Excerpt

Chapter One

One moment there was light; the next there was nothing. The lights snapped off and darkness swallowed the huge amphitheater whole. All sound ceased for one long moment, cut short with a collective indrawn breath. The heady aromas of sweat, perfume, cigarette smoke, and burning hemp permeated the air. Adrenalin pumped and brains were charged; the moment was a still-shot photo against a backdrop of slowed time. Every eye in the building focused forward. It was going to be awesome.

Nick pressed the length of his body as tightly against Ruthie's soft curves as he could get—so close that he could feel where her short skirt stopped and her legs flowed downward, could make out the syncopated rhythm of her heartbeat in the almost total silence. He was aware of her, but his focus was on the stage.

It wasn't visible in the darkness. Only the glimmer of hundreds of Bic lighters, waving back and forth in a flickering, undulating motion, disturbed the eerie vastness. It was hypnotic and powerful. His heartbeat thundered in his chest and vibrated up to resonate through his mind, amplified by the forced silence.

Every muscle was taut; his nerves were on edge. Though it remained invisible, the distant platform pulled against the massed bodies with a magnetic attraction that threatened to press the back of the crowd forward so tightly into the front that they would become a single, human, particleboard conglomeration. Nick grinned into it all fiercely. This, he knew, was it—what it was all about. This was the night.

An odd, half-whining, half-rustling echo rose from all sides at once: the sound of the wings of a thousand bats, rippling, multiplying, growing until the air resonated with the sound. All those thousands of eyes, seconds earlier gripped by the black nothingness that obscured the stage, darted upward in sudden confusion, watching, unwilling to miss a single sight or sensation. In those seconds of diversion, lightning flashed. The air went suddenly white, and the echoing rustle became a roar.

Nick snapped his eyes back from the ceiling to the stage, but all he could make out was the glaring, strobed image of the flash. Sound undulated around him, caressed and pounded him, moving between the hairs that dangled across his forehead and vibrated against his scalp.

Then the glare cleared, and they were there. Maelstrom, chrome-studded leather glittering in the wash of brilliant, multi-colored light. They had snapped into existence like an invasion force from another world. The guitars wailed; the drums pounded, and the incredible volume of the vocals embedded their message in the base of his skull, rising rhythmically through his mind. Slowly, the corners of his mouth twisted up in a demonic grin.

"Righteous!" he screamed, his words lost in the cresting sound of the band and blending subtly with the unchecked bedlam that was the crowd. "Awesome!"

Devon Storme grinned out into the fuzzy expanse of writhing, screaming humanity. His eyes flashed with the fiery glitter of complete control. Slowly, each move a theatrical symphony of motion, he raised his eyes until they faced skyward. His silver hair, long and straight, flowed in an iridescent cascade from his shoulders.

He howled. As the microphone in his hand carried the sound to the amplifiers and mixers, it rose in volume and power and shot from the towers of speaker columns to echo off the acoustically perfect rafters, carom wildly from the walls, and lift the audience to an even higher emotional level. It took them to "the edge."

From where he stood, concentrating his energy on the pitch and the resonance of that one long screaming note, he couldn't hear the overpowering sound he was creating. The monitors on stage were set for a much lower decibel level. He judged how he affected changes in the crowd by their motion. Each variation of sound flowed through the seething mass of bodies in waves. It was exhilarating beyond any other high. They were his, his and Maelstrom's, and they were in for the night of their lives. He snapped his eyes downward, focusing on an abstract point near the center of the crowd. With the lights glaring in his face, he couldn't make out any individual faces beyond the first three rows, just a twisting, swaying mass of energy and emotion. Without warning he brought his hand up, then back down, and pointed his finger into the crowd. He tossed back his hair and launched into the first song. Behind him the guitars screamed and the bass rolled like thunder. He rode the eye of the storm and fired his words like bolts of energy into the eager targets below him.

"Ride upon the dragon's breath,

The essence of the Mistral Wind,

Take the pathways sealed to man,

Ride the serpents coiling scales,

Alone upon the dragon's breath,

Ride it if you dare!"

He felt the psychic pressure of their eyes, all of their eyes, riveted to his face, his body. Every leap or twist brought screams of adulation, ripples of movement. The crowd, entangled in his words, had become an extension of the band, a huge, monstrous body of flesh with the music at its core, the band as its brain.

The song ended, but the steady backbeat of the drums never faded. He smiled out at his disciples and tilted his head to the side in a patented gesture that said, "Hey, let's party!" It was a universal body language that was eloquent in a way that even the music fell short of.

"Are we happy tonight?" he asked, voice crashing and echoing, otherworldly and hypnotic. "Are we ready for the Storm?"

He swung his hair about and swept the crowd with a leering scrutiny that hushed what little sound remained. "We are all here, you know," he continued. "The Mechanic, on drums."

His voice faded into the resounding beat. A tremor of snare and symbols rang out, then another, a building crescendo of crashing, rhythmic thunder. Cresting on the wave of an avalanche of syncopation, The Mechanic's hair spun, and sweat flew from his brow, sparkling like small rivulets of light. Then the thunder faded slowly, returning to a steady, deceptively intricate backbeat. Stepping forward once again, Devon smiled.

"Beside me rides The Force, rhythm guitar." A crackle of distortion rocked out and wove itself into the rhythm of the drums, small flourishes and eddies of notes rippling through the steady, droning resonance of the chords.

"And Tommy Thunder on bass!" he snapped, ushering in a pummeling, bone-shaking rush of deep, rich notes, perfectly timed with the drums, but so closely woven with the chords and notes of the guitar that the two might be a single instrument, the sound born of a single thought.

The music was gathering speed now, and Devon threw his hands over his head as he cried, "Lightning!"

Beside him, the short, blonde-haired guitarist moved slightly forward and launched into a flurry of notes that hit the amphitheater like a waterfall of sound, bursting through the structure of the music but disturbing nothing, flawlessly running harmonic foot races with bass and drum, and speeding through the rhythm like quicksilver.

Louie "Lightning" Rivers was hot. Devon knew it; the crowd knew it, and Lightning knew it. Devon's smile widened yet again. The music was there—right on the edge, and the crowd was eating it up, absolutely entranced, with the band's hole card yet to be played. It was time to bring on the show-stopper of all showstoppers.

Stepping further to one side, just out of the spotlight, he grabbed the second microphone that awaited him there. He raised his arm above his head, a sign to the lighting crew, and the spotlights dimmed, replaced by a greenish glow that was brightest at the center of the stage.

"And the Storm," his voice echoed, reciting in deep, mystical tones, "rose to tear and rend. Thunder crashed, Lightning flashed, and the night was taken—taken by…" he hesitated as the music slowed, a seductive blues beat that pulled at the collective limbs of the crowd with invisible strings, forcing them into sinuous motion, "Gail Force!"

She slipped from the shadows with lips parted and eyes aglow and gyrated across the stage to stand, writhing and twisting in perfect unison with the waves of sound. Her nearly bare body glowed in the green radiance from above. The lights wound about her, like a giant luminous serpent, tightening its grip. Bodies swayed in time; all eyes were on her as she sent her passion flowing outward, dripped the honey of pure sexual abandon from her skin, flung it from her hair and out in a shower to soak them all. Then she stepped to the microphone, and she sang.



Nick could just make out the haughty, arrogant form of Devon Storme as he stepped forward once more to stand at Gail's side. They were like fire and ice, moon and sun. A perfect complement, one to the other.

It was like a dream. Nick's mind blended one light with another, all light with the sound; and before his eyes a goddess danced, just for him. He continued to press forward, oblivious of his surroundings. The trip was hot. He felt the LSD pump through his veins and tasted it sizzling at the back of his throat, reminding him what network was responsible for the program. WLSD—better living through modern chemistry. Yeah. He hoped he'd be alive when it was all over, but for the moment he was trapped, adrift in the frenzied emotion, twisting in the grasp of Maelstrom.

"Awesome," he thought again—or had he spoken? The moment was lost, and he couldn't quite recall, nor could he remember why he would care. All around him his friends shook, danced, and stared up at the stage, lost in their own private worlds, off on their own trips.

He felt Ruthie press back against him firmly, never letting the contact between them break, or lessen. Her touch, the feel of her body, her scent, every sensory perception wove itself to the vision of Gail Force, toying with his fantasies, driving him right to that edge, that magical Jim Morrison world where anything was possible. His teeth ground together compulsively, and the odd numbing dryness at the back of his throat persisted. Every ten minutes or so, a sizzling crackle shot from his throat to his ears and back down his throat.

Fried, he thought, grinning. What a night!

The music shifted, slow and sensuous, fast and frantic; and it twisted them first one way, then the other. It was magical, the hold the songs had over them, an escapist's dream. The world, its problems, its mundane realities, all had been scraped away to show the bare, essential emotion of the moment. Three hours seemed like three years until it ended, and then it seemed all too short.

Devon and Gail crooned, then screamed, all in perfect harmony; Lightning Louie's solos grew, if possible, faster and more complex as the night wore on. His guitar spoke, cried out, sang, and screeched at the perfect controlling touch of pick and fingers.

It ended, just as it had begun. The lights flashed out; the crowd was stunned to silence, and their next vision was the stage, barren and empty, as the house lights rose from a dim haze to a confusing brilliance. Nick's mind told him that it must be the same stage that met his eyes; he knew it was the same, and yet in some subtle, impossible way it was not.

The fluorescent lights glared; the wooden platform was snarled with wires and dead amplifiers, and the garbage—the refuse of 40,000 screaming fans was stuck to the floor in puddles of spilled soda, beer, and sweat. All of these things registered themselves among Nick's thought patterns, and then were rejected. It was cheap, disgusting, and way too empty. Time to roll.

Ruthie seemed to sense the snapping of the spell, and she peeled herself reluctantly from his embrace. He wondered if it had been the same for her; if she had been dreaming that they were making love, melting to one, flowing together in a molten blob of passion. She looked around at the others, then at Nick; her eyes filled with nervous guilt—with uncertainty.

Ruthie was on Nick's wavelength: he felt it. She was tripping like a rocket, and unlike Nick and the others, it made her feel conspicuous and alone. He smiled at her, willing the sparkle in his eyes to tell her that he was just as far beyond control as she was, just as fucked up and out-of-sync, and that it was okay.

Tripping, he knew, could bring people together, or drive them apart more quickly and completely than any other experience. It forced you to the edge. On the edge you can be pushed just as easily as you can fall—or jump.

"Wow," Weasel commented, breaking the silence and tossing his stringy black hair out of his eyes with one hand. Sweat splashed the rest of them, and he watched the droplets fly, grinning. "Hot trip," he added. "Guess we'd better vacate, though. The air's getting pretty dead in here."

"Well," Flash tossed in, his eyes bright and full of energy, "we can't go home, that's for sure. My mom and dad would fucking freak if they saw me like this. I mean, they already think you guys spend your nights killing old ladies for their bread money and drinking blood. You send me home tripping, mom makes me a sandwich and I tell her to make it stop flopping and breathing so I can eat it…? Nope. No fucking way."

They all laughed and turned toward the doors, where the last dregs of stoners and drunks were weaving their way through the huge exit and into the after-concert bedlam of the parking lot.

Outside waited a surreal world, much different from the confined inner space of the amphitheater. Thousands of cars in various states of departure moved in a slow-motion mechanical dance. The four friends wove their way through small groups of people gathered around the tailgates of trucks to wait for traffic to clear, passing through waves of sound as they moved from the range of one stereo to the next. Some played Maelstrom; others ran the gamut of the safer, more traditional sounds of Morrison or Zeppelin, and the newer, more trip-intense groups like Nine Inch Nails, or Seether. A few adventurous folks even braved the radio and its endless stream of prattle and pseudo-pop nonsense.

They passed through it all in silence, waiting; and they were not disappointed. Flash, as everyone knew he would be, was the first to break the silence, tossing off the words they all wanted to hear.

"Good night to raise the devil," he said, his voice wavering in a horrible impression of Vincent Price. "Shady Grove night?"

Nobody answered, at first. They glanced at one another tentatively, waiting. None of them could face their parents yet, and empty rooms without music, alone, were not real possibilities as long as the drug held them, which would be most of the night.

The shaded paths and whispering mists of the graveyard were a challenge: one that they knew only too well. Every time Flash and Nick were tripping, they somehow ended up there.

Nick said he was looking for ghosts. Ruthie was watching him now, the gleam in his eyes, and the far away smile on his lips. She could believe, when he was this way and when the trip gave her the sight, that he might find them. She wasn't certain if she wanted to be there if he did—some of the real-world ghosts of his life were powerful enough to be frightening. Like his father.

He drew her though, almost like Maelstrom had drawn them all. It was a Shady Grove night; that much was certain, and it was going to be wild. Ruthie drew a little closer to Nick's side and shivered.

The van was still surrounded by wandering kids, open cars, trucks and vehicles of all types, and sound. A thousand stereos blared in melodious discord. This, along with the acid, kept them quiet. They moved in a tight bunch: it seemed safer.

Using the memorization ritual he'd perfected long ago, Flash led them unerringly back to where "The Magic Bus" was parked. He'd purposely put it in plain sight of the parking lot markers 3 and D.

"Welcome, friends," he chanted, spinning slowly to grin at them in his best sideshow manner, "to the third dimension. It is a dimension of sight, and sound. Your coach awaits, the night beckons, and it's going to be a long, long trip…buckle in, and prepare for blast off."

"The rap" had started. Maelstrom had warmed them up, reality was gone, and they all laughed and rushed with the pseudo-energy of LSD-25. When Flash got started, the words flowed on and on, unending waves of profound gibberish. It filled the void, breathed life into dead air.

Sometimes Weasel and Nick joined in—it was like a war zone then. Ruthie was always amazed, unable to catch up or take part, and glad that they were content to leave her out of it, an observer yet still a part of the experience.

Mostly it was just Flash, but tonight Weasel was giving him a run for it. Nick was silent, holding her tightly against him and dreaming. Ruthie waited it out, waited for the cool breeze and shadowy silence of Shady Grove.

The two of them sat in the very back of the van, and she leaned between his legs, cradled in his arms. He reached forward slowly, cupped her breasts in his hands and massaged them sensuously to the beat of the music that now blared from the van's massive stereo.

Weasel had taken the reins, steadily feuding with Flash and keeping him alert. Driving on acid was like a video game, and all of them were acutely aware of what happened to the losing spacecraft in video games. Flash managed it, again, and they rolled out of the lot and onto the freeway, one of a stream of thousands of drunk, stoned, and rowdy vehicles in a river of rushing metal.

Weasel popped another tape into the stereo, and, like a minor flashback, Maelstrom belted out their trademark song, "Tailspin," Gail Force screeching in a high-pitched, soprano whine that belied the otherwise melodic qualities of her voice. The memory of the last few hours snapped vividly back into focus.

Nick's hand, as his thoughts returned to the band, and the concert, drifted toward Ruthie's thigh and continued its sensual massage.

"Yeah," Flash screamed, flooring the van and passing a long string of cars as if they were motionless, "bring on the night!" The highway, in silent agreement, complied. It would be a long trip.