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  Contents

  An Augmented Fourth

  Other Books by Tony McMillen

  An Augmented Fourth

  Frontmatter

  Dedication

  Frivolous Black

  Illustration One

  Hazel Daze

  Heathen’s Greetings

  Illustration Two

  Suffer a Witch

  Hidden Forest

  Illustration Three

  Blossom of Corruption

  Illustration Four

  Summoner of Sorrows

  Year Without A Summer

  Tetrahex

  Illustration Five

  Schizoid

  Beyond This Sleepless Dream

  Illustration Six

  Antigonish Stares

  Storm Mouth

  Grave Expectations

  Remote Guidance

  Illustration Seven

  Visitation Rites

  Altered Hymns

  Illustration Eight

  Friv Today, Die Tomorrow

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  An

  Augmented

  Fourth

  Other Books by Tony McMillen

  Nefarious Twit

  An

  Augmented

  Fourth

  A Novel of The Lord of Low End

  Tony McMillen

  Word Horde

  Petaluma, CA

  An Augmented Fourth © 2017 by Tony McMillen

  This edition of An Augmented Fourth

  © 2017 by Word Horde

  Cover art © 2017 Alan M. Clark

  Cover design by Scott R Jones

  Interior illustrations © 2017 by Tony McMillen

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  ISBN 978-1-939905-31-4

  A Word Horde Book

  To Peter Leon. The first person I remember telling me that a song I wrote was good. And then he told me what was wrong with it. He was right too. Fucker.

  Frivolous Black

  December 12th, 1980, three days after some Yank shot John Lennon dead on the street in New York City like some unloved dog, and there I was, trapped, snowed in at a hotel in Boston certain that someone was coming to kill me next.

  My name’s Codger Burton. If you know me it’s because I’m the bass player for the heavy metal band Frivolous Black. But you probably don’t know me.

  I’m the bass player.

  I also wrote most of the band’s lyrics but some fucker with a high-pitched voice got to sing them so he gets most of the credit. I don’t mind that. Most of the best things I ever wrote felt like they were written by somebody else anyways. Which makes it a bit weird to take much credit. If somebody asked me where’d I come up with the words to “Beyond This Sleepless Dream” or “Tetrahex” or any of the old stuff, I wouldn’t know what to tell them. Except it’s almost like they were given to me. Just waiting out there for someone, anyone, to grab them. Like somebody else would have written them eventually if I hadn’t have been the one. But I was. That’s the whole problem I suppose.

  I don’t know how long I was unconscious in my hotel room but when I came to the first thing I did was stumble-step to the window, part the blinds, and look out at the endless white swirling outside. The storm didn’t notice me back. The whole city was covered in snow, the taller buildings looked like massive, gleaming white bone, newly cleaned and jutting out of the earth. I watched, silently mesmerized as more and more perfect white flakes fell down playfully all over the cold dead city.

  Fuck me, this was going to be a shit time to try and kick cocaine.

  We were touring behind our new record with our new frontman and trying to restart the band’s career when I decided to restart myself and finally give up the coke and the drink and all (most) of the other assorted bullshit. I suppose all the rest wasn’t a big enough challenge. Quitting cocaine isn’t like kicking heroin, or so I’ve been told. You don’t puke and thrash about or any of that, it’s more like the biggest comedown you’ve ever had, but Christ help you do you crave more coke. Quitting booze on the other hand, there was plenty of puking and shaking to go along with that. Feeling like my skin was falling off of my body in hot wet sheets one minute and then that stabbing deep cold that had me churning like a dead leaf in a breeze the next. Shit, I might as well have done the smack with the state I was in now. There’s a song off our second album, the one everybody owns, about heroin addiction. I wrote it after all these Yank soldiers coming back from Vietnam started turning up at some of our early gigs in England. They had seen and done so many fucked things over there that they had all started shooting up to deal with it. There were practically piles of syringes covering the ground at some of the shows after everyone had left. Poor bastards, they were just trying to get away from their own private hell but instead ended up inviting it back straight into their veins. I could relate in a small way. I guess we all can.

  My own hell wasn’t so bad really, especially in comparison. It’s hard to moan about being rich and famous and getting to do what I love for a living but of course I still manage. My own hell was called Frivolous Black and I had spent eleven years in it at that point. From back when we were a blues group called Soil ’til the day Vinnie came in to band practice with a new direction and a new kind of riff, saying maybe we should be playing “doomy tunes,” right up until we sacked our frontman, Sully Sullivan, last year. I’ve been there for it all. And some of it has been good, very good. Heaven even. But of course that just makes the other side even worse. And if you’re looking at your old LPs and wondering which one I am, of the three gentlemen with long hair and drooping moustaches standing with their arms folded behind our clean-shaven, oddly angelic looking lead singer, I’m the one with the bushiest hair and the second-best moustache.

  Now Frivolous were touring behind our new record with our new lead singer, a Yank, no moustache either (I don’t think lead singers are allowed to have them for some reason) and we were almost done with this leg of the tour. Just one more gig here in Boston at the Boston Garden, then a nice big break for Christmas and New Year’s so I could go back to Birmingham and maybe see my relations. Of course that last gig was supposed to be today, but the entire city was practically shut down due to the snowstorm from what the television said yesterday, so needless to say our concert was cancelled too. It pained me to give the parasite any credit at all, but when our road manager, Peter Dorsbry, got word of how shit the weather was suspected to turn in our area he had all of us switch hotels. ’Least that’s what he told me on the phone when he called me five hours ago incredulous that I hadn’t been swept up with the rest of the band, the roadies, our trusted dealers, birds and various other muckers and barnacles that had attached themselves to the great underbelly of the Frivolous organization over the last ten years, ever since the band trundled its way out of Birmingham.

  “You’re still there at the Hotel Alucinari? Codger, Jesus, man. You’re snowed in, you know? Nobody can get to you until maybe tomorrow. You know I had your room searched? Nobody saw you. Where were you hiding, might I ask?”

  That conversation with Peter was before my moment at the window looking out at the white skeleton city. When I woke up later I thought I had left the window open it was so cold, which is why I walked up to it. But it was still sealed, which meant the heat had been turned off. I checked the phone and it was dead too. TV and lights the same. They had shut the power off after they evacuated the building, or maybe the storm had knocked it out. I didn’t even have a watch to tell what bloody time it was. Brilliant. Luckily I had an even worse problem to occupy my mind: The absolute center of my head felt like it was caving in at that
moment. I remember getting sick and going to the toilet before finally passing out again.

  When I woke up, I was in the closet for some reason, not laying down on the floor but standing straight up like a vampire’s prick in his crypt. I didn’t know how much time had passed, but sunlight was still creeping in through the window so it couldn’t have been too long. I was getting the shakes pretty bad at this point and I just wanted to find somewhere dark and quiet. So I went to the toilet where I could return to being sick. I always had a fragile stomach. Sully used to stand over me while I let it loose and clap his hands and laugh. He’d call it my “solo project.” Bastard. His actual solo project was going along swimmingly, that first single with his new guitar player, fucking bostin’. Even though that fucker was a Yank, Christ could he could play… When I closed my eyes it felt like my brain was swelling up against the inside of my skull like some hot air balloon made of meat. The fucking drink. I had been hitting it too hard for years, I knew that, but we had all been hitting it hard. Why did I choose now to try and kick it along with the coke? I was setting myself up to fail all over again. I had gotten sober for five months a year ago when we fired Sully. It didn’t feel right throwing him out of the band for being a coked out alcoholic loon when the rest of us were also coked out alcoholic loons. So I quit drinking and the coke then, just to be sanctimonious, which was the second time I tried to quit and the first time it stuck. Well, stuck for five months. It had been bad then, really bad. But now was worse. No matter how many times I think I’ve turned my back on the church, when I’m puking, I’m a believer. No one’s an atheist when they’re hungover. Hell, when you’re trying to kick you might as well be born again. Believe me.

  I think I may have been getting the DTs then, because in the bathroom on my knees, face hovering above the toilet bowl full of my own sick, looking perversely like I worshiped the filth that my body produced, I kept thinking I could see something black swarming in the corners of my eyes. Some flickering, weird, unexpected crackle like when you opened a sugar jar only to find a vortex of shiny black ants crisscrossing in and out of the white granulated dust…

  Christ, I needed some coke. I thought, maybe I should just quit the drink but keep the coke for a bit. Maybe just ’til I’m off the bottle…

  I waited for about ten minutes and when I didn’t puke again I got slowly to my feet.

  This was day two off any shit and I knew it could get bad again but I also got the sense that a relief period was coming. I went to the mirror out of habit but avoided looking at myself in the eye like it was a divine mandate. Of course curiosity got the better of me, like it usually did, and I gave myself a quick appraisal: My eyes looked like an empty auditorium. The skin on my face was taut and greasy and there were bruised, almost green circles forming around my eyes. On top of that, even my moustache looked shit. Maybe I always looked this bad and now I was just sober enough to see it. Then that black flicker again off to the sides of my vision, dark tiny tadpoles dancing in my peripheral. I had the distinct sensation of the gnarled tips of black tree branches curling around my head then receding swiftly from my view. I turned around stupidly to investigate and of course there was nothing. Fucking DTs. I needed something to do before I started seeing little green men coming out of the upholstery. So after procuring a pair of pants from my luggage and putting on my complimentary bathrobe, I left my room in hopes of finding something, anything, to get my mind off of things. Before I left the room I looked back at the window, watched the storm for a bit more, the snow corkscrewing through the air this way and that. Everything inside the room with me then was still and quiet and the only sound in the whole world was the long sustained howl of the wind outside.

  Hotels mostly look the same on the inside. I’ve been living in them for the last decade, and the Hotel Alucinari was no different than any of the rest but still, I’d never been in an abandoned hotel before. I’d stayed in the Alucinari a few times in the past, the place saw a lot of traffic from people in my line of work. It was no Hyatt House or Chelsea Hotel but it was the closest equivalent that Boston could muster. I even heard that Frankie Gideon, who was supposed to play the Garden the night after us, was staying here too.

  From the outside the hotel looked like someone had made a Middle Ages Catholic Church from an antique hypodermic syringe, but once you were inside the Alucinari was as ordinary as any other hotel. But now that the power was out some of the mystique that the exterior had conjured for me had returned. I flicked open my Zippo to see where I was stepping in the dark halls, and where I was stepping was onto a weird, red and dark brown American Indian looking pattern on the carpet. The halls were even quieter than I expected. It lent the place a seriousness that bordered on reverence. I suppose I should have found the whole thing terribly creepy or frightening, especially after seeing that film about the haunted hotel and the little lad on the tricycle going up and down the halls while that crazy fucker from Chinatown with the eyebrows went all yampy and ran around with an axe, but I wasn’t scared. Not yet. After being in the Satan-courting, evil incarnate outfit known as Frivolous Black for so long, I just found most of that spookshow stuff boring now. When you’re in the band that supposedly created heavy metal, and you wear black to work every day and go on stage and play songs about the devil and the atrocities of the human condition to thousands of doomed-out, bong-brained teenagers, it kind of ruins haunted houses for you. Halloween too. Having Anton LaVey at our album release party would have ruined Satanism for me too, but I was never really too keen on the idea to begin with. Seems like a bunch of atheists with a sense of pageantry if you ask me. Don’t tell the press that though, it’d ruin our mystique. That is, if our new album and new singer didn’t do that already.

  The guy was a Yank for starters. And maybe the whole thing with Lennon had got me prejudiced as of late, but I spent the last three days watching TV and feeling like the world was ending; crying while I watched the news, realizing that whatever the dream of the 60s and my youth was, it was never coming back. Lennon was dead. It was over. That’s where my head was at. And besides, it just felt weird having a Yank singing in Frivolous.

  Don’t tell Vinnie, but it felt weird having anyone but Sully singing, if I’m being totally honest. But this new guy being a Yank felt doubly wrong. And secondly, this pleb wrote his own lyrics, which was fine with me because I was struggling for material to give to Sully for the last couple of records anyway, but the trite, superficially Satanic wizards and warlocks horseshit that this bloke came up with… it was pedestrian. It was unreal how beneath us it was. The worst part was that I knew what he was trying to do… and I almost understood why.

  He was trying to capture that dark occult thing that we did on the first three Frivolous records. Because they’re easily the most popular records. They’re the ones that everyone knows us for. That’s how they remember us no matter how much we grow out of it. They want songs about the devil or about strange, otherworldly sinister forces, songs about madness, about surrendering to the darkness inside and fighting against the darkness out. I don’t know what they want actually, I never did. But they want what we did, what we used to do… effortlessly. Because those songs happened organically. That’s what this Yank didn’t realize. That’s what Vinnie, our guitarist, and Burt, our drummer, don’t remember: We didn’t set out to invent heavy metal or to make horror music, it just happened. Back in those days we would just show up to our practice space or a recording room and it was like the songs were already written. Like they were given to us from somewhere else. We used to joke that it was our secret fifth member. Our Brian Wilson, transmitting his demos to us from somewhere in hell. The music felt natural even if it was unlike anything we’d ever heard before. It wasn’t contrived, it wasn’t assembly-lined, it didn’t try to sound scary. It just was. The scariest thing of all was just how good it was. But now, with this new album and this new singer, we sounded like all those other bands full of half-soaked geezers that tried to sound like us and failed.


  I moved through the hall slowly waving my Zippo flame, half pretending I was exploring some desolate old cavern or something. I always had a healthy imagination. I wasn’t hungry exactly but I could eat and I could also use a smoke. The scariest part of this whole snowed in-abandoned hotel experience so far had been when I realized I already smoked my last cigarette. I made a silent prayer (possibly to the toilet god I had left back in my room) that I’d find a working cigarette machine or a mummified former cave explorer with my brand in his cobwebbed pocket somewhere in the lobby.

  Of course without electricity the lifts were dead, so I walked past their useless doors and was about to proceed down the hall to the stairs when out of the dark to my left a burning hand appeared. I froze, stifled a scream, then craned my head to the side and found my reflection studying me. It was the long rounded mirror situated between the lifts. There floating in the dark it looked like some sort of bubble with a man inside it. He looked scared and when he laughed at himself for being so barmy and stupid he just looked old and scared. I left him there in his bubble and decided to take the stairs down.

  I was only on the fourth floor so it wouldn’t be that much of a descent. Pale blue light shot in from long rectangular windows lining the far right wall of the stairwell, and I had to pass through the little rivers of light with each floor I traveled. As I neared the bottom the wind outside started picking up into a din that the stairwell amplified. This place got a pretty good sound actually. Could be a good place to record drums. Big, fuck a mountain into rubble sort of sound, like Friv got on our fifth record. We recorded that at a bleeding castle, it was miserable. Better than when we recorded the next one in Florida though. We shared a studio with the fucking Eagles and before we could record anything properly we’d have to scrape all their cocaine out of our mixing board. Must have been a pound of that shit left on the board. Good shit too. Waste not, want not. The Eagles… they’d do that and then bellyache about us playing too loud next door and they had to keep stopping while they were trying to record “Hotel Fucking California.” The sound we made was bleeding through the walls. Too bad we couldn’t get them to just call it a day and stop recording that awful dreck altogether. Believe me, we did try.