Introduction

“It’s worse than the seventies.” Rob Wallet allowed for the time delay, but Tom Scavinio was only in New York, not on Venus.

“No it isn’t.” Scavinio sighed. “In the seventies they would have thrown a real horse off the roof of the East Midlands Arena.”

Toten Herzen’s six comeback concerts had turned a profit of just over two million Euros. The figure would have been closer to twelve if the papier mache horse hadn’t been thrown from the roof of the East Midlands Arena. The equine surprise took someone’s eye out, so they sued. Four million.

Wallet scanned a solicitor’s summary with morbid curiosity and disbelief. The corrosive figures and eye watering descriptions compiled a grim bestiary of life on the edge of a parallel civilisation.

“Another hole in the profits were gouged out by the torching of a restaurant at the Allianz Halle. Fans held an impromptu fire breathing contest with strong beer and barbecue lighter fluid. . . .” Wallet hunted the document for the figures. “Two million.”

“And the point of all this, Rob, is?”

“Can it be stopped? Is anyone capable of stopping it? Look at this. . . .”

The phone line groaned.

“In Budapest a fan was impaled on a flag pole when he climbed to the top and tried to balance on one foot. He sued the promoters not for his injuries, but because paramedics took six hours to pull him off the top of the pole and he missed the concert . . . another two million. Two million Euros, Tom.”

Scavinio was speechless, but Wallet had more. Much more.

The atrocities didn’t end at the top of a flag pole in Budapest. Eight fans were injured, one seriously, by the lethal beaks of masks imported from China. Eighty had their mouths scalded by hot mead in Geneva. And the second riot at the rescheduled Ahoy concert left two French fans with internal injuries. The medieval weapons inserted into them – orifice thankfully undisclosed – were described in police reports as ‘like red hot pokers’. Combined total two million, grand total ten million and none of it covered by public liability insurance. (A sneaky clause to exclude acts of ‘bizarre criminal activity’ pretty much excluded everything these mad bastards did.)

“They’re a liability. Literally. There’s just no predicting what they’ll do.” Wallet shook his head. “No matter what you allow for, you can’t anticipate them. It’s like a contest. You think you’ve outwitted them, you concoct some devious security arrangement, pay a fortune in obscure insurance clauses, but they still manage to redefine the word stupid.”

Scavinio finally spoke. “Yeah, well . . . maybe they’ll grow out of it.”

Grow out of it! Wallet wasn’t sure about that. Wallet thought it was becoming a trend. A meme. Acts of social disorder were now described as going a bit Toten. “Well, I don’t need to tell you Susan’s not happy. When she saw these figures she left the building in a rage and we all know what happens when she gets in a rage.”

“Yeah, yeah. We do.”

“Things have to change or she’ll bail out, Tom. She’s had enough.”

“That might be for the best, Rob.” Scavinio’s yawn was audible. “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. They wanted to know what would happen, well, now they know. They’re not Toten Herzen without the fans. Without all the bullshit.”

“I wouldn’t normally advise this, but I really think they need to jettison the past. Stop trying to recapture it. Start again.” The image of the papier mache horse gliding gracefully through the Birmingham evening sky wouldn’t leave Wallet alone. “I mean, how did they even get on the roof?”

“I don’t know, Rob. I really don’t fucking know. Maybe they learned how to fly.”

“Sorry, Tom. It sounds like I’m keeping you up.”

“It’s five o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Okay. Sorry, I’ll let you get on. Just thought I’d update you. No decision yet on you coming back over here. . . ?”

“No.”

“No. Okay. Not a problem. I’ll let you go. Speak to you again, Tom.”

“Bye.”

Wallet threw his phone in the air and watched it land with an awkward, clumsy crunch on the stone floor of the kitchen. “Add that to the bill. What price do you put on a manager?”

TRACK 1 – AT WAR WITH THE WORLD

1 – Bad weather

When marauding mobs gathered in one place to create a critical mass of hooliganism not even powerful witchcraft could move them.

“You take your life in your hands coming here at this time.” The force of the rain transformed one tall police officer into a sodden hunchback.

Lena Siebert-Neved thought the downpour would clear the area and wash away the problem. Enormous gobbets of rainwater dripped off the hood of her coat, off her eyebrows, nose, chin, anything with an edge to it.

Her ability to summon the worst kind of tempest had failed and now this cop wouldn’t leave her alone. “Why do you come here?” he said.

Another marble of rainwater landed in Lena’s eye. The accidental wink encouraged the cop to stand next to her. “I’m not here to watch any of this. I just like to hang around with men in uniforms.”

“My mother wanted me to join the police.”

“And you wanted to make her proud.” Lena leaned closer to make herself heard above the rattle of raindrops on waterproofs. “You look like the officer who killed a friend of mine.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Oh, you don’t need to apologise. It’s a very long time ago. He’s dead now.”

“Your friend?”

“The officer.” Lena unleashed a wicked smirk.

“Ah, well . . . what to say? There are always one or two who are bad . . . in every organisation.”

“Are there? Well I never.”

The small tracks and lanes around the hillside village of Gurmzer were clogged with police cars, pagans’ cars, locals’ cars, motorhomes, vans, motorbikes, motorbikes with sidecars, bicycles, even a child’s scooter (which may have belonged to a local child, but today anything qualified as an intrusion). The transportation was here to carry the curious and the devout up the side of the mountain to watch the witches holding their sabbat. Except the witches weren’t here. They hadn’t been here for three years, not since the sabbat of 2010 was abandoned because of the crowds trying to muscle in. Now with nothing to hold their attention the gathering mob turned to violence. The spectacle became a protest.

“Are you here alone?” The cop shared Lena’s misery and saturation.

“No.”

“Your partner isn’t up there is he?” He nodded at the upper slope of the hill where a human hunt propelled police and protesters through mud and woodland, wave after wave of seek and destroy.

“What makes you think my partner is a he?” Lena took her gloves off. “What’s your name?”

“Uwe.”

“Uwe. Let me show you a little magic trick.” Lena cupped her hands. “Keep watching . . . keep watching.” Uwe watched, but he had one eye on the upper slopes of the hill and the chase, the angry dogs. “Uwe are you cold?” Uwe’s eyes bulged as a red flame glowed into life, hovered a centimetre above Lena’s skin and grew to the height of his head. He was about to ask for instructions, but a swift clap of Lena’s hands propelled a cloud of vapour the size of a fist into his gaping mouth. “That, young man, is what happens when you make assumptions about the world around you.”

–

On a dark and desperate evening the villagers of Gurmzer watched nonplussed as their community was ransacked by both law breakers and law enforcers. Lena and her friend Birgitte Schelm were bystanders who knew the score, knew what all the dreadlocked, unshaven, shabby fuss was about.

“Forty years ago we would have been up there fighting the cops.” Birgitte’s lip curled as she watched another line of distant figures emerge from the woodland edge and sprint over the crest of the hill.

“For what? The right to what? What’s their cause? What do they want here tonight?”

“We should show them how it’s done.”

“Birgitte, you agitator.”

“We may as well be soaked for a reason.”

Lena agreed and headed off alone along a narrow track away from the village and up the hill towards the woodland. As she ascended she stepped over battered and beaten bodies dropped by the proximity of police batons or savaged by dogs with their own canine agenda. Bosch would have felt quite at home up here, surrounded by all this pillage and soggy human litter. The woodland was a partially abandoned camp with a ravaged understorey of protest debris, bags and discarded clothing; the ground trampled to slime by an unremitting footfall of rioters’ boots. The canopies cackled with shouts and whistles, ghostly cries and yells.

“They won’t be happy until they’ve driven us all over the edge.” An upright collection of clothing spoke to Lena as she studied the soft sponginess of the ground around the edge of the trees. Somewhere above a heavy trench coat, behind a tangled beard, was the mouth of one of the rioters.

“They? The edge?” The ground was saturated. Perfect for conductivity.

“Fascists.”

“Fascists. Oh, not them again.”

Beardy dissected the international corporate agenda to eliminate the alternative lifestyle. “And fuck the workers.”

“Is that what you think or what the fascists think?” Lena concentrated on the search for a branch, something small, no more than thirty centimetres.

“Fascists. No. Them. They’re killing the planet, killing us all.” Beardy swung his outstretched arms. “Give them five years and we’ll all be gone.”

“Five years.” The branch was found, close to where Beardy stood. “You know today is Imbolc.” She stuck the branch in the ground and dusted the tip with a substance taken from a bottle in her top pocket.

“What’s that?”

“Red sulphur.”

“Yeah, well, there’ll be no red sulphur, no Imbolc. . . .”

“And what are you doing about it?” Lena secured the branch before stepping around it in a slow circle.

“This, all this. Protest. Create a nuisance.” He moved out of the way as Lena completed the circle. The whistling through the canopies belonged to another group of cops who emerged, wet and agitated. They saw Beardy.

“Running around in the rain will only get you wet. What you need is a loud bang.” Lena snatched her hood back from her head and offered her face to the downpour. Beardy should have run. He had a choice: offer his dreadlocked scalp to one of the cop’s batons or stay and watch the curious ritual in Latin around a sulphurous piece of twig.

–

Birgitte crossed a torrent of water escaping diagonally across the road from the field edge. The shelter of a small cafe allowed her to remove some damp clothing and study the photograph she had just taken on her phone. The image contained a web address.

TOTENHERZEN.COM

The whole sordid history was here: the band’s fall and rise, or possibly rise and fall – success and failure were indistinguishable; the bastardised birth and gruesome separation from the first manager Micky Redwall; Rob Wallet featured in a wordy account of his discovery of the dead band still alive; and a blog, which decreased in detail as the concerts became increasingly chaotic, ended mid-sentence on December 4th. ‘Another bad. . . .’

Birgitte read the closing words of Dee Vincent’s biography when the lights in the cafe flickered and the muzak stopped. Everyone looked up simultaneously milliseconds before a flash of blinding light and a crack of noise shattered the village and shook the building. A furious bolt of lightning ripped across the hillside. In the mist of the upper slopes figures, human and canine, flew through the air, blown off their feet by the terrible burst of static electricity and the ground transformed into a live circuit board.

The cafe emptied with chair-scattering panic as if the safest thing to do was run towards the explosion. Birgitte sat and waited for the evacuation to end and then served herself a piece of gateaux and a large latte.

When Lena walked in fifteen minutes later the place was still empty. She removed her dry, dark green beeny hat and tried to flatten her hair.

Birgitte laughed. “Put your hat back on, Lena, you look like Einstein.”

“All that static. It won’t lie flat now.” Lena was about to help herself to coffee when Birgitte shoved the mobile phone in her face. “Where is that picture?”

“Back up the road. I noticed it just after you went up the lane.”

“Show me.”

Outside the cafe, the crowd parted as a police siren screamed through the village, followed by an equally hysterical ambulance. On the upper slopes some bodies, dazed and charred, hauled themselves out of the mud. “Have we asked ourselves the right questions, Lena?”

“It’s just one of a number of stepping stones, but maybe, just maybe the journey to our lost valley starts with this vehicle.”

The car in the photograph was an ancient Saab. The paintwork was probably the last remaining memory of the car’s structural integrity, give or take a few windows and tyres. Lena inspected the dents and rust and peered through the windows at the mess: the lager cans, old shoes, a rolled up sleeping bag, an interior smeared with an unidentifiable brown film like alien lichen. “You know their fans appear to compensate for the band’s secrecy. . . .”

“Maybe.” Birgitte put her phone away. “I looked at their website while I was in the cafe. There was a question and answer section that was quite illuminating. They were asked what they would rescue if the house caught fire. Elaine Daley said the insurance policy, but Dee Vincent said she would rescue her book collection.”

“Book collection.” Lena ran her finger over the rear window of the Saab, across the sticker on the inside of the glass. “She has a book collection?”

“Quite a large one. Antiques. First editions. Manuscripts. Curios. Lost works.”

Uwe the cop, drove past. He noticed Lena, but turned away. “If there’s one book every vampire should own it’s that book.”

“Of course there’s no guarantee she has it,” said Birgitte.

“No.”

“But it’s an opportunity. If she doesn’t have it maybe she’ll know someone who does.”

“Yes.”

The rain had stopped. Lena stroked the remaining drops of water off her coat sleeves and looked again at the derelict Saab. The sticker in the back window said everything that needed to be said about the owner of the car, the owner of the mess and the object of worship. Toten Herzen’s crest lay on a red and black background with the words ‘fuck us, fuck you, we win.’