SCRAVIR III – Possession, preview chapter

CHAPTER 1

Whitby Pavilion

30th October 2021

It nestles in his hands. He raises it above his head., as his mentor showed him.

A newborn offered to the gods. Then trembling gently on the worktop. A single violent downward sweep of the machete splits it in two, revealing the soft creamy surface within, puckered cerebral wrinkles and folds, glistening in the harsh light of the dressing room.

His guitar is spattered. He wipes it quickly; who knows what this stuff can do to the varnish?

The spoon sinks in easily. He raises it to his nose and sniffs. The sweet sourness makes him shiver.

In no time he has wolfed down everything.

The doors of perception slide apart, smooth as silk. Colours crisp, time splinters and tessellates, smells shimmer, hearing heightens, proprioceptors glow …

The power of cupuaçu.

A glance across the room, anticipating the next knock.
Just five minutes ago he put down his guitar and said, Yeah, and the door had swung open.

Long blood-red hair and a TóMORROW’S GHOSTS festival crew t-shirt. ‘Daniel?’

He had nodded.

‘This arrived for you earlier. It got forgotten in the office.’

She stepped into the room and handed him a cardboard box covered in foreign stamps.

‘We’re really sorry.’ Apologetic smile. ‘Smells a bit. Hope it isn’t something perishable. Oh, and I‘ve been asked to tell you the band are all here. They’re doing the sound check.’

‘Nice t-shirt. Can I get one for my girlfriend?’

‘They’re almost sold out, but I’ll leave one for you on your guitar case.’

‘Thanks. Not too small, she lifts weights in the gym.’

Daniel stares down at the now empty box and the broken fuzzy coconut-like fragments of cupuaçu shell. What the hell, a gig at the Pavilion! Six months in the back rooms of pubs on Church Street and Baxtergate and now this, supporting the visiting bands on Goth Weekend. If this isn’t the occasion then what is?

Almost five years to the day since Thor Lupei introduced him to the strange alchemical elixir that is cupuaçu. On this very spot, in this very dressing room! The one-stop living pharmacy that boosts your immune system and heightens your senses.

As used in the rainforests of Brazil.

Only on that occasion he was a spectator not a performer. A newborn offered to the gods. The fruit and Daniel himself as it turned out.

The machete and the spoon smell of melon, banana, bubblegum, chocolate, pineapple, aniseed, ginger … the fruit that tastes of everything. He tucks spoon and blade back in the pocket designed for sheet music within his guitar case. He has kept the machete there ever since he promised Tiffany that he would throw it away. You can’t ignore or undo your past but you can keep it in check.

Pretty much.

For eighteen months now. Work in progress, you might call it.

His phone vibrates. A message.

Tiffany

Have a great gig. Sorry I can’t be there. My shift won’t finish while eleven. Hope someone is filming 🙂 Rock the room! XX

He smiles, strums a few chords on his guitar and puffs his cheeks.

The door flies open.

‘What the fuck, Danny boy? You’ve missed the soundcheck. We’re on, you bastard, and you’re sitting down here stuffing your face with coconut!’

Liam the drummer is ripped, his teenage tattoos bloated and blurred by endless workouts in the local gym. A roofer in his day job. Head shaved to hide his bald patch, his teeth a medley of different coloured crowns fitted after getting into fights. He is occasionally a decent drummer; when he avoids the booze. Today will not be one of those occasions. If Liam had his way Daniel would have been kicked out of the band months ago. And vice versa. Liam wants Daniel out mainly because he is a southerner and doesn’t belong in Whitby. But also because he is a stuck-up twat who refuses to get pissed before and during and after a gig like normal people do.

Daniel tosses the empty cupuaçu shell into the bin, grabs his guitar and follows Liam out, along the corridor and up the stairs.

‘There’s two hundred people waiting,’ Liam snarls over his shoulder.

The other three are on the stage, turning red and green and blue as the lighting guy fiddles with the overheads. The crowd are standing about, flexing their plastic beer glasses.

Ironic applause as Liam and Daniel approach the stage.

‘He were sitting there eating a sodding coconut,’ Liam tells Matt, the singer, as he pushes his way to the drum kit.

Daniel climbs onto the stage, plugs his guitar into the Marshall amp and strums a couple of chords.

Matt leans across and arches an eyebrow. ‘Why do you wind him up?’

‘Because it’s easy. Because he thinks a metronome is just a name for a short guy on the underground, and because he plays better when he’s angry. It takes the edge off the booze.’

‘Fair point.’
Daniel checks his pedals. The crowd is restless. Matt counts them in for the first number; Liam is already too far gone to count to four without making mistakes.

The music kicks off. Standing beside Matt, the cupuaçu zinging his senses, the excitement and joy of performance coursing his veins, Daniel is in the zone. Music is singing, cascading, flying from his fingertips. Lockdown has been a godsend. With Tiffany’s encouragement, he has used the time well. Aside from various boring jobs, mainly delivering fast food around Whitby on his pushbike, Daniel has been practising his guitar for hours every day. Teaching his muscles to assimilate the movements of the great blues musicians of the past. Copying riffs and solos over and over until they have become absorbed into his fingers, hands, and arms. Thousands of licks, two note pull-offs, double pull-offs, unison bends, stutter bends, finger flutters … Delta blues, Chicago Blues, Buddy Guy, Prince, Hendrix, Clapton, B B King … and ‘Lookin’ Good’ by Magic Sam; the most awesome piece of fingerpicking the universe has yet seen.

He glances across at Tony, the bass player. He feels it too. And Sasha on the keyboards. Even Liam. The beat is so on the nail, so in the pocket, it is frightening. The devil’s music. They exchange grins.

There is no talking in the hall now. Everyone is locked in, watching the band, swaying, dancing, drowning in the beat.

And Daniel is watching them.
Always watch the sheep, Daniel.
He knows what they are all thinking; is this really just the local support act?

It beats playing the beer-sticky floors of backroom bars on the harbour.
Matt is flying, his vocals strutting the tightrope of the high notes with the confidence of an acrobat.

They are only allowed five songs; it’s a long evening and the support act is only there to bring people out of the bar. By the fourth song, a high-octane anthem written by Matt, Sasha and Tony, the hall is packed. Daniel lets rip. His sixteen-bar solo has the crowd jumping and cheering.

It isn’t enough.

Daniel keeps on playing. Round again, his fingers flowing over the fretboard like a murmuration of starlings twisting over flooded fields. Rising, turning. tumbling. The cupuaçu is sparking his synapses, he is a man possessed, a soaring eagle. He is thinking twice as fast as his fingers, not deciding each movement but watching them, coaxing them, guiding them. He has never played like this before. He gazes out at the crowd as he plays. The hall is full. There must be nine hundred in. Daniel stares at individual faces, walks to the front of the stage as he plays, dragging them into his world. Everyone is urging him on, entranced, bewitched. And another sixteen bars. He glances at Sasha and Tony. Like him, they are slaves to the beat, smiling, surfing, sound sculpting a rising crescendo that will lift the roof off the Pavilion.

A tap on his shoulder.
Matt.
He points at himself and mouths the word vocals?

Daniel ends his solo on a high wail that hangs impossibly as it fades. Matt comes back in to sing the last verse and chorus.

As they hit the last chord, Daniel’s feedback scream disappears in a brutal thrashing of drums that slows like a runaway train smacking the buffers.

The crowd roars.

Someone is at the edge of the stage. The stage manager gesturing with his finger; time’s up.

‘We’ve one more piece to play, Mr Stage Manager,’ Matt says into his microphone.

The stage manager shakes his head and points at his watch. ‘Pretty please?’
The crowd stamp their feet and cheer in support “One more. One More. ONE MORE” but the stage manager is having none of it. He climbs up onto the stage and grabs the microphone.

‘Local band 200 Steps there having their brief moment of glory. You can catch them on Thursday nights in the back room of one of the less popular Church Street pubs. And now for the amazing Goth bands you’ve all actually paid to see! Put your hands together for the spectacular …’

The crowd are not best pleased. The stage manager ignores them. Liam kicks over two of the cymbals. He catches up with the others and grabs Daniel’s collar.

‘You useless bastard show-off twat!’
‘Hey! Leave him,’ Matt shouts.
‘It’s all me, me me with you, you lanky shit,’ Liam spits in Daniel’s face.
‘I said leave him.’
Daniel stands his ground.
Guitars in hand, the first of the main acts passes by on their way to the stage.
‘What are you looking at?’ Liam demands, fists clenched.

‘FUCK OFF!’
‘Get him out of here,’ the stage manager snarls, holding the stage door, ‘or security will do it. Now.’
Matt puts his arm round Liam’s shoulder and steers him through the exit. Sasha and Tony have their heads down, avoiding trouble.

They descend the steps to their dressing room. No one speaks as instruments are packed away. Sasha and Matt fidget by the door, keen to leave. Liam is festering on a plastic chair with an open can of brown ale in each hand. He downs them quickly one after the other, tosses the cans across the room, missing the bin, grabs his drumsticks off the table and thunders an angry tattoo on the edge of his chair while muttering incoherently.

‘What’s wrong with his arm?’ Sasha asks, noticing the ugly sores on the drummer’s forearm.

‘None of your fucking business, you limp shit!’

‘Catch you upstairs, guys,’ Matt says. ‘Come on,’ he drags Sasha away before things get worse.

Tony waits for Daniel to close his guitar case. As Daniel joins Tony at the door, Liam staggers to his feet, crosses to the bin and pulls out the broken cupuaçu shell and hurls it at one of the mirrors, smashing it into a hundred pieces.

‘You selfish, selfish southern BASTARD!’ Liam screams.

Tony and Daniel leave Liam to it, go back upstairs, find Matt and Sasha and a couple of beers and join the back of the heaving crowd to watch the main acts.

‘You were awesome!’ someone shouts.

Daniel turns. A group of goths – top hats, bodices, heaving busts, black suits, and vampire teeth – have recognised them.

‘Stage manager should have let you carry on. What a prat.’ ‘Nice guitar, mate.’
‘Great band. You’re better than this lot.’
Daniel turns to Matt. ‘Sorry about …’

Matt shakes his head. ‘Nothing to be sorry about, Dan. We were on the big stage; we needed to go up a level.’

‘You were brilliant,’ Sasha tells Daniel. ‘And your vocals, Matt! Mint!’

‘It were easier tonight, somehow,’ Matt says. ‘In the bars I always worry about making too much noise.’

An hour later Daniel decides to go home. He wants to surprise Tiffany when she gets in from her thirteen-hour shift at the hospital.

‘See you Tuesday,’ Matt tells him. ‘Don’t worry about Liam, it’s just noise.’

‘Like his drumming,’ Tony adds.

With the band’s laughter in his wake, Daniel makes his way through the crowd and out into the night air. The cold wind bites his ears. At the foot of the cliff below, the sea is rough and rowdy. Waves are white smacking the piers. Snub-nosed clouds torpedo the pewter sky. It is raining.

Still on cloud nine, Daniel strides through the Pavilion car park up towards the Whalebone Arch, the North Sea wide as wet Wednesdays to his left, the grass bank up to Clara’s coffee shop and North Terrace on his right. Five long years ago there had been a black double decker bus parked here. The black bus that ambushed him on the Hawsker Road and transformed his existence. And the owner of that bus still lives rent-free in Daniel’s head in those hypnogogic hours between dreams and daylight, undermining his attempts to move on with his life.

Even Thor Lupei would have saluted my playing tonight.

Daniel shifts the strap of the guitar case from his left to his right shoulder and swaps thoughts about Thor Lupei for thoughts about Tiffany, the girl who has transformed his life. For fifteen months now they have lived together in a flat on Cliff Street. She jokes that he may yet become a northerner. She has given him faith in the future, even in the midst of the pandemic. Her quiet courage, her unshakeable down-to- earth belief that things can be better have helped him park his demons. She is his Whitby, his port in a storm, his sanctuary.

And next weekend he’ll take Tiffany to …

The blow comes out of nowhere. One second, he is walking up past the row of parked cars, the next he is flying through the air, too shocked to shout. He slams onto the road, hears the guitar case crack beneath him. His head doesn’t stop with the rest of his body but keeps on going in a parabola that ends with a tarmac crunch that shakes his brain. Hard. Too al dente for Dante. He smells and tastes the pain. A boot catches him several times bang in the stomach. Daniel grunts as the air is kicked out of him.

‘YOU SHITTY, SMUG, SHOW-OFF, SELFISH SHIT!’ Liam.
Must have been waiting behind one of the cars.
Before Daniel can even think to move or fight back he receives a blow to the head and loses consciousness.

When he comes round Daniel immediately feels the vibrations and the noise and knows that he is lying on the uneven floor of a moving vehicle. Blindfolded, arms and legs bound. Heavy metal pounding on a sound system. ‘Fear of the Dark’ by Iron Maiden. Someone is shouting along to the music. Memories trickle back, the taste of tarmac outside the Pavilion.

Things slide noisily around close by. Something thuds into the small of his back. Daniel groans.

The vehicle brakes and Daniel slips across the floor, randomly bumping into other objects. A corner rolls him over and, with a roar of the engine, the vehicle accelerates away. A thunderous bang as they hit an obstacle.

‘Oops-a-daisy!’ the driver laughs manically over the music. Liam.
The road is all crests and cracks. The van’s suspension rattles and grinds and Daniel wriggles his arms and legs, but nothing gives; so trussed up he could teach turkeys a thing or three.

Skid, screech to a stop. The engine fast fades. A door opens and slams. Then another door and Daniel feels himself grabbed by the legs, spun around and dragged.

‘I should let you drop but, if I do, you’ll just be a body in the dirt,’ says Liam, ‘and we won’t have as much fun, will we?’

Daniel is pulled by the arms, hauled up on his feet. The blindfold is whipped off.

‘Not so cocky now, are you, twat?’

A car park beneath the trees. Daniel sees he was right; he has been sharing the back of Liam’s work van with a bag of tools, a drum kit and a bicycle. A vicious zombie blade slashes the gaffer tape that binds Daniel’s legs together. His hands are left tied behind his back. Liam, in jeans and a vest, all tattoos and bulging muscles, stinks of alcohol and cigarettes.

‘We’re going for a little walk.’ Liam stumbles as he steps back.

‘Where’s my guitar?’
‘You won’t need your guitar where you’re going, my love.’ They pass through a gate and onto a puddle-strewn gravel track that leads uphill between tall conifers. Clouds chase across the jagged skyline overhead. The moon has not yet risen. Daniel could try to run off between the trees but they’re so densely planted and it is so dark that he would quickly be snarled up in the branches and, with his hands tied, he has no way to protect his face from being ripped to shreds.

‘Keep going, tosser.’

Liam whistles tunelessly as he pokes Daniel in the back to keep him walking. The track ends eventually with a clearing and a gate. A sign reads ‘Private – No Entry’; a welcome reinforced by coils of friendly razor wire that runs along the top of the gate and along the fence on either side.

Daniel’s gaze shifts to the clearing. Grass, heather and a clear view of the moors.

‘Pretty, isn’t it? Always liked the view. There’s a little drop over there, rocks all the way down then more trees.’

Daniel takes everything in: the trees, the track, the gate, the large rocks and, maybe twenty-five metres away, the edge.

‘This is madness. You want to throw your life away over what?’ Daniel says quietly. ‘A gig?’
‘Not my life thrown away, arsehole. We had a great band till you showed up! We were a band. We played together. No super-hero star-crazy narcissocal … narci … big-headed I’m- the-only-fucking-person-who-matters bollocks. You London twat. So you are going to take a running jump and …’ Liam smiles, mirthlessly.

Liam must weigh twice as much as Daniel. Muscle as well as lard. An ocean of hatred and resentment with an inferiority complex the size of Middlesbrough on his tattooed shoulders, but he is also drunk and drugged up to the brim of his cranium. He is a man possessed.

‘Move.’

It starts to rain. A real downpour. The last five steps are over wet rocks. Daniel gazes down at the drop beneath his feet and shivers. It is a long way down, maybe ten metres to the treetops and further to the leaf litter shadow dark awaiting his broken body. He twists his head round to look at Liam. The drummer grins crookedly, the rain running down the dome of his shaved head.

‘You can either jump or I can sweeten you up with this,’ Liam displays the serrated blade of the zombie knife.

Daniel is keyed-up, tense, alert, every muscle primed taut and ready. It would have been better not to have had that pint of beer but it is what it is. His life depends on the moves he will make in the next few seconds. The Cupuaçu is pumping through his body, giving him a clarity of vision and distance. He has to improve his odds of survival and to do that he needs his hands.

Liam has one leg higher than the other, one foot resting on a rock, his body weight unevenly distributed. Daniel throws himself forwards and right, away from the hand holding the knife. He guesses right. Liam lurches to block Daniel’s path but his foot slips. He tumbles and the blade whistles empty air. Daniel is already on his feet running away from the edge.

He can either head down the track and hope to outrun Liam or free his hands. As he reaches the gate, he spins round to check how much time he has. Liam has only just climbed to his feet. He also appears to have cut himself on his knife and is roaring in fury.

The razor wire on the gate is too high up. Daniel throws himself up against the fence, feeling the razor wire ripping his jacket. On his tiptoes he moves back and forth searching blindly for the wire to snag at the gaffer tape that binds his hands behind his back.

Liam is staggering forwards unsteadily through the wet vegetation.

The razor wire buries itself in the tape. Daniel shifts to and fro, using the wire like a saw to rip through the thick winding of tape. The wire stabs through the sleeves of his jacket, shredding the fabric.

‘You’ve fucking had it, pal!’ Liam snarls as he closes the ground between him and Daniel.

The fibres of the tape are snapping one after the other but there is so much of it. How long does he have? If he runs now, he will still have a reasonable lead down the track.

How did he drive the van in that state?

Liam’s foot is caught in the heather. Daniel keeps going with the razor wire. Only seven or eight metres between him and Liam now. He has left it too late. Frantically he rubs the gaffer tape against the wire. His whole body is itching, like maggots are crawling beneath his skin. His arms and shoulders howl from the exertion. His toes, ankles and calves too. His jacket sleeves are ripped to pieces. The wire doesn’t care what it cuts, gaffer tape, clothing, flesh. Daniel gasps at the sudden steel slicing of skin, slick as a scalpel, crisp as laser through to the bone of his wrist.

And in the same instant the gaffer tape yields to the wire’s razor edge, his hands roll away from each other and he drops down from the fence, twisting his wrists to free them from what remains of the tape.

Liam is almost on him.

Daniel ducks the slash of the zombie knife, pitching forwards, losing then regaining his footing then measuring his length on the ground. Behind him a loud screech of metal against metal as the knife smacks the coils of razor wire, ripping the blade from Liam’s hand. The knife spins away over the fence to disappear among the trees.

Liam roars. In two steps he is standing over Daniel, eyes black with fury.

Daniel aches from head to toe but his mind is clear as the drummer grabs the lapels of his jacket and hoiks him upwards toward his beer-breath face.

‘You miserable little shit. You’re dead meat.’

‘You don’t have to do this, Liam,’ Daniel says calmly. ‘You can still back off and go home.’

Liam headbutts him in the nose. The pain is immediate and severe.

Daniel snaps.
It’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget.
And Daniel has tried so hard to forget.
Like a tiger released from its cage. A cornered rat.

Purposeful. Decisive. Brutal.
From that place of absolute calm in the storm, Daniel focuses the art and power of creierul anticilor from deep within the oldest part of the human brain. His hands reach up and find Liam’s neck. The ember whips into a flame and Daniel propels the energy through his fingers and into the tattooed neck of his assailant. Liam staggers back. Daniel uses the drummer’s movement to pull him up onto his feet.

How can a skinny runt like Daniel be so strong?

Liam’s hands lose their grip and fall away from Daniel’s lapels.

‘Fuck you,’ Liam snarls in defiance, but he cannot land a blow because his arms won’t move.

Daniel says nothing as Liam lurches backwards in the heather, his strength ebbing away. He is struggling for air, repeatedly attempting to raise his arms and prise Daniel’s fingers from his neck. His arms remain stubbornly limp hanging at his sides.

‘OK, mate,’ Liam mumbles deflatedly. ‘Forget it. I’m pissed … that’s all … If you … hadn’t …’

Too late. Besides, Daniel sees the devious spark loitering in Liam’s eyes. He is just playing for time, waiting for another opportunity to turn the tables.

‘Listen, Dan. I’m sorry. I promise I’ll …’

Daniel is no longer listening. While his eyes stare absently over the edge towards the moors, his mind is busy inside the drummer’s body, blocking nerves, blocking blood flow to the brain. The pressure isn’t on the outside of Liam’s neck; Daniel is surfing the inside underside of his adversary’s skin.

He is indulging sensations he has fought hard to suppress.

It’s payback time. How long has he put up with Liam’s belligerent bullying? Not just Daniel, all of them. Everyone too timid or too polite or too scared to fight back. He isn’t even a good drummer. He’s shit. Bulging muscles pouring over his vests, Goth tattoos, and the ability to grimace like a Maori performing a Haka are no substitute for being actually able to hold a beat.

Time dawdles as Daniel forages about inside the drummer like a man rummaging in an old trunk. With all the time in the world, his mind’s eye sweeps left and right, following the contours of his assailant’s neck then out above a clavicle towards the shoulder looking for an idea.

How do we bring you down to size? How do I persuade you to leave everyone alone from now on?

The moment is broken when Daniel’s face covered in spit. ‘You just caught gonorrhoea,’ Liam smirks.
Now the dark mist fully descends. By the time Daniel stops to catch his breath, the cold rain on his head and the bitter wind peppering his face, he is wet with sweat.

Almost done.
Ten minutes later he is in the car park. He does not know where he is exactly and he cannot drive but he doesn’t need to; Liam’s bike is in the back of the van. Daniel takes the bike and cycles away.

It takes a while to find a signpost, to Littlebeck and Ruswarp. Having got his bearings, in just under an hour he is back in Whitby where, soaked to the skin, he leaves the bike at the leisure centre and hurries to the Pavilion. His guitar case is in the shadows underneath a Range Rover; Liam must have kicked it there out of sight. Daniel is about to retrieve the case, hoping against hope that his guitar is undamaged, when he hears raucous laughter down the hill. He makes himself small in the shadows between the cars.

‘Let’s go down the beach,’ shouts a woman’s voice. ‘Don’t be a wazzock. Tides in,’ laughs a friend.
‘I don’t care. I want a paddle. Pleeeze.’
‘Told you she was pissed.’

‘Am not. Just a bit … merry,’ the woman laughs hysterically. ‘Woah. You can’t sleep there. Pick her up, Chloe.’
The party is almost level with Daniel. He hopes the drunk woman doesn’t spot the guitar under the car as her friends peel her off the road.

‘Spoil sports,’ she drawls. ‘You’re as bad as they are, Chloe. You want a paddle, don’t you, love?’

‘He’s nice,’ she mutters, her head dropping forward again as she is walked on up the hill.

‘What’s that?’
‘She’s pissed, Chloe.’
Daniel waits until their voices are no longer audible. Why hadn’t he stayed in the Pavilion with the rest of the band? Too late now. He unwinds and climbs to his feet. The coast is clear. Guitar case in hand, he heads up the hill towards the Whalebone Arch and East Terrace. It is one forty on Sunday morning.