“Sumer is icumen in,He’d been waiting for the Ruin-Dredger CD for a fortnight. Triple A, that was the name of the album, whatever the fuck that meant. Someone had told him that they’d turned Goddess-fascist, that you could make a swastika and a triangle with the dismantled lines of three A’s, but that was obvious bollocks and who cared anyway? The music was all that mattered and he wanted to be the first to hear it, the first in the whole fucking shithole of a town. It was pathetic, really, that he was so excited by it, but at lunchtime he was going down to W.H. Smith’s and leafing through the extreme music mags, watching for the first review, the first picture of the cover. He had something prepared for its arrival too: a black candle to light before he put it on the player.
Lhude sing, cuccu.”Traditional song.
He’d made the candle himself, adding three drops of blood to the wax from a finger that had ached for a couple of days afterwards, as though he’d infected it. That was pathetic too, making a candle as though he were fifteen again and listening to the Sisters of Mercy, but ’Dredger had been his favorite band for over a year now and there was fuck all else happening in his life. He’d even started sleeping badly because of the anticipation, getting up, having coffee and toast, listening to his previous ’Dredger albums with headphones. He woke early on the morning the CD was delivered too, thinking he’d heard a knock at the door. He got up still naked and went to the door, but when he looked through the spyhole no-one was standing outside on the shadowed corridor, which flickered for a moment as though early sunlight had flashed down it, reflected from somewhere outside. He wasn’t going to get back to sleep, so he made some coffee, had two slices of toast, and listened to the last ’Dredger album from tape with headphones on. In the silence between the fourth and fifth tracks he heard the letterbox go and knew, with a sudden lurch of excitement, that it was the CD.
He stopped the tape and almost ran to the door. Yeah, that was the Gogmagog package, re-cycled paper with the little red sunburst. He picked it up, fingers shaking a little, and tore it open eagerly to slide the CD out. The cover was minimalist, as though in reaction to the writhing fractal they’d used on Hair of the God that Bit You: almost pure white except for a thin black line with a jag in it just a little off-center. He turned it over as he walked back to his stereo, reading the track-listing. But there was only one track listed, “Pulvis Es”, and there must have been a printing error, because it was timed at 3”. He tilted the CD, trying to see if there was any trace of more text, but he couldn’t see anything. He reached the player and slipped the CD in, then ran to the kitchen for his candle.
He didn’t notice the silence outside for a moment, then realized that there was no traffic noise drifting up from the street nine storeys below, which was ridiculous at this time of the morning. When he went to the window, he saw what had happened. The whole town was bubo’d with speakers: big black swellings, some of them three metres across or more, in regular lines over the walls of all the buildings, high-rises, offices, churches, shops, terraces, in the roofs of the motionless cars, up and down the tar surface of every street he could see, clustered thickly at the top of what had been the floodlight pylons at the football stadium in the distance, and pedestrians’ heads were all speakers too, held aloft and ready on wide-braced legs as hands gripped and directed their rims. A moment before the next knock on the door they all came alive with a premonitory crackle that made his windows rattle, then he was carrying the candle through to see who it was.
Through the spyhole he saw that the corridor outside was full of waving tenacles, misty still but solidifying by the second, and flickering with more colors than the spectrum held. When he turned and ran for the player, he was blind in the eye that had looked through the spyhole and it was weeping blood that splattered the player as the third knock came and he stabbed a finger down on PLAY for the solitary, salvefactory riff of “Pulvis Es”.
© 2006 Simon Whitechapel