Eight

The World Begins in Fire

     Fire Brisbane switched off his computer. This was unbelievable. Some fan writes him a few e-mails, some kid, and here he goes, catching the fever all over again. Hadn't hardly thought about the Miasma, the Plasma Miasma,for almost three decades. Well, 'hardly' as in 'not more than ten times a day', and here it was '97 and once again it was all he could think about. He wanted to retouch that magic; he wanted to reignite that fire that had driven him back in the 60's, back when he was a kid and the world was an electric landscape of potentialities.
     He wheeled his chair over to his record cabinet; well, 'record closet' was more like it. He's stopped counting at seven thousand LPs; he'd stopped keeping them organized ten years and three moves ago. But he always knew where to find everything; it was some sort of psychic power. There, on the bottom, in between the first Clear Light LP and that GTOs thing; The Plasma Miasma, "Songs from a Halloween Dream". He slid the worn cardboard from the stacks and held it in his hand. "Look at this baby," he thought, "That old thick cardboard, that heavy vinyl. Records really weighed something back in those days." Not as much as 78's, though.
     The cover showed them standing together in front of a swirl of psychedelic patterns, with a mostly Halloween motif; jack-o-lanterns, skulls, crows, Poe, that sort of thing. It was a good cover, really dated but well-designed, with deep, rich colors and an eye-catching font. The record company had done a great job... which kind of made up for the fact that they hadn't gotten much moolah out of them. Kind of.
     It had been their second album, the second of three. Still his favorite... the first had been too poppy, the third a bit too experimental. Great tracks on all of 'em. He flipped the cover over, looked at the back.
     The tracks were listed on the left, with individual black and white pictures of each member of the Plasma Miasma on the right. Pretty straightforward, pretty standard for the time. Look how young they all were! "Daniel Hawthorne - Drums"... nice muttonchops, Danny. "Willie Falcon - Bass". Willie was wearing one of those frilly Edwardian shirts, open to his navel. Chick magnet. Fire smiled. Wild Willie always thought women dug him 'cause he dressed sexy; never caught on that it was his humor that they dug. None of his girlfriends really liked to look at him much. "Andy 'Fire' Brisbane - Lead Vocals, Keyboards". Look how pretentious he used to be, with his face cast in shadows. Pretty funny, now. Ahh, what do you know when you're young? He was an "Artiste". Crazy kid.
     Just below teenaged Andy Brisbane's portrait, a pair of haunted eyes looked out at forty-something Fire Brisbane. Fire sighed.
     "John Symonds - Lead Guitar"
     Fire Brisbane shook his head, sadly. John Symonds. Used to live in an attic above a pizza shop. A dingy heatless square of a room, filled with books. Constantly reading, always learning something. Fire remembered stopping by one afternoon and finding John sitting on his cot, playing guitar while reading a volume of Nietzsche, which he was holding open with his knees. It was amusing to see him try to turn pages without losing the beat.
     He imagined that the room in the attic was not much larger than the room John lived in today. The only difference was that he could leave the attic when he wanted.
     Fire didn't expect that John Symonds would be leaving his new room, his nice padded room at the Arkham Home for the Mentally Disabled. What they used to call an asylum, what they now called an "Enablement Hospice".
     It had been that bad acid of course, the bad acid that everybody took at the Miskatonic gig. Fire still had flashbacks from it every now and then; but he knew enough to just stop what he was doing and ride them out. He rarely drove, just in case; they were like seizures in a way, just something that happened every now and then. No big deal.
     Except when they were happening.
     He slid the record out of its sleeve and placed it on his beat-up old turntable; enjoying the scratchy click of the needle (that, at least, was new; tough to find them these days) as it found its way into the groove of the opening cut, "The Opener of the Way" one of the eerier tracks. He savored the sound effects, the hooting owl and backward guitar that opened the song. Beautifully done, leading perfectly into the keyboard intro. Fire remembered how he used to play it, on a Vox Supercontinental, great instrument but temperamental as hell. Great reedy sound. And here came the drums!
     Then John leapt in with a thunderous guitar chord. Sublime. Spooky. What a great band they used to be. What the hell happened?
     Bad acid.
     Fire was still in contact with a lot of people from the old days, mostly West Coast types, but a few that had even heard of the Miasma. The Internet was fairly swarming with counter-cultural individualists of all age and stripes. Just about everyone these days was sure that there was no such thing as "bad acid"; the prevailing belief was that an improper "set and setting" was the trigger for the proverbial "bad trip".
     But Fire Brisbane didn't buy it. He'd seen an entire room spontaneously freak out. He's seen shared hallucinations, he'd seen psychotic breaks, he'd seen a murder. He'd seen his own guitarist, a cat that was just quite possibly his best friend in the whole world, lose his ever-lovin' mind right in front of his face.
     If it wasn't the acid, what the hell was it?
     The song ended, and the next one began. "Song of Sour Night," an instrumental. A slow, melodious organ weaved its way between intermittent chimes. The guitar was subdued, gentle. It seemed to the casual listener to be backward; but John had played it that way, controlling the sound with a volume pedal. They had often amazed people by duplicating it live. Pretty cool.
     Fire had tried to visit John back in the early seventies, tried many times, but the docs wouldn't allow it, said that Fire was part of the problem and that John would never get better with people from the Plasma Miasma hanging around him. So Fire had stayed away after that. But John never did get better.
     The guitar hit a particularly intense, mind-melting note. On headphones that one note had been a chill-inducer; it seemed to emanate from a point inside your skull. Even without the phones it was still gave Fire a chill. Or maybe that was just the thought that the man who played that incredible note was locked away for good, straight-jacketed and lobotomized for all Fire knew. Damn!
     He wheeled back over to his computer on his ergonomic office chair. Look at that message! he said to himself. Who does that kid think he is? How can he think he could ever fill the shoes of John Symonds? What gall!
     Fire should just tell him where to get off. Tell him what a gen-x waste of time he was, how he should just join some damn grunge band and forget about reuniting the Plasma Miasma. 'Go peddle your papers, kid. That's what Fire should say.
     "Let's do it" was what he did say. Short and sweet. Step off the cliff. Flap arms.
     He hesitated a moment, then hit "Send". There was an electronic rattle as the bits of data headed off to the mysterious land of energy pulses. He thought a moment about a movie he'd seen, "Pulse", about living electricity. Hell of a film. The guy in that was a psychedelic rocker too, Cliff DeYoung, used to play in Clear Light. That LP was around here somewhere too. They were pretty good. Fire saw them play in Boston in '68. Pretty sure it was them. Those days! What a blur.
     Fire thought about his life since the sixties. He hadn't become an actor or anything like that, but at least he was still sane, still working. He'd gotten into the electronics at the end of the decade, puttering around with primitive synthesizers, then transferred that interest to the nascent computer industry. He'd created a couple of programs that still brought in the residual checks; worked for one of the Big Boys for a while but grew disturbed... the company kept the short-hairs in suits upstairs, and Fire and his lot, the heavy-hitter programmers, were kept out of sight in the basement, lest the clients be disgusted by their tie-died shagginess. They were given a lot of freedom , true... to this day, Fire's neck had only been choked by a necktie on three occasions: two weddings (his) and a funeral (not his)... and paid extremely well, but one of those flashbackky days he'd had a vision of himself and his cronies as Morlocks, toiling away n the fluorescent depths while blissful Eloi Capitalists danced overhead. It was a total Feak-out... brr! Still gave him the creeps. So he got out of there. Contract work only, since then.
     And lots of weed.
     The music had fallen by the wayside; he still bought all the newest goodies when they came out, but he hardly used them. No matter how the technology grew, there was still nothing that could duplicate the sound of a SuperContinental. Let alone a Hammond B-3. He'd jammed with some people, even played in a few cover bands in the 80's. But that just plain sucked.
     His marriages had also fallen by the wayside.
     But why not? He was a bitter old throwback, too surly to be a hippie, too progressive to be (God forbid!) a Republican... any wonder people could put up with him only for short bursts of time? In his whole entire life, he'd only been in one relationship that just plain flat-out worked.
     The Plasma Miasma.
     How far the world had fallen since those heady days! Fire couldn't bear to switch the radio some times. The beats were choppy, the melodies grating, the sound sterile. This wasn't music to seep into your brain, to take you to another world; it was music that shouted "Hey! This is the damned world, it sucks and you're stuck here!" Even when the songs were positive, the music was simple nihilism.
     There'd been plenty of people who'd called the Plasma Miasma a "dark" band, even judged by the somber standard set by the other Arkham bands. It was sort of funny... to him, the darkest bands of the sixties (The Doors, Mad River, C.A. Quintet, Barrow Wights) still had a message that the bands of today wouldn't have recognized:

There is something more than this. It may not be something good. But there is something more.

     It wasn't a positive message; in a way, it was a grimmer vision than the Earthbound despair of the existential antiheroes of the 90's. But it was an infinite vision. Like the digital technology they employed, the radio stars of today made music that was specific and finite; and though you could now get a wider range of sound onto a disc than in Fire Brisbane's glory decade, what you were missing was what went on between those little bits of sound.
     Space. Infinite space.
     He would remember that. That's what would differentiate The New Plasma Miasma from all the other old fogey reunion bands. Instead of trying to keep up with the (Jesus) Jones', they would pick up right where they left off. And they would make music that might be dark, might be grim, but it would leave room for the Infinite. He couldn't wait to get going.
     Dark. Hell, there'd been people in the sixties who thought the Grateful Dead were dark!
     The record came to the closing of the first side, a short, mostly a Capella number, "The March of the Dead", inspired by Mexican Halloween parades. There was a skip in the record, and the phrase "Death in the clock shop" kept repeating, until Fire reached over and picked up the needle.
     "That's what I've been," Fire said to himself, "Stuck like a needle in a groove. Not moving forward, just jumping back. Time struck dead." He thought about the appropriateness of the song and its stuck needle for another moment. "But Death, in Tarot, signifies change. Dramatic change. And that's what I'll do, I'll change time. I'll rewind it. Pick up where I left off.
     "The New Plasma Miasma will pick up where the old one left off. We'll finish that third album. The one that could have been our masterpiece. The one for the infinite.
     "The one we debuted at the Miskatonic Acid Test."
     Whistling a tune of his own composition about pits and pendula, Fire Brisbane flipped the Plasma Miasma LP over and prepared to enjoy the second side. A small ritual he would repeat hundreds of times over the next few weeks as he tried to get his mind back into its 60's groove.
     "It's time to make great music again," Fire said, "It's time to summon the infinite."
     The music started.