She sat down on the stool opposite him. "That might be the point, at least a little."
"Yeah?"
"Gerard's never written sober. Better haunted by demons than free and clear with blank sheets of paper."
It wasn't an angle she'd told anyone she even considered, but Bob nodded slowly. "Think it'll rip the band apart the way the addictions did?"
She didn't know if it was a tech thing or a Bob thing, that ability to cut straight to the core of what she didn't want to discuss. "I hope it doesn't. I don't really want to think about it."
"Then it won't. Hopefully."
Bob had seen more bands break up than Rae had seen, period. The thought weighed heavily on her bind. "It won't," she said firmly, taking a sip of coffee.
They were alone until noon, which Rae wouldn't have minded in the slightest, except they didn't get anywhere with writing. Objectively, nothing was wrong with the riffs or the beat, but Rae hated everything they tried.
She gave up when Frank knocked on the door and said, "Hey, Mikey and Gerard are throwing spaghetti on the ceiling, so I made sandwiches. Want anything?"
Gerard was unusually quiet, and Mikey was – well. He wasn't acting off, Rae thought, but he was definitely more Mikey than usual, prone to sudden silence and creepy staring.
Rae was halfway through her sandwich when Gerard threw away his overcooked spaghetti and drew an X on his sketchpad. "I'm going exploring," he announced. "What's more inspiring than a giant fucking haunted house, right?"
"I'll go with you," Frank said immediately, hopping up.
"I'm good, thanks."
"It wasn't optional." Frank batted his eyelashes. "Ah want to be alone with you, Mr. Way."
It was completely ridiculous and, luckily, made Gerard laugh. "Christ, okay, come on. We'll ghost-hunt together."
The second they were gone, Mikey shook his head. "Not for a million dollars."
Bob rolled his eyes. "You don't really believe that shit, right?"
"I do, sometimes. What?"
"It's shit," Bob said again.
Rae wiped her hands clean and grabbed the abandoned sketchbook, flipping through it. "Maybe," she said. "Hey, Mikey, did you -"
"No."
She'd given him the basic exercises before they even flew out to LA, and he'd promised to look over them. She sighed. "Mikey."
"I've been busy. So have you," Mikey said defensively. "And it's not like I could play a complicated bass line even if I did do them, so why bother?"
It was an old argument in the same way the morning's failure was a normal irritation, but somehow the two combined was too much. "How the hell do you even know?"
For her, it was flying off the handle; Bob raised his eyebrows. "Rae?"
"Answer the question, Mikey," she said, stubbornly ignoring both Bob and the blush creeping over her own face.
But Mikey just stared at the table sullenly. "Because they're my fingers."
"That doesn't even make sense," Rae said. She was pretty much failing at not being angry.
"It does to me," Mikey said.
A thump came from upstairs. She glanced up before remembering Frank and Gerard. "You know practice helps," she said.
Mikey reached into his pocket and took out his Sidekick. "I don't get service."
"That's the point," Bob said quietly, before Rae could chastise him for straying from the subject again.
"Yeah," Mikey said. "Well. That's the point."
He set his phone on the counter and left the room, shoulders hunched.
"I'm an asshole," Rae said after a second of too-full silence.
"Not much of one." Bob shrugged. "Seriously, you don't rent out a haunted fucking studio without expecting this kind of thing to go on, do you?"
"You just said it was shit. The haunting stuff, I mean."
Watching Bob right then was like watching him before any of them had learned Bob-ese, the quirks and tiny movements that meant Bob was who he was. Or, more accurately, it was like watching a wax Bob figurine: he was impossible to read. "It doesn't really matter. If we believe it – and even I do, a little, it's human fucking nature – it'll fuck with us."
"Mentioning something Mikey promised he'd do isn't fucking with him," Rae said immediately.
"Isn't it?" Bob shrugged. "Hey, fuck if I know. You're just not usually the type to push."
"Maybe I should," Rae said unthinkingly. "Maybe that's what they need."
"Maybe," Bob said. "Or maybe you'll be the catalyst that tears the band apart."
It felt like a physical blow. "You should stop talking."
Bob looked surprised – at himself or Rae, she didn't know. "Fucking house," he said finally.
She just nodded in agreement.
||
"Maybe it's because we forgot to knock on wood."
Mikey blinked at Frank. "Huh?"
Frank twisted his hand around his fret hard enough to make Rae wince. "We were all talking about how this was going to work out. Maybe it's not because we forgot to knock on wood."
"We've only been here a week," Bob said. "And it's supposed to be haunted with ghosts, not luck demons or what the fuck ever."
"What if knocking on wood keeps ghosts from doing shitty things?" Gerard tapped his pencil. "It's not impossible."
"It is seriously unlikely, though," Rae said.
Mikey yawned, foot twitching. He'd sat down two hours ago and rested his head on Frank's shoulder, and he'd barely moved since then. "Are we done?"
"We haven't done anything." Rae played a few chords, then shook her head. "There's something there, I can feel it. We just have to keep going."
"I'm pretty tired," Gerard said.
"We just - what?"
He shrugged. "The storm last night kept me up."
Frank turned to look at the sunny skies outside, then turned back to look at Gerard, then looked outside again. "It didn't storm, man."
"Yeah, it did. There was crashing and shit. I could hear stuff hitting the windows." Gerard looked around at them. "Didn't it?"
Rae had slept soundly. "If it was, I missed it."
"I was awake all night." Mikey's voice was quiet enough that they had to lean in to hear it. "It didn't storm, Gee."
Gerard put his notebook down and stood up. He looked pale, disturbed: as close to gone as Rae had seen in a long time. "I'm going to go outside," he said.
She exchanged glances with the others, and each of them made an aborted move to stand, too. In the end, no one followed him.
"It could've been a dream," Frank said abruptly. He hopped off the couch, ignoring the way Mikey slumped down horizontally. "I mean, it was a dream. It had to be, right? We would've heard a storm."
"Mikey would've," Bob said. "I sleep like a rock."
"I do normally, but my bed's pretty shitty." Frank made a face. "Seriously, this is the worst mansion in LA."
They lapsed back into silence, until finally Rae stood up. "I'm going to go get Gerard. We should eat together."
"Why?" Mikey said.
"Because ghosts aren't real, but we're freaking out anyway."
He wavered a little when he stood up. "I'll come with you."
Gerard was sitting with his toes just barely touching the pool water. Rae stayed back; the odds of her actually drowning in the pool were pretty low, but it was the last thing she wanted to risk in a not-haunted house.
"I heard you last night," he said, looking directly at Mikey.
Mikey turned red. "I just couldn't sleep."
Rae took a step back, as quietly as she could.
"You were fucking – Jesus, Mikey. If you need your phone -"
"No." Mikey's voice was too high and his hands were clenched into fists, but he sounded certain. "That was the deal, remember? No cell phones."
Gerard held out a hand. Mikey went to sit with him, but not close enough to touch. "Tell me what's going on in there, Mikes."
Mikey shook his head. "Nothing. I'm just having trouble sleeping, I. That's all. That's it. "
Nothing had a hold on her but Rae felt pulled anyway, taking another step back and then another, and another, until she was inside the house again.
She flicked on the lights and watched dust motes float down from one of the over-elaborate chandeliers. Wires snaked around the baseboards, the equipment looking bizarre against the old-fashioned furniture. "I don't think we know what we're doing," she told one of the paintings, but she sat down in an overstuffed chair anyway, watching Mikey and Gerard out the window.
Frank poked his head in a few minutes after Gerard and Mikey left the side of the pool. "I'm going to look for secret passageways and shit people left behind. Want to come?"
Rae raised her eyebrows, standing up. "You're that scared to explore alone?"
He flipped her off. "Fuck off, I could get eaten by a wall or something."
"Terrifying danger." She waved a hand. "Lead the way."
Frank's idea of exploring mostly consisted of sticking his head into rooms and then wandering on. The mansion was simply laid out but somehow exhausting to walk through. They kept taking hallways that ended in empty rooms, or opening doors and finding cluttered closets.
"It's a – what's it called?" Frank made faces at one of the too-numerous portraits. "Not a crypt. The other one."
"Mausoleum?"
He snapped his fingers. "That's the one. Oh, hey."
The new door opened to a narrow staircase. "Sweet," Frank said, and started running up it.
Rae rolled her eyes and followed. The stairs were wood; with their luck, she thought, they'd turn out to be rotten and collapse and they'd die in a viper pit or something.
But in the end she stopped two stairs below Frank, staring at the wall the stairs led straight into.
"Fucking remodeling," Frank said, but his voice was shaky.
The lights flickered; the stairwell was cold. It was the norm for the house, but Rae found herself turning around anyway. "Come on," she said.
Frank grabbed her hand and tumbled after her. They didn't quite run, but they came close.
||
"Mikey's having problems," Gerard said quietly. He glanced uneasily at the others, not quite out of earshot, then lowered his voice further. "He keeps talking about his room. It's..."
"Creepy?"
"Everything is. But no, he." Gerard stopped, biting his lip.
She leaned against the refrigerator, deliberately blocking his view of the rest of the band. "Gerard."
"He says there's a blue light in his room," Gerard said, almost too quickly for Rae to make it out.
She blinked. "Um. A light where there shouldn't be, I'm guessing?"
"I told you. Problems."
The house wasn't haunted. She knew it wasn't. She was creeped out all the same. "What're we going to do?"
"There's nothing we can do, is there? I guess he'll sleep on the couch."
Rae nodded. "So. Composing."
"Composing," Gerard said, nodding hard.
It was two weeks and a day in, and they still hadn't come up with anything of substance. "Hopefully we'll be luckier today."
They were, in a way. They hadn't had a day where anything flowed right since stepping foot in the mansion, and it was making them snappish, the normal band comfort replaced by insane levels of friction. Today, though, they thought of things in fits and starts, twenty minutes of flawless work followed by two hours of nothing.
"This one's useless, though," she said, poking 'Shut Up And Play'. "Best case scenario is we get people asking us about the Dixie Chicks."
"We could rename it," Mikey said casually.
Bob shook his head before Ray could even answer. "It's too...something. Doesn't fit the album."
"What we want the album to be." Frank looked over at Mikey apologetically. "He's right, though. Sorry."
She'd only seen Mikey this obviously frustrated a few times. "Keep it for awhile," he said. "It's a good song. We'll find a place for it."
Rae opened her mouth to argue, but Gerard cut her off. "For now," he told Mikey.
"We've already played it live." Mikey's face was flushed, his voice too loud. "It'll be on the CD."
"Okay." Frank's voice was calm, but Mikey shook the hand on his arm off anyway.
"It'll be on the CD."
"We don't need to argue about this now," Rae said firmly. "Let's just fix the chorus, okay?"
They made almost no progress. Rae wanted nothing more than to go to bed, but instead she picked up a book and read it aimlessly, barely comprehending half the words. There was nothing wrong with her room, really, especially not if what Mikey and Gerard were saying was true; still, she didn't want to be the first to give up and leave.
At two AM, Bob finally stood up. "I'm not making breakfast again, assholes," he said, and left.
She put her book down and flinched: Mikey was staring at her, creepily still.
"Goodnight," she said, and left for her room.
She hadn't had a dream she remembered since they came to the mansion, so she didn't know why she woke up with the half-finished chorus running through her head. She'd have to talk to Gerard, then, even if the thought of bringing up that song again made her cringe.
By the time she managed to make it down the stairs for coffee, the rainy gray drizzle she'd woken up to was a slightly brighter rainy gray drizzle. Gerard was the only one up, sitting on the couch with two blankets on top of him and a notebook on his knees.
She drank the first cup as quickly as she could, wincing when it burned her tongue. "You're naked under there, aren't you."
Gerard looked shifty. "Maybe."
She rolled her eyes and shook her head, getting another cup. "Is this working, do you think?"
"My sleep's for shit." Gerard shrugged. "I have bad dreams. I've drawn more monsters in the past two weeks than in two months touring."
"So. Yes, basically."
Gerard nodded. "On my end, anyway."
She sat down next to him, poking her feet under the blankets. "Mikey's..."
"Important," he said defensively. "He never fucking gets it while we're writing, but he is."
She picked at the blanket, not looking up at Gerard. "You think I don't know that? But he's messed up right now."
"He's fine," Gerard snapped. "Jesus, you don't have to babysit us."
That was enough to jolt her. "I didn't think I was."
"If you keep worrying, everything's gonna fall apart. He'll be fine. He has insomnia, that's all. He'll be fucking fine."
Her stomach unknotted, because she understood this, could deal with it. "Gerard," she said. When he shook his head, she grabbed his notebook.
The tiny, sad figures sitting at the end of shadowy hallways and at the bottom of too-deep pits didn't look much like Mikey, but something about the angles of his limbs and the way his face was downturned left Rae with no doubt that every single one was him. "Jesus," she said.
"This fucking house," Gerard said.
"It's not just the house," Bob said quietly from the doorway.
"Well, no. Ghosts don't exist."
"Not what I meant. Jesus, Way, put some clothes on." He sat down in the chair opposite them. "We're all off. Just, completely. We're gonna write outside today."
"I thought you said it wasn't the house," Gerard said.
"It's not." Bob shrugged. "It's how we're thinking about it."
Rae couldn't explain why she didn't like the idea. "There's no studio outside."
"When'd you turn into such a fucking princess, Toro?"
It was a worryingly good question. She shut her mouth.
Just when they were about to go as a group up to Frank and Mikey's rooms, Frank came into the room, tugging Mikey along after him.
"We're going outside," Frank announced.
Gerard laughed. It was tense, almost hysterical; when Frank raised his eyebrows questioningly, he just shook his head. "Let's go."
Something about the way Mikey attached himself to Gerard's side made Rae hang back. Frank waited until they'd gone out before pressing his face into Bob's shoulder.
"He fucking slept on Gerard's floor last night," he said. "He came in to tell me."
"His room's not haunted," Rae said. "It's just...it can't be. It's not. Right?"
"He thinks it is." Frank glanced around the room. "And honestly, I don't know."
"This is ridiculous."
"Damn right it is." Bob pulled away from Frank. "Just...fuck, come on. Even if the house is haunted, the lawn can't be."
She wasn't completely convinced, but she followed them out anyway.
After three hours of sitting in the grass, Rae carried back an almost-completed song and a sheet of paper with "the five of us are dying" written in Gerard's shitty handwriting over and over again. The song wasn't cheerful and it needed a lot of work, but it was better than nothing.
She went to sleep that night and tried not to think about the way Mikey's shoulders had slumped the second he stepped back inside the house.
||
It wasn't a dream, because dreams weren't this sharp or this indefinite; she never dreamed in whispered words.
Just a sad song with nothing to say
Rae woke with a start. Three weeks in, the fourth time with that not-dream, and instead of seeing an empty room, she was looking Mikey in the eye.
She didn't scream, but it was a near thing. "What. The fuck," she whispered, hands clenched in the sheets.
"You listened," Mikey said. He didn't sound pissed, just...empty. Almost desperate. "Listen again, Rae, just listen."
"It's three AM! We already decided!"
His eyes narrowed. "It's important. You have to."
"I don't have to." She could smell him, she realized. She hadn't showered in days, but for him it would've been weeks. He was gaunt where he'd been too thin, and the words – he was still fucking mouthing them. "Mikey, just stop. What are you doing?"
"It said -" He shook his head. "Nothing. Just, nothing. You have to. This house, Rae, it's fucking with everything. The song, me. We have to."
She scrambled mentally for something, anything, to say to him that would make him the Mikey she knew again. "When was the last time you slept?"
That got her a shoulder twitch. "It doesn't matter. I'm okay."
"Mikey."
"It doesn't fucking matter, Rae!" She recoiled as his eyes bugged out, his voice moving from whispering to yelling. "You're not fucking listening! None of you are!"
She could take him. Hell, she could break him in half if it came to that, but she desperately didn't want it to. "Listen to yourself, Mikey. You're not okay."
"Not okay, not okay." He fisted a hand in his hair. "That song was fucking bullshit, that whole fucking record was fucking bullshit, we're in this house going crazy and you can't even listen to me when I say the song's important. What the fuck? I should just leave."
"Mikey -"
"I should just leave," he said again, and ran out of the room.
Every nerve in her body was screaming at her to follow him. She couldn't make herself move.
||
"Where's Mikey?" Frank said the next day.
"Sleeping, I hope." Rae bit her lip. "Hey, have you been having any weird dreams lately?"
Frank nodded. "I've had that song of his on my mind. The one he wants us to keep."
She felt like ice was settling in the pit of her stomach. "Oh."
Frank scratched the not-quite-beard forming on his chin. "He's not in his room."
"Mikey?"
Frank nodded. "Gerard, on the other hand, won't leave his."
"Where's Bob?"
"Studio. He was there all night."
They were falling apart. She didn't need to say it for both of them to know it. "How much longer can we keep this up, do you think?"
Frank took a gulp of coffee. "...I thought about quitting for six months before Japan. So awhile, probably."
That was as comforting as knowing the specter screaming at her last night hadn't been a ghost, but her bassist. "Right."
||
They didn't see Gerard the entire day and half of the next. She and Bob were playing the quietest, most subdued version of 'Helena' imaginable when a scream ripped through the house.
It was too loud to be real, but before they even had a chance to say anything, Frank was barreling into the room. "Did you hear that? You heard that."
"Gerard," Bob said, standing up.
They'd left him alone – which was stupid, Rae realized, mentally slapping herself and throwing the door open.
Mikey was curled up against the farthest wall, arms around his knees. "He won't stop," he said, nodding to Gerard.
Gerard's eyes were closed but he was screaming loudly enough to make Rae's ears ring, voice cracking and coming back raw. His back was arched, and his neck...
He was clawing at his neck, face getting redder and redder.
"Fuck," Rae said, racing over to the bed. Bob beat her to it, slamming his hands down on Gerard's shoulders and shaking him hard.
"Gerard, snap out of it," she said loudly, holding onto his legs.
He abruptly went limp, eyes rolling back in his head. "Stop," he whispered, voice hoarse.
"What happened?" Frank said. When Gerard didn't answer, he turned to Mikey's corner. "Mikey, can –"
But Mikey had already left.
"Shit," Frank said. He made an abortive attempt to move, then stopped. "Rae, can you get him?"
It wasn't a choice she'd known she would make until he told her to. "I don't want to leave."
Frank closed his eyes and kept them closed almost long enough for Rae to worry. "He's not going to talk to me," he said finally, looking at her. "We've got Gerard."
She'd run out of things to say; Frank knew Mikey better than she did and her conscience was already nagging at her. "Fine," she said. "Tell me where to look, at least?"
He didn't even stop to think. "The studio."
The studio, where her notes for the new song that she definitely hadn't discussed with Mikey were. Right.
She broke into a run. In the end it was anticlimactic, though, because Mikey was sitting in an armchair and calmly rifling through some papers.
"Hi," he said, not looking up.
She sighed in relief. "Mikey."
"This is interesting."
And just like that, she was back to nerve-wracking fear. "What is?"
"This is a bass line." Mikey tapped the paper. "But, you know. I'm not good enough to play it."
The song was about cancer. Rae hadn't been able to get the bass part out of her head. "It's not a question of skill, it's written like a guitar part."
"Stop playing dumb. It's a fucking bass line I can't play, Rae." His tone was as harsh as his words, but he looked ready to cry. "Why the fuck did you write it like that?"
"I had to," she said. "That was just...it was what we came up with, Mikey. It doesn't mean anything."
"It means there's an important song I'm not going to be able to play."
"We can teach you."
Mikey rolled his eyes. "Yeah, sure. I got fucking great last time."
"You did." She couldn't stop herself from sounding desperate, unable to stop focusing on the way Mikey's hands shook, crinkling the paper. "You learned, you can learn more. Or I can play it, if I need to."
"And I'll what? Just – Jesus. You could've told me if I wasn't good enough."
"You are. Just because you don't know it doesn't mean you're not."
"No." He threw the papers down, shoulders braced as he stood. "No. Just shut the fuck up, Rae. I get that I'm not good enough. Shut the fuck up."
"You're not listening," she said frantically. "Mikey, God, you know what this band means to me. Just stop and listen to yourself."
It wasn't Mikey who turned to look at her – not the Mikey she knew, anyway. He looked vicious, completely out of it. "Everyone was right." He laughed. "Do us both a favor and get out, Rae."
The studio – any studio – had always been hers, both to her and to the band. Right now, though, she felt completely unwelcome.
Mikey was carefully tearing up her notes when she backed out of the room.
||
The days blurred together after that.
Gerard wouldn't leave his room except at night when he thought the rest of them were sleeping; Mikey alternated between sleeping on Gerard's floor and going insane in his own space. Frank had gone back to the quiet, tense mood he'd held for months when Gerard was at his worst. And Bob...
"It's not haunted," Bob said, even when doors slammed on their own and Gerard woke up from night terrors night after night. "It's fucking not."
Rae just tried and failed to write, spending her days and nights playing wrong notes and writing bad riffs.
"We're gonna stick this out," Gerard said. He had bags under his eyes and his hands were covered in bruises; it had been a bad few nights. "This fucking house isn't gonna beat us."
"Mikey?"
"Mikey, too."
"I haven't seen him," she said. She tried the chords again, shaking her head and biting her lip hard when it didn't work. "Gerard, we can't do this."
"We can. You'll get it, Rae, just give it time."
She shook her head. "We're breaking apart. You know we are. How're we going to be a band if we don't have a bassist?"
"Don't fucking say that," Gerard said fiercely. "Don't. Don't. "
Gerard was scared too, then. She closed her mouth and went back to fighting to make the music work.
She took her guitar up to her room that night. She tried to keep music out of any place the others weren't; they'd been in the house long enough that paranoia was cropping up around them, filling them with sets of superstitions and nervous tics that Rae knew were ridiculous even as she adhered to them. But something about today was making her feel even more on the edge than usual; something, she knew, had to give. Tonight, it would be her.
Trying at her own music would have been beyond useless. She played Metallica instead, quiet and subdued enough that, comforting though it was, she knew it sounded terrible.
She hadn't expected just-a-girl to ever stop dogging her steps. Tits and everything that came with them were what she was – except with this band. The secret she'd never stop keeping was that My Chem ending would break her heart, both because they were her best friends and because she knew she wouldn't find another band that would act like that, be what they were to and for her.
It was tempting to blame failing now on being a girl. Plenty of people would. But it wasn't, Rae thought, playing a little more quickly; it was just something wrong with her, her brain and her fingers. She'd lost the music. If the band ended and she went back to being just-a-girl on the edges of the scene, if they broke apart in this house, she'd have only herself to blame.
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