By then, the drugs had taken noticeable effect on Deidre. Her breathing was labored and she had collapsed onto the arm of the couch. Boyle turned to her, and though the camera revealed only half his face, his decision was obvious. “No,” Deidre cried. “Run, baby. Let them have me. You’re the important one.”
“It wasn’t you who made the deal. Get to the house, call an ambulance.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Deidre, don’t let me die thinkin’ I killed you too. Please.”
“No, goddammit, I won’t leave!” She swung around to Karney, murder in her voice: “And you—you can suck The Man’s dick!”
And Clay saw her lipstick writing on Peter’s wall, a taunt he hadn’t yet understood.
Then Deidre was yelping at the pain in her scalp as Boyle grabbed a fistful of her hair. Her arms slapped madly at his guiding wrist. “I told you to get out!” he growled, dragging her toward the door. “Get the fuck out and don’t come back. For once in your life, listen to me!”
They wrestled in the shadows—in eerily the same fashion as at the start of the video. They fought all the way to the threshold before Deidre’s knees gave out. “I’m dead anyway, baby,” she groaned. “My legs can barely go. Let them do to me what they’re going to do to you.”
“Crawl if you’ve got to,” Boyle begged her, “but get to a phone and call for help!”
Deidre mumbled something in reply, something hopeless and heartbroken, before Boyle kissed her on the mouth and pushed her from the Generator, slamming the door between them.
“Mortal love,” the voice mocked. “So foolish and fleeting.”
Boyle returned to the circle of candles, to where Karney waited with his arms crossed. “You’re afraid of it,” Boyle shot back. “Love’s the one thing you have no power over.”
“It’s turned so many men to my favor,” the voice replied.
Boyle stared up at the dangling noose. “Alright. Enough mind-fuckery. I signed the Hailmaker’s contract. I understand the Hailmaker’s price. But I won’t make the kind of empty, soul-gouging music you want me to. So let’s move it the fuck along.”
He stepped onto the chair and drew the rope around his neck like an act of defiance. “Get the hell out, Rooster. He doesn’t need your help with this part, believe me.”
Karney nevertheless reached up and tightened the noose around Boyle’s throat. “I have to,” he confessed. “He won’t give me what I want till I give him what he wants.”
Boyle spit in Karney’s face, spattering his eyes in a buckshot of saliva. “He came to me when I was broke and homeless and offered the whole world. See how it ends. Sooner or later the same’ll happen to you.”
“Maybe,” Karney said. “But I’d rather my life be short and famous than long and worthless. Besides—you’re wrong. You weren’t telling the truth on The Disharmonic. You sound like an asshole, singing a lot of asshole nonsense. There’s no point giving the world hope. The only honesty is the brutal kind. If you can’t accept that, step off the chair, make it easy on everyone.”
“Fuck you. Kick it out.”
“Don’t you want to save Deidre? Step off the chair, you high-horse prick.”
“No. Murder me. See if you can live with yourself if…”
Boyle trailed off as the figure, The Hailmaker, The Man, drew into the candlelight.
Clay leaned closer to the screen, unable to see its eyes, only a mane of salt-and-pepper hair and the side profile of a large face that didn’t match proportionally with its drastically thin body. A suit hung on its frame like it might have on bare branches, leaving the unsettling impression that there was nothing beneath the cloth but the barest bric-a-brac of anatomy.
And Clay knew who this was. Oh, yes. The evidence wasn’t there onscreen, but rather in a certain contortion of his gut, in a fear he had felt only one other time in his life. Despite the change in gender, Clay had met this terrible creature before. In Philadelphia. He observed its long spindly fingers, the very ones that had caressed him under the door—Claaaaaaay Haaarrrrper—and he shivered hard against Savy.
Onscreen the figure’s shadow fell over Boyle’s face like a death cowl.
A profound silence presided over both rooms—the kerosene-soaked one Clay and Savy were trapped in and the Generator on that terrible night years before.
“This will only make me a martyr,” Boyle assured him. “My music will live on.”
“Even rock-n-roll doesn’t last forever,” The Hailmaker mocked. “In your world, a bad death is a dime a dozen.”
Boyle spit at the figure, sneering at the bull’s-eye he scored. Except The Hailmaker only wiped it off with a bony finger and flung the glob effortlessly back into Boyle’s face. “You hold love in such high regard—but it’s anger that drives your soul.” The figure moved closer, indifferent to the height advantage of Boyle on the chair. “For instance, what do you feel more strongly when I tell you that, after you die, I’m going to send Rooster to bash your lady’s brain in? Is it love for her or anger at me?”
Anger blossomed on Boyle’s features, proving the point. Though there was something else in his eyes too, a sadness as naked as his own flesh. “Both,” Boyle retorted stubbornly. “Both at once. Our souls run deeper than you give us credit for.” He stared back at the unseen face without blinking, without flinching, without fearing. “She’s got nothing to do with us. You gave me your word she’d go free.”
“My word, yes,” the figure said. “As you did.”
And what happened next happened fast. The Hailmaker must have kicked the chair because it flew out from under Boyle and went soaring at the camera, one whirling leg missing the lens by inches, or less.
Boyle’s body dropped and the force of the noose snagging his weight should have been enough to tear the fixture from the ceiling. Except the fixture held and Boyle writhed, his hands flailing at the rope, legs thrashing just above the floor. His throat made
