Enter The Stargate
A short work of fiction about Blood Incantation's new album, 'Absolute Elsewhere'
~~
I needed that, Sheriff thought as he drove to his first day back at work. A week at the cabin always does me right. The family had fun, the water was warmer than usual, and I finally replaced that damn awning on the porch.
Sheriff’s good mood wouldn’t make it even halfway to the station. Two squad cars sped past him, lights ablaze. At first, he chuckled. Those boys, always making a flood out of a puddle. It was the caution tape around a house that flipped his switch. Then another taped-up house.
He sat at his desk thirty minutes later, having finally wrested the big picture from the squawking mass of coworkers, civilians, and local brass congregated around the station. The town was overrun with animals. Bear and cougar attacks. Deer in the supermarket. Chipmunks in carburetors. Sure, these things happen, but not all at once. He thought back to the snake he ran over as he pulled out of his driveway—first time he’d ever done that, but probably the thousandth squashed garter he’d seen in his lifetime.
A call with a wildlife specialist later, he’d confirmed the logical suspicion: by and large, these animals all usually dwelled in the protected lands surrounding the nearby mountain.
Sheriff’s cruiser pulled up the gravel driveway of the last house between the town and the State Forest. His department had spent the better part of two days combing the woods, and he’d spent hours on the phone with seismologists, geologists, climatologists, and whateverthefuckogists. Nobody could explain it. Now it was time for boots-on-the-ground police work.
This house had recently entered the rental market, and its current occupants were the members of a local band, seeking an out-of-the-way location to make as much noise as they wanted. Sheriff had heard of these boys, but didn't know them personally. He was just hoping that, given their proximity to the woods, they'd seen something that others in the nearby town hadn't.
A skinny man with long, scraggly hair opened the door. The band, he said, were "out back" in the middle of a recording session and didn't want to be interrupted. As for the animal thing, they'd had a raccoon problem ever since moving in a few months prior, but it had abruptly subsided earlier that week. Other than that, he said, there had been no other strange occurrences.
Sheriff nodded along with the man's responses, maintaining eye contact but letting his peripherals scan the inside of the house. Pizza boxes, a couple of bongs, a TV playing the History Channel—par for the course. But then he noticed a closet, half-open with what appeared to be a sprinkling of dirt around it. Inside were shovels, a pickaxe, and headlamps. Not exactly a Gibson Les Paul, he thought.
He left the closet unmentioned and bid the tenant farewell. Just as he stepped off the porch, he thought he felt a brief, barely perceptible rumble under his feet. He turned around, but scraggly hair had already closed the front door. Sheriff walked to his car, backed out, drove a few hundred yards, and pulled over. He'd just remembered a random detail about that house.
He pulled out an old surveyor's map from his glove compartment, and there his memory was confirmed: there was an old mining shaft on that property. The tunnel had been dynamited to close it off almost 75 years ago, but the entry cave was still accessible.
Sheriff entered the record store on the town's main drag. Not the most orthodox next step, but the owner was the only resident he was aware of that knew the band in more than just passing fashion.
"Honestly," said the clerk, "I've seen less and less of them in the past few months. The last time... Oh yeah, you know what? It was weird, the last time I saw them they came in and bought just a ton of stuff. I always assumed they were on something of a shoestring budget—one record here, a handful of used cheapies there—but this time they left with about $900 worth of LPs."
"What kind of stuff," asked Sheriff, "Different than their usual purchases?"
"Well see, these guys have always had pretty eclectic taste, as long as it's heady—I don't know how familiar you are with the more psychedelic end of the spec—"
"I've seen The Dead five or six times."
"Oh! My apologies. Well, not The Dead exactly, but Chick Corea and Return To Forever-type jazz fusion stuff, ambient synth music, krautrock, all that out-there dub like Lee 'Scratch' Perry, of course, a bunch of metal, but only the weird shit. If I had to sum it up, they seemed hellbent on getting anything considered remotely nerdy."
"They are a metal band, yes?"
"Oh yeah. I think 'cosmic death metal' is the preferred tag."
This conversation had gotten too far into the weeds for Sheriff's liking, and he began to wonder why he came. As he tried to disentangle himself from record store guy's thicket of niche genre specifications, another customer butted in, brandishing a record.
"Hey man, what's up with this cover art? Is it battery-powered or something?"
The clerk furrowed his brow and flipped over the sleeve so Sheriff could see it. On the cover was a woman with a large afro kneeling on the ground in front of an orange background—fairly nondescript, save for the fact that the orange was pulsating with light. The clerk dropped it and began flipping through other stacks. It was the "P" section—the name "Pig Destroyer" caught Sheriff's eye—and he stopped dead at Pink Floyd. Animals, Dark Side..., Meddle, The Wall—all pulsing unnaturally.
"Say Sheriff," he creaked weakly, "That animal problem we've been having... It wouldn't be anything related to radiation, would it?"
Dusk. Again Sheriff drove up the road to the band's rented house, but this time, he parked before he got to the driveway. He headed directly into the trees, looping around the house with a wide berth until he reached a crumbling rock wall about 500 feet past the back door. He felt his way to the cave, careful to not use a light or snap any twigs, despite the fact that the house look dark and deserted.
As he peered into the darkness, he saw a very faint glow in the distance. Crouched, almost crawling, he proceeded forward, slopping through mud, stepping over rubble. Many of the displaced rocks on the cave floor looked freshly dislodged—thanks to the pickaxe, he thought. He reached the source of the light, a narrow slit in the floor that widened when Sheriff lifted up a wooden board that had been fashioned into a makeshift trap door.
He moved even slower, even more carefully, as he lowered himself into the fluorescent gap in the ground. Securely perched on a ledge below, he took stock of his bright surroundings.
It was an expansive cavern laid out like a recording studio, as far as Sheriff could tell. A drum set, racks of guitars and basses, a bunch of old, expensive-looking keyboards with wires emerging every which way, a console with hundreds of knobs. But it was the huge pile in the middle that really caught his attention. It was a pyramid of LPs, towering nearly to the 10-foot ceiling, from which hung a giant glass ball that scraped the top of the record heap and was wired to the console.
Four guys in lab coats scurried around the teetering monolith, playing Jenga with records on the edges. They tossed some aside, and replaced them with others taken from cabinets around the edge of the room. Sheriff silently snapped some pictures on his phone.
"Alright, that looks good, let's try it it there," said one long-haired labcoatsman. The other three scattered to the edges of the room as he approached the console. He grabbed a handle that Sheriff hadn't initially noticed—a big metal switch like the one on electric chairs or in Frankenstein's lab—and pulled it.
Everything started rumbling, and a visible current travelled up to the ball above the pyramid. Objects inside of it, which Sheriff couldn't quite make out, began rattling. After about 30 seconds, the rumbling stopped and the current whimpered to a stop.
"Damn it, back to the drawing board," said longhair number one.
Sheriff had seen enough. He quietly exited the cave and crept back to his car.
He returned the next morning, taking no such precautions. He had backup and a warrant. When the four officers burst into the underground lair, the lab coats were still there, seemingly still hard at work. As his lackeys booked the musicians, Sheriff took a closer look around the studio. Painted on the wall in big, malevolent font were the words "ENTER THE STARGATE."
He had to partially climb the pyramid to get a look inside the glass ball. "Hey, throw me one of those shovels," Sheriff yelled down at another officer. Holding it aloft, he stabbed the ball repeatedly with the shovel's blade until it cracked. Out fell two large slabs of rock, which slid down the side of the pyramid and came to rest on the floor.
"Uh, boss, I think you're gonna wanna see this," said another earthbound officer. Sheriff climbed down and examined the massive stones—or perhaps tablets was the right word. One had a giant "A" carved at the top, the second an "E." Below that were lines and lines of unfamiliar characters.
"You remember the old Microsoft Word 'Wingdings' font, boss? That's what this looks like to me."
"Don't get your greasy mitts all over it," snapped Sheriff, ordering his men to load both into wheelbarrows and take them back to the station along with the band.
"I'll tell ya, reeeeal characters, these guys," said another cop as Sheriff entered his office. "Seemed pretty normal from our initial interviews, but did you see those paintings on the wall? And get a load of the search history on the computer we found down there: 'Convincing David Gilmour impression,' sure, but, 'What does it mean to be human?' 'How to add Doppler effect to guitar?' They're up to something, man."
"Okay, let me take a crack at 'em," said Sheriff. "But first, where are those tablets? I want them to give me some answers about those."
He entered the interrogation room where all four band members, labcoats exchanged for jumpsuits, were chained up. Another officer wheeled in the tablets behind him.
"Alright gentlemen," Sheriff said, "Who's gonna tell me what in the hell is going on here."
Just as longhair number one started to open his mouth, a rumbling started, far more violent than the ones Sheriff had felt in the cave. It was the tablets. Rattling around in the wheelbarrow, they suddenly shot straight up, busting right through the ceiling. All six men looked up to see blinding lights that vanished almost immediately.
Sheriff ran outside to find a huge crowd assembled, all eyes turned towards the mountain. A silver disk, about a quarter-mile in diameter, hovered just above the peak, its array of lights glinting in the distance. He yelled at any cop in earshot, "Go get me those boys!"
A previously silent band member spoke up first: "They actually came. I don't believe it."
"WHO?! What in the ever-living fuck are you talking about," spat Sheriff, sensing a rising tension in the surrounding townsfolk.
A gleeful, mischievous smirk crept onto longhair number one's face. “Can you hear them," he asked, adopting an impishly reverent tone, "Calling your name. Screaming so loud in the dark.”
Steam came out of Sheriff's ears. He reached for his baton, ready to smack that mocking expression right off of this nerd's face, when off in the distance came whirring, bubbling noises. It was coming from the disk, which had begun spinning clockwise.
The whole band's eyes lit up. "They're playing it. They're actually playing it," said one.
Music boomed over the mountainsides to a rapt audience. It frightened them, but no one ran.
Marcus
My "Best of Inbox" playlist will return on the next edition of Inbox Infinity.