Made In Norway by Josh Anderson

Made In Norway

By Josh Anderson

Beneath a blackening sky, a Ford Econoline cuts its way across the upper midwest, a pathogen in the veins of the American night. Its occupants, exiles from polite society, spend their days navigating endless expanses of highway. By night they descend into basements, subterranean sanctums where black-clad masses gather to witness their performance of arcane nocturnal rituals.

Except lately, no one had been coming to the fucking shows. The last tour had been an unmitigated disaster, plagued by perfidious promoters, incompetent sound guys, and pitiful turnout. The members of King Paimon held no illusions of achieving fortune or fame; their strain of heavy metal plodded along at a glacial pace, mired in dissonance and distortion. It was challenging music that demanded patience and rumination, scarce resources in this age of instant gratification. However, nothing had prepared them for the crushing indifference they faced night after night, playing one sparsely attended show after another in an endless parade of futility.

Before embarking on this run of shows, the band had forged a solemn pact that if things did not improve, they would throw in the towel once and for all. Sitting now in the rust-eaten van on the way to their first show of the tour, they felt ambivalent about their prospects. Some bands were just cursed to languish in obscurity. Yet, this time around, they had a secret weapon.

Several weeks ago, the band found themselves in their grubby practice space, passing a joint and attempting to diagnose the reasons why they sucked. “It’s that fucking limp-dick guitar tone,” insisted Melissa, King Paimon’s drummer. Abigail, bassist and vocalist, concurred. “It is kinda… I dunno… insubstantial. We need a fuckin’ wall of sound, man!”

Eddie, guitarist of the trio, knew they were right. He took to messageboards of fellow metalheads and gear nerds in hopes of finding a guitar pedal that would lend his tone the bone-crushing weight their music demanded. Initial responses inspired little hope - inane suggestions from bedroom blues hobbyists with no conception of doom metal. Eddie was on the verge of slamming his laptop shut and abandoning all hope when a private message piqued his interest.

The messenger claimed to be a pedal builder from a remote village in rural Norway. He insisted that his guitar pedals were built with a secret, proprietary method unlike any other, and that his devices were guaranteed to “begrime your guitar signal with the sulfurous soot of Hades.” Eddie rolled his eyes so hard he was sure they would sever from their optic nerves. While this did sound exactly like what he needed, hyperbolic marketing copy meant nothing to him. He wanted to hear the damn thing. He requested an audio recording of the pedal in use and was met with an irresistible offer.

The pedal builder offered to send him the stompbox free of charge. “Try it out”, the message had implored. “It’s unlike anything you’ve ever heard. If you don’t care for it, send it back. If you find yourself entranced by its unearthly tambre, as I’m certain you will, we can work out a suitable payment.” Eddie felt he had nothing to lose and gladly supplied his address.

The package had arrived mere hours before the band departed for the three-week trek. Enclosed in an unadorned brown box, the pedal itself was similarly austere: a matte black metal enclosure with one lone stomp switch and a singular LED light staring out like a cyclopean eye. Eddie tossed it in the trailer with the rest of the gear and clambered into the van to commence their voyage.

Hours later, the van lurched into the moon bathed driveway of the Fargo punkhouse they would be playing that evening. They began unloading, lower backs straining under the weight of massive amplifier cabinets as they navigated the treacherous, warped steps leading into the dank basement. Abigail noticed the group of crust punks holding court near the keg in the corner and overhead a sliver of their conversation.

“What’s that King Pokemon band all about?” inquired a dreadlocked woman adorned in pants seemingly constructed entirely of band patches. The punk to her left, hair plumed in resplendent blue liberty spikes, pulled at his flask and replied. “I checked out the demo on their Bandcamp- some poor man’s Electric Wizard shit. Self indulgent riff worship. Fucking yawn.”

Tough crowd. King Paimon set up and surveyed the scene. The basement was empty save for the crusties and a few scattered kids leaning against the wall, glazed gazes transfixed on their phones. The majority of the punks and metalheads in attendance remained upstairs, smoking and bullshitting.

Eddie plugged a cable running from his guitar into the new pedal, another from the pedal into his amp. Under normal circumstances, he would never play through a new piece of gear without tinkering around with it first, working out the perfect sound. However, he had nothing to lose. They had no fans to alienate. Besides, there were no knobs to twiddle in pursuit of gnarly tone. Either the thing worked or it didn’t. “Fuck it,” he thought. “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it.”

The microphone erupted in a shriek of feedback as Abigail leaned in to address the smattering of basement dwellers. She backed off and began again. “Hi, we’re King Paimon from Minneapolis. This one’s called ‘Lair of the Goat Wraith’.” The crusties continued their conversation. The wallflowers’ gaze did not rise from their phones.

Melissa counted them in. Eddie stomped the pedal with the toe of his army boot, activating the esoteric circuit within, and struck the first chord. Several things happened at once.

The chord rang out like sheet metal being torn asunder, a deafening roar that resonated through Eddie’s teeth. The bare bulb illuminating the basement exploded in a deluge of sparks and glass shards. The room was suddenly awash in the sickly green luminescence of the pedal’s LED light. Its brightness defied reason.

Eddie played another chord, and another. A funereal riff emerged, conjuring images of unspeakable despair. The sound was all-encompassing. The crusties fell silent.The wallflowers’ stare was now aimed at the band before them. All lumbered towards the source of the sound, enclosing the band in a tight semicircle.

The band played on, the sounds of their individual instruments coalescing into a mid-tempo churn, an elephantine death march. The assorted miscreants above began filing down the stairs two abreast, filling up the room with their flesh. The ring of bodies around the band tightened and densified, a dark sea of studs and spikes and unblinking eyes. Filing down, filling in, until the band could no longer see the far wall of the basement beyond the impenetrable corporeal mass.

The band played on, as the eyes of the rapt crowd rolled into the back of their heads, bloodshot sclera glowing in the caustic green light. Abigail belted out the first verse. It took her bandmates a moment to register that the words she sang were not the lyrics of ‘Lair of the Goat Wraith’. They were not the lyrics to any of their songs. The sounds she produced, an alien sibilance more befitting a bestial maw than a human mouth, were not in any language they recognized.

The band played on, as their stomachs knotted with terror at the realization that the song they performed was not their own, was not a song any of them had heard or performed before. Eddie felt like his solar plexus was filling with television static.  What terrible fate had he brought upon his bandmates?

The band played on, as thick rivulets of gore began to trickle from the ears of the bewitched spectators. The smell of copper and sulfur filled the basement. It felt as if all the air had been drained out of the room and replaced with noise, like they were breathing in the incessant, unholy dirge.

The band played on, as the enchanted horde began to headbang in perfect time with the blasphemous tune, synchronized like macabre clockwork. Their ears sprayed blood with each wrenching of the neck, casting sheets of crimson rain crashing against the band on each downbeat.

The band played on, unable to stop despite the utter terror that gripped them all. They were marionettes suspended on unseen strings, impelled by unknowable forces.

The band played on, as the PA erupted into flames.

The band played on, as the hellfire lapped at their flesh, as their skin blistered and cracked, as the fat of their bodies rendered and blackened.

And none attempted to flee as the flames leapt from punk to metalhead, crusty to wallflower, voraciously feasting on their flesh.

The authorities would deem the incident an electrical fire, chalk it up to improper grounding. Few truly believed it, after witnessing the terrible monolith of muscle fused by flame, the inextricable tangle of charred remains. How had no one been able to escape?

And somewhere far away, deep in the frost-rimed pines of Norway, a man laughs to himself and knows an ancient ceremony has been completed. An offering has been made. The bloodlust of the ones below has been sated, at least for now.

This story was originally printed in Issue #1. Pick up the entire issue here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/626379306/the-rock-n-roll-horror-zine-issue-1