Face The Music And Dance

BZZZT! BZZZT!

She picked the phone up in one fluid and automatic motion. She barely checked the screen, never recognised the numbers anyway.

“Hello?” she asked the inanimate object.

“Lila.”

A single world came back at her from a world away. 

From another life. 

A word she had never heard here. 

That voice. 

Him. 

Then the music played and she danced a dance that she knew only too well. A dance that only she knew.

The dance of death.

The music played and not only was it an earworm, the worm burrowed into her mind and left an aperture for the wasps to crawl in. Wasps. So many wasps and their infernal buzzing. They were angry. So angry.

She banged her head with her fist in a frantic attempt to dislodge it. She tried again, interrupting the baseline and almost knocking the needle from the record in her head…

But the music played on.

The music was always going to play on.

“Janet?” asked a stranger who had only moments before been her husband of over twenty years.

The woman that Henry had known as Janet stared at him in the most disconcerting of ways. It was her movements that shocked and confused him though. She was shuffling from side to side and shrugging her shoulders in an appalling approximation of the way that him and the boys had danced back at the school disco. Trying to dance, but also trying not to dance. Wanting to let go, but being too nervous and embarrassed to do so.

“Can you hear it?” she asked him in a dull and strange monotone.

“Hear what?” he asked her.

He didn’t hear the music, and so he had to die.

GHACK!

She punched him in the throat. He wasn’t expecting that. Now she had his attention, she held him in a final embrace.

The last thing he heard was her humming a catchy tune. A tune that he thought he’d heard before, but couldn’t quite place. The last thing he heard was that, or…

CRACK!

The snap of his neck as Lila broke it and in doing so broke Henry irrevocably.

Henry Billington lay on the floor of his kitchen. A kitchen that was so very obviously a kitchen. A kitchen situated in a house that was like all the other houses in suburbia. A house he had worked tirelessly to pay for and was so very near to buying in full. Today, for the very first time, Henry was going to be late for work.

Lila boogeyed out of the kitchen, but not before she’d opened a drawer and with only the briefest of considerations, selected the meat tenderiser. She lifted it to her mouth and silently lip synced the words of the tune that played over and over in her head. There was nothing else. Only that tune and where it took her with its catchy and repetitive beat.

She sang into her meat tenderiser mic, but the volume on the mixing desk was set to zero. She heard it all the same and she let the music take her. Music is a time machine with the controls set to the past. A song comes out of nowhere, taking a person back to another time. Sometimes the music can take someone back to another life, a life that Lila hadn’t even dreamt of in the last twenty years. She’d thought that life was gone. She had buried Lila. But as soon as the band struck up with that tune of theirs, Lila was back, and she was back with a vengeance.

Benny didn’t say a word. He was caught up in his own music. The soundtrack to the first person shoot ‘em up that he played for hours and hours each and every day. He should have been on his way to college, but the music pulled him from the sad reality of his humdrum life and cocooned him in a fantasy. In his fantasy he was a tall, buff dude and he was as hard as his six pack. The ladies loved him and he had his pick, but killing was his thing and he was good at it. Not the best, but he would be. It was just a question of time.

There was movement in his peripheral vision.

“Tut!”

Benny would have been surprised to learn that as final words go, tut was as common as they came. Tut was one of the words that people used when they mistook a fatal threat for a benign occurrence.

THOCK!

Was the sound that ended Benny’s reign as third best in his fantasy game of pretend death. He didn’t see the hammer blow that caved his skull in, and neither did he see the sniper’s bullet from the second best player in the game. The second best player had little time to celebrate killing Benny as the first best player stepped up behind him and plunged a hunting knife into his back and straight through his heart.

Guns for the slob, knives do the job! That was the best player’s maxim. He was eight years old and if his parents found out that his older brother let him run amok gutting kids twice his age, they wouldn’t give a shit. Just as long as he was quiet and didn’t cause them any trouble, it was fine with them.

Benny was very quiet now. Soon though, he would let rip with a fart that he would have been proud of. Maybe not a full ten out of ten, but close.

That left Chloe.

Lila was singing out loud now, not that she really noticed the increase in her volume, as she left Benny’s room, she shuffled back a step every now and then. She was focusing on the music, it helped drown out the animosity of the wasps. Her head was bobbing this way and that and she span around on one foot as she lifted the extension cord from work bench in the garage. She was smiling, but that smile was so far away it wasn’t attached to Lila at all.

She trotted up the stairs jauntily, and shimmied sideways into Chloe’s bedroom. Chloe wasn’t there though and Lila knew that. She bent double and took the opportunity to shake her ass to the music only she could hear. As she straightened, she plugged the appliance she’d rescued from the carnage of Chloe’s bedroom floor into the extension lead. Back on the landing, she plugged the extension into the wall.

Then she lifted the hairdryer to her mouth and sang a full three minutes of karaoke for all she was worth. Buoyed by her singing, she kicked the ajar bathroom door wide open and slid across the bathroom tiles in her slippered feet.

“Mum?” asked Chloe from her prone position in the bath.

Lila merely raised her eyebrows, then lifted her hand out across the bath and performed a deadly mic drop. 

Chloe blinked bathwater from her surprised eyes. Lila raised a finger; wait a moment.

She skipped out of the bathroom and flicked the power switch on the socket.

CRACK!

A sound of subdued thunder as power surged through the house and made Chloe dance one final time before slipping under the surface of the bath like a forlorn and swordless lady of the lake.

Done.

Lila was done here and for a moment the music stopped. For a maddening moment, all there was was the buzzing of a million wasps and the gnawing of a hungry earworm in Janet’s brain. Then the music kicked back in and Lila took up her dance again.

She strutted her stuff over the prone form of Janet’s deceased husband and switched all the rings of the gas hob on. For good measure she also turned the gas oven on and opened the door.

Back to the garage for a string of outdoor lights which she wrapped around her as she went for it with a series of dance moves right from the nineteen seventies’ hey days of disco. She disentangled herself from the lights, tapping her foot as she did so. Wrapping them into a ball, she bunged them in the microwave and set it to cook those bulbs for the next ten minutes. 

Less than five minutes later, the entire kitchen was an oven with Henry browning nicely. It wasn’t quite a Viking cremation, but it would have to do. 

How Lila found someone fitting her description and had her sitting in the front room with a magazine on her lap and a bread knife jutting out of the base of her skull was anyone’s guess. Lila would never tell. Not that there was anything to tell, because for Lila there was only the music and the thumping bass tone of all those wasps. That and the dance, a dance that would take her to a preordained venue and a rendezvous with a very important dance partner who would not live to see the next dance, let alone the next day.

And the music played…

…over and over and over…