Beautiful City of the Dead Read Free

long curls. No doorbell. He'd told me that already. "There's some rocks on the front step. Just use one of those to bang on the door. My mom will hear it."
    And she did. The door came open. "You're the girl," she said. No "hello," or "come on in." She just stood there looking me over. "You're the girl," she said again.
    That wasn't obvious? "Yeah. Relly said I should—"
    She opened the door wider and I figured that meant I should go in.
    My bass case kind of banged against the door. I was trying to pass through without getting too close to Relly's mom. "Sorry, sorry," I said. But she wasn't the type to care about a few digs in the woodwork.
    She was no suburban mom. Not by a long shot.
    Like Relly, she was tall and thin. And she had the same long black hair. From the way he'd talked about her, I thought she'd be an old stoner metalhead. She actually remembered going to see Orion Hedd. "Totally changed my
life." He repeated this to me. And it sounded like he'd heard her say it about a hundred times. "I'll tell you that. Nothing was ever better. It was like a shimmering magic wind came blowing through. Right down from the stars, a cold wind from the seventh heaven."
    But with me, she didn't get into the '70s trippy weirdness. At least not that first night.
    She pointed to the stairs. "You'd better leave your coat on. It gets cold up there." And that was that.

Ten
    S O I CLIMBED THE three flights of steps to the attic. The stairs didn't creak. They whispered. Or that's what it seemed like as I went up. Faint voices from far away.
    At the first-floor landing, I heard the steady thump of Butt's kick drum. At the second, a low growling riff reached my ears. By the third floor, the whisper of the stairs was drowned out by drums and guitar and someone's maniac yells.
    I got to the attic and pushed open the door. A wave of sound broke and poured around me. They were good. Already I could tell.
    "Hey, all right!" Relly said. "You came."
    "I said I would."
    He pointed to Butt, behind his drum set. "There he is. Don't smell so good and can't hardly talk. But he can drub those drums better than the best." Relly had a different way of speaking now. A little louder. Kind of brash and
bragging. This was his turf, unlike school. These were his friends, his allies, his band mates. He could be more himself here than in a school filled with two thousand strangers. "And this is Mr. Jerod Powers, the Golden Boy."
    Jerod was so good-looking I almost had to turn away. I mean it was too much, all that wild blond hair and piercing blue eyes and pouty lips. I guess every band needs a pretty boy. Didn't matter if he could sing. But as it turned out, he was pretty good.
    "So what do you think?"
    I didn't answer at first. What did he want me to say? "Yeah, Butt's a shaved gorilla and Jerod should be in the movies?"
    Then I understood. He meant the attic, and what they'd done to make it a practice space. "It's great, it's great," I said. And I wasn't just talking. It truly was an amazing place.
    The ceiling went way up, with dozens of weird angles like a cathedral. It was all raw boards. And the ooze of hundred-year-old sap hung down in hard amber drops.
    They'd pushed mountains of abandoned junk to the edges of the attic to make room for the band. There was a wardrobe full of old clothes, wooden crates and cardboard boxes, stacks of books, toys, rusty tools. I saw a floor lamp in the wreckage. The shaft looked like bone and the shade like dried animal skin. An old army helmet hung on the
wall, along with a velvet painting of a snarling black panther, and a wedding dress in a tattered plastic bag.
    The other band I'd played in, and that was only for a few weeks, had practiced in a cellar. Relly's attic was full of junk, too. But it felt just the opposite of some wet, smelly basement. With no close neighbors, they didn't have to insulate for the noise at Relly's. No mattresses on the Walls. No foam on the windows or layers of Curbside Special carpet