and stand up on the railing right there.” Plink Plink Plink Plink.

“Carson, please,” Darla begged but her body was already on the move, dragging her across the cement balcony, towards the railing that sectioned off the room from the outside. Her hands gripped the burning black metal, her feet slipped on the bars attempting to climb. One leg stretched beyond comfortable capacity and her left foot planted itself on the top of the railing. She pulled her torso up, brought the other foot to the bar and slowly raised to stand. It was impossible to stay still, her arms drew exaggerated circles in the air like a cartoon character. She tried not to look down at the five story fall to the pavement that the slightest gust of wind threated to end her with. Her hair blew across and stuck to the sweat on her forehead, hindering her vision, but she was too scared to make any attempts to brush it out of the way. Across the hotel was a series of streets that led to various shop and business, little black specs went in and out of buildings and down the pavement, but none seemed to stop and see her standing atop the balcony railing like one who’d had enough of life and was ready to jump. Darla thought about screaming for help but Carson seemed a step ahead of her thoughts. He continued playing, continued talking, while she stood on the rail and prayed, to a God she thought it was now time to start believing in, to please get her down from this.

“Getting people to listen is the hardest thing to do. Hearing and listening are two different things. Just like seeing and believing. They are not the same things but with one can ultimately come the other. Bend down.” Plink Plink 

With a startling quickness Darla’s torso snapped down like she was trying to touch her toes, bringing the ground below much closer to view. Sweat and tears left her face like a leaky faucet and fell smaller and smaller, disappearing from vision before she could see them splash to the ground.

“Carson what are you doing,” she cried out, “please please whatever the fuck you are doing stop it and get me down from here!” 

“Be quiet,” Carson said. Plink Plink.

A sneeze of weather blew through. Her left foot slipped from the railing and suspended in the air. Darla’s bent body started to tip forward. When she tried to scream nothing came from her throat except raspy air.

Carson grabbed the back of her t-shirt and yanked her off the railing. Darla fell the three feet smacking her tail bone hard against the balcony. Tears freely dripped from her eyes but any sound of her sobs was nonexistent. 

“Last year, on the night you followed me, you saw first hand the gift that I was given. It was no coincidence you found me on the internet and sought to represent me. There are billion’s strings dangling around the word that make things go where the hand wants them to go. I had to prove that I was worthy of the gift. The first year we came to here together I proved I had the talent and I was given another gift, this one with a test. He played for me the solo and said that if I was worthy I could halt the minds of millions. And when I played Everyone Sings More Sadly Here for the first time the next day I saw, in the lost expressions of the crowd, that He was right. I had proved my self worthy. Worthy for the final gift. The gift of what to say.” 

Darla had stopped crying. She stared wide-eyed at Carson looming over her. He’d stopped playing but the music of the guitar continued, from inside the hotel room. She leaned over to look past Carson and in the chair, at the desk, was the man made of wrinkles, with bone tip fingers plucking away. 

“You can get up now,” Carson said.

And now by her own free will, Darla was able to stand. Her body felt like she’d just finished running a marathon, her legs shook violently and she felt a collapse at any moment. She leaned against the railing, somehow finding a comfort in it’s support when only moments ago it was a diving board to death. 

Carson turned away from her and retreated back inside. He took a seat at the end of the bed, propped the guitar on his knees and began playing along with the thing in the chair. 

There was nowhere for her to go but inside, lest she take the dive of the patio that she had prayed to God against. Her whole body trembling in cold sweat, Darla stepped into the hotel room. 

The thing in the chair payed her no attention, just kept on playing. Whatever this power they played in to being, to control her, Darla once again found herself praying, that whatever this thing was would not open it’s mouth and issue her a command, because she was certain that whatever it might say would be the last thing she ever heard.  

It was Carson though who spoke.

“I got the music and now I just need the words. Then the people hear. Then the people listen. Get me on a plane back to New York. I need to be in my studio.” 

Plink Plink Plink Plink Plink Plink Plink Plink Plink Plink Plink Plink Plink Plink 

 –

Accordingly, the flight to New York was booked and Darla spent as much of the time in the sky that she could away from Carson. Carson had not breathed a word to any of the staff while boarding the small private aircraft, and elected to dismiss any drink or meal offered to him, spending the flight with his eyes under cover of a sleeping mask.

Darla took the first glass of wine she was offered and downed it before the flight attendant had time to turn away. “Just keep’em coming,” she said and ignored the look of displeasure from the young twenty-something, who was most likely told not to do that kind of thing. It seemed that getting drunk on planes, know matter how private, was becoming a thing of the past.

For most of the three hour flight Darla kept her eyes on Carson. She was seated behind him and aside from the occasional dip of his head, he didn’t stir at all. It was still hard to believe that what she’d just fell victim to in the hotel room had happened at all. To even think of it seemed ridiculous; a guitar solo that allowed the player to control anyone who was listening,  but that feeling of control she’d been under had not completely escaped her, it still lingered in her bones  like the after effects of a cold.

  I’ve got the music and now I just need the words. 

With each sip the courage built to take the knife from her uneaten chicken dinner plate and plunge it through the neck of one of America’s Top Talents To Look Out For. 

Bouncing along over waves of turbulence it felt like a cursed responsibility had been dropped in her lap. Hard to believe as it was, she had been victim to this new power at Carson’s disposal, the gift, and she had no idea how he intended to use it. Aside from their strictly business relationship, Darla knew very little about Carson. He seemed very reserved to ever talk about himself, whether in regards to his upbringing or any personal beliefs he held. Darla had never asked and the interviewers who had tried, were always steered away from the question to arrive at an answer of musical influence. This had always struck Darla as an admirable trait to Carson’s character, in a day where anyone with even the smallest platform thought their opinions needed broadcasting, Carson stood on his and seemed only to care about preaching the good name of music. Admirable then, but now, after the events of hotel room, the confirmation that what had happened down the street with no name had been real, Carson seemed like a dangerous stranger and Darla’s ideas for what he stood for and what he might do were completely empty. Suddenly she felt more scared than when she had been under control, standing atop the balcony railing, looking five stories down at the pavement. 

She refused anymore alcohol and by the time the plane touched down, her mind was clear but still uncertain on how to proceed. She followed Carson out of the plane, forcing a smile to all the crew, and across the tarmac to the car that was waiting to take them in to the city. The bags were loaded in the back and Carson requested that the busted up guitar case ride in the back with he and Darla. 

It was the middle of the afternoon, the leather interior caused the back of Darla’s legs to sweat. She wished she’d grabbed a water bottle or something from the plane before getting in the car, the dizzy feeling had returned, whether it was dehydration or sitting next to Carson that caused it, she couldn’t tell.

They were bound for his apartment first, a forty minute drive plagued in silence. She new she had to say something but any conjecture of words that sprouted up seemed instantly vacuumed away like specs of dirt. When the driver pulled up to the front of Carson’s building, a man was there to open the car door and as Carson, holding tight the handle to the guitar case, began to step out, Darla called his name.

One leg already out of the car, Carson paused and turned to her.

“What are you going to do?” Darla asked.

Staring back at her own worried face in the reflection of Carson’s aviators, he offered her a coy smile. “I’m gonna go make some music.” 

He got out of the car, guitar case in hand, and gave the roof a couple of taps. The driver moved forward and Darla watched Carson all the way to the end of the street, until the car turned and he was out of sight.

–

Darla only stopped by her apartment to drop of her bag and spent the next several hours wandering the city streets in a daze. Aromatic billows of smoke streaming from open restaurant doors, the clinking of glasses, the laughing, the sweat, the exhaust, the clouds of a lit cigarettes; all of it nauseated her. To any of the hundreds that passed by, she would appear to be a woman navigating without cause or reason, simply to exist without thought or purpose, but even if she refused to acknowledge it, Darla knew exactly where she was going. So sure that she hailed a cab and didn’t even remember giving him a destination, but just before seven, when the sun was sinking behind the high-rises, stretching black shadows over those leaving work, the cab driver stopped in front of Carson’s building and after paying the driver, she walked through the front door, into the elevator, and was pressing the button for Carson’s floor.

   The hallway was baren and quiet. The sound of Darla’s feet dragging across the carpet echoed out like a nails against a chalkboard. There were four doors and Carson’s was the one at the far end. To proceed without any kind of plan seemed unwise, but to think about it too much seemed enough to draw her back, to where? She didn’t know. Back home didn’t seem like any option, no where really did. What would she do? That too was unknown and she hoped that whenever it happened (what was going to happen?) hesitation would be triumphed by adrenaline and she wouldn’t need to think, only act.

The closer she came towards Carson’s door, a sound started to fill the silence between her dragging feet and more so, with increasing terror, she started to recognize it.

From the hallway she could hear the muffled Plink Plink Plink, that had not abandoned her ears since the incident in the hotel room. That sound alone was almost enough to cause her to turn back immediately but, listening closer, she understood that the notes were not coming from the guitar directly, but playing over a speaker. 

Darla knocked on the door and called out Carson’s name. Nothing. She tried again with the same results. She pulled out her phone and opened up the tracking app. Carson’s icon was nowhere near; it wasn’t on the map at all.  

Darla curled her fingers around the door handle, the metal vibrating to the pumps of the speakers inside, and when she pulled down the door opened. 

She walked in to blackness. Darla slid into the room and closed the door before the music from the shrieking speakers could spill further out the hallway. She fumbled in the doorway for a light switch. When she flicked it on, the room came alight in a dim red. Light strips lined the tops and bottoms of the walls, traced the doorways. Slowly, Darla advanced through the apartment. In a near shout she called out Carson’s name to no response. She passed the main room, the kitchen, and proceeded down a hallway towards the bedrooms, following the distorted plucks of the acoustic guitar. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom down the hallways, and as she passed the open doors she took a peak in and saw mattresses thrown on the ground and propped against windows, drawers from dressers stuck out like mocking tongues, clothes splayed out from inside, discarded wrappers of fast food balled up, liquor bottles lined up and stood at attention, some empty, some filled to the brim with piss. It was the first time Darla had ever been inside the home of Carson Beaumont, such formality she usually denied from her clients, unless there was a particular reason to celebrate. Invited or not there was always a underlying feeling of intrusion in stepping in to someone else’s house. There were secrets hidden in homes, things you weren’t supposed to see. Rooms you weren’t supposed to enter when no one else was home. 

The last door at the end of the hallway was closed. From the crack at the bottom of the door, Darla could seen neon colors of dancing light. It was where the music was coming from, the series of particular notes she’d been put under control with in the hotel that morning. Maybe it was the notes, maybe it was the fear that Carson would pop out from around a corner with his guitar and make her slit her own throat but Darla was getting an intense headache at her temples. There was still no semblance of a plan at all but the thought of if not now when, refused to quit her. Somehow she was going to destroy that song, whether it meant destroying the guitar, the music software, the computers, or even Carson Beaumont himself.

She pulled out her phone and checked the tracking app again, still no sign of Carson’s icon. She pressed her ears up to the closed bedroom door and could feel the pulsing vibrations drum their way inside her ears. Darla took a deep breath and opened the door. 

The wave of music hit her like a strong gust of wind. As with the rest of the apartment, the room was bathed in dim red light. It was the biggest room in the house, the master bedroom, and had been converted in to a bare bones recording studio. Microphones on stands were scattered around all corners, black wires clustered in piles on the floor like dead snakes. Against a wall there was a line of electric and acoustic guitars (in her brief look Darla couldn’t see the one Carson had played earlier) in the far corner of the room was a desk with several monitors shining brightly and a long mixing console. Speakers planted on the ceiling corners blasted the cursed music that had lured her in. 

Plink Plink Plink Plink Plink Plink

Darla hurried over to the desk where the sound waves flowed through Pro-Tools. Her foot tangled in the electrical cords and she fell to the floor. She cursed aloud and started to get up when something caught her eye in the space next to the desk and the corner of the wall. In the dim red light it looked like a giant black sack hunched over. Darla crawled towards it. The blues guitar screamed through the speakers as her knees dragged along the carpet. 

When she was close enough to see what it was, the scream she let out would not be heard over the ever amplifying music. It wasn’t a sack. It was Carson Beaumont.

Hunched over, still in the same clothes he’d been wearing getting off at the airport, a shotgun laid across his lap. The top half of his head was missing and behind him on the wall was a painting of blood and brains, black gunpowder smoke and holes in the plaster from stray shrapnel. 

Darla launched across the floor trying to get away from what her eyes saw, what her brain could not comprehend, as quickly as possible. She landed in another mess of wires and for a frenzied moment, believed  they were wrapping around her ankles and wrists. With her heart threatening to break free from her ribs, she stood up and kicked the wires across the floor. The music continued through the speakers. She needed to take one more look at Carson, to make certain that what she’d seen had been real. But her neck was stiff as stone and refused to cooperate in turning. She counted to three and forced a quick peak at the musician slumped against the wall by his desk with only half a skull and it was all the confirmation she needed. 

Darla paced around the studio, carefully avoiding coming close to the body in the corner, going through all series of options she thought she would never have to list. She would have to tell somebody, call the police, call the record label, call someone. What was there to say, she didn’t know. Carson Beaumont had killed himself. Darla tried to think of how she would explain the events of the hotel room earlier that morning; why did he kill himself? Well, it seems that he might have gotten a little in over his head with a couple of devils that gave him the power to control people through music, you know, classic ego of the prophetic artist. The more she debated the explanation the more it seemed reasonable to just leave it out all together. Perhaps it was a blessing, what happened in that hotel room would stay and die in that hotel room. Maybe it was true that Carson had gotten himself in something more than he could understand, Darla herself could reflect on it a lifetime and probably never come close to anything that resembled reason. Carson had meddled in forces that humans were not meant to meddle in and had paid the ultimate price. 

  Something tingled against her thigh; her cell phone. Darla pulled the phone from her pocket. The screen was lighting up with alerts from pop news sights and twitter, text messages from names she’d recognized from the label. The first headline she read, before it was buried down the list of notifications, was from an Indie Music site and it read: Blues Musician Carson Beaumont Releases Surprise New Single On Spotify and Apple Music! 

Plink Plink Plunk Plink Plunnnnk

The phone nearly slipped from her hand, but Darla held it tight and scrolled through her messages. People in high power were furious, how the hell could he think to do something like this without their approval? They needed a meeting with Carson immediately! The numbers on the streaming platforms were coming in and they actually looked pretty good. Get Carson the hell over here now! 

Plink Plink Plink Plink 

I’ve got the music and now I just need the words.

Darla could feel the hot air of New Orleans blow through her hair as it had earlier that morning when she was staring down at death from the balcony. She felt she might faint, her legs were shaking, sweat sprouted over her brow. But before she could slip in to unconsciousness, a voice came through the speakers and started to sing, freezing Darla in her place.

It chose me.

The words came clear over the plucking guitar, slithering from the speakers to Darla’s ears in a language she had never heard before, belted from a voice that sounded just like Carson’s. 

There was nothing she could do, no command she could issue to her body that it would obey; her body was a puppet , incapable of independent movement or thought. Tears streamed from her eyes and dropped with a salty taste down her mouth; that she could still feel. Then another feeling. Hot breath against the back of her neck. A hand around her shoulder turning her around.

The foreign words continued through the speakers, as she was turned Darla caught, through the dim red string lights, one last look at Carson Beaumont’s corpse in the corner, it was almost a cruel joke to see that the only half of his head remaining was the half with his mouth.

Carson swiveled from her view and Darla was turned to face the horde of Hell’s army that she prayed had only been a bad dream since that night she had walked down the street with no name.

Before she could scream, the fat man who she’d last seen eating shrimp, stuck two big greasy sausage fingers in her mouth and pulled her lips apart until the skin split to her ears in a forever smile. The topless lady with the with the blank white eyes came towards her as the fat man moved to her back and pressed his bulging stomach against her. The Woman embraced Darla’s fleshly, mutilated lips with a kiss. Her mouth opened wide and Darla felt the woman’s tongue, rough, metallic, serrated like chains, slide down deep through her, down her chest until the chains wrapped around her beating heart and squeezed tight. The Woman withdrew from her kiss and her tongue retraced back in her mouth like tape measure. She stepped back and made room from the wax man. His body dripped in white puddles around the floor. He approached Darla and the peacock tail he carried behind him rose to attention. Like a blanket, he draped it over her until her whole body was covered and she was shrouded in darkness. Still at her back, the Fat Man used his fat fingers to keep her eyes open. Her chest burning, blood spilling her her mouth, Darla was unable to look away as the feathers that enclosed her came to life in a muted field of color. Red, greens, yellows, orange, brown, all under a filter of gray, swimming across the field of feathers like the blobs of a lava lamp. Slowly the colors started to come together, forming shapes and with her eyes held open, Darla saw the shapes morph into people, hundreds, then thousands of people falling down. People like her, their mouths ripped open, their eyes bugged and bulging from their sockets, chests exposed with slowly beating hearts wrapped in chain. The numbers on the streaming platforms were coming in and they actually looked pretty good. They all looked the same as the crowd had the first time Carson Beaumont had played Everyone Sings More Sadly Here, and it was easy to believe that wherever they were going, that would certainly be the case.

There are billion’s strings dangling around the word that make things go where the hand wants them to go.

Darla felt the floor disappear from beneath her feet and she was falling, under the shroud off the feathers, with the Fat Man’s fingers keeping her eyes open the whole way down. Unable to scream, unable to see anything beyond the crowd of thousands staring back at her, Darla fell towards lights of red, yellow and orange heating her newly ravaged body. As she fell she could still hear one thing.

Plink Plink Plink Plink 

Plink Plink Plink 

Plink Plink 

Plink