“What do you want from me?”
The thing behind Payton’s face hardly had to think about it. “Your voice. Your dexterous hands. Your songwriting. Your determination. Your rage. Your sadness. Your passion. If King Midas had the golden touch, then what you surely have is a genuine touch.” He took a moment to let this sink in, lifting Payton’s brow exactly how Payton would have lifted it.
Clay’s eyes fled, determined to avoid eye contact. They fell on Payton’s unbuttoned dress shirt, immaculately white, open at the throat, and he tried to gauge if the therapist’s chest was moving. Was this his body, possessed? Or was Payton at home, waylaid in bed, having woken with a mysterious stomach flu? Clay sincerely hoped it was the latter—because it did not seem like the entity before him was drawing air. “And—if I can’t deliver?” Clay willed himself. “You, what, light me on fire?”
“You mistake my work for yours,” the Hailmaker replied. “Davis Karney did what he had to do to get on top. His first record was okay, wasn’t it? But the follow-ups? Empty pop shit. It’s just the way it is: Some bands prosper; others expire. You and I and all his fans already knew his fate. The upcoming tour was the Demons’ last before they were decommissioned. But I have put many a musician to pasture, and they’ve lived to tell. They paid their debt and may go about their lives with their hot tubs and aging strippers and never do a thing for me again. The point being—there was no need for Davis Karney to resort to histrionics.”
Clay’s stare dropped to Payton’s desk, his Barbie fallen on her face, dropped dead of fright. In her six-inch vanity mirror, though, the Hailmaker’s features were not Payton’s, but something else—grotesque, elongated, indistinct—evidence that he presented himself one way to the human eye, another through the looking glass of the peephole, the camera lens, a shard of mirror.
“He was convinced you had execution in mind,” Clay managed. “Since he helped execute Rocco and Deidre for you.”
“You saw the film? Not quite up to Sundance standards, was it?” The thing laughed Payton’s jovial laugh and the tiny mirror shivered. “When I discovered Rocco Boyle, he was camping on a rooftop. A soul drifting along, waiting to die anonymously. A year later he was touring the world. A year after that he owned the world. And when he passed, The Disharmonic was still number 3 on the charts. Why, then, did he have to be dealt with?”
Clay closed his eyes and pretended to consider the question. Meanwhile he managed to pull himself up and lean his torso forward in the chair. If he could do that much, he was confident he could stand. If he could stand, he could get his legs moving. If he could get his legs moving, he could bolt for the door. Just six bounding steps and gone—
Except the Hailmaker’s gaze fell upon him again, and Clay was pressed, gently but insistently, back into the chair.
“The only thing that changed between The Disharmonic and the other albums was the message,” Clay said, and he still sounded wrong in his own ears, like an imposter of himself. “It went from ‘I’m angry in a hopeless world’ to ‘I fight for the world because there’s hope.’”
“Indeed. Rocco Boyle violated his contract—by straying from a message that was genuine. He thought he was above reproach. But no one is above reproach.”
Clay dug his fingers into the chair until his nails screamed, jarring his mind. Again he willed himself to say what he wanted: “The Disharmonic is the most genuine album I’ve ever heard. It made me want to be a musician.”
“Respectfully, I’ll disagree. The lyrics spoke of having faith in your fellow man, of human beings being capable of change, of love conquering all. Don’t worry, be fucking happy? As if the drug-induced ’60s hadn’t died pathetically on the vine.”
“What Boyle was giving us was a reason to—”
“What he was giving you was something far crueler than anything I’ve ever conjured. What’s worse, after all—to accept the truth or to flock under a false banner? To embrace your contempt for this miserable existence or wait in vain for love to save the day?”
“You’ve obviously never been in love. Or had any hope.”
The Hailmaker gave a mocking snort. “Go to the third world and tell that to a starving child.” And his Payton impression slipped. Just a little. For two or three syllables the voice took on a deeper, harsher tone, spewed up from some diseased larynx. “Or into the ghetto, where your friend Mo was last night—go see if there is hope in those places. Unconvinced? Then let us go into the mansions up and down the coast. Houses that would put your own to shame. Let’s witness the vane misery those souls live in.” The Hailmaker dropped Payton’s feet from the desk and rested his elbows there. “For every good and honest soul, there are a hundred flawed and corruptible ones. If humanity was my business, Clay Harper, I would have gone bankrupt centuries ago.”
“I don’t believe that,” Clay challenged. And he didn’t know why he was engaging in a debate with the thing behind Payton’s face—it seemed tantamount to slap-boxing with a trained heavyweight fighter—but he sensed it was important to do so, very important.
“Corruption is my business,” The Hailmaker assured him. “Rock stars, politicians, athletes, celebrities, CEOs, clergy, billionaire philanthropists—all of the most prominent players lie and cheat and snort and sell out and betray. They disgrace and humble themselves; they go to jail and they die young. A man of the cloth surrenders to pedophilia. Leaders of the free world murder the innocent and force themselves on women their own daughter’s age. The nicest boy in school carves up his girlfriend’s face. Read the paper any day. Again and again the best of your race proves they are so weak and corruptible.”
“Then you won’t have
