Clay nodded and tossed the Gibson into the tech’s arms.
In the far wings, Priest was screaming at a pair of bouncers, his words lost in 130 decibels. By the time he realized Clay had stepped into the stage lights, it was too late.
Fiasco Joe was crouching on the far side, his Fender held out in a ham-job for the flashes popping in the crowd, and Clay had a clear shot at Savy’s mic. Any fear or doubt was gone the moment he raced out in front of the sea of bodies. Savy was halfway through the second verse of “Disaffected,” when she sensed someone sidling up beside her. Her reaction suggested she’d have expected the corpse of Jerry Garcia to appear, maggots falling from his eye sockets, before Clay Harper. She missed a word, a line, and then Clay had the microphone in his grip.
Fiasco was yanked from his revelry by the new voice in his monitor; his eyes grew sharp, furious, understanding Clay’s coup immediately. In the dark beyond him, Priest was jumping and swinging his fists like a fine-carpet salesman ruined by a vomiting child, and Clay grinned and sang with everything he had. Over the bridge Savy matched him word for word, syllable for syllable—but by the time they reached the last chorus she had stepped away, surrendering the mic, nodding at Fiasco and Spider to keep playing, just keep playing dammit.
Clay’s adrenaline overloaded him. His doppelgänger—the onstage maniac that had possessed him at their first three gigs—took full control. He shook the mic stand violently back and forth, banged his head to the blast-beat. If any of the bouncers came for him, he would surely tear their arms off and paradiddle their heads with the bloody stumps.
No one came. Though there was upheaval in the sound booth, no engineer dared fuck with the mic levels of the convulsing figure that drew every eye.
The Palladium was round and reminded Clay of an Art Deco dance hall. Sweeping balconies to the left and right, where the crowd could stand three deep and pitch beers down on the churning mass below. The room had screamed at the sight of him and they screamed now as Clay urged them on. But it was hard to gauge the emotion behind it. The faces leering up from the barricade looked vicious in the stage lights, and Clay wondered if it was the song doing that or his arrival.
But when “Disaffected” slammed to its abrupt punk-rock halt, a cheer rose to the Palladium’s ceiling and—Reality check!—Clay knew that, whoever was watching, wherever they’d come from, they were here for the music. And for him.
Not Priest though. To say the new Ghost manager didn’t enjoy golden rain on his parade was an understatement. He shouted something to Fiasco, something civil like “Deal with him, shit-for-brains!” And Fiasco stepped to the backup mic.
“How about Clay Harper, boys and girls? Out of thin air. Hole-lee shit!”
The crowd hollered and hooted its roadhouse welcome.
“Yes, Clay Harper, back from the dead.” Fiasco gave him a wink and walked his fingers playfully up and down his bass. Doo-Dub-Doo-Doo-Dub-Dub-Doo. “Except nothing good lasts forever. This is unfortunately Clay’s last show with us. He’s quitting the band.”
The boos he intended to invoke were there, but scattered. Mostly, a confused hush fell over the house, waiting to hear if Clay would confirm or deny. And Clay pressed his teeth against his mic and told them, “The good news is ‘Disaffected’ was Joe Belasco’s last song with the band. He’s leaving to pursue his true talent in the Jim Rose Circus. Swallowing light bulbs in his ass.”
Laughter filled the room, followed by several mock whistles, and Clay gave Fiasco’s wink back to him. “So can anyone play bass for us? Anyone here need employment?”
Two dozen hands shot up.
“Hey, dick,” Fiasco fired back, “why don’t you just go back to burning your—”
“This song’s called ‘Skeletons at the Feast’. Count us in, Spidey.”
Spider hesitated, lifted his stick, then hesitated again, a deer in the giant headlights of his mounted toms. He glanced desperately at Savy, whose face gave nothing. Though she must have communicated something to the beatmaster because his stick slammed the hi-hat—1-2-3-4—and they were into their second song and Clay was still there, still at the center of the storm.
Without a second guitar, their sound wasn’t as robust as it could have been, but the crowd didn’t care. Unencumbered, Clay pogoed and danced and played with the crowd. And the crowd responded to his every demand—if he wanted them to bounce, if he wanted them to clap together, if he wanted to divide the room and send them stampeding at each other in a fun-loving Wall of Death, all he had to do was order it so.
He was singing the last of “Skeleton,” when someone leapt onstage. There were a pair of bouncers below, but as Boyle had foreseen, the volume of crowd-surfers and rascals shoving at the barricade overburdened them. Clay watched the figure mount the apron, expecting Davis Karney, or worse.
A bearded man appeared in the lights. Clay was mid-stanza and couldn’t distance himself from his approach. “Everyone is special, but most, we get forgotten,” Clay sang, slightly off-key, and now the man was reaching for him, and Clay clenched his fists, ready to claw his beard off. But instead of attacking, the man only grabbed the mic to sing the next line with his beer-battered breath: “Life is just a peach, so luscious and so rotten!”
“Don’t know about the future,” Clay sang with him. “Can’t say how the story ends…” And all at once he recognized the would-be singer. Not his face, but his tattoos. From the night before. It was the naked guy in the Alice Cooper mask, the one who’d brought down the Viper’s disco ball. At the time, Clay had assumed he was drunk, high, or simply wackadoo,
