Welcome To Hellville - Part 12 contd By Rich Mills

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At four pounds fifty-one pence for a Big Value, five hundred sheet, A4 refill pad, he knew where the money was best to be spent. He'd done his sums and worked out the cost of writing his opus, this swan song. With the five pounds he'd scrapped together, for expenses and materials, Alan had gone straight out and bought an Electric Token with the face value of fifty-six pounds and thirty-two pence from Dodgy Doctor Death the local card dealer.

Dodgy was ageing fast; his leathered skin hung loosely off an angular skeletal frame. No longer the wide boy, he'd shrunk down from a juiced-up firm plum to a sun-dried California prune. They used to be the best of friends, shared a house together, shared women, shared a bed, shared clothes, shared... Due to its fall from a great height the rose tinted glass splintered into three hundred million shards. With the song of breaking glass Alan remembered the imbalance in the give-and-take ledger, and why they were no longer friends.

3-D always made him smile, he was a natural clown. Everybody loved him. 3-D, that was what Dodgy called himself when he started up the band. Pray for Rain, it was Alan who had come up with the idea for the name and the reason they had asked him to be their manager. They were supposed to be a Psycho-Indie-Goth experimental guitar band, with influences of Jimi Hendrix. This was purely because the band's lead guitarist worshipped at the altar of Screaming Guitar Solo. A little known Hindu deity, whose image is that of a whaling naked harlot sat astride the blade of a huge axe.

The handle of the axe, forming into a phallic bell at the end, which is being licked suggestively by the long forked tongue of the screaming banshee riding the knife-edge.

Alan had always known that the band was doomed to failure. 3-D's idea of rapping Pink Floyd songs in the style of Frank Sinatra was original, but a definite non-starter. Almost every Monday and Thursday the band would rehearse above the local pub, the Critter and Cabala. The room was usually used for the lodge meetings of the Benevolent Order of the Moroccan Brotherhood. Burn marks from hot-rocks peppered the bench seating around the circumference of the functional room.

They never played a single gig as a band, although as manager, Alan had set one up for them in a local venue. He'd even gone to the effort of designing and having flyers printed up, with a slogan and everything. They read in wavy gothic text up the side, Your soul is dry, it's time to... Then across the top in stretched, pulled and twisted gothic text it read, Pray for Rain. That memory was the only connection between them now. The only way they knew how to communicate was by checking whether the fragment of the puzzle each held onto still fitted together.

It was always the same. As Alan handed over the cash he'd look Dodgy in the eye and repeat the long decayed slogan. To which Dodgy would reply by handing over the illegally acquired token and in a flying retort complete the phrase. Alan often wondered whether the little custom they'd developed meant anything to his shadowy pal, or was he just wasting his breath. Then again he did sell the tokens to Alan at half price, so the guy did have his advantages.

Continued Welcome To Hellville - Part 13 By Rich Mills.. Next Page

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