They leave me alone to panic, writing reflexively, half-asleep in the dead of night, stuck on a bus with the other father of my child.
In the middle of the night, someone’s playing acoustic guitar, and I wake from a dream of that high school fantasy of being part of the band, two chords and windows down, singing out into the highway. Everyone becomes a music journalist for that dream. This time, though, it’s nothing benign. Akercock is playing a summoning, and I don’t know if I want to be here for it.
I can hear Eron’s voice, singing a call in a language I don’t know.
We’re driving through a city and like that, there are kids all around us, out of nowhere. I see them running at the bus, like they’ve been waiting for us, straight out of the dark. They’re all bright-eyed and looking lost, and most of them are in their pajamas and underwear.
Some kind of mob planned for publicity? The bus pulls over with a lurch. I get my jacket on and get out. The group outside isn’t just girls. It’s teenagers of all sorts, but that’s what Akercock lives to play for, whatever they are, kids from everywhere.
There are kids for miles. No way for them to have just arrived. They’ve either been here, or they’ve run out into the night and come to this spot on the highway, but whatever happened, there are teenagers as far as the eye can see.
“What’s going on?” I ask Mabel, and she looks at me, her eyes glowing.
“Last concert,” she says. “She takes the child; we take the children.”
Eron Chaos wriggles his way out the roof of the van until he’s standing on top of it. Then he’s playing a song just for them.
This isn’t the normal rock song, though it’s got the usual moaning and wailing. This song fills my head with a kind of strange vision. I find myself kneeling on the sidewalk, but my mind is full of marching, of people in bright cloaks and armfuls of flowers, kids not in their T-shirts, but dressed to kill, leather and sequins and electric pants to match Eron’s.
The rift is there behind him again, a bright gold and green place, and it opens out of the night, the stars making way for it.
“Come on, children,” sings Eron Chaos, and his voice is a hymn. His voice is caustic harmonic spite mixed with soul, and he dances on the roof of the van, his fingers opening up and fire hanging from each one. His eyes are gold and his hair is moving without any wind.
I watch the children start to move toward him. I watch them begin to enter the rift, walking one by one into it. I feel like I can’t move, my muscles full of tar and honey. It’s the song. I try to stand, but I can’t get up. Old man, I think. I don’t have any business here, but here I am.
“What’ll happen to them?” I ask Mabel, who is standing on the roof of the van, looking ready to dive and disappear.
She shrugs. “Something,” she says. “What do you care? The world is ending, buddy.”
The band is playing fully now, and I look up and out into the city. I can see children of Earth coming to us, from everywhere, out of their houses for the first time in some of their lives, walking into something that is either fairyland or something else entirely. There are hundreds of them. Thousands.
They’re blank-faced and slack-jawed, and they are going to their doom, maybe, or to salvation, and I can’t tell. The drummer is playing those pipes again, and drumming a beat that can only be made with eight arms. Eron Chaos is shining with a light that’s coming up out of the rift, and on his head I can see a crown.
I know one thing. It’s all I’ve got.
It’s a lullaby. I made it for the son I adopted, the child born of the fairy queen and her husband, the baby I met and loved and chose.
Our son was trouble. He had to be held tightly, night after night, because when he slept, he shifted from a baby into other things. Some of them were beautiful, and some were terrible. Hummingbird, polar bear, burning brand, starfish, electric eel, brick, straw, rat. Once he became a cloud filled with acid rain and poured down onto the sidewalk, and another time he became a lump of coal.
Tania could sing a note that could make me sleep, and a note that could make me wake, but she had no notes that could make our child stop screaming.
He isn’t my biological son, but I raised him. The moment I saw him, I knew what kind of thing he was. Our baby was a rock & roller, and he wanted rock & roll.
I swallow hard. I try to breathe. I’m not a singer. I’m a writer. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I start to sing that lullaby anyway, over the noise of the best band on Earth, over the magic they’re doing, over the piper summoning the last hopes of salvation into a cave underground.
I sing as loudly as I can sing, a lullaby of Earth and all its dirty concerns. Prayers that switched over to poems when Cohen died, when Bowie died, when Prince died. Funk and rock turned religion. Sinatra-styled stun-gun supernatural soul. I sing Kurt Cobain and will the world not to shift into a full-on disaster. I sing a chorus of the purple one’s grind, and three bars of Patti Smith, and Joan Jett and a bar or two of Elvis and some notes made famous by the Rolling Stones because there is no satisfaction, but you stay on Earth anyway. I’m singing like I’m actually a singer, when really I’m a journalist who’s spent his life following the boys in the band around and writing them down like I was the scribe to the Apocalypse.
I shift the song and sing the rest of what I know, the song I learned from Tania, which is a song of names. All the names of Earth and elsewhere. The city moves around the van, and the band is barely playing now, because the song of their queen shuts them up, even if she’s not here to sing it.
Even if she doesn’t want to sing it with me. Even if I fucked everything up too badly, and even if I can’t save the world. I start to close the rift with my song, shaking the edges of the boundary between fairyland and here.
Eron Chaos is a blinding light of fury and guitar, and he’s standing above me suddenly, looking down on my poor mortal self. I’m like a garter snake beneath a shovel.
It’s only now that I see my wife, standing in the street in her red dress with my son holding her hand. She’s wearing my old leather jacket, the one I thought she burned to ashes, and she’s watching me, her eyes glowing.