Electric Guitar

By Brian Rieselman

The strange letter that follows below -- partially reproduced here, but in its original form torn, smudged, wrinkled and water-damaged...with traces of human blood -- is an exhibit, declassified by Scotland Yard, in the case of two missing persons, one known, the other as yet unknown. Yet to be conclusively established are several possible links to individuals reported vanished, and/or to unidentified and unclaimed human remains presently in police custody.

It was found on a rural roadside near the Borderlands, some miles east of Marshall Meadows Bay. It is undated.

Portions of the letter are redacted and some parts remain illegible. The contents are otherwise presented exactly as written, to the fullest extent of the forensic efforts used to reconstruct them.

Case Status: Unsolved, all available leads and methods having gone cold. Investigation suspended until further notice.

#

...call me naïve, but I suppose I would have followed Jarod Carrick anywhere that night. A castle in Scotland sounded just fine to me, never mind the severe weather. His enthusiasm might have been strictly professional, or signs that something was seriously wrong with him.

“Think of the shots you’ll get, Suzy,” he said, holding the useless wind-shredded umbrella over us as the torrents of cold wet rain drenched us to the skin. “Even if we don’t find the holy grail, you’ll get some real atmospheric images of Tyler Bon Boni’s last known place of residence exactly ten years from the night of his hideous death.” He grinned.

I shuddered. The car we’d hired had long since departed, leaving us at a ruined gate. We’d come up from London on this whim and now stood in mud up to our ankles on the grounds of the crumbling-down ancient Crabwell Castle, where Bon Boni had organized a drug-fueled bacchanal that last night of his young life (he was 27; my age, Jarod’s age). He’d been electrocuted in mid-solo by his electric guitar on the stormy ramparts of the castle, and died instantly.

Or so went the rock and roll legend.

No one who’d been at the debauched party that night was alive to tell the tale. Jarod had relentlessly searched out the names in the contemporary press accounts, he told me. A handful of groupies, a few hangers on...all presumed deceased in the space of a decade.

And the “holy grail” Jarod spoke of? The exact same electric guitar that killed Bon Boni. It was supposedly stolen long ago. Or was it actually hidden in the castle somewhere?

“That’s what I’m betting on,” Jarod told me. “It’ll be worth a fortune. But for me it’s much more precious than money.”

Jarod, like several of the new crop of music producers (glorified DJs, if you asked me) worshiped Tyler Bon Boni, whose first album still got about a half a million downloads a year.

“Will you share the money with me?” I asked as Jarod pounded on the huge front door with its great brass knocker. He swore someone had finally replied to his incessant phone calls to residents in the vicinity of the castle, arranging our impromptu visit.

“You’ll get plenty for the photos, Miss Suzy Macroom, star photographer extraordinaire. But the answer is yes, of course, you’ll share in my exploitations. We’ll be rich, the toast of London.” He gave my bag of photo gear a light pat and adjusted his soggy backpack.

Jarod couldn’t play guitar but he was something of a whiz on keyboards and consoles. I couldn’t whistle a note, but as a photographer in London I was being called “the new Annie Leibovitz.” At least I was called that by the publishers of the mags and websites that hired me steadily, and by my hyperbolic agent. And that’s how I ended up in the wilds of Scotland with Jarod. I’d been shooting him at Abbey Road Studios and here and there around London and we’d hit it off. Over several strong drinks he invited me on this mad adventure.

You could ask, Why in God’s name didn’t I stay home? I must have been quite stoned, I suppose.

“And what if no one answers the door?” I asked, feeling cold and apprehensive. No sooner had I said it than the great door creaked open and a musty scent of cold cavernous chambers greeted us in a swirl of phosphorescent dust.

The thing that opened the door grinned at us with malevolence. “I didn’t think you’d really arrive here, what with the foul weather,” she said.

I got the impression of a once-glamorous supermodel with rattle-snake cheekbones and a taut, tall thin frame. Not looking well, I must say. As if mummified in her own decaying flesh.

The woman, whoever she was, showed us in. She might have been some ancient groupie. Her thigh-high once-white go-go boots were rotting off spindly legs. The kohl around her eyes completed the look of a glammed-up skull. Her ratty scarves and floppy hat dripped dust as she tottered along. The bangles she wore on her stick-like arms gave up a sort of death rattle.

“I think we’d better spend the night,” Jarod said, as lightning flashes gave us glimpses of baronial wreckage, scurrying rats and moldering furniture.

“That’s not advisable,” she replied, with a whistling through her few rotten teeth, and a weird sucking sound. “You may look around, for the agreed upon fee...I’ll give you an hour.”

Jarod handed her a thick wad of folded bills. “This is three times as much as we agreed to, and you won’t need to send us back out into that dreadful storm.”

I expected her to protest. Instead she smiled. “As you wish, sir.” She turned to leave us.

“Wait...were you here that night?” Jarod reached to touch her shoulder, then seemed to think better of it. “The night...he died.”

She turned slowly. She held up her boney chin. “You mean, you don’t remember?”

#

Our hostess seemed stubbornly unhelpful when it came to sharing info. Jarod grilled her about the guitar, but she simply shrugged (awful sound, like when you pulled chicken joints apart).

Jarod went on, as was his wont, about the guitar, its model, the make and color (black), the pickups, the semi-hollow body, and Bon Boni’s amazing leads and flourishes on that “last great rock and roll album of an era,” so called.

She seemed unmoved. We climbed and climbed stairs to an upper gallery of closed doors and low-burning begrimed sconces.

“I’ll bet you saw him in his death throes, then, playing a blistering solo as thousands of volts surged through him?” Jarod asked cruelly as she showed us into a high-ceilinged bedroom with -- I noted -- only one bed, albeit a huge one with four posters and a canopy that looked like a sagging cobweb. A tarnished suit of armor stood in a corner, holding an axe. Those guys always seemed shorter than you’d expect.

“Many times,” she said mysteriously, and she left us, giving the door a solid slam that was met with thunder, like a weird echo.

“What did she mean, you don’t remember?” I asked, annoyed with myself that my voice sounded weak, tremble-y. I looked again at that bed. Jarod and I had never slept together. Looked like maybe this was to change. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

“Oh, she’s probably just trying to freak us out. She’s clearly insane.”

“Think we’re safe here?”

“Safer than out there.” The thunder and lightning seemed even more intense now than when the car had dropped us at the end of the long muddy drive, in near pitch-black darkness. The watery windows gave off a greenish sickly glow, like a bad lobster.

“I’m calling a taxi. There are several respectable inns not far from this place.” Predictably, I had no cell phone reception.

“It’s here, I just know it is,” said Jarod, in his reverie. “The guitar...I’ve heard it strum in my sleep the past few nights.”

I felt a little shiver. “Jarod, if it’s all the same to you --“

“Listen!” He held up his hand to silence me. “Did you hear it?”

I was genuinely pissed off now. No one shuts me up. I didn’t care if he was Mr. hot shot producer, sound mixer, computer or synth whiz (I wasn’t quite sure what it was he did in those studios, actually). And to think I’d been swooning over him when he told me he’d worked on some of the Amy Winehouse sessions. That he’d met the biggest names in the biz, legends. That he’d visited Kurt Cobain in Seattle, shortly before Kurt’s tragic suicide, to discuss a potential project. That he’d been in Vegas the night Tupac...

I was seriously creeping myself out. “What is it with you and dead pop stars?” I asked.

His eyes were a bit too wild, like maybe he’d done a line or two of blow without telling me. Or sharing. “Jarod, you’re acting like an asshole.”

“That’s my job description, what’s yours?” He laughed. He reached out and took my hands in his. “Wow, you’re cold as a tomb. Listen Suzy, get your best lens on that camera. When we find Tyler Bon Boni’s guitar, you’re going to capture it for the ages. Understand? Probably sell it to a hundred markets. Or maybe exclusive to Rolling Stone or NME...Mojo or the BBC or even the Times. But I’ve just now made a decision. I’m keeping the guitar itself for myself. I can’t sell it. Maybe rent it out for certain studio sessions.”

“What if it’s not even here? What if it doesn’t even exist anymore?”

He cocked his head like a spaniel. Slowly turned his face trance-like toward the door. “It’s calling me.”

“Stop it.”

“Don’t you hear it, Suzy?”

I heard nothing. I flopped on the bed, and found a cig in my bag. I watched as he pulled the door open. Lightning flashed. That creepy old groupie was standing there, and I nearly fell off the lumpy mattress.

“Follow me,” she rasped.

I stood up and rushed over to Jarod grabbing his arm. He shook me off.

“I hear it!” he cried. He held his hands over his ears. “It’s...almost too loud. It’s Bon Boni playing, I’d know it anywhere! I know that riff!”

I heard only thunder, rumbling like a warning growl. Jarod was on something, maybe acid, I concluded. “Jarod, what if it’s just...an hallucination,” I offered, feebly, following them to the end of the corridor where a wide stone curving stairway led upwards into deeper shadows.

“It’s him. He’s playing live!” Jarod shouted, as if above a din. The old hag pointed at a closed door. She said not a word.

“Come back down here Jarod,” I cried. “It’s a trick. Why should she show you the guitar, anyway?” I looked with contempt as the old woman as she passed me, trailing a scent of dead roses. “Why are you doing this to him? Can’t you see he’s sick?”

Her back was to me as she strode away, and she raised her arm and gave me the finger. On that knobby digit was a terrifying skull-ring heavily cast in silver.

Jarod pushed and pushed on the heavy door and at last it flew open and a veritable waterfall of rain cascaded down on him in lightning flashes. I thought it was rain...yet it wasn’t. it was too dark, too viscous...it looked like blood.

I felt my own blood draining from my head and staggered backwards. I saw Jarod reaching upward in this miasma of blood- rain, dripping down his hair and his face and his neck. I saw the skeletal arms and bones of hands descending through the open door toward him, grasping the neck of a gleaming black guitar. It flashed like diamonds as the storm pulsed and throbbed, and thunder cracked like the drums of hell.

“You may touch it, but you may not own it,” rasped this hideous wraith.

Jarod took the guitar into his hands at the moment of a deafening floor-shuddering, window-rattling lightning strike. His bloody hair stood up on end; his eyes bulged. But he smiled ecstatically. I heard satanic laughter.

I collapsed to the floor, almost too frightened to watch.

The ragged-clothed translucent ghost of Tyler Bon Boni clapped his now-fleshy palms together before his handsome angular face wreathed in a wild mane of black curls as Jarod’s smoking hands strummed one terrible crashing chord. Sparks exploded upwards. I don’t remember much after that, because I guess I was passing out. But the last thing I saw was a throng of hip revelers milling and dancing around me, stepping over me, with drinks in their hands and pointy party hats on their skull-heads, and black holes where eyes should be.

#

It was almost a year later that my lawsuit against Jarod’s estate was settled. The doctors who’d treated me in Scotland all testified under oath that I’d obviously been slipped some pretty bad acid by none other than the one-time hot producer, Jarod, the guilty party in absentia.

So he was disgraced, or would have been if he hadn’t already been almost completely forgotten. It’s eerie how quickly fame can fade in the pop world. His name vanished from the media and the public eye faster than I’d thought possible.

But I remember Jarod. He’s now locked away in Bedlam. He didn’t die the night he was electrocuted. But he went completely insane. It’s sad, but he seemed to be headed in that direction even before our night at Tyler Bon Boni’s mad ruin of a castle.

No one visits Jarod Carrick.

They say he sits in his padded room and he plays lead guitar, rarely sleeping. He perches at the edge of a little stool and he plays and plays. No one but he can hear his brilliant music, though. Because he’s holding nothing in his hands, he’s playing air guitar. Day after day. Night after night.

Most people (rock historians, I guess) of course still assume the actual guitar was never found.

They’re wrong.

That strange ancient groupie who let us into the castle had the good sense to call for help the night we had our bad acid trip and -- in Jarod’s case -- a bad shock. Many, many volts worth. She then disappeared into the shadows. But I know she’s up there.

The authorities collected our stuff. My bag. Jarod’s backpack.

The black guitar.

Which I claimed as mine when they released me from the hospital and sent me back to London.

I keep the guitar in the back of my closet in my flat in Marble Arch. I’m not home much. I’m off shooting members of the Royal Family and movie stars and once in a while pop royalty like Beyoncé and Jay-Z and Taylor and various Kpop boys. By all appearances, I’m doing well, thank you very much.

Except, I’m not doing so well. Not really. Not at all. The black rings under my eyes tell a tale.

I suppose I could have the guitar authenticated and make quite a bit of money off of it. Or I could be really kind and visit Jarod in Bedlam and make it a gift to him.

Wouldn’t that blow his mind?

But I’m thinking of doing something else entirely with this macabre instrument...I’m thinking of returning it to its rightful owner. I guess I need closure, if you’ll forgive the rotten expression.

I’m at the very edge of desperation, you see.

Like Jarod, I rarely sleep. Especially when I’m home, with my secrets. If I so much as doze off for a moment I have the same dreadful nightmare. I hear Bon Boni’s shredding chords. And I hear that screaming voice of his telling me “Bring back my guitar...bring it to me...or I’ll come for it, bringing death and ruin to you and everything you love!”

That’s why I’m writing you today. I can’t do this alone. I need someone to accompany me up to Crabwell Castle, in Scotland. I thought of you immediately. You, only you. You’re possibly the only one who might understand me, who wouldn’t be afraid. I mean, really truly afraid. As I am afraid.

So, there you have it. Now you must know what I want of you.

Please respond and let me know soon. Will you?

Will you come with me to the castle?

THE END