The Devil of Echo Lake Read online

  They descended a flight of stairs lit by a series of red neon tubes and stepped into the back of a crowd. The men at the front were yelling, their shouts the only sounds in the room. Whatever they were here to witness, it didn’t involve music, and although there was plenty of alcohol being passed around among the revelers, the quiet put Billy on guard. It was unsettling to be in a crowd of drinkers without so much as a rave beat. Even sex shows had a beat. What kind of party was this, anyway?

  Flint leaned into Billy’s loose, black curls and said, “What do you think, bondage show?”

  Billy studied his friend for signs of fear. “I don’t know. It smells strange in here. Some of that Jap porn is pretty foul.”

  He felt a skinny arm encircle his waist, and Kiyoi slid around him as if he were a pole in a strip club. She had her mouth open, and he saw a little round tablet on the flat of her tongue. In the red light, he couldn’t tell what color the tab was, but what difference did it make? Whatever it was, she’d apparently had one already and it must have loosened her up. He bent down and allowed her to push the pill into his mouth on her soft tongue. Her kiss tasted like cinnamon, medicine, and sweat.

  Billy swallowed the pill.

  “What is this place?” he asked her.

  “Come on,” she said, tugging on his arm, pulling him away from Flint and into the crowd. A moment later they spilled into a space where there were no more bodies to buffer them, and Billy fell to his knees on the concrete floor. It was shit—that was what he had smelled. He felt his heart hammering hard in his ribcage.

  At first he thought he was seeing a six-legged crimson beast spinning toward him. Then he realized it was two dogs, entangled, tearing at each other’s throats, blood pouring down the swaying dewlap of the one on the bottom, mixing with its fawn coat and the red neon light to form an image of homogenous murky gore. The dogs went about the work of mauling each other in eerie silence. Billy had grown up with dogs, was anything but afraid of them, yet here on his hands and knees just a few feet away from the vicious melee, he felt a short burst of piss escape him before he could stop it.

  He clutched at Kiyoi’s long black skirt and looked pleadingly up at her, “What did you give me?”

  “Shabu.”

  “What?”

  “Speed.”

  He tried to stand, but his boot slipped out from under him in a puddle of dog blood. His chin hit the concrete floor, and as he bit his tongue on impact, he tasted his own blood. Kiyoi squeezed his jacket in fistfuls at the shoulders and tried to pull him up, but she had only succeeded in getting him back on his knees again when the dogs broke apart, the loser slumping to the floor in a heap of mangy fur and disjointed bones. The crowd roared with equal parts triumph and outrage.

  A shaven-headed handler with a sharp black goatee stepped into the ring and slipped a wire loop over the winner’s head, but the dog had already made eye contact with Billy. It lunged at him, flashing its frothy red jaws in a quick, chattering rhythm that spattered droplets of blood and saliva across Billy’s cheek and forehead. Later he would wonder if the dog had reacted to his prone position, his submissive stature at the moment it had noticed him, fresh from the kill. Or did it smell his urine and the scent of fear radiating from his pores as the speed was transmuted into sweat? But in that space of three deafening heartbeats, when the dog’s eyes locked in on him, all he could think of was Trevor Rail and a fragment of an old, old song playing to the beat of his heart.

  Got to keep movin, blues fallin down like hail

  Got to keep movin, hellhounds on my trail

  Billy felt his fingers and toes going numb as fear surged inward, closing off his senses. Pink video noise swarmed from the neon tubes in his peripheral vision, narrowing the tunnel through which he viewed the dog’s thick neck, bloody muzzle, and flashing fangs. The rush of blood roaring in his ears drowned out the foreign voices. He imagined the pressure with which it would jet across the room if the dog bit him. His throat constricted, but he soon realized that this wasn’t another symptom of his terror; someone was pulling on the collar of his leather jacket. Someone stronger than the girl was hauling him to his feet, wrenching him back from the mouth of the monster and into the crowd.

  * * *

  Danielle Del Vecchio flipped her cell phone open, dropped it on the tile floor and exclaimed, “Shit!” through her sea kelp mask. Flavio, her manicurist, picked it up and placed it back in her left hand, then resumed his work on her right. She reclined again and said, “Yes?” It was Donnie Lamar at Gravitas.

  “He’s fine,” she said. “Don, get a hold of yourself. I said he’s fine…. What? No, it wasn’t a pit bull.... Uh-Huh. A Tosa Inu…. I don’t know. It’s some kind of Japanese mastiff. I guess it looks like a pit bull. I don’t know. Who cares? It didn’t bite him…. It scared the living hell out of him, but he’s fine now…. Yes, his hands are fine, not a scratch. Stop being so hysterical, okay? He’ll probably get a song out of it…. Mmm hmm. Yeah, I’ll tell him. Flint was there. He’s okay too…. Don, can you hang on a sec? I have another call coming in. It might be Billy.

  “Hello? This is she…. Evan Malhoney? The fireman. Billy’s told me so much about you. What can I do for you, Evan? Billy’s on his way home from Tokyo today. He gets into LAX at nine ten tonight…. What?” She sat up straight and wiped the kelp strips off her face, yanking her hand back from Flavio so fast she cut her finger on the edge of his emery board.

  “Pen, pen!” she whispered. Flavio shot out of the room and returned before the door could finish swinging shut, bearing a ballpoint and a pad with the salon letterhead.

  “What’s the best number to reach you at? Give it to me anyway…. Okay. Sunday, Pearce and Sons Funeral Home, Port Jefferson,” she said, scribbling. When she had finished writing, she closed her eyes and listened. She said, “Evan, I’m so very sorry.” She looked at the phone, took a breath and pressed a button.

  “Donnie? That was Billy’s brother. His father just died of a heart attack. He’s going to New York sooner than he thinks.”

  * * *

  Billy Moon, his band, and crew landed in L.A. on Friday night in the rain. Danielle was waiting for him in Arrivals. Billy knew someone was dead before she even touched his arm and searched in vain for a place to sit him down in the empty corridor. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and her face was so solemn and pale that he almost didn’t recognize her at first. If he trusted anyone, he trusted Danielle, but seeing her face devoid of all pretense was something new. He had learned a long time ago that acting was an essential skill in a rock manager’s toolkit. She needed to change faces from mother, to motivational speaker, to mad dog depending on who she encountered around the next corner, or on the next call in the queue. Seeing her standing there in the vast vaulted hall of Terminal 4 with no mask or strategy in her eyes both embarrassed and scared him.

  She took his hands in hers. Travelers rushed past with their coffee cups and paperbacks, rolling their luggage to the exits and taxi stands. A soothing female voice made some echoing announcement. Then Billy was taking a fist full of Kleenex from Danielle, marveling at how quickly his eyes had filled with too much water to see anything but splintered light and how much sniffling he had to do all of a sudden to keep the mucus from dangling down into his lap in this crowded place where someone might recognize him.

  He caught himself resenting her for exposing him to this unexpected grief in public. But then he remembered that he had made a career out of being emotional in public, an observation that made him laugh and cry at the same time, as he wiped his face and tried to breathe. Keith, his bodyguard, stepped in front of him and folded his arms over his broad chest. The foot traffic flowed wide around them, as if the man were a boulder in a stream.

  Billy told Danielle to get him on the next plane to New York. After doing her best to convince him to at least spend the night before flying again, she relented and bought him a ticket. By midnight he was back in the air, without so much as a change of clothes, flying
over the Great Plains with lawyers and executives whose laptops illuminated the first-class cabin like a video arcade. In their company he looked even more like a vampire than usual. He turned inward, behind his sunglasses and headphones, letting his favorite duo, Jack Daniels and Joni Mitchell, lull him to sleep.

  When he woke up, the sun was rising behind New York and the pilot was telling them to fasten their seat belts for the descent into JFK.

  On the ground, Billy kept the shades on to avoid eye contact and kept walking when anyone called his name or touched his jacket. As a kid, he’d thought rock stars looked cool in sunglasses. As an aspiring musician in his twenties, he’d found them pretentious. Now he knew them for what they really were—privacy. Eye contact was how they trapped you, the leeches who wanted to rub up against your aura of fame and take the residue of glamour back to their mundane lives. It never seemed to cross their minds that you had mundane bullshit to deal with too. Hunger, grief, a moody girlfriend, a dead father, and maybe some of that was on your mind today as you made your way from here to there on your tired feet like everyone else. Didn’t they understand that he had bad days just like they did? If he didn’t want to sign his name every fifty yards on a given day, did it really have to mean that he was actually “an asshole in person?” He fixed his eyes on a far-off point on the concourse ceiling and kept walking.

  On the street he flashed a wad of cash at a cab driver and climbed in. By midday he was on the north shore of Long Island winding through tree-canopied suburban streets he hadn’t seen in years. The cab dropped him at number 14 Huckleberry Lane.

  The house he had grown up in no longer resembled the one he remembered. His father had been renovating it for as long as Billy could recall. He suspected the man hadn’t even been finished working on it the day he died, but the small transformations it had undergone each year while Billy was away chasing his dream amounted to what looked like a whole new house: a porch where the hedges had been, a bay window where there had been none, new vinyl siding. The old cars had been replaced too and Billy wondered as he walked up the path, if the classic convertible Mustang he had bought the old man when Eclipse went platinum was in the garage. The house was still a two-story Cape, but it looked like an impostor sitting among the trees he had climbed before the guitar came into his life.

  Then he looked up the cracked cement steps and any feeling he had that this wasn’t home evaporated at the sight of his mother in her nightgown behind the storm door, the reflection of red leaves and cotton clouds overlaid on her ghostly silhouette.

  Two

  The first leaves were starting to fall when Jake Campbell stepped off the Greyhound bus in Echo Lake, New York. He had started his journey the previous day in Florida with a cup of coffee in one hand and a suitcase in the other. There had been no one to send him off as he boarded the bus in the gunmetal-gray, pre-dawn light. Ally had kissed him good-bye and wished him luck back at their apartment in Winter Park, and she was probably already asleep again by the time he bought his ticket.

  As the bus passed through the Carolinas, Jake imagined her cleaning the apartment after the previous night’s party and then maybe going to the library to return the books he’d left with her—the apartment where he no longer lived (unless he fucked this up) and the library where he would no longer be a member. It still felt unreal, things had happened so fast.

  By the time the bus reached New York, Jake felt unsettled. He tried to tell himself it was just the fast food and the long hours on the road, but when his sneakers hit the sidewalk of Main Street in Echo Lake and the beauty of the Catskill Mountains spread out before him above the rooftops, he had to admit he was nervous as all hell about his ability to do the job.

  Jake pulled his suitcase out of the luggage bay and scanned the street for anyone who looked like studio personnel. How am I supposed to tell? He had barely formed the thought when a stocky young man with a shaven head, braided beard, and eyebrow ring nodded at him and extended a hand tattooed with a scorpion on the webbing between thumb and forefinger. Jake shook it, surprised by the gentleness of the grip.

  “I’m Brent. Are you Jake?”

  “How’d you know?”

  Brent shrugged, “You look like a college guy.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I don’t mean anything by it, just nobody else who got off… Come on, car’s this way.”

  Brent led him to the rusted remains of a Buick station wagon and scooped a handful of food wrappers, plastic bottles, and dirty socks out of the hatchback to make room for Jake’s suitcase. Another scoop and toss in the front seat cleared a collection of CD jewel cases with fractured covers to make room for Jake’s feet. The car shot out onto Main Street with more speed than Jake expected, the dashboard buzzing to the pulse of System of a Down.

  Jake was grateful for the deafening music because it absolved him of the need to make conversation while they passed through town. Hopefully the ride would be long enough to hear some of Brent’s thoughts about the studio, but for now he just wanted to take it all in. He and Ally had looked at the Echo Lake Chamber of Commerce website, but there hadn’t been many photos of the town. Now he had a chance to take quick inventory of what the place had to offer.

  It was weird, passing through a small town in a shitbox car doing something just shy of the speed of sound and trying to assess the place as a new home, all to a soundtrack of dark, paranoid heavy metal. There was a Laundromat (essential), supermarket, graveyard, funeral home, Greek restaurant (looked decent), library (big enough for Ally?), never mind—bookstore, head shop, hardware store, ice cream shop, movie theater, and we’re out of town watching the trees and farm stands go by. Jake knew there was more to it than what had just flashed by, but he didn’t know it would be two weeks before he would have another chance to see it by daylight.

  In the middle of nowhere, without so much as slowing down, Brent turned the car off the paved road and into a gap in the trees Jake hadn’t even noticed. Clouds of brown dust swirled around the vehicle as it bounced and rocked over potholes, climbing a dirt road through the densely wooded hillside.

  “We keep a low profile,” Brent said. “It’s like the fuckin’ Bat Cave.”

  Jake glimpsed the occasional barn or cottage through the trees, but when the road became more of a wide, steep trail, he couldn’t help musing that maybe it would end in a desolate backwoods clearing where his driver would rape and murder him. A couple of deer looked up from grazing just long enough to take notice of the lumbering car.

  Brent downshifted and forced the tired wagon up a final, steep incline. At the top of the hill, the sky opened up and Jake could see the muted purple peaks of the mountains in the distance again, now forming a regal backdrop for the building in the foreground. Tall and sprawling, it was a marvel of cedar planks that fanned out in spirals from its pyramidal peak down to its multi-tiered deck, a cascading series of high windows reflecting the lush pine forest in fractured segments on all sides. Something about it reminded Jake of a galleon out of a pirate movie.

  “Here we are,” Brent said, “Main Building. Eddie’s office, maintenance department and tape library. It’s also Studio A. Studio B is—”

  “In the barn, right? And Studio C is in an old church.”

  “Yep, you’ve done your homework. C’mon, let’s see if Eddie’s around.”

  They found Eddie in Studio A, an enormous concrete room with a vaulted ceiling from which a small fleet of semi-cylindrical wooden sound-reflecting baffles hung on strings, resembling rowboats seen from under water. The walls were draped with tapestries and horse blankets for additional absorption, and the vast wood floor was covered here and there with oriental carpets. Eddie was directing a couple of assistants or runners, who were pushing a grand piano into a corner. He bounced a basketball and shouted directions, the sound of each impact of the ball against the floor telling Jake all about the gorgeous reverberation of the place.

  Eddie turned and threw the ball at Jake, who caught it partly with
his hands, but mostly with his stomach.

  “You Jake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Eddie O’Reilley.” He extended a huge hand.

  Jake dropped the ball and shook the hand.

  “How was your trip?”

  “Fine. Took buses all the way from Orlando like Susan said to.”

  “We’ll reimburse you for your ticket. Did you get a receipt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come on, I’ll show you the control room. You won’t be out here in the tracking room much on this project—it’s a rap session, so it’ll be all about samplers in the control room. There’s a booth over there for vocals, but that’ll probably be the only mic. We’re just clearing the live room so they can use it as a basketball court when they’re not working.”

  Jake followed Eddie’s blue flannel shirt and shaggy head of white hair into the control room, where the older man sat down in a mesh-and-leather swivel chair. He sent its twin gliding across the floor to Jake. This time Jake caught with just his hands. He sat down and scanned the room, feeling like the first mate on the Starship Enterprise. There was a state-of-the-art SSL mixing console spanning the entire length of the room below a wide double-plate window, through which he could see runners wheeling the basketball hoop into place. The console was flanked on both sides by multi-track tape machines—almost relics in the year 1998, but in the other corner, wearing the blue trunks, was the Pro Tools rig that was about to do a smack-down on the mammoth multi-tracks and send them to the Smithsonian.

  Eddie ran his hand through his thick hair and Jake noticed a wedding band. His new boss had bags under his eyes and a friendly, disarming smile.

  “So this is the room you’ll be working in for the next… two weeks, I think. You’ll be second engineer to a guy named Rick Delahunt. The producer is Tutenkhamen. Young guy, but he’s hot all of a sudden. The artist is Tokin’ Negro. They get here on Monday, so you have today and tomorrow to get to know the patch bay and set up some of their gear. The only things I’m sure you’ll need a lot of are D.I. boxes and adapter cables. You can borrow some from Studio B, but make sure you check with Brian first. He’s the assistant in there this week. They’re doing some last minute overdubs on a David Bowie project.”