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n its prime, Newburg Mall bustled with visitors to its department stores, clothing boutiques, restaurants, theatre, video arcade and other shops and amusements. It was the chief entertainment for miles around. But it declined with the decline of the neighborhoods around it and in the face of new competition. Stores closed, their lots left empty, or were replaced by humbler businesses. One by one, the thoroughfare darkened and quieted with slow abandonment until, in its last year, one could walk from end to end without passing a single person. At last, it closed its doors. It would stand empty for four years. And the place might have been useless were it not for a single secret and illicit innovation.
On a morning in July, when the sun still sat low over the hills, two carloads of youths pulled up at the rear of the building. They unloaded from the back seats of each car their instruments, amps and PA system along with a box of miscellaneous cords, battery-powered lights, microphones and effects pedals. From the trunk of one car they unstrapped a portable generator, while from the trunk of the other they took a spare tank of propane.
The back doors of the building could be entered without trouble since many of the glass panes had been broken while the boards fitted to replace them were flimsily held in place. While two drove the cars and parked them at inconspicuous locations, the others carried the equipment inside for perhaps a hundred yards until they came to a storefront that had once hosted the sale of fashionable clothes for young women. At its rear corner was an elevated platform—a terrace on which had once stood racks of colorful blouses and t-shirts and on which they now deposited their burdens, except the generator which remained ten yards beyond the entrance because of the noise and fumes it would make. They attached an electrical extension and carefully fixed it along the base of a wall with duct tape in order to keep it from being pulled loose by careless feet. Then they assembled the drum kit and connected the amps and instruments. When they were done, they did not start the generator but sat, sweating and quietly smoking their cigarettes while they waited for the others to return.
This they did in a few minutes, bearing between them the requisite iced drinks they would need throughout the day. Then they started the generator, tuned their instruments and spent nearly a half hour twisting knobs and playing short snatches of music until the sound was satisfactory. With that, they shut the generator off and sat on the decaying seats of the thoroughfare, talking, smoking and making occasional nervous remarks about the likelihood of receiving the hoped-for audience.
An hour before noon, the first attendees made their way inside. They were friends of the musicians and gave each their assurances that discreet invitations had been issued to all who seemed safe to tell and likely to attend. In order to facilitate arrivals, one member remained posted at all times just outside the rear entrance while another kept watch at the front. Gradually, their room began to fill. Shortly before one o’clock, the generator was restarted and the equipment turned on.
The music, covers and originals, had been endlessly rehearsed during the previous six months and their material would be sufficient to fill four hours or more. The only outstanding question was how they would be received—this was their debut. Each player surreptitiously regarded the crowd now and then, taking the rough estimate of their numbers and apparent mood. There were two or three dozen, and their demeanors ranged from obvious excitement to a defiant expectation of anticlimax. Without a word or any preparatory signal to the audience, the guitarist struck the first note.
Whether the acoustic properties of the building increased the sense of atmosphere—or whether the music was enhanced by the forbidden scene of its performance and the dim light of the room in which it was heard—all have since agreed that something magic was in the air that day. The beat of the drums and bass throbbed in the floor and walls—the guitar ground out chords and riffs that leapt and skated as though dancing over the heads of the crowd—and the singer’s voice, transformed by the accompaniment, seemed to sermonize on the elemental force of life.
And when the show was over, the players exhausted, they watched the crowd depart until once more they were alone. After a few minutes, they took down the equipment and instruments and retraced their steps until they stepped out into the light of day. It was still only afternoon, and it was remarked how wrong it seemed to stand in sunlight so soon. They all agreed, it should have been night when they emerged.
The next performance was set at a later time and better attended. Rehearsal tapes advertising their music were passed out freely to the guests—and again the show commenced. For four weeks, the void and hulking structure was filled with music, played each night to successively larger crowds and with more abandon than before. The entire assembly removed from the old boutique to the main thoroughfare in order to accommodate the audience. And although the lights were few and scattered as before, the music was received with an ever-increasing intensity of response. The noise could be heard plainly through the mall’s outer walls. Alcohol was brought in, people became drunk and violent disorder regularly threatened. But still the music played, while some enthusiasts wrote or painted the band’s name or fragments of its lyrics on the walls.
On the last night, while the hours passed with the increasing abandon of the performance and its audience, the band gave way to uncontrolled elaborations of its songs, filling minutes with instrumental improvisations, or obdurately repeating the same riffs while the singer made speeches or sang wordless tunes in reflection of the altering atmosphere of the hall. And with that, the audience became steadily more distracted and unruly, as though urged on to greater excess by the music that it heard. The lights were overturned and darkness spread more prevalently among them. Excited shouts and whistles were disturbed by more violent screams, and through the music’s crescendos could be heard a gradually increasing clamor as of riot, a thick, constrained movement of the whole body, until the noise of alarm became so great that the musicians paused in their performance.
Then, like a curtain drawn back, the cessation of music revealed what lay beneath. The thoroughfare was utterly black. Not even a gleam from the outer world penetrated the mall’s many boarded apertures. And a vast, throbbing movement surrounded them, pierced by screams and pathetic cries for help. Those who were fortunate took refuge in one of the many niches of the storefronts, while others were caught inextricably in the crowd and trampled underfoot. The musicians themselves were jostled and thrown down. And a single horrified voice warned all that someone had a knife.
From without, the survivors could be seen to emerge through the same opening as had admitted them. One by one and separated by minutes during which could be heard vague, disconsolate and disturbed noises from within, they appeared, shaken, bloodied and with such expressions of blank and hopelessly lost horror that when they were found afterward wandering the streets in directionless attempts to find home they frightened those who found them. And worst of all were those covered in blood upon whom no wound whatever could be found.
News spread. Police and ambulances came. Equipped with bright lights to dispel the inner gloom, they went inside. Some living still remained, huddled in corners or lying in varying states of consciousness on the floor. But in the region where the instruments and equipment lay smashed were found the strewn dead, in strange positions, with wild and staring eyes. The musicians lay in widely separated spots, pale faces and hands streaked with scarlet stains, their eyes gleaming incomprehensibly from the black pools in which they lay.
The silent walls re-echoed the verses of the songs only in graffiti. The rumored knife lay dispossessed upon the floor. And with the departure of the dead and wounded, with the last of the police, the mall resumed its desolation, destined now for the permanent abandonment of destruction. |
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