You Must Love This

Some music horror I should probably have saved for Pulp Rock 2, but what the hell.

Image created with Bing’s AI image generator.

The husband-and-wife couple came upon him on a crowded street. People packed so tightly you didn’t notice them when they were around, or when they were gone. A tire iron hidden in a purse. Incongruent. Thunk. He woke up to a black-clad vision, a flat-chested succubus in skimpy leather standing provocatively at the foot of the bed. Tasteful white interior. Minimalist or maybe accidentally aesthetic due to artists’ poverty. We will never sell out, it said. Or perhaps, We have never been given the chance.

She gyrated, muscles twitching, gleaming. Every pelvic thrust a power chord ringing out across a sea of hungry faces. Her bleached blonde hair cut short, bob barely moving, heavy lidded eyes tantalizingly half-open. She was feeling. What she lacked in curves she made up for with lips and cheekbones. Strangely alluring. 

“All of the energy inside,” her vulva seemed to say but it was those other lips that were speaking, voice in pre-orgasmic throes. “We need to move away from . . .” Thrust hips. Volte-face now. 

What the fuck is going on? 

“You have to appreciate,” grind, thrust, her arms directing traffic like on a tarmac in the direction of a smudged-out shadow in the corner of that white, white room, “the unique ability we have . . .” She could barely finish, her breath ragged with excitement. Didn’t succibi usually mount their victims?

“What the fuck is going on?” he croaks, out loud this time. 

Hard to speak. Something hard and black inhibits his trachea. A riding crop held by two hairy knuckled thin hands. Beard-ringed lips brush his ears, wet and quivering. He’d like to push them away but his hands are bound by what is this? Pink shag handcuffs, as though made specifically to affix people to beds. He asks again, “What the fuck?”

“Isn’t she beautiful?”

She is in her way. Boyish body contrasting with decidedly feminine paroxysms of attempted sexy. It was too grotesque, a caricature, but he not by choice couldn’t look away. The hell she mumbling about now?

The husband picked up his wife’s train of thought. “What she means is we need to move away from the testosterone-laced whiteness of most musical forms and bring guitar-based rock back to its roots.” 

“Oh, okay,” he grunted. Playing along might make this end sooner. Raving lunatics on street corners fixated upon anyone who accidentally looked up from their phones long enough to make eye contact, the poor bastards. A captive audience. Sometimes a few seconds of acknowledgement was all it took for them to calm down. That’s what we all want, even crazy street preachers, just a modicum attention to remind us that we’re not specters floating through the ether unseen and unheard. Like and subscribe. 

She spoke on and he tuned in like finding the one radio station not blotted out by static: “. . . late seventies it looked like a renaissance in female-led new wave.” Her crotch closer now, inches from his. Thrust bang. She backed away and turned. Boyish the rest of her was, that ass was something else. “Only to be taken away by greedy A&R reps and corporate control of the airwaves. But we are fighting back.”

A guitar in the corner, carelessly perched amidst discarded undergarments of man and woman alike. A red Gibson SG. It had the vibe of an original and not a reissue. Very nice. 

So this was a music thing? 

She squatted, hands on thighs, head turned like trying to squeeze out the mother of all loafs. Instead of flatus her voice a hoarse whisper. “We’re bringing it back. Using the past . . . to create a future . . . oh God . . .”

Oh God he thought too. If only someone in the street had noticed he’d been brained. 

The lights flickered, a photo negative superimposing itself on his eyes, existence toggling the light switch. She was glowing blue now, red eyed in cheap B-movie splendor before coming back to normal. “Normal.”

The husband kissed his ear then whispered seductively: “So what do you think?”

I think I’d rather endure a Roman crucifixion than see what comes next, he wanted to say, but instead forced out “Cool.”

She started singing, ass moving sllllllowwwwwwwwwwlllllyyyyy to the macro beat of a song that suddenly played in his ears. The bed started bouncing (Oh gross!) as the husband moved up and down, up and down, his own ass in some weird rhythm. 

“Oh bay-bee we struggle
To find us some time 
Devour the presence 
Of a deity unkind
We slave for the wages
Of some suits from above
But rip off the Band-Aid 
It’s time for our love
Our loooooove . . .”

It was doggerel, intoxicating, set to pounding bass, drums like frantic pud-pounding, and buzzsaw guitars with a delicate touch. He found himself moving like a puppet on a string, gurgling “No, no . . .”

And that was the chorus he sang along to without even knowing the tune. Such is the power of song:

“No no-o-o-ooh baby no
No no . . .”

Another air-traffic-controller pose and another flicker of reality, but this time it stayed in the off position. He got frightened even more now because it was in time with the song’s middle eight.

She ducked and then stood, arms upraised fingers down like a kid’s version of a zombie. No black wings sprouted from her back, though worse things sprouted from worse places. 

“Do you like it?” the husband whispered. The riding crop tightened so he could only muster “Klrkhllbrg.” Supposed to be “Get me the fuck outta here” but it wasn’t. 

Thrust. Slow and powerful. Black tendrils emerged from her crotch like strands of its skimpy covering taking life. 

“The rawness of Bruce Springsteen, the glamour of Blondie, the insouciant cheekiness of the Velvet Underground . . .”

Husband sounded like he was creaming his jeans, voice thick in hushed ASMR tones. Raw breath with a hint of Thai basil scarfed down for lunch or dinner. What time was it?

Didn’t matter. Those strands kept growing in time to the beat, emanating from each part of her, every crevice, swaying to the music as she kept singing. 

“This love gonna eat me alive
Baby let’s go for a drive . . .”

“The urgency of The Cure, the dark sexiness of Depeche Mode . . . we’re bringing it back,” said the husband, but he was too scared flipped out freaked out frightened panicked frantic horrified horror-stricken petrified hysterical terrified to do anything more than drool and piss. Forget music forget music appreciation this was not right because those tendrils kept growing kept resolving into something vaguely man-shaped and tall and thin so tall it hunched over oh no! 

A nite blite. A scribble monster. Urban legend egregore. He’d seen creepypasta about such things but never thought . . .

Looking at it was the visual equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. Still singing, the wife made grand gestures, urging the beast she had birthed to move towards the bed. It quivered spastically like a cock spurting out the last few droplets in post-coital muscle contractions.

She stopped singing, the song over but the world still weird purples and blacks and blues and her red eyes still glowing. Heaving breath. Wetness dripping down her thighs that wasn’t piss. But not silence. A low-level static thrum like techno bass from a club heard through three floors below. 

“So,” she asks with the the glamour of Blondie, the insouciant cheekiness of the Velvet Underground, the dark sexiness of Depeche Mode, “what do you think?”

The nite blite shuffled close. A doodle-hand reached out, jerking here and there like bad animation, Heisenberg uncertainty animation, in many places and nowhere all at once. He screamed now, he jerked, he spasmed. The riding crop loosened. The power of fear let him break the bed cuffs like fucking Samson but the temple didn’t fall. At least he took the husband by surprise. 

Why did they want his opinion? Why did it matter so much? It made no sense. Nothing made sense. He had to get out if here. Weapon. The guitar. 

Gibson SGs weren’t cold hard slabs of muscle like Les Pauls but they were pretty goddamn solid. And he needed God to damn this goddamn monster. He dove between the scribble monster’s legs, feeling a wave of ice, and slammed head-first into the axe. A true weapon.

Hands around the neck. Choke this motherfucker. It was hard to feel brave with pee-pee running down your legs but it could be done. He turned and swung, intending to hit the nite blite but connecting with the husband. The recoil shivering up his arm made him queasy, as queasy as seeing the husband’s ruined face, blood-splattered beard and squashed nose, broken glasses driven into his forehead. Prematurely balding stringy hair, skinny sickly like a sedentary 62-year-old drinker in a thirty-something’s body. Grown-ass man in a Joy Division t-shirt. Suddenly he didn’t feel so bad. 

The wife did. She screeched and pointed. The nite blite obeyed her command but something in its gait hinted that this demon was not pleased at the state of affairs. It was something deeper and older than anything he (oh God he couldn’t remember his name in the face of this thing) could hope to deal with and all he had was a guitar. 

A swing at the nite blite. It hit something but it  wasn’t solid. The guitar passed through incorporeal resistance and came back around, almost braining himself on the backswing. 

“All you had to do was say you liked it!” screeched the wife. 

“Why?” he screeched back, guitar held before him like a sword. “Why?”

“We need it!” She pounced, knocking him down. Pinning him. Shimmying herself up near over his face.

He nearly puked, nearly choked on his own vomit in true rock n’ roll fashion—John Bonham, Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix, me! He threw her aside. She hit the nite blite and it sort of caught/absorbed her and put her upright. 

“Made from the love of a thousand lost souls!” the wife chanted. “Every kind word, every man’s opinion makes it grow! Behold: validation!”

All the thing did was validate his nightmares. He backed away, guitar at the ready. “You wait me to, to say I liked it? Liked the song?”

The wife’s eyes flared. “Yessssssss!”

Hurt eyes blinking. Damn that scribble monster. “Then I can go? Sure, it was all right.”

She moaned. The nite blite went crazy, expanding and contracting in more there/not there frenzy. “Like you mean it . . .”

“It was really . . . really good.”

“No not enough That tells me nothing! Tell me why . . .” Vocal fry drawing out that last word to eternity and beyond. 

“Fuck I only heard it once! Sounded like a Strokes rip-off anyway!”

“Silence!”

Oh damn oh fuck she did not like that. Neither did the nite blite. Another doodle hand thrust and this one got him. Right through the heart. Held like a bug pinned to a thorn by a shrike. It lifted til feet dangled over the ground and mouth fell open with the sheer weirdness of another thing inside him. This must be what women feel like. No wonder they hate us. Alien intelligence flooded his own with the overwhelming sense indeed of a thousand lost souls but you know what it was? It was an absence that filled him. An absence of love. 

Insight hit him like thunder, like God’s finger stirring his brain. Seriously damaged people need external validation so bad they seek it from complete strangers. The more complete, the more perfect, the better. This was the wisdom granted in his pre-death moment of clarity. Now he knew what drives some to get into “the arts”: a self-loathing so deep as to be monumental. A gaping hole that becomes a galaxy unto itself, the black hole at its center all consuming but never fulfilled. 

“I’m sorry.”

Neither nite blite nor wife appreciated these words. The human monster quivered and quaked and clutched at herself. “What did you say?”

“I said I’m sorry. That you feel like this.” Was this the end? The Big One? When would he die already? 

Ooh it was shaking now, which shook him. Vision jittery like one-thousand ampules of espresso jammed into his forehead. A monitor on the fritz. Unreality made more unreal but this time with a smoldering core of something warm. Love, maybe? “I wish you didn’t have to be like this,” he said. 

The husband groaned, twitched, sat up slowly. 

“But this . . . you have to love this!” The wife clutched her head now, hunched over. All dark sexiness drained and there stood only a five-foot-nothing would-be diva looking for positive write ups on Brooklyn Vegan and Pitchfork. Would she settle for sympathy from an uncool piss-stained regular guy? Who still thinks Led Zeppelin was the pinnacle of rock, and Lynyrd Skynyrd too? 

“I,” and this was hard to say, “I love you. I don’t know you but—”

Howl of pain in his head right up until the nite blite’s doodle finger flew out of his heart like slurped spaghetti and back into that scribbly body. Violent shaking. Maybe his words were violence? He dropped the guitar. Dropped everything because he, in fact, dropped. On the floor. Ouch. 

The man groaning sounded one-thousand years old echoing from some Middle Eastern tomb, but it was his own. Still, he wrangled his voice into coherent words. “Just, just do what you want you know? It doesn’t matter what . . . I think or anyone else.”

“No you just don’t get it!” she screams. “It’s all that matters! It’s the only thing!”

“No, it . . .”

The nite blite collapsed in on itself, scribbles resolving into straight lines, ever shrinking, tighter and tighter into a single horizon before slowly retracting inwards, a point in space, the closing of an old TV set winking out of existence in a fit of embarrassed self-pity. The light returned, reality coming back into its proper God-given shade. His head still hurt, his plants were still and he was still surrounded by two psychos but he was alive and that thing was no more. 

Nobody speaks. What a weird silence. Even that throbbing bass was gone, replaced by the city streets outside. Boom box blaring hip hop, the familiar rhythm a lifeboat to his addled mind. What a weird day. He was delayed he was waylaid and didn’t even make it to the coffee shop. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. 

The wife looks up through mascara running eyes. “You can go now.”

He swallowed, intimidated by her look of vulnerability, suddenly human. “Why me?”

“Because you were there,” said the husband. He spit out a tooth. Ptooie. “Because you were paying attention.”

“I almost got hit by a car looking at my phone once while crossing the street.”

“I said you can go,” said the wife. 

So he went, to continue the day surrounded by humanity awash in its own little worlds where the esteem of strangers was more important than the thought of a dear old friend.

- Alexander