Somewhere in America Tom Waits used his voice. Whether he spoke a prayer or read the directions on the back of an oven-pizza, the thought gave The Troubadour hope. 

The wandering musician’s boot heels touched down on the same sprawling country where Tom Waits rested his slippers, where he hoped a drum kit shook a neighbor’s house, and where a kid picked through his scales in a poster-plastered bedroom, giving Rockin Roll a little hope.

Gotta use your gift. He had to remind himself. Sam called it a “gift”. Waits had a hell of a gift. The Troubadour was still measuring his gift, long rehearsed, but still not defined. He put it on the scale and most days it sank from gift toward curse.

Today, that curse dragged him to the burning center of hell. The heat had him rambling again, getting existential. Keep on keeping on. Keep on truckin. Keep kicking those boot heels forward, touching down on the golden purchase, never minding the endless plane of burning land.

Many a man had drawn his last mark with a boot heel. Dying standing usually means a violent end, a conclusion supported by a short and brutal human history. He waited for the boot prints he followed to end. He waited for a body, hoping it didn’t move anymore.

He looked at the traces of toe and heel pressed into the sand, staggered markings: right, left, right, then a stuttered left. They got more erratic the further he followed, trailing them out into the blistering heat. He waited for that last boot heel, never surprised to see the next.

He took long, calculated breaths, his own cowhides dropping one in front of the other in measured time. The sun worked on his skull, trying to split it wide open. He imagined his brain shriveling like a slug under the ferocity of the sun, his skin blossoming around the cavity like an eager flower, wilting to flakes in a simmering instant. 

But he didn’t dwell. Imaginings were fine, as long as he didn’t turn his attention to his actual blistering skin. 

He placed his boots in the large imprints of the last feet to fall in this place of death. It struck him that their four feet were probably the only of their kind to touch down on this stretch of Nevada sand in a very long time, maybe ever. It seemed likely that no man had placed a boot heel in this hell ever, not for miles anyway. The trail he followed disappeared into a shimmering sea of warped air, light bending the melting world to a dancing mirror of blue and white. Clarity and definite lines shivered away, the horizon appearing and disappearing with every step.

He didn’t lose himself in the sun-warped reality dancing along the horizon. He extended his conscious self elsewhere instead, noticing how the tracks staggered… hard to picture the bald man, the Bald Devil, staggering. The Bald Devil had towered over him.

Maimed? Death blow? We’ll see, thought The Troubadour.

A hundred and nine degrees couldn’t shed the black leather coat from his back, not when he could feel The Song like this. Tympany teased the back of his mind. He could let The Song begin, let it play out, taking over his thoughts and vision. He could, but that was never smart. Parts of it were always there, threatening to take over. Its harmonies passing through the cortex worked something like the image of God, crippling the person with awe and grandeur… and horrible power.

The best guitarists didn’t see beyond their focus, beyond their love… or obsession. The world class guitarists, the elemental folks that welded themselves on to the gears of rock eternity, had only themselves and the strings wound across their instrument. They didn’t hear the stadiums filled with adoration. They didn’t know the noise. They just let themselves soar, finding heaven in their fingerwork.

He gripped the neck of his guitar, but kept his fingers from the frets. He’d seen The Song on the man’s skin, before everything went to hell. He saw the staves drawn in shaky black ink– incomplete, but familiar. 

The man knew him, he’d seen that recognition before they ever hit Nevada. Everyone on that bus could have died. The odd oily spheres filling the man’s eye sockets snapped to meet his right after he’d glanced at those dangerous tattoos, like he’d passed a test and now the rest of humanity could be shredded to ground beef.

The face looking back at him rippled, like the muscles under it lived their own separate lives. Every inch of pale skin moved, hairless and exposed, except what he covered with his torn tank top and black jeans. The Bald Devil sat in the back of a bus leaving the California coast and didn’t even have a bag… maybe that was normal, except no destitution could be found in his severe features. He only stared. His neck pulsed like he might stomp through the eight seats between them, crushing every sleeping grandma and tablet-absorbed child in the effortless process. They rode that way for two states, waiting until the constant desert filled every window.

Every time he glanced at the helltracks inked up and down the creature’s arm, his wandering gaze met a surly face that could only be planning his destruction. The black eyes locked at the center of his square head flashed with visions of apocalyptic death and mass chaos.

The tattoos were something of a miracle: how could the music of desolation live in obvious sight and no musician see it?

He didn’t have long to wonder. Once they hit the desert things went to hell. Whatever happened on the platform over those six trundling wheels seemed like a gaussian dream. Some of the passengers didn’t have a chance. He hoped the others were fine now, probably cursed with nightmares for the rest of their lives… but fine.

 He’d been lost in the moment of recognition for hours. Those notes, no one can have those notes. Then the badlands filled the windows and the Bald Devil made his move.

Reaching for his guitar always made The Troubadour’s world disappear. The Song made him disappear. This instant was no different.

He tried to remember the details, but became distracted. It became more and more difficult to drop his steps into the increasingly awkward footprints. A good sign. 

He remembered changing the octave of the verse he played, bringing the melody down as low as he could and slowing the tempo. Moving the scale like that was risky, not that he thought about it at the time. He always let instinct guide his hands. The change meant he had a chance to salvage the sanity of the human passengers while attacking the unnatural threat– assuming The Bald Devil was more than human, or something else. He didn’t know much about unnatural things, but had seen enough in the last couple of years to know that they were very real.

The ground at his feet felt like concrete, only with a dusting of endless sand swirling over its surface. The relentless particles found their way up and around his face and into his shirt and underpants with ease. More discomfort to ignore. The key to success. Life relented.

The solar destroyer worked from above. The song worked from within, a few notes escaping his subconscious and reverberating off the dome of his skull like it was a packed arena. Not many people could hold such a thing in a tank of flesh. Containing the whole song, note for note, in one brain, that was his gift, today’s curse.

The Bald Devil had good reason to trail him out of California… but that tattoo made him a mark in his own right. How much does this thing know about those notes?

The steps in the sand vanished, continuing as a snake-like streak that wound towards a dark lump behind the veil of heat and dust.

The Troubadour reached for his hip and twisted the power knob on the lunch-box sized Marshall amplifier he wore. He found the fretboard on the guitar behind him and pulled the instrument over his bag, readying it in front of him. He slid the cable into place, the little box letting out a screech.

He trailed the winding lines in the sand until the lump took the shape of a man. The form lay crumpled in a distorted position.

The Troubadour pulled the Fender close, half focused on The Song, half curious about the state of the thing he saw before him. It didn’t look threatening, but he had plenty of experience with things that didn’t look threatening. 

He tested a string and felt the air change. Waves of heat bent around him and the gentle note hung, hardly audible. He reached under the flap and pulled out the pick. It felt heavy in his hand.

“Sam,” he said. He hadn’t been able to touch the thing without saying it, without feeling that connection. He could unload out here if he wanted to. There was no living creature for miles.

The shape on the ground remained flat, the image of a dead man, only flatter. The Bald Devil lay too flat, his arms bent and folded at odd angles and his legs disappearing into the black crumpled fabric of his jeans and shirt.

Standing feet away, The Troubadour could see the devil’s skin rippling, shiny black movements pooling around it. It looked like he’d fallen over an oil well, the rich stuff bubbling up from the ground. Not natural.

The black essence leaked from his orifices, not like a liquid, but like living creatures. Four black shapes bolted towards him, gleaming husks skittering quickly with their barbed tails raised in menace.

Scorpions.

They rushed at The Troubadour’s feet and he put his trust in his Durangos, timing each kick and stomp to meet the rhythm of their attack.

Four crushed exoskeletons was an easy enough outcome, but the trailing sound of clicking joints revealed a whole legion of angry black arachnids pouring from the human shape, funneling from its eyes and mouth and scampering across the desert sand. 

The human-like skin rippled with the evacuation of each venomous arachnid.

Looks like someone paid the desert tax, thought The Troubadour, putting his fingers to the frets and raising his pick. He liked to think a devil like this one paid extra, but he doubted it.

The swarm of scorpions nearly crashed over the toes of his boots, but, in the instant his hand rose, the black river parted. Skittering creatures clambered over each other to reroute away from the man threatening to strike his guitar– an apparent danger to the black swarm. 

“Smart bugs?”

They coursed around him, disappearing into the sweltering expanse. 

Not a single scorpion remained. They’d passed him like commuters at 8:50 a.m.. In a matter of seconds he stood alone in the desert again.

He twisted the knob on the amp until it clicked and unplugged the guitar, swinging it back behind him.

He gave the skin a kick and waited, then kicked it again.

After a couple of seconds he knelt down and plucked at the clothes. They pulled away as he snatched, catching on the bloodless flaps that they used to sleeve. He pulled until the garments were clear of their pale contents.

He shook the grotesque shape as he pulled, hoping to shake any remaining scorpions loose. He didn’t see one.

The remnants were surreal: skin and skin alone, like a rubberized suit plopped down out of nowhere. No bones or muscles or blood. A few inches of song poke out from the folds, the pores in the ink reminding him what he was looking at.

He pinched the skin and lifted. He expected the feeling of a cheap Halloween mask, but the skin maintained a soft feel, almost like suede, but with the lipids. He’d never known rubber so soft. 

He shook it– one last check for bugs. It flapped like a scuba suit, only lighter. The head fell back behind the deflated man, its features lost, sagging around vacant holes. 

Even in death, without bones or meat, he could tell The Bald Devil enjoyed a big ten inch record, a sight that made him queasy. He folded the man in half, the top flopping over the bottom, and then he folded him the other way. His stomach lurched again when he noticed the toenails, still present and all painted black.

He didn’t study the ink, he’d have plenty of time somewhere more comfortable, but he knew he had too. The skin had to go with him. He had to know what this thing knew, and find out who else might be after it– who else he might have to run from.

He opened his bag and realized that a man’s worth of skin didn’t fold as tight as a t-shirt. He pulled two white shirts out of his bag and left them to the desert, but he had more decisions to make.

Within five minutes his turkey sandwich box-lunch from the bus-station, his two empty water bottles, and his flare gun hit the sand too. He left them miles behind within an hour, the skin stuffed under a flap and two stressed buttons.

Food… water? Not now. Not today, unless he got lucky. He grinned, the sun shrinking from him, the death orb suddenly cooler… suddenly shy. 

Everything you don’t know, you’ll know in the end, he’d been told. That didn’t mean he didn’t feel it now. The Song grew louder, leaking into the safe parts of his mind. He felt it alright, rising faster than the burning sun, and twice as eager to turn all it touched to ash.

Here comes your man.

This episode was written to the album In Step, by Stevie Ray Vaughan