Chapter Text
“Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.”
—Mark Twain, Recollections of Joan of Arc
From the outside, the Paramour is beautiful. To look at it, there’s nothing of the haunted house: no dark stone or steep sloping roofs; no dirty dormer windows or signs of disrepair; no climbing ivy or tangles of dense and unkempt vegetation. The stucco walls are a warm yellow-brown, the doors arched, and red brick lines the roof, the foundations, the windows. The mansion itself is huge, in the middle of LA and surrounded by plants that remain inexplicably green. If there is a gardener or groundskeeper, they must come at night, because no one’s ever encountered them. They’ve been here for weeks and Ray hasn’t seen a single sign of life—not one spider or cockroach, or any living thing within these walls that didn’t come in with them.
He hasn’t seen it, but he can hear it; there’s something inside the walls here, though whether it’s living is yet to be determined. A low, unsettled rumbling, like a storm in the distance. The kind of storm that’s happening somewhere else, no cause for worry and nothing to do about it if there was. Storms always start that way. That faraway crackling, electricity humming somewhere below sound, crawling up the back of your neck and tingling sharp-sour on the tongue. A long ways off, like smoke on the horizon, until suddenly it’s close, closer, right on top of you—and so Ray worries anyway. He listens and waits, and this is what he hears: a storm in the walls, and it’s coming for them.
One thing remains true; there’s nothing to be done about it. The house has no cell service, and they don’t have any access to cars on the premises, everything just far enough to be too far to bother walking. It’s why they chose the Paramour in the first place.
Gerard seemed possessed by the idea of the house as soon as Rob showed it to them. It lit something up behind his eyes, and Ray wonders now if he should have looked closer. If the familiar glow of Gerard’s enthusiasm would have taken on a green and sickly tinge away from the hotel’s warm incandescents, the way he’s heard the sky turns green just before a tornado hits. If he would have felt the tingling on his skin, seen the heavy clouds gathering on the distant horizon. He doubts it would have mattered. The storm had coalesced in that moment; those clouds crept ever closer, and there was no moving out of their path.
We have to push ourselves right to the edge, Gerard had said. Gerard has an intuition about these things, and so Ray went along: no secondary accommodations, no breaks except the festival they’d already signed onto. Frank had reservations, but Mikey hadn’t cared, which meant he threw in his lot with Gerard out of loyalty. And so Frank was outvoted.
Once they arrived, they threw themselves into a punishing studio schedule, clocking twelve hour days in the cavernous ballroom where they’d set up to record the demos. It was colder in that room than any house in Los Angeles should have been. The chill seemed to follow them everywhere. Even outside in the sunshine Ray felt it, like a shard of ice had cut him to the bone. Like the tip had become lodged there and was slowly melting, cold water seeping out into his veins.
Sometimes it seemed the whole house was against them. There was a darkness lurking in the unseen places—crouched out of sight around every corner, tucked into the ends of long hallways, whispering through the layers of shadow that gathered in the high ceilings—and an answering darkness in the way they played. Gerard, with his vision, dragged them to the edge. Ray, with his drive, held them up against it, the way he’d hold his pick against a string to make it scream.
They would have stayed right there at the edge, if not for Mikey. His departure shifted the weight distribution and sent the whole thing toppling into free-fall. Ray knows what drove him to it; the edge wasn’t a nice place to live. But then, it never is. To get away from it was to cast the rest of them over it, into the mute darkness that followed.
It happened after the festival. Each of them had held onto the hope, unspoken but shared, that the break would change things. That it would help them claw their way out into the light. And it did. That show was like coming up for air after a long time underwater. Like clawing up through the damp earth after being buried alive. Ripped free from the dark embrace of the Paramour, the festival was blinding, the crowd pulsing with life. They’d dug their fingernails into the sunlight there; swallowed the whitewater roar of the crowd; ripped into the fresh air with desperate, clawing guitars, violent drum beats, Gerard’s voice raised in a jagged scream. They’d hoped to drag pieces of it with them back down into the dark. But those shreds of light guttered and went out, like a candle in a window that someone forgot to shut, and that hope fizzled into despair. Of all of them, it hit Mikey hardest.
Ray still isn’t sure what happened to Mikey. All he knows is the look on Gerard’s face, white as a dry bone, when he told them that they had to get Mikey out of here. They had to get Mikey out of here right now.
Mikey had packed his bags, and Stacy came in her car to take him to her place, where he would stay. Gerard had stood in the yard and watched the car crawling away down the drive until it disappeared behind the curve of the hill. He hadn’t put on shoes, and his socks slowly dampened in the grass, still wet from the rain that fell in sheets the night before. When he finally went inside, he left damp footprints in a trail up the stairs: dark spots on the ornate carpet that lingered longer than they should have. Ray had stepped in one hours later, and it soaked his sock through to the skin.
Mikey’s leaving lets the darkness in. There was a protective factor to having the band all together that cracks with his absence. Writing comes to a standstill, and after that everything stagnates. The whole house seems to take on the dark, dead smell of standing water, and things they’d been ignoring bubble up to the surface, no longer borne down by the steady flow of music.
In its place, other sounds emerge. Some were there all along, and in its absence they grow louder. Yet already Ray could hear them, creeping alongside the chords and the drumbeats and the vocal line, competing with them; biding their time until pockets of silence opened up between notes, chinks in the armor through which they could strike. Doors slamming out of nowhere, voices whispering through empty hallways. The constant shush of water running in Bob’s room. Ray drove them harder to flush those sounds out, pulled each melody tighter to close in the gaps. They built themselves a fortress, a towering wall of sound, and battened down the hatches.
It only takes one crack in the dam before everything falls apart. Every wrong note, every missed beat, every fumbled chord was an opening big enough to slither through. Ray had come down on Mikey hardest, because Mikey left them most vulnerable. And now he’s gone. Ray can’t help resenting him for it; can’t help blaming him. Without him, the music has been silenced, and in its silence wholly new sounds wake, their dark shoots growing through the sunless cracks. Laughter. The howling of the dogs at night. This rumbling. The storm stops and starts and stops again, rising and falling until it takes shape.
As it turns out, there’s no storm at all. It’s just Gerard, on the phone with Mikey in the next room. Ray can hear him talking through the wall, muffled and indistinct, the way he imagines Mikey must sound from the other end of the line.
Of course he’s talking to Mikey; Gerard loves Mikey. So does Ray. It’s strange, to be here without him. As long as there’s been a band, Mikey’s been in it, and his leaving feels wrong. Unnatural.
Ray gets up from the bed where he’d been lying, guitar resting on his chest though he hadn’t been playing, and sets it carefully in its stand. Then he takes the twelve steps down the hallway that put him in front of Gerard’s door.
“How is he?” Ray asks, leaning his shoulder on the doorjamb.
Gerard is sitting on the bed with his legs crossed at the knee. He teeters at the very edge of the mattress, as though afraid the giant four-poster might swallow him whole. His only answer is a short, tense shrug.
“Come on,” says Ray, and he steps inside the door. He’s never been any good at the kind of indifferent nonchalance they’re always being asked to put on for pictures. From inside the doorway, he can see the far wall where Gerard has taped up the paintings and drawings he’d done back at the Oakwoods Apartments, interspersed with the song titles scribbled out in giant letters. “You’re not the only one who’s worried about him.” Underneath lie the words he doesn’t say: He’s not the only one I'm worried about.
Gerard seems to collapse in on himself, like the air in his lungs was the only thing forcing him upright. His hair shines dully, stiff with grease, and when he drags a hand back through it the strands cling together, holding the shape of his fingers. “He’s not doing great,” Gerard admits, scratching at the place where his neck meets his scalp. Ray can hear the rasp of his nails against the short hairs there. “Better than he was, though.”
“He knows we just want him to get better,” Ray says. “Doesn’t he?”
Gerard’s eyes land on him, piercing; the dark circles make them look sunken, cavernous, like empty sockets, his gaze boring into Ray from their depths. “Do we?”
Ray steps back a little to get away from it, then edges forward again when he feels the chill breath of the hallway at his back. “Of course.”
Gerard’s smile is as empty as his eyes. “So that we can get back to writing, right?”
Ray rubs a hand over the back of his neck, feeling cornered. “He’s kind of leaving us in the lurch.”
Gerard nods vaguely and picks up the remote from the bed behind him. “Yeah,” he says, but he’s not looking at Ray anymore, his mind already retreated to that unreachable place he’s been sinking into more and more often lately. He clicks a button, and the reflection from the TV makes his face glow white; puts an eerie flickering light in his eyes. On the screen, Joan of Arc stands on a pyre in front of a crowd, her body engulfed in flames.
Ray retreats, moving quickly through the hallway to get back to his room. He’s already through the door when he remembers Gerard’s suite isn’t supposed to have cell service. He feels the chill overtake him, and as he climbs under the covers he wonders if it was really Mikey on the phone at all, or if Gerard was just talking to static, like Joan of Arc hearing voices in her head. Her death wasn’t meant to be watched with the sound off, Ray thinks. On the screen in Gerard’s room, the whole world remained silent as she burned alive.
They’ve set up in the ballroom that used to be a chapel, and before that an enormous parlor. The room is huge and cold, like the inside of a slaughterhouse. A grand chandelier swoops down from every corner like the racks from which the meat would hang. The ceiling is high, trussed with exposed beams, as though they’re standing in the dead belly of some great beast, its bare ribs stretching above their heads. Sometimes Ray thinks he can feel its breath ghosting over them.
There’s an enormous fireplace on the far wall, but they’re not allowed to use it. Ray’s practically living in the one sweater he brought with him. The air here claws at them with sharp fingers, the chill always pressing, always trying to get in, searching out the cracks. Even while they’re playing, it creeps up their ankles like a climbing vine, its thorns biting at their fingertips. Ray plays like he’s trying to set the guitar on fire just to warm his hands. Like he has to keep playing or he’ll freeze to death.
A squeal of feedback rends the air as Gerard shoves his microphone away. “This isn’t working.”
Ray’s fingers pause on the frets. He lets go of his guitar and shifts it around so that he can shove his hands under his armpits. Already they feel like ice.
“Okay,” Frank says peaceably from his corner. “Take five?” At Gerard’s frustrated growl, he raises an eyebrow. “Ten?”
Gerard shoves at his mic again, though without real intent. His face is pale, as if he’s wearing makeup, but Ray knows he’s not; he hasn’t stepped foot outside since Mikey left. He looks like a ghost. A poltergeist, batting at his equipment with the moody petulance of a disgruntled spirit that just wants to prove it can still exert its will upon the world. “We don’t need ten minutes,” he says, the growl replaced by a whine that sets Ray’s teeth on edge. “We need some fucking songs. We need—we need—“
“Mikey,” Ray finishes quietly, not looking at him, and Gerard seems to sag where he stands.
“Yeah.”
Frank sighs. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. Let’s take the afternoon, all right?” He scrubs both hands down his face, then pulls the shoulder strap over his head and sets his guitar down. “I’m going to my room.” Bob wanders off next, mumbling something unintelligible about the stray dog he somehow brought inside and coaxed up to his suite. In their absence, only Ray and Gerard remain. Gerard is glaring out the window, like he resents the sunlight for daring to intrude upon the shadows of the abattoir. The only light he seems to crave now is the purifying flame, a phrase Ray sometimes hears him whispering to himself. He knows what he means: the thing that possessed him when he screamed into the microphone back in John Naclerio’s basement what feels like a lifetime ago, that made the hairs stand up on Ray’s arms, made him shake a little and cry a little and think this is it. But it hasn’t been it. That fire hasn’t come to them, not since they’ve been here.
Ray’s fingers itch. He doesn’t want to put down the guitar. It feels dangerous somehow; just the thought of lifting the strap over his head makes the hairs prickle along the back of his neck. He wants to put his fingers back to the strings and run through every riff he knows, wants to tear something out of the guitar that makes the air hum against his skin. Build a crackling field of energy between himself and this house that should be dead but isn’t. He wants to get close to Gerard, put their heads together like he does onstage, and wrap him safe inside it too.
When Ray was a child, his brother’s friends told stories of people who sold their souls to the devil for things that turned to ash in their mouths. They got what they asked for, but it never came to them the right way. One that stuck with Ray in particular was about a woman who asked the devil for the gift of talent: the skill to become the greatest musician who ever lived. He gave it, but in the same breath cursed her with an insatiable desire to play music, to the detriment of all else. She played until the strings flayed her fingers to the bone, and even then she couldn’t stop, wearing the bones themselves down into smaller and smaller stubs. Eventually, she starved to death, but only after starving all three of her children.
With each subsequent retelling it became bloodier, until she looked up to find her children rotting away around her and garroted herself with a guitar string, or beat them to death with the body of if after they interrupted her playing. But Ray still thinks that original version was the scariest: a devoted, loving mother, become so obsessed she never even noticed her children wasting away.
When Ray first took up the guitar, he used to be terrified of his own single-minded focus. He’d sit right beside the record player, so close he could feel the vibrations humming through the sleeve of his t-shirt, and lose himself in the music, trying to replicate those sounds. The guitar would draw him in, hypnotic, and he’d forget to eat, piss, sleep, everything else falling away as he slipped down into that place where the music flowed over and through him. Eventually, that flow of music swept the fear away. He can play for hours, but it’s never that hard to put his guitar down at the end of it. At least, it hadn’t been. Now, he’s not so sure.
He feels a sudden sharp tug, a hand fisting in his hair, and a voice in his ear whispers, “Earth to Toro.”
Gerard lets him go again and Ray reels away from him, nearly tripping over his rig. His elbow collides with his guitar, still hooked up to the cabinet, and the discordant sound as the strings grumble their complaint jangles through him. “Jesus!” He steadies himself, stumbling to find his footing before his pedalboard can take him out, and then he’s standing in the middle of the room, panting, like he’s been running for his life. “Don’t do that.”
From a safe distance by the mic stand, having retreated to his own space to avoid retribution, Gerard is giggling. It reverberates oddly through the cavernous space of the ballroom, as though echoed by an unseen chorus. “Sorry, man. I’m sorry. It’s just, you were totally checked out just then. That kind of concentration, you were either thinking about finger picking or, uh, fingering.” His face falls into desolation, like switching from one opera mask to the other, and the manic light in his eyes snuffs out as quickly as it ignited. “Guess I can’t blame you. We’re not playing music, and no one’s having sex.”
Ray doesn’t want the too-wide smile and too-bright eyes back any more than this look. He casts around for something to say that might unstick the mask entirely, get his fingers underneath the edges and peel it off and away. “I don’t know,” he settles on. “Bob brought that girl in the other night.”
Gerard makes a face. It’s better, at least, than the frown that preceded it. Ray has always prided himself on being able to shake Gerard out of a funk, but lately, it hasn’t been going so well. It’s hard to offer someone a hand up when you’re right there in the pit next to them: breathing the same dank air, following the same shadows out of the corners of your eyes. “I don’t want to think about Bob having sex.”
Ray raises his eyebrows. “But you’re okay thinking about me doing it?”
He expects an eye roll, a quick retort, another pulled face, but instead Gerard just shrugs. The chandeliers give him four separate shadows in four different directions, and they all shrug in time. He fiddles with the mic cord and sighs, not seeming to notice the whispery crackle of feedback, the way the mic picks up the bare edge of his voice. “Maybe Mikey’s at least getting some.”
Ray huffs and looks down at his guitar, half to inspect it for any elbow damage and half to avoid Gerard’s eye. He tries not to look at his own shadows, growing out from his feet in each cardinal direction, like four gnarled trees from a single trunk. There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with the guitar, but he starts the process of tuning it anyway, quickly picking his way through the scales. “He fucking better not be.”
“With his fiancée,” Gerard clarifies, rolling his eyes so hard Ray can see the whites of them.
“With anyone,” Ray snaps. “If he abandoned us just to get his dick wet, I’m going to fucking kill him.” Everything sounds slightly off, but he can’t tell if it’s the guitar or just the strange acoustics of the room, his fingers made clumsy by anger or cold.
“He left because he needed to leave,” says Gerard, his voice sharp. Ray grunts and re-frets the same note; the sound slipped away from him in the choral echo of Gerard’s voice, sliding down between the layers and into the dark. “God forbid he finds a little comfort out there. I mean, Jesus, Toro. It’s that or the fucking hospital.”
Ray stops tuning abruptly, looking up to meet Gerard’s eyes. What he sees there makes him grip his guitar tighter. He feels disoriented, like he really did trip over his rig; like someone walked over his grave, or shot his shadow through the heart. “Is it really that bad?”
Gerard takes a shaky breath and steps closer to him. Ray doesn’t even think before reaching for him, pulling him into a one-armed hug, made awkward by the guitar still strapped around his neck. Around them, their many shadows slither and twine together like the heads of a hydra. “Yeah,” Gerard says, muffled into Ray’s shoulder; the word held close between them, nestled into the dip of Ray’s collarbone, where it never reaches the rafters and their echoey chorus, never drops down to the floor with its shadows. He can’t help thinking that maybe they won’t grow if nobody feeds them. “It’s really that fucking bad.”
He already feels less solid than he had when they arrived, and Ray wants to keep him here, where listening ears can’t hear him. The room is still freezing, but he’s warm all up and down his side: everywhere he and Gerard touch. “I’m sorry, G,” he says into that same space, shielded by their bodies. “I didn’t—“ Embarrassingly, his voice shakes a little. He clears his throat. “I didn’t know it was like that, man.”
“I just really want him to be okay,” Gerard whispers.
Ray tips his head against Gerard’s, temple to crown, and closes his eyes. His breath feels warm on the side of Ray’s neck. “Yeah. Me too.” Cold fingers curl against Ray’s bare skin where his shirt has ridden up, and he jumps—but it’s only Gerard tucking himself in closer. He giggles a little and pets at Ray’s hip in an attempt to soothe. It works, in a way; the touch settles something inside him, even as goosebumps erupt in the wake of those fingers for a different reason entirely. He’s glad for the side hug, the guitar hanging down between Gerard and any kind of clear view he’d have to Ray’s more obvious reaction.
It wouldn’t take much at all to slot his thigh in between Gerard’s legs; all he’d have to do is turn his hip out, push his knee forward and grind. It’s this thought that finally spurs him to relinquish his hold—it unsettles him, to think that any part of him might take advantage of the way Gerard turned to him in search of comfort, might take that trust and warp it into something ugly in order to claim something never offered in exchange.
Ray hadn’t meant to startle him, but the way he lets go seems to knock Gerard off-balance. His face shocked for a moment into unexpected honesty, he looks lost, scared. Immediate regret tugs Ray back into motion, and he reaches for Gerard once more, but sometime between then and now the few inches of distance between them have become insurmountable; already he’s retreating back into that place in his head that seems to call to him endlessly, where nothing can reach him and no one can follow. With a mumbled excuse Ray can’t quite parse, he slips away from Ray and drifts toward the door. His shadows warp grotesquely around him as they lengthen and shrink, two disappearing as though burrowing into him through the soles of his feet while the other two rise to engulf the whole of the room.
Ray watches him go, then watches the door, left slightly ajar: a space big enough to slither through. He waits for pale fingers to slide into the crack, to wedge it open wide enough for a body to pass. Gerard, returning, or maybe something else entirely. Finally, he rips himself free of the twin strangling hands of fear and hope and sets his fingers back to the fretboard. He tries to play, but his fingers are stiff with cold, and the sound that comes out is worse than nothing: a pile of tinder left out in the rain, too wet to build a fire, not enough to build a wall. In the end, he’s left them more vulnerable than Mikey ever had.