The Devil of Echo Lake

PART I: BIG IN JAPAN

“In the middle of the journey of life, I came to myself in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost.”

–Dante Billy Moon didn’t know exactly when he had sold his soul. There had been no pact penned in blood, no dusty crossroads. Maybe it happened that night on the bridge, the night he met Trevor Rail. Maybe his soul was tucked away in one of those paragraphs of legalese he had skimmed over hungrily in his mid-twenties—his eternal spirit leveraged against mechanical royalties and recoupable advances in a five-point font. I sold my soul, he thought, and it fit. Like a perfect chorus summing up the verses of his life, it rhymed with the rest of him.

* * *

Tokyo, 1998

On the last day of the Lunatic tour, Billy received a harmless-looking fax that felt like a death sentence. It was from his manager, Danielle Del Vecchio. She had left Japan two days earlier, confident that the final show at the Tokyo Bay NK Hall would go off without a hitch. Billy took the envelope from the bellhop and mumbled, “Domo.” He’d given up trying to tip them, but it still felt weird not to. As the suite door glided shut, he collapsed into a stuffed leather chair. He shook the page free of the envelope, which he tried to fling across the room like a Frisbee, although it disappointed him by flying like a bat.

Billy, Trevor just called to inform us that he has you booked at Echo Lake Studios in upstate NY for the next 2 months. I know it’s short notice, but Gravitas doesn’t mind paying for you to write in the studio this time. It’s a residential studio out in the woods, so you’ll be free of distractions. We’ll fly to NY on 10/30. You’re doing the MTV Halloween show on 10/31, and then I’ll have a limo take you up to the studio on 11/2. Would have just called, but now you have your schedule in writing, so you won’t forget. Break a leg tonight!

xoxo

Danielle Billy let the page flutter to the floor. He took a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table and lit up. The afternoon sun warmed his face and hurt his eyes. He could see his reflection on the dull gray surface of the TV screen: tangled, unwashed hair, black kimono, belly hanging over the waistband of his underwear. He didn’t like the image, so he exhaled, banishing it with a breath of smoke.

Why couldn’t she call him on the phone like she had every other day for the past ten months? So he’d have it in writing? No, she had to fax to tell him he’d be spending the next two months hunting songs for the third album in the woods with Trevor Rail because she knew he was having reservations about Rail. It was just like Danielle to drop the bomb from a safe distance. Just got a phone call from Trevor, my ass. But then, if honesty was to be the word of the day, he had to admit that “reservations” was an understatement. What he felt about Rail was more like pure, undiluted dread.

He hadn’t talked to her about that in any depth, but if he had, she would have just told him to stop smoking so much pot because it was making him paranoid. And she’d probably be right. Still, could she blame him for being paranoid when he had to divine his fate from some fax while everyone with the decision-making power in his life was on the other side of the world?

Billy looked at the heavy oak door and remembered where he was. Someone was knocking, and he wasn’t sure how long they’d been at it. The knocking started up again, but now it was deeper. Someone had switched to pounding on the door with the side of a fist.

“Billy, you better be getting laid cause if you’re passed out drunk, I’m gonna have to beat your ass.”

Flint.

Billy opened the door. The pressure that had been building in his head over the fax dissipated at the sight of Flint’s mischievous grin—missing tooth, scruffy dimpled cheek, and all.

The guitarist scanned him from top to bottom and back again, from behind a pair of sunglasses that looked like welders’ goggles. It was a wonder he could see anything at all through them, but he must have because he said, “Christ, Billy, don’t you even dress yourself when Danielle’s not around? Come on, we gotta be at sound check in half an hour. Don’t want to blow it on the last night, do we?”

Billy gave a half-hearted smile. “No. After all, we’re finally big in Japan.”

* * *

On the way to the limo with Flint, Billy was called over to the front desk by the concierge who had a small package waiting for him, delivered by a local shop. Billy unwrapped it in the back of the car, finding under the brown paper a dragon-themed red and gold silk brocade box with silver clasps.

“Sexy,” Flint said beside him, looking at what lay on the gold silk lining.

“A knife,” Billy said, stating the obvious.

“Not just a knife, bro. That’s an authentic Japanese tanto.”

Billy picked it up gingerly and turned it over in his hands. The handle was scarlet silk wrapped in a diamond pattern over some black textured material. The silver end-cap on the hilt was engraved with a cherry blossom. Three more flowers in mother-of-pearl adorned the black-lacquered wooden sheath. It was stunning, exuding a graceful, evil beauty.

“What’s a tanto?” he asked, staring at it.

“That’s one of the three blades a samurai would carry. My old roommate was way into this shit. Samurai movies every other night. Dude had some replicas too, but nothing like this. That’s real stingray skin on the handle.”

Billy drew the blade from the sheath and examined it—nine inches of tapered steel that looked sharper than anything he had ever handled in his life.

“Whoa, dude. Put it away before we hit a bump. That thing is sick. Who’s it from?”

There was a small envelope in the box. It contained the knife’s registration with the Japanese Ministry of Education and a second card with a sword-smith’s insignia and a typed message:

Dear Billy, A small token to celebrate your recent success on the Japanese charts. Please bring it with you to our sessions. I think it would be brilliant to get some photos of you with it for the cover art. Looking forward to working together again.

Yours, Trevor

“It’s from Trevor. He wants pictures of me with it.”

“Cool.”

“Samurai blade, huh? I thought they carried big swords.”

“They had three different blades for different jobs. The katana would be for the battlefield—that’s the long one. Then there was a medium size one for close combat, a waki-something-or-other. I forget. And this one here for ritual suicide if they were captured or disgraced.”

Billy laughed without humor. “I’ve barely even written anything for the next album, and he already knows he wants me posing with a Japanese suicide knife in the artwork.”

“See that’s what makes ol’ Third Rail a marketing genius. He’s already thinking about how to bridge your new Asian audience with your crazy goth chicks who like to cut themselves. The crafty fucker.”

* * *

They closed the show that night with “I Like to Watch,” a techno-metal song Rolling Stone had called, “a scathing high-decibel diatribe against the vampiristic nature of the news media.” Billy staggered out of a foggy wash of blue lasers as he struck the final chord on his blood-red Les Paul, then slammed his fist down on top of his amplifier, making the spring reverb inside it rattle and shudder in what became a series of explosions echoing throughout the hall. Only when the sound had almost faded did the applause swell up and break over the stage. Exhausted and bathed in sweat, Billy was once again impressed by how intently Japanese audiences listened. In America there was always some drunk guy yelling during a quiet section, but that never happened here.

He handed the guitar off to Phil, his tech, bowed low to the crowd, and ran down the metal stairs beside the drum riser. A second set of boot heels echoed in the narrow corridor, and he cast a glance over his shoulder at Flint. Looking ahead again, Billy threw his arm out behind him, pointing at the floor somewhere in front of Flint, then swept it forward to point at the double doors at the end of the corridor and the security guard stationed in front of them. He passed the dressing room and heard the guitarist’s steps falter.

“Where are you going?” Flint called.

“Out. Come on.”

“The street? What are you, tripping? You’ll be caught in an autograph mob.”

“Not if you hurry up. Most of them are still wondering if that was the last encore.”

“No they’re not. I saw the house lights come up.”

“Then we really better move.”

Billy and Flint shoved their shoulders into the doors and pushed through into a clear night sparkling with city lights.

A small group of Japanese goths flocked up the steps to the exit with CDs and permanent markers held aloft.

“Billy, I don’t see the car,” Flint said. “I don’t think we’re on the right street.”

“Don't worry about it. I just want to get some air.”

“That’s the last thing you’ll get if we hang around here.”

Billy looked around at the kids. There were five of them, who had probably skipped the last song to stake out this particular exit. Well, they got lucky.

“Hey, are you all together? Did you come to the show together?” Billy asked as he scribbled a black squiggle across the front of a jewel case.

They all started talking at once, and he couldn’t make out a coherent sentence, so he said, “Who has a car?”

A muscular kid wearing a wife-beater and a small silver cross on a chain said, “I have a van.”

Billy noticed that this kid was the only rocker among the goths, with their black clothes, makeup and dyed hair. This one looked like most of the Japanese rock fans he’d seen, a walking advertisement for American corporations: Converse sneakers, Levi’s jeans, pack of Marlboros poking out of the pocket of a plaid shirt, unbuttoned to reveal the beater and the cross. Totally Americanized from his smokes to his personal savior.

“Where’s it parked? I want to get out of here.”

One of the goth girls started jumping up and down, tugging at the bottom of her sweater. The kid with the van smiled. He looked at Flint, “You coming too?”

Flint glanced at Billy. “This is not a good idea, bro. It’s Tokyo, for fuck's sake. I couldn’t read a train map if I had to.”

“You’re such an old lady,” Billy said. Then to the rocker kid, “It’s our last night here. Take us some place interesting. Show us something we can’t see at home.”

“Where’s home?” the kid asked. He seemed way too cool for the situation. Billy decided he must not be a fan, just a ride for some of these other kids. When the jumping girl settled down and clasped her arms around the rocker’s bicep, Billy decided she was probably his sister. There was a resemblance.

“Good question. Flint, where is home? New York? I have a house in San Francisco. Fuck, I don’t know. I think the Hilton is home.”

The kid laughed and said, “Man, this place want to be New York, and you have shit in California you won’t find here, but I can definitely show you something you don’t see at Hilton.”

“Well then I guess it’s not anything sexual. I’m game. Flint?”

“Man, you’re in a dangerous mood.”

Billy just grinned.

“Yeah, I’m game.” Flint sighed.

“Kiyoi,” the kid said over his shoulder. “Tell your friends they have to take the train home.”

“Why can’t they come too?” she whined.

“Not enough room. And your idol wants to see something exotic. I’m not taking a bunch of kids.”

“Where we taking them?”

To Billy it sounded like the kid said, “Tosainnuring.”

The girl gasped. “That’s so cool. Guys, you have to go home.” This was met with groans of complaint. “Give me your CDs. Maybe they sign them in the van. Come, come on, give them to me. I’ll call you guys tomorrow. I promise.”

The rocker, who said his name was Munetaka, trotted across the street and unlocked a white van. Billy, Flint, and Kiyoi followed.

The city dwindled behind them until a few faint stars could be seen twinkling through a veil of smog over Mount Fuji. Billy had feared the drive might be one of those regrettable private moments with a fan in which he was deluged with questions, but Kiyoi was deadly silent after he and Flint signed the stack of CDs. Her English was good, but she appeared to be too afraid of saying something stupid to venture any conversation at all. Billy considered breaking the ice just to put her at ease, but after singing for two hours, his voice was hoarse, and he was content not to use it if he didn’t have to.

When the van stopped, Flint pulled the door open. They found themselves in a pockmarked, muddy lot in front of a warehouse with blacked out windows, somewhere south of the city. A couple of orange sodium lights poured their jaundiced glow over the lot, illuminating cars whose riders’ muted voices could be faintly heard from somewhere inside the cinder-block building. Shouting and cheering seeped through the cracks in the walls, mingling in the cool, quiet night with the ringing in Billy’s ears.

Munetaka rapped his knuckles on a door Billy hadn’t noticed. It opened to reveal a lean Japanese man in mechanic’s overalls. Munetaka rolled up the sleeve of his flannel shirt and flashed a tattoo Billy couldn’t quite make out. It might have been a stylized animal mask like the ones on totem poles. The doorman waved them in.

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…Mm 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 has 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.

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 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.”

Jake’s eyes must have widened at that.

“Yeah, the Duke. You like his stuff?”

Jake nodded.

“Me too. In fact when I was about your age, I was the assistant on a record he tracked in the city.”

“Cool.”

“We’re going to put you up in one of the cottages we keep for clients here on the grounds. You’ll have a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom while you’re on this project and for a while after it’s done, until you have time to look for an apartment. But no housekeeping, so do your own dishes. If you’re even there long enough to eat. I doubt you’ll see much of the place.”

“That’s fine. How will I get to work? I’m gonna buy a used car, but for now…?”

“A runner will give you rides for now. Any other questions?”

“Not until I look around.”

“Okay, did Susan talk to you about pay?”

“Not yet.”

“Bloody Christ. Why can’t people do their jobs? It starts at seven an hour. We can talk about a raise if it works out.”

Jake nodded. It was what he had expected, but when his father—who had paid for a good chunk of his education—asked about it, he was probably going to present it as an annual figure, pre-tax.

“I know it’s low,” Eddie said, “but if this is what you want to do for a career, it’s about getting experience at this point.”

“I know. That’s pretty much what my teachers said to expect.”

“And you’ll find that the cost of living around here is lower than Orlando. Sure is a lot lower than Manhattan. You can get a two bedroom with a fireplace for six-fifty a month.” Eddie smiled and rose from his chair. “Well, I’ll let you get acquainted with the gear.”

* * *

Later, on the phone, Ally said, “That’s nice, Jake, a fireplace? That’ll be really useful if you don’t get paid enough to make the heating bill.”

“The heat will never be on because I’ll never be home,” Jake said. “Look, if I started out as a runner, it would take me about a year to even get to this point. They’re kind of taking a chance on me.”

“Who’s your first client?”

“Tokin’ Negro. Just got out of prison.”

“No shit.”

“None whatsoever.”

“And how much are they paying for the studio time?”

“Uh, Studio A is twenty-five hundred per day.”

“Of which you get seven dollars an hour to basically run the room. You’re the cheapest tool they’re renting, sweetie. You deserve more than that.”

“But think of all my classmates who didn’t get a placement, who racked up just as much debt, and now they have to schlep their resumes around L.A.—where I know you don’t want to live, and neither do I—just so they can get a chance to make six an hour brewing coffee and emptying the trash.”

“How can studios get away with that? That’s not even minimum wage. Those guys could be making coffee at Starbucks for more than that and they’d be getting tips!”

“Ally, it’s a competitive business. Very competitive.”

“Well, I don’t like it. I’m sorry.”

“Maybe you just don’t like me going away.”

“Yeah.”

“Everybody who succeeds goes through this stage. It’s where you prove that you want it bad enough to pay your dues, and that you’re not going to freak out some rock star who’s in a vulnerable creative state by saying some fan-boy bullshit. It’s where I prove I know what I’m doing and I’m not going to erase the damned tape. Then they’ll pay me more.”

“Okay. I am happy for you.”

“I know.”

There was a silence on the line. Jake looked out the back window of the cottage into the dark woods.

“David Bowie’s here for a few days.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I don’t know if I’ll see him. He’s in Studio B, which is in a barn somewhere. How fucking cool is that?”

“Pretty fucking cool.”

“Will you come up and visit when this project is over? We can go apartment hunting together.”

“Jake, I haven’t decided yet if I’m moving.”

“I know, but I have to live somewhere. You might as well like the place.”

“Okay, I’ll come. How much of the town have you seen?”

“Not much, but I think you’d like it. It’s pretty artsy. I saw a coffee-table book lying around that tells how Echo Lake was an artists’ community going back to the turn of the century. And Woodstock is close enough that you can still see which houses Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan once rented. You can tell it’s New York City’s backyard. I think you’d feel right at home here.”

Silence on the line again.

“Allison?”

“I’ll come and see you in a couple of weeks, when you have the time, okay? Just, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You should focus on your job right now. A lot is happening for you.”

“I know. I’ve just been thinking about how you’ve already ruled out Florida for grad school, right? So why stay there while you’re figuring it out?”

“Well, my parents are here, for one thing.”

Outside the window something slid out of the trees and bounded across the grass about thirty yards from the cottage. Jake could barely make it out in the dusky light, but it looked to be about the size of a deer, only white. The notion that it was a dog crossed his mind, but the way the light danced across its torso made it look like anything but fur. More like pale flesh stretched taut over a ribcage. It seemed to flicker in an odd way, like a projection. Jake squinted, but it had already disappeared into the tree line at the far end of the lawn. He squinted at the shadows where it had vanished, then startled when a pair of violet lights flashed back at him, like cat’s eyes reflecting passing headlights. The back of his neck prickled, and his stomach churned. But then, of course, he would feel unsettled with the long trip, the job jitters, and the fear of losing her.

“Jake, are you there?”

“Yeah. I’m tired.”

“You sound funny. Are you okay?”

“Yup.”

“Don’t start lying to me now. You never have before. Look, we can talk about it, but I just won’t know until I can see the place.”

“No, it’s okay. I think I’m more tired than I realized. I’m gonna go to bed. I have to get up early to get a handle on the room.”

“Okay. Love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Jake hung up the phone, picked up his bottle of beer, and froze before it reached his lips. Something out there at the edge of the woods had caught his eye again, and he knew that it couldn't be, but it looked like a naked woman walking away.