Southwestern Drone
He didn't believe them when they said they'd string him up from his crime, he didn’t believe them when they placed the rope over his neck. Witchcraft wasn't a real crime, not in the 21st century. His shock at the sudden drop from the platform was only mitigated by the awful snap of the rope that threw his near lifeless body to the ground. His survival and the subsequent panic it sent the yokels into served as a soothing balm for his not inconsiderable wrath. He was not a witch, not exactly, and this town in the middle of the New Mexico desert was about to learn what he really was.
It felt like he had been laying there for hours, his muscles suddenly forgetting what they were and how they functioned. He wavered, hunched up and curled over like a gargoyle. The screams, shouts, and alarm of the townsfolk created a protective shell around him. Within that hysteria, despite being the epicenter and cause of everything, he was invisible. Finally, like the snapping of a tree branch, his muscles regained their life and he was moving again.
The wound on his neck throbbed and pulsed. He rubbed it gingerly, wincing as bolts of electricity down his nervous system. Would this injury impede his power? The question that hung in the desert air made him shudder. He raged, trying to send out waves of power into the surrounding air with his mouth contorted in a howl, but nothing came from his throat but coughing air. Pain shivered like cactus needles down his spine and he lost his footing, falling to his knees. One heartbeat. Two. The pain subsided and his breath evened out. In the distance, barely a smudge out on the vast Southwestern horizon, something caught his eye as he stood: a storm was coming, and something was inside it.
He had faced these things a half dozen times now and he was barely into his thirties. They were rare, rare enough that outside a small conclave of troubadour-wizards, no one in history knew they existed. He could feel the hunger from here, a vague sense of greed gnawing at the back of his mind.
Suddenly, he was back in the room with the blue paisley wallpaper, he was ten years old. Sickness was heavy in the air, strangling all sense of hope with a dreadful stench of dry decay. All sound seemed muted, like it was covered by a hundred feet of earth. His uncle was in the bed, papery thin skin covering his cancer ridden body. His uncle was a living corpse. A trembling hand beckoned him over, out of the doorway where he hung back, afraid. He did not want to move, but inexorably he felt his body responding to the summons.
The words of his uncle, wafting through vanilla-scented cigar smoke and heavy with desperate purpose, rang in his ears, surprisingly strong for a man with no life left in him. “I
t’s our power, your power, that holds them back. That’s your legacy, your meaning.”
They had been over this many times before. He remembered all the stories his uncle told him, about ships that had their whole crew eaten up during a hurricane and the hulk had been left to drift, about towns on edge of a forest that vanished wholesale after falling prey, hikers that got lost up in the mountains, pinned down by bad weather that turned out to be more than just a random thunderstorm. His uncle even tried to connect the Roanoke colony story to the power of these things, an entire colony gone without a trace.
He told him stories about their ancestors too, men and women blessed with the ability to use music as a source of magical power. He went on about the Pied Piper, about a link the god Pan, and someone named Zann that he could only find mention of in a Lovecraft story. He claimed that Nero did indeed fiddle as Rome burned but he did so because the fire was one of these things, an entity that evolved beyond that of a thunderstorm. A group formed back in the old country, France or Germany or someplace, the details often changed, that dedicated itself to fighting the monsters that lived in the maelstroms, a cosmic calling from something beyond to protect the world.
His uncle had forced him to learn an instrument, despite his reticence and distaste. His hands still bore the marks of those early failures, lessons writ in red welts and cigar burns. He had hated his uncle for years. The man was possessed of a single-minded cruelty fueled by a sense of divine fanaticism and he poured his faith and sense of duty on the boy until he was sure he would drown in it. He had virtuoso talent for the violin, but not with people.
Then the cancer came; liver, pancreas, and prostate. A fitting trifecta. It ate away at him rapidly, leaving him an insubstantial husk in less than six months. The boy thought he was about to be rid of his uncle and his cruel music lessons forever.
However, the previous night, a hundred miles away, as his uncle was being devoured, a tornado struck his Oklahoma farmhouse. He had thought it just another storm until he saw the shapes the lightning illuminated in the clouds. He had never known such panic before, he wanted desperately to believe that it was just tricks of the light, his imagination running wild from his uncle’s stories, but he knew. He knew they were all true in that moment. The lightning backlit something huge and terrible, something that this world could not contain. He watched as a dog, barking defiance at the thunder, was suddenly gone, evaporated, dissolved into nothing as he watched. With nothing left to do, he grabbed the nearest instrument he could find, a mandola. It was old, the varnish long worn off, the frets were faded, and the nylon strings looked brittle but it would have to do. It was a family instrument, his mother had played it back when he was barely able to walk, he remembered the songs she would sing with it, old songs in Italian. It called to him now, the caress of the wood felt warm and familiar.
It warbled to life as his fingers danced, twisted, and curled along the instrument’s neck, creating the foundation, a drone that would stand against the power outside. It barely worked, the sound was small and pathetic compared to the claps of thunder that countered it outside. His fear made his hands tremble and the music faltered. The storm grew, he could feel the thing inside reaching for him, fingers from something outside his reality clutching for him. The welts and burns roared to life and his rage ignited for the first time. A fiery brand against an onslaught of darkness, he poured the rage into the music he was creating, the mandola hummed and droned, textures came into his thoughts and expressed themselves through the chirp of the electronic instrument. The storm lessened. His rage, at his uncle and his opponent, continued, howling with life and ascendancy. His power soared and beat it back, pushing it back and swallowing its counterattacks with counterpoints of his own until it died. He believed then.
"You’ve seen them now,” his uncle had said, his voice phlegmy and thin. His eyes were lasers, boring into the boy’s soul. His uncle grabbed him with a desiccated hand. “You know! You know! It’s your duty! Fight the storms! Fight them with your sound!” The dying man broke into a coughing fit so intense the boy thought it would break his frail back. Nurses poured in from nowhere and rushed him out. That was the last time he would see his uncle. That had been two decades ago.
A low rumble brought him back out of his reverie, a sound like the footsteps of a giant. He stared at the dark clouds, still barely a smudge on the horizon for a long moment, he watched as flashes of purple light ignited somewhere within its depths. It might be mistaken for beautiful. He came out of his reverie bit by bit until the screams and shouts of the people around him became almost too loud to bear. He looked up, his eye searching desperately. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for until his eyes locked on a transformer nuzzled into a telephone pole. He sneered, reached out, and closed his fist. An explosion of sparks drowned out any human sound in the area. The low remnants of laughter, tumbled out of his mouth. Another transformer sparked and exploded, then another and another going up the street. The people around him screamed and ran, forgetting the target of their mob rage in their panic. He slumped to the ground, exhausted from his effort.
He only had seconds, he knew, until the town remembered he was there. His throat throbbed as he swallowed, the pain was glass sharp. He stood up falteringly, his legs nearly giving way beneath him again. He stiffened and flexed his back. They had dragged him to the park in search a tall strong tree barely two blocks from the gas station where his car had been left unattended, he could even see from this angle.
He raced to his car on tired feet, dodging into an alleyway and behind a dumpster whenever he heard the sounds of people. Their voices were garbled and indistinct. He was nearly to his car, less than a hundred yards. He took a deep breath, winced, and ran as fast as he could. He was blind to everything but his faded silver car. He couldn’t hear or see anything else around him. The space between them grew smaller and smaller, but in his exhaustion it felt too long, the space expanded and contracted until he overshot the car and ran hard into the gas pump. He howled and kicked it.
Ducking into his backseat, a thought came into his head: leave these superstitious nutbag yokels to their fate. It was moving fast, it would get here soon and begin to feed. Why shouldn’t he let it? This whole ordeal started when child and a middle aged blonde woman had seen him utter a few indecipherable words and make a few peculiar gestures to a broken gas pump that caused part of it to crumble. Accusations flew like wildfire and before he had had a chance to get his bearings to either escape or blow them all to great yucca plant in the sky they had him strung up. These hinterland morons didn’t deserve his protection, his magic, his power.
The thought was honey-sweet and liberating but it was poison all the same. Say he did leave them to their fate, this cloud abomination would devour them and it would grow more powerful, it might even change its form, something he couldn’t track down, couldn’t find again. No, he’d save them from this thing because it was his enemy. He would burn this town to the ground in the aftermath though. This one stop light town would pay the price for his wounds. He chuckled, savoring the thought, but the sting of the wound threw him back out into the real world.
His mandola sat next to him, his only companion for the last twenty years, a massive crack splitting the neck in half. The strings, customized bronze with charms inlayed, had been ripped from the pegboard and hung limp. He stared at his instrument, his only connection to his mother, in shock, his body went cold and his stomach twisted in disbelief, a whimper escaped his dry, cracked lips.
His rage, no matter how potent, would be completely ineffectual without its conduit. The warm rhythms, the dry drones, melodies woven with centuries of tradition, were all gone, their power with them, his instrument was unplayable. How had this happened? Had the mob done this in the struggle? Was it the thing building on the horizon, exerting its power?
A sullen, despondent eye was case upon the old leather violin case, caked in the dust of years. He kept the case, and the instrument inside, only out of respect for his uncle. It had been his instrument, the conduit for his own power. His hands winced away from it as welts and cigar burns, decades gone, formed on his hands as if they had never healed, he could hear angry words in German shouting at him.
He cursed and opened the case, flinging the locks open to reveal the richly dark body of the violin, at least sixty years old now. It was worn, spiral lines of dust coated the pegboard, down the neck, and over the body. He took it in his hands, testing its weight. It was well balanced, he placed it beneath his chin. It was cool to the touch but otherwise felt unremarkable. He sighed, casting an eye to his mandola. This was going to have to do. A rumble outside the car forced his attention away. The tempest, only a smudge on the horizon before, was now much closer, moving supernaturally fast. He cursed again. He needed to get a place with a good vantage point, a place that his performance could counteract its strength.
The general store, across the empty street, was at least three stories high. A ladder, untrustworthy with rust and age, dangled on the side. Without taking the time to think, he was out of the car, leaving behind the protection it offered and into the open, exposed air.
His muscles ached and groaned from the climb up three stories on the ladder. The roof of the general store was a chaotic mess, trash flittered about, faded sheets of paper swished and crinkled in the wind, brushing over the dry gravel. Spider webs, haunts of fiddlebacks and black widows, stretched over the outworks and into the shadowy corners. The whole place smelled of decay, dry and hungry. He wrinkled his nose involuntarily. He could still hear the angry, frantic hum of the people below him, searching for him. It might have been an enjoyable buzz, a drone that would have been at home in any industrial ambient album. He smelt the air, rain was coming. It was almost pleasant, but there was something rotten in this petrichor. The orange sky roared, wind picking up and blowing a harsh, gritty handful of dirt into his mouth. It tasted of moldy and dry, with hints of electricity. He spat, trying to rid himself of the taste, the wind nearly blew it back in his face. He hardly noticed though, a gigantic black mass was hurdling toward the town, a slice of void cutting into reality itself. It was still miles away, but the flat land all around the town made the distance deceptive. The air pressure changed, dropping so suddenly that his ear popped and sent shivers of pain down his neck. Lightning crackled and fizzed somewhere in the monstrous wall cloud, sending out waves of thunder, whose very sound sent shockwaves ripping though the building, causing it to creak and rumble.
The storm was massive. Tornadoes were uncommon out here in the desert of New Mexico, the elevation making the air too thin for them to form regularly, but the colossal wall-cloud was much larger than anything he had ever seen during his youth in Oklahoma. Within just a few minutes it had grown from a smudge, a blip of dark cloud to a monster than tore the horizon apart and blotted out the sun. He was terrified; it was far, far larger than anything he had ever faced. It was a grizzly bear and all the other entities he had faced were mere teddy bears. He felt small, tiny, utterly meaningless and insignificant. His shadow shriveled.
He lowered down to a crouch, cradling the violin as if it were an infant. His hands shook as he placed clumsy fingers on the tuning pegs, shifting them infinitesimally up and down. The strings, catgut as far as he could tell, were still in pristine condition, they hummed with life, with rich vibrant sound as he plucked them, testing their tune. They were charmed, he knew. That was good, he was going to need all the help he could get. He stood back up, but his hands and knees still wobbly.
Below him, the sounds of people shouting in anger turned to people shouting in fear. There was no way to ignore the strangeness of the weather, even if they had no idea what it was. They feared it. He could feel the waves of fear reverberating up from the ground, a thrumming aimed directly at the clouds as they came barreling in. With each wave of fear the tempest consumed, it grew larger, more monstrous, the pitch-black night that suddenly fell on the tiny desert town grew darker. Soon, it was not shouts of fear, but the shouts and cries of sheer panic. He knew that kind of fear, it was the same he had felt in his first battle. The waves came faster and stronger now, he nearly lost his balance as they buffeted past him. It licked up each wave.
He rested the violin on his shoulder and drew the bow across the strings. The sound was rich and velvety, the drone was warm and light, the air about him felt more at ease, the dread, at least within his small radius, dissipated. He fixed his mind on the sound, held it and drew it out, using the magic his uncle had taught him to amplify and shape the music as it came from him. He fed his rage into it, another draw, his fingers flying across the neck to play new notes, the sounds mixed in the air, hung heavy about him. He fed his confidence, weaving melodies that lilted across the roof top.
He created a barrier around him, a shield against the onslaught of hunger, entropy, and fear. He gritted his teeth. This storm was strong, it was still miles away yet he could feel the battering of the wind against the shield; he could feel the sound of ice shard ripping into him, in the shield. Another note warbled from the violin, lashing out against the wind. It hung in the air, he poured his rage into the note letting hang in the air much longer than it should have, increasing its volume and its range. A smile played over his sweat stained features. He was putting up a good defense.
Then the rain began to fall.
At first it was just a few drops, cold but isolated, but the torrents began soon after. Hail blasted him, pummeling him with body blows. He faltered, his knee gave out and he nearly tumbled. He caught himself, just barely, bowing a low note, so low that even he, with his keen sense of sound, could barely register its existence. The thrum from the note resounded off the rooftop, bounding through space as it crashed against the rain. The building next to the general store, a boutique of some kind, suddenly melted, dissolving into ash that spend upward into the cloud. He gulped. Screams began, a cacophonous accompaniment to the thunder and lightning. He felt their fear, understood the abject terror that was ripping through the city. Another building, several blocks away, vanished. Glass shattered. He spared a heartbeat to look down and a saw people running, screaming, desperately trying to reach shelter. A bolt of light flashed and they were gone, ripped out of the fabric of the universe as if they had never been there.
A lightning bolt struck the roof, cracking the air and sending waves of malignant hunger into him. His neck wound began to throb, it pulsed with a life all its own. He could feel himself getting weaker. His rage fueled him, but it was wild and unfocused, it was ebbing . It did not come from a single source, it wasn’t as pure as it should have been. With such impurity, his power drained fast. He played on, frantically letting his fingers skip and jump across the strings. He couldn’t keep track of all the notes in the air, desperately pulsing against the powers of his opponent, it was all he could do to defend himself against the feeding frenzy.
“
You know! Fight them with your sound!” The words of his uncle came to his mind, and with them all the memories of pain, humiliation, helplessness, isolation, and frustration. And, like that, his rage had a focus. His hands burned with the welts, long healed, but long remembered too. Cigar burns up and down his forearms surged to life, their fire never fully forgotten. He raged. He howled as he played, his voice surging forth in an onslaught, the pain in his neck was no barrier for this rage. This rage was aged like a fine whisky. It burned as he poured it into the air, leaving a cinnamon flavor in his mouth. He smiled, his arms were tired, his fingers burned with exhaustion, but the exhilaration was in him, fueling him. He howled at his uncle, at the abuses he suffered at his hand. He played a melody that danced and vibrated, surging downward to the streets in an almost visible hue of pink and purple.
He felt warmth in his muscles, in his bones. Exhaustion dripped away as sounds stitched themselves together, given life by his rage to form another barrier against the maelstrom. Finally, he was pushing it back, starving it. He laughed, a high pitched ululation that mixed and began a counterpoint to the hum of the violin, the two sounds, like elegant ballroom dancers, moved in unison, throwing off waves upon waves of power. He watched as the black clouds gave ground, moved back, retreated. He drew the bow across the strings a final time, using the rest of his energy to build a melody that would eat away at the gloom. With tears in his eyes, he collapsed.
The clouds broke, scattering. Sunlight, weak, began to peer through, snaking its way through the maze of sky until the town was once again illuminated by the vibrant noon sun, expelling the void back to its primordial prison. Voices, indistinct and muddled, began to fill the air, voices filled with relief and consolation. The air was sweet, tiny waves of hope filled the air, banishing shadows and nightmares. The sound was a soothing balm.
His neck throbbed, but the pain felt distant. His rage was gone, spent. Rage was a strong fuel, but it burned quickly when unfocused. Whatever ill will he had harbored against the people of this town had been consumed by the storm, he had none left. It would be for the best. Everyone here had suffered and would still suffer from the terrors they saw in the shadowy mass of thunder and lightning. They had seen their friends and family eaten by wind and rain, their homes dissolved into nothing. That was a harsher punishment than he could have meted out.
The he felt the town collectively exhale, and so did he.