The Flute of Pan
these are the bones of a lovecraft-esque story that i got the idea for while at my father's band reunion....it isn't very good, but i'm willing to take any critisim...needs a lot of work before it can get anywhere...
“Listen, if we bring a gas powered generator, then hook the amps up to that and hook the guitars and bass and mics up to that, we shouldn’t have a problem. Trust me, it will work.” Steve took a sip of his coffee with an air of self-confidence. He made a face and, picking up the sugar, proceeded to try to mask the flavor of diner coffee.
“I’m down with it. How about you, Mark?”
“Good by me. Just tell me when to be there and I’m there. Not like I have a job to call out of or anything.”
“And you? What about you, Ed?”
“I suppose I’m gonna have to figure out how to get a generator as well as bring all this gear and crap, right? So if I say no, then it’s a no go for everyone. And then everytime we get together it is going to be this whole guilt trip on me because I refused to help the band get together, right? So I might as well say yes.”
“How about you? We can’t have the band without the lead singer.”
Ryan looked up from the menu. “You know, I can get 25% off my next window cleaning? Yeah, sounds good. At least I can finally use some of my old camping gear.”
“You gonna take the three days off and come with us?” Steve looked at me, his eyebrows arched over the caffine stained porceline.
“I don’t play an instrument, and I don’t sing this type of music, and I really need to money and the hours. I don’t think I can manage it.”
“Come on,” Steve said. “Seriously, you work too much.”
“Apparently working at all is tantamount to working too much.”
“Whatever, we need a roadie. And besides, you’ll have a good time, I promise.”
It would go on like this if I didn’t conceed to going. And truth be told, it wasn’t like I wanted to be at work, nor was it like I wasn’t excited at the prospect of going out to the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania and seeing these guys try to form a rock band in the middle of nowhere. The amusement factor alone would easily cover for the hours and money that I would be missing. I was confident in that. After having my responcible adult routine seen through, there wasn’t very much holding me to my current obligations.
“Fine, I’ll take the days off. Just tell me when they are so I can let my boss know. But I am not your roadie, got that?”
For most of my life, I always hung out with guys. With only one or two close female friends, I drifted about in circle of prepetual brothers bent on incest. I wasn’t dating any of these guys, and really had no intentions of it, although I was pretty sure that Steve would be up for the idea should I brooch it with him. I existed in perpetual flux with these guys. Some days I loved being around them, other days I was convinced that I would go nowhere in my life if I kept hanging out with them. While physically in their early 20’s, most of these guys, with the exception of Ed who worked at a liquor store, didn’t have a job and had no intention of getting one. They pretended that they had dreams of becoming rock stars, although they had never played together before. I suppose, if I really thought about it, I hung out with them because they made me feel better about myself. No matter how pathetic, how meager my existance was, at least I wasn’t them. At least I had a steady job, benefits, some semblence of a future. My future as a musician was actually plausible. They were all tone deaf.
About a month later, with Ed’s truck packed with the gear and gasoline and Mark, while Ryan and I got into Steve’s car, we headed out for Pennsylvania. We got onto 80 going west, towards Pennsylvania and away from New Jersey and our regular diner haunt. We figured the waiter would probably miss us when two in the morning roled around and he had nothing to do.
The Jersey barriers that ran up along the thirties gave way to rocks and then gave way to the Delaware Water Gap along our left hand side. It glistened in the first full light of day, and the little islands of trees that dotted the middle of it had a magical affect. But as soon as we crossed over the gap, and had paid the toll to leave Jersey, I felt a vauge feeling a dread. It was completely indescribable, and made even stranger by the belief that should I cross back into Jersey it would have been completely gone. We continued to head west, however, and I continued to feel like the bottom of my stomach was knotting up and slowly trying to get up through my mouth.
The highway lost much of its urban feel up in this area, and the forest began to grow up along the sides of the road. We left behind rest stops, outlet shopping, the first 60 miles of Pennsylvania, Steve following Ed and Ed following a hand drawn map given to him by his older brother. I stared out the window, the fresh morning air making my lungs feel restricted. If I could only figure out what it was that was making me feel like this. True, we were probably going somewhere that we weren't supposed to be. They would be drinking and smoking up, and that was probably not something I wanted to be around, even if I wasn't doing it, if a park ranger or someone came by. But the trip had been cut down to one day (which was why we had left at four thirty in the morning) and I had extracted a promise from Steve that I would be driving home and that Mark would be driving home with me, as would Ed should he need to. So yes, there were many things that should have given me pause and made me think twice about this, but not anything to fill me with an inexplicable dread that ebbed and flowed in my gut. We stayed on the road for a long time and as I was looking out the left hand side of the car, I had no idea what exit we were at. I don't think I could find the place again if I tried.
Suddenly, the brake lights on Ed's truck went on and he made a wide turn onto a small, mostly concelled dirt road on the left hand side of the road. My stomach lurched as Steve did the same manuver with significantly less grace. "Dude, watch it! You're gonna smash our crap if you keep driving like this!" Ryan had woken up with the start of the car and was kept from going back to sleep by the rocks that the poor civic was trying to make its way over. I didn't want to think what the bill he was going to have to pay a mechanic when this was over was going to look like.
Ed kept his lights on the entire time after he turned on the dirt road. Even in the early morning, the sun hardly got through the thick trees that surrounded the road. The rocks under the tires made the car ride feel like a kiddie roller coaster and my fear seemed to increase with every bump and bounce that the car experience. The only thing I could think while driving down the road was "What if we need to get out of here quickly? What if we need to get down this road fast? How are we going to manage that?
There was a small clearing the right of the road and that is where Ed finally pulled over. We had been driving for three hours, and at least fourty five minutes of the ride had been on that dirt road. And while normally I loved taking roads that shouldn't be driven by anything that wasn't made by the army, I couldn't enjoy the ride one bit. No one else seemed to feel anything, though. No one else was nervous, or scared, or even a little creeped out. I figured they had dulled their senses so much that they could no longer experience paranoia even if it was real, and their olafactory senses were so shot to hell they couldn't smell that strange and mildly stomach turning stench that seemed to prevade the clearing.
Ed got out and started to set up the generator with the help of Mark, while Steve threw me the keys and proceeded fill up the cooler had a brought with beer and ice. Ryan picked up and opened a beer, and then went to help Ed. I sat in the car for a while, the door open and my feet resting along the edge, looking out into the trees and completely unwilling to get out. They were yelling and laughing and I felt that it was imperative that we be quite. I didn't know who was listening, but I was sure that someone was. But I couldn't tell them that, it was completely out of the question to bring it up to them. All it would lead to would be a laudry list of crappy advice starting with "If you want to feel better, you should have a beer and a joint" and ending with "You'll never be able to stop worrying so much unless you have sex with me". Since all their suggestions were never going to happen, I simply kept my mouth shut and made my self get up. The slam of the car door horrified me in a way it simply shouldn't have.
They took a while to set up, and it was almost noon before they got the generator/amp/instruments combanation working correctly. Apparently it hadn't been as easy as Steve had thought it would be. I watched all the proceeding with a growing trepidation, one that rose almost the point of a violent illness when I saw how loud they intended to raise the volume. Any protest to keep things quieter was met with reproach for not realizing the sacred importance the volume was to the good of the band.
They decided to call themselves "Shades of Death" after the road, even through none of us lived in the Great Meadows/Independence area of the state. That was what took the first half hour of practice, with a ton of other names thrown around and out and back in again. Then, after they all had something to drink, they began to play.
I would have laughed at their efforts if I didn't feel like I was waiting to die. Sitting trunk of Steve's car facing the group, I watched as they all tried to remember exactly what "Smoke on the Water" sounded like and argued over to exactly what the lyrics of "Stairway to Heaven" were. It hardly mattered as none of them had even a basic knowledge of what they were doing. They were just four guys out in the middle of the woods making a huge racket with their insturments, amps, and generator. This went on for a while until the trees to one side began to move a little. I wished I could hear anything over the cacophony that was being produced in front of me, but all I could do was wait until the man appeared from behind the trees.
Under normal circumstances I would probably have throught he was hot. Maybe a little older than I was, he was tall and broad, with a shaved head and a well kempt goatee that vaugely reminded me of an egyptian pharoah. He was dressed in jeans and a tee shirt and carried an oddly shaped flute in his hand. He was barefoot and his toes were strangely shaped, seeming just a bit too long for his feet. His appearence horrified me beyond reason, and seemed to take my four friends aback. They all suddenly stopped playing and were left with an awkward silence filled by the sound of the generator whirring and winding its way through a gallon of gasoline.
"Hey man," Ryan moved his mouth away from the mike, as if he suddenly shared my fear of being too loud, "do you need something?"
"No," the man said. His voice was very deep and there was edge that I couldn't place. "I heard you playing and thought you might like a flute player. You know, like Jethro Tull. Except completely different. And I have some amazing stuff with me." His accent was Boston, and why the hell he was hanging around in rural Pennsylvania with a bag of weed, a flute, and no shoes was completely beyond me. But I knew that it was nothing I wanted to have anything to do with. Having stayed up all night so I could be sure I would be ready to go by four thirty this morning, I saw this as an wonderful time to go into Steve's car and sleep for a while. That way, I wouldn't have to smell the weed, which made me sick, and maybe some of their awful playing would be blocked out. It was cool for summer, and leaving all the windows up in the car was no problem.
I really have no idea what happened after that. Which is exactly what I have told the police and the parents of these guys, and Ed's boss, and everyone who asks. I went to sleep in the car. The last thing I saw was the man pull the bag out of his back pocket. And then I was having dreams like I had never had before. Always prone to nightmares, it was hardly a rare occurence for me to wake up breathing hard and sweating in the middle of the night, or for me to have to sleep with the light on for the rest of the night. I was used to reaccuring places, but the place I dreamed of that day was no place I had ever been before. The city was cyclopean, huge and wrong. Unlike the places in my dreams with their secret doors and hidden passages, this place was a city of spires and steeples, no doors or windows, no way to get in out of the waist deep water that I was wading in. And the entire time I knew that there was something in that water with me, and I knew that I had to get out of the water, but there was no where to go. I waded through, my feet sluggishly dragged through the thick, cold mud. In my dream, I heard a weird flute sound, always just a bit too far away for me to fully make out the song. I felt that I had heard it before though, that I knew it, and if only I could get close enough to it I could tell what it was.
When I woke up, the sun was beginning to set. The generator had stopped running, although I don't know when. Sitting on the ground, with their instruments abandoned around them, were Steven, Ed, Mark, and Ryan. Their eyes were glassy and blank and they looked ill.
I got out of the car quickly, stumbling over my own feet that had pins and needles now that blood was allowed back in my veins. "Guys," I said softly. "Guys, are you ok? Seriously, this isn't funny." I touched Mark's arm, and found his cold to the touch. Then, I heard the sound of the flute, distantly in the woods. I heard a voice chanting, although I couldn't make out the words. A choir of voices chanted back "Ia! Ia!".
Thats when I left. I got back into the car as fast as I could and sped down the road, the undercarriage probably kicked up sparks. I almost slammed into trees dozens of times and barely missed a truck when I hit 80 going east. I pushed the car up passed 90, passing everyone who wasn't going as fast as I was, praying that a cop would pull me over so that I could have some level of normalacy. And so I could tell him. And he would go back with me and we would find all four guys there laughing hysterically and they would introduce me to their friend Nathan and Nathan would introduce me to all his friends and they all played this elaborate hoax on me because they thought I needed to loosen up a bit.
But no cop pulled me over. And I didn't stop driving until I reached the police station in my own town. There was no way I was going to stop in Pennsylvania, and once in Jersey, I wanted to get as far away from the border as possible.
I went in to speak to the police, and they listened to me with looks of slight confusion on their faces. I tried to lead them back to the place, but really couldn't find it, so they did a search. In the end, they found a pick up truck and a bunch of rusted metal stuff, but most of it was unrecognizable. There were some bones lying around, but the officer just shrugged when he told me about it. "Something was just dragging out its bones," was the phrase he used. They never looked into anything as a murder investigation, simply said that if they didn't show up, they could only assume they were missing persons until a body was found.
I don't know what happened to them. I don't know what they woke up in the woods that day with their failed rock band experiement. Who it was who randomly appeared to them, or where he came from. Perhaps the music they were trying to play woke something that hadn't heard anything since the thin, whining piping of the noxious flute players who continually pipe to the demon-god Azathoth, gibbering mindlessly in the center of the universe. Perhaps.
“Listen, if we bring a gas powered generator, then hook the amps up to that and hook the guitars and bass and mics up to that, we shouldn’t have a problem. Trust me, it will work.” Steve took a sip of his coffee with an air of self-confidence. He made a face and, picking up the sugar, proceeded to try to mask the flavor of diner coffee.
“I’m down with it. How about you, Mark?”
“Good by me. Just tell me when to be there and I’m there. Not like I have a job to call out of or anything.”
“And you? What about you, Ed?”
“I suppose I’m gonna have to figure out how to get a generator as well as bring all this gear and crap, right? So if I say no, then it’s a no go for everyone. And then everytime we get together it is going to be this whole guilt trip on me because I refused to help the band get together, right? So I might as well say yes.”
“How about you? We can’t have the band without the lead singer.”
Ryan looked up from the menu. “You know, I can get 25% off my next window cleaning? Yeah, sounds good. At least I can finally use some of my old camping gear.”
“You gonna take the three days off and come with us?” Steve looked at me, his eyebrows arched over the caffine stained porceline.
“I don’t play an instrument, and I don’t sing this type of music, and I really need to money and the hours. I don’t think I can manage it.”
“Come on,” Steve said. “Seriously, you work too much.”
“Apparently working at all is tantamount to working too much.”
“Whatever, we need a roadie. And besides, you’ll have a good time, I promise.”
It would go on like this if I didn’t conceed to going. And truth be told, it wasn’t like I wanted to be at work, nor was it like I wasn’t excited at the prospect of going out to the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania and seeing these guys try to form a rock band in the middle of nowhere. The amusement factor alone would easily cover for the hours and money that I would be missing. I was confident in that. After having my responcible adult routine seen through, there wasn’t very much holding me to my current obligations.
“Fine, I’ll take the days off. Just tell me when they are so I can let my boss know. But I am not your roadie, got that?”
For most of my life, I always hung out with guys. With only one or two close female friends, I drifted about in circle of prepetual brothers bent on incest. I wasn’t dating any of these guys, and really had no intentions of it, although I was pretty sure that Steve would be up for the idea should I brooch it with him. I existed in perpetual flux with these guys. Some days I loved being around them, other days I was convinced that I would go nowhere in my life if I kept hanging out with them. While physically in their early 20’s, most of these guys, with the exception of Ed who worked at a liquor store, didn’t have a job and had no intention of getting one. They pretended that they had dreams of becoming rock stars, although they had never played together before. I suppose, if I really thought about it, I hung out with them because they made me feel better about myself. No matter how pathetic, how meager my existance was, at least I wasn’t them. At least I had a steady job, benefits, some semblence of a future. My future as a musician was actually plausible. They were all tone deaf.
About a month later, with Ed’s truck packed with the gear and gasoline and Mark, while Ryan and I got into Steve’s car, we headed out for Pennsylvania. We got onto 80 going west, towards Pennsylvania and away from New Jersey and our regular diner haunt. We figured the waiter would probably miss us when two in the morning roled around and he had nothing to do.
The Jersey barriers that ran up along the thirties gave way to rocks and then gave way to the Delaware Water Gap along our left hand side. It glistened in the first full light of day, and the little islands of trees that dotted the middle of it had a magical affect. But as soon as we crossed over the gap, and had paid the toll to leave Jersey, I felt a vauge feeling a dread. It was completely indescribable, and made even stranger by the belief that should I cross back into Jersey it would have been completely gone. We continued to head west, however, and I continued to feel like the bottom of my stomach was knotting up and slowly trying to get up through my mouth.
The highway lost much of its urban feel up in this area, and the forest began to grow up along the sides of the road. We left behind rest stops, outlet shopping, the first 60 miles of Pennsylvania, Steve following Ed and Ed following a hand drawn map given to him by his older brother. I stared out the window, the fresh morning air making my lungs feel restricted. If I could only figure out what it was that was making me feel like this. True, we were probably going somewhere that we weren't supposed to be. They would be drinking and smoking up, and that was probably not something I wanted to be around, even if I wasn't doing it, if a park ranger or someone came by. But the trip had been cut down to one day (which was why we had left at four thirty in the morning) and I had extracted a promise from Steve that I would be driving home and that Mark would be driving home with me, as would Ed should he need to. So yes, there were many things that should have given me pause and made me think twice about this, but not anything to fill me with an inexplicable dread that ebbed and flowed in my gut. We stayed on the road for a long time and as I was looking out the left hand side of the car, I had no idea what exit we were at. I don't think I could find the place again if I tried.
Suddenly, the brake lights on Ed's truck went on and he made a wide turn onto a small, mostly concelled dirt road on the left hand side of the road. My stomach lurched as Steve did the same manuver with significantly less grace. "Dude, watch it! You're gonna smash our crap if you keep driving like this!" Ryan had woken up with the start of the car and was kept from going back to sleep by the rocks that the poor civic was trying to make its way over. I didn't want to think what the bill he was going to have to pay a mechanic when this was over was going to look like.
Ed kept his lights on the entire time after he turned on the dirt road. Even in the early morning, the sun hardly got through the thick trees that surrounded the road. The rocks under the tires made the car ride feel like a kiddie roller coaster and my fear seemed to increase with every bump and bounce that the car experience. The only thing I could think while driving down the road was "What if we need to get out of here quickly? What if we need to get down this road fast? How are we going to manage that?
There was a small clearing the right of the road and that is where Ed finally pulled over. We had been driving for three hours, and at least fourty five minutes of the ride had been on that dirt road. And while normally I loved taking roads that shouldn't be driven by anything that wasn't made by the army, I couldn't enjoy the ride one bit. No one else seemed to feel anything, though. No one else was nervous, or scared, or even a little creeped out. I figured they had dulled their senses so much that they could no longer experience paranoia even if it was real, and their olafactory senses were so shot to hell they couldn't smell that strange and mildly stomach turning stench that seemed to prevade the clearing.
Ed got out and started to set up the generator with the help of Mark, while Steve threw me the keys and proceeded fill up the cooler had a brought with beer and ice. Ryan picked up and opened a beer, and then went to help Ed. I sat in the car for a while, the door open and my feet resting along the edge, looking out into the trees and completely unwilling to get out. They were yelling and laughing and I felt that it was imperative that we be quite. I didn't know who was listening, but I was sure that someone was. But I couldn't tell them that, it was completely out of the question to bring it up to them. All it would lead to would be a laudry list of crappy advice starting with "If you want to feel better, you should have a beer and a joint" and ending with "You'll never be able to stop worrying so much unless you have sex with me". Since all their suggestions were never going to happen, I simply kept my mouth shut and made my self get up. The slam of the car door horrified me in a way it simply shouldn't have.
They took a while to set up, and it was almost noon before they got the generator/amp/instruments combanation working correctly. Apparently it hadn't been as easy as Steve had thought it would be. I watched all the proceeding with a growing trepidation, one that rose almost the point of a violent illness when I saw how loud they intended to raise the volume. Any protest to keep things quieter was met with reproach for not realizing the sacred importance the volume was to the good of the band.
They decided to call themselves "Shades of Death" after the road, even through none of us lived in the Great Meadows/Independence area of the state. That was what took the first half hour of practice, with a ton of other names thrown around and out and back in again. Then, after they all had something to drink, they began to play.
I would have laughed at their efforts if I didn't feel like I was waiting to die. Sitting trunk of Steve's car facing the group, I watched as they all tried to remember exactly what "Smoke on the Water" sounded like and argued over to exactly what the lyrics of "Stairway to Heaven" were. It hardly mattered as none of them had even a basic knowledge of what they were doing. They were just four guys out in the middle of the woods making a huge racket with their insturments, amps, and generator. This went on for a while until the trees to one side began to move a little. I wished I could hear anything over the cacophony that was being produced in front of me, but all I could do was wait until the man appeared from behind the trees.
Under normal circumstances I would probably have throught he was hot. Maybe a little older than I was, he was tall and broad, with a shaved head and a well kempt goatee that vaugely reminded me of an egyptian pharoah. He was dressed in jeans and a tee shirt and carried an oddly shaped flute in his hand. He was barefoot and his toes were strangely shaped, seeming just a bit too long for his feet. His appearence horrified me beyond reason, and seemed to take my four friends aback. They all suddenly stopped playing and were left with an awkward silence filled by the sound of the generator whirring and winding its way through a gallon of gasoline.
"Hey man," Ryan moved his mouth away from the mike, as if he suddenly shared my fear of being too loud, "do you need something?"
"No," the man said. His voice was very deep and there was edge that I couldn't place. "I heard you playing and thought you might like a flute player. You know, like Jethro Tull. Except completely different. And I have some amazing stuff with me." His accent was Boston, and why the hell he was hanging around in rural Pennsylvania with a bag of weed, a flute, and no shoes was completely beyond me. But I knew that it was nothing I wanted to have anything to do with. Having stayed up all night so I could be sure I would be ready to go by four thirty this morning, I saw this as an wonderful time to go into Steve's car and sleep for a while. That way, I wouldn't have to smell the weed, which made me sick, and maybe some of their awful playing would be blocked out. It was cool for summer, and leaving all the windows up in the car was no problem.
I really have no idea what happened after that. Which is exactly what I have told the police and the parents of these guys, and Ed's boss, and everyone who asks. I went to sleep in the car. The last thing I saw was the man pull the bag out of his back pocket. And then I was having dreams like I had never had before. Always prone to nightmares, it was hardly a rare occurence for me to wake up breathing hard and sweating in the middle of the night, or for me to have to sleep with the light on for the rest of the night. I was used to reaccuring places, but the place I dreamed of that day was no place I had ever been before. The city was cyclopean, huge and wrong. Unlike the places in my dreams with their secret doors and hidden passages, this place was a city of spires and steeples, no doors or windows, no way to get in out of the waist deep water that I was wading in. And the entire time I knew that there was something in that water with me, and I knew that I had to get out of the water, but there was no where to go. I waded through, my feet sluggishly dragged through the thick, cold mud. In my dream, I heard a weird flute sound, always just a bit too far away for me to fully make out the song. I felt that I had heard it before though, that I knew it, and if only I could get close enough to it I could tell what it was.
When I woke up, the sun was beginning to set. The generator had stopped running, although I don't know when. Sitting on the ground, with their instruments abandoned around them, were Steven, Ed, Mark, and Ryan. Their eyes were glassy and blank and they looked ill.
I got out of the car quickly, stumbling over my own feet that had pins and needles now that blood was allowed back in my veins. "Guys," I said softly. "Guys, are you ok? Seriously, this isn't funny." I touched Mark's arm, and found his cold to the touch. Then, I heard the sound of the flute, distantly in the woods. I heard a voice chanting, although I couldn't make out the words. A choir of voices chanted back "Ia! Ia!".
Thats when I left. I got back into the car as fast as I could and sped down the road, the undercarriage probably kicked up sparks. I almost slammed into trees dozens of times and barely missed a truck when I hit 80 going east. I pushed the car up passed 90, passing everyone who wasn't going as fast as I was, praying that a cop would pull me over so that I could have some level of normalacy. And so I could tell him. And he would go back with me and we would find all four guys there laughing hysterically and they would introduce me to their friend Nathan and Nathan would introduce me to all his friends and they all played this elaborate hoax on me because they thought I needed to loosen up a bit.
But no cop pulled me over. And I didn't stop driving until I reached the police station in my own town. There was no way I was going to stop in Pennsylvania, and once in Jersey, I wanted to get as far away from the border as possible.
I went in to speak to the police, and they listened to me with looks of slight confusion on their faces. I tried to lead them back to the place, but really couldn't find it, so they did a search. In the end, they found a pick up truck and a bunch of rusted metal stuff, but most of it was unrecognizable. There were some bones lying around, but the officer just shrugged when he told me about it. "Something was just dragging out its bones," was the phrase he used. They never looked into anything as a murder investigation, simply said that if they didn't show up, they could only assume they were missing persons until a body was found.
I don't know what happened to them. I don't know what they woke up in the woods that day with their failed rock band experiement. Who it was who randomly appeared to them, or where he came from. Perhaps the music they were trying to play woke something that hadn't heard anything since the thin, whining piping of the noxious flute players who continually pipe to the demon-god Azathoth, gibbering mindlessly in the center of the universe. Perhaps.