Yet another four o'clock beat its entrance into the band room beneath Bethany High, the fluorescent lights glaring a hole into the retinae of one Harold Hiller, Bachelor of Music, sipping the dregs of his Irish Teacher's Room Urn coffee. The rejects, retards and renegades of the school, the ones who could find no other extracurricular than band, slowly made their way through the standardized manufactured wood door with the chicken-wire screen slit window into the overlit, sparsely furnished band room, which, despite several million candela, still had the sepulchral pall of the Haley suicide hanging around, the spirit of Steve "Scherzo" Haley clearly palpable, though his lanky body with a ruptured abbreviated head, K-Mart grey chinos and faded white, light yellow and brown striped button up next to the splattered bits of grey matter, blood and bone, topped by the over-sized gold-rimmed aviators he habitually wore, had been thoroughly cleaned, and the area incensed and cleansed by several dozen clergy members. Turned out, the spirits of people who blow their brains out with a zip shotgun disguised as a clarinet are had to remove.
Harold did not mind Scherzo's presence, as it meant at least one member of the band was present, if non-corporeal. The second to enter the room was Mazy Van Leeuw, a timid-seeming, conservatively dressed young woman with a long skirt and shirt, lugging her backpack and a flute case. She tripped over the strategically placed music stand Hank Hiller (no relation to Harold) kept leaving after practice. From her backpack flew several dollar store composition books, the cover of each decorated with a different hand-drawn pinup person, as well as a mesh zip bag filled with stick and poke tattoo supplies. The trip had been so bad her skirt fully inverted, revealing the immense mandala of ink on her legs; sex acts, violence, several passion scenes, they were all there, done by her coterie of simps from the adjacent junior high.
"Eh, eto, sorry Hiller-sensei."
"Look, as long as you have my uze, I don't care about what the hell your doing."
"But of course." A cheap pillbox was produced from her left bra cup.
Hiller rattled it, popped it open. Inside was an adequate supply of adderall, xanax and pure morphine.
"Well, maybe we'll get through this semester 'til homecoming alright then." He set aside one of each pill on the stool Scherzo had blown his brains out upon, a libation for the most loyal member of the band.
At half past, the rest of the reprobates arrived. Hank Hiller, the band's erstwhile trombonist, arrived first, noting that his stand had in fact caught its quarry. His massive gut sat on its stool first, then the rest of him.
"Hi Hank."
"High Hiller."
Next was... Cymbals, the band's percussionist. He was less selectively mute than selectively speaking, though apparently of genius IQ. He was also very clumsy and incapable of keeping a rhythm, which made him the band's second most valuable player.
Tsh, tss, bo-ong Cymbals greeted all with.
"Yeah, just set up on the floor there. Don't bother picking your stuff up."
Next were Tweedle and Tweedle, adoptive brothers sharing a foster mill and likely the dumbest kids in school. Tweedle Dflat was black and allegedly on a half-dozen medications to help with his various developmental conditions, but as the Tweedles were the town's one stop shop for stimulants, only the stupefying beta-blockers and anti-psychotics crossed his lips into his gullet. Tweedle C Sharp was twice Dflat's weight, and not markedly ill except for being really, really fucking thick in the skull. Both had recurrent sinus problems, which of course meant they'd get to play rhythm tuba.
"You guys just... yeah, right there."
Finally came the one person who's only issue was severe ODD and ASPD, most likely due to having been kicked out of her house at ten for preferring black clothing. Liza was the band's trumpeter, which would be fine if she was capable of following sheet music as written.
"Uh, right at the door is fine. If you wish."
Harold looked at his band. In fact, they had not played live for years; out of fear of the madness their natural cacophony could cause, the PA had broadcast public domain performances of half-time show favourites instead of the cthonic chords they created. They did not practice so much as attempt to synchronize their idiosyncratic voices, and the last time any of Bethany's instruments had been in tune, Jimmy Carter had been president.
"You're a bunch of retarded, perverted, degenerated, obstinate, homoerotic floccnoccinihilipilifacatory fuckheads. I myself am retarded, degenerate, hypercelibate and a pathetic excuse of a human being, whose only real desire right now is to blow my fucking brains out. I guess we're all a bunch of fucking PUNKS here!"
A minor aneurysm blew in his brain, killing several minor inhibitory neurons, making a small change in the weighting of his inhibitions.
The flask came out, the top came off, and he drained it in one chug.
"YOU GODDAMN FUCKERS MAKE ME FUCKING SICK. IN A BACKWATER SCHOOL OF DEGENERATE FUCKHEADS YOU ARE THE FUCKING BAKED ON SCUM AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POT. YOU ARE THE GUNK PATTY THE LUNCH LADY HAS TO SCRAPE OFF AFTER EVERY LUNCH. YOU ARE THE FUCKING NIGHTMARE IDIOTS OF THIS SCHOOL, THE UNREPENTANT CTHONIC LUMPENCLASSMEN OF A DYING COAL COUNTRY SCHOOLHOUSE. GOOD GOD I SHOULD'VE JUST FUCKING DIED FROM HEROIN LIKE MY BUDDY JACKIE, OR WRAPPED MY CAR AROUND A TREE LIKE BILLY-JOEL AND BILLY-BOB, OR DETONATED MYSELF ON ACCIDENT LIKE UNCLE FESTER THE METHMAKING PYROMANIAC WHO WAS PROBABLY ON THE SPECTRUM, OR JUST GOTTEN AIDS LIKE THAT PERVERT WHORE VERONICA. INSTEAD I MADE THE INCREDIBLY CUCKED, RETARDED DECISION TO GO INTO MUSIC TEACHING. AT LEAST IF I WERE ON THE ROAD I'D BE GETTING SOME UNDERAGE GASH INSTEAD OF JUST GETTING TAUNTED BY IT."
He sat down on the armchair the Tweedles had stolen from the discount furniture store in Evansville.
"God, I'm sorry guys. My life is fucked up, your guys' lives are all fucked up, I have a lot of dead friends... dead punk friends."
Teardrops rolled down his cheeks. In the smeary vision he thus gained, the glaring resemblances between his current band and the one he'd had about twenty years ago became obvious. Yes, yes, now he realized it.
"Fuck your sad sack bullshit, Harry." yelled Cymbals. "Shut up and let's go." yelled Liza. Dflat emphatically nodded, the most energetic motion he was capable of at the moment, and Mazy furiously flipped through her notebooks, revealing an energetically executed tableau of the entire six members of the band as their fursonae, and C Sharp played the tuba as it was played neither before or since, elegantly and metaphorically speaking of many things, of all life's seasons, of finding meaning in the quotidian nightmare that is existence, of the resurrection in store for those true to the Earth...
A perforated clapboard panel fell off the back of the room, where Liza slept at night, and Mazy had her simps fawn over here, revealing Scherzo's perfectly preserved pile of records, ranging from bootlegs of obscure punk bands to perfect editions of Beethoven, Wagner and Mussorgsky.
The record player which had been untouched since Scherzo's death started up, and the dulcet tones of G G Allin's defiant rage played, and played, and played, the methamphetamine and opioids flowed freely, and when the needle lifted, Holst's Planets came on... and through the weekend, their blend of cacophony had been written on their souls anew; and they had become like the ghosts of the Applachians, renewed and energetic, determined to retake life from the eminent gray apocalypse that had risen up into the hills.
Homecoming night came. Bethany played a pathetic game against Evansville; it was quite clear who would win. The exhausted players went off into the locker rooms, and the band, wearing long woollen coats, came out onto the field.
They arrived at the zero yard line, threw off their coats and began playing. The PA system fell silent as the cacophony started.
As if a million tap dancing ghouls blasted out of their tubas, Dflat and C Shap blased an arrhythmic nightmare beat. Cymbals screamed "aahak bl' phtagn alulullululul ecko ecko ecko exS!" as he maniacally beat in several keys and times at once, and the Pentecostals in the crowd foolishly started speaking in tongues, their heads exploding with every measure, their bodies animated only by the beat that came straight from the chaos nucleus. The stands were soaked with this blood from beyond, and yet the crowd did not move, locked into their seats by the compulsion from out of time.
Mazy and Liza played a duet, summoning colour from sheer space, a retelling of the true history of creation, and of the human species's bowed, infinitesimal place in it, their eventual regeneration into the adopted children of star spawn burned into the mind of all present.
The Evansville crowd had become hideously deformed into blobs with elephantlike probosces, attempting futilely to slither out of their seats and out of the stadium, only to collapse on the stairs, looking like overcooked fritattas with too many limbs, and a garishly terrifying mottle of pink and gray.
The band, refreshed, stopped their musicking, donned their coats and returned to the catacombs below Marsh field.
Out came the Bethany high team, transmuted into creatures of all mythical sorts; but mostly of the squamous and shuddering variety. The Evansville team, wasted nearly to a skeleton each man, their faces blanked and reconfigured in inifinitely possible ways, wearily walked upon the field, and collapsed. As the refs had been nailed to either set of goal posts, and the other team clearly was out of play, Bethany High won its first game since 9/11.
The band was lifted high by an assemblage of tentacles, pokey limbs, probosces, squamous steel, and void telekinesis, to return to a Bethany completely demade, to a place where the Shoggoths roam, and the Byakhee and Mi-Go play.
