Smoke rose from beneath city grates, catching the streetlights and turning a hellish red. Jack fidgeted in the cold. Nervousness squeezed at his veins, telling him he shouldn’t be there, waiting outside some New York City basement, but the invitation was just too intriguing. The door opened and an innocuous man, no older than Jack, and likely also a college student, eyed him from the threshold. Jack stepped down the cement stairs to meet him.
The two didn’t greet each other. They didn’t shake hands. The man at the door, Derek, as Jack had been told, looked him up and down and said in a calm tone, “Your friend explained this to you?”
“Yes.”
“All of it?”
“He said this is a way to achieve what we want. A kind of magic?”
“No magic,” Derek said, “just the mind… Come inside.”
Jack hurried in behind Derek, leaving the cold’s searing bite behind, but inside was unnaturally hot. There was a small hallway, dingy with orange industrial light bulbs caged overhead. The hallway led to rooms marked with hammered-in numbers. They entered Room Eight.
Jack went to take off his coat, but there was no hanger beside the door. The room looked like a boiler room, but not even that. A few chairs scattered about, each a much better quality than the rest of this place. Splotches upon the concrete walls played with his eyes the way they danced like children in the light of a single furnace; its jail-like bars kept back a roaring fire forced to breathe out through a pipe that escaped through the ceiling. A table with various unlit candles sat awkwardly in the center of the chairs and another young man sat among them.
“Are you familiar with the carrot and the stick, Jack?” Derek asked, pulling Jack’s attention away from the third man.
“Yes, you … incentivize with a carrot and penalize with a stick as … learning and teaching.”
“Very good, but this is the carrot … and the gun.”
Jack’s pupils dilated at the word. Gun? No one said anything about a gun.
“It only works if you believe it will.”
“But will it work?”
Derek’s mouth curled. “What terrifies you the most?”
Jack looked away, the heat constricting his throat. Or maybe his tie was just too tight. He pulled it down to no relief and looked back at the third man. Like Jack and this Derek, he didn’t look older than his early twenties. But his physicality hunched over in his seat, the tired look on his face and the glow of the fire casting unfamiliar shadows made him seem as if he had just aged a lifetime. Jack’s eyes trailed down to the man’s lap. He gripped his hand tight. White gauze stained red around his palm; it had been slit.
“Jack?”
“Uh… I-I don’t understand.”
“Your friend Ramirez tells me you want to be a conductor.”
“Yes.”
“The greatest?”
“Yes.”
“What do you want to bet?”
“What?”
“What is the worst fate you can imagine?”
“I suppose … dying?”
“How?” Derek asked, narrowing his eyes and waiting with mouth agape for the answer.
“Uh… Bullet to the head?”
Derek’s longing eyes rolled away as if to say, Is that your best?
“Drowning or … no, burning.”
“Attaboy.”
Derek held out his hand, ushering Jack to have a seat in one of the chairs. The leather squeaked under his weight and no matter how Jack adjusted himself, it never felt comfortable. But it was just one prong of a pitchfork barbing his senses. The other was the furnace curling his hairs. The last was this third man, still holding his bleeding hand, and staring at him.
Jack flinched as one candle on the table lit. He stared at it. No amount of heat from the furnace could light a candle on its own. When he looked back at the third man, he hadn’t moved a muscle. He kept staring at him, unfazed. What the fuck did I drink tonight?
Derek paced around in front of the furnace. “Harry here said, being eaten alive by a monster. I think it’s interesting that you chose something so … attainable, Jack.”
Jack pulled his gaze from the candle. “Sorry?” His airway constricted. He wanted to run. Just run. You do what you want to do. Get up. His breath shook. Get up. Just get up. He pulled himself to his feet just as the door sounded behind him.
It was Ramirez, his friend, his lifeline, his way out—
But Ramirez locked the door behind him.
Jack hurried to him, holding him to the door for privacy, and longing to keep him away from these loons. Planning a hushed tone of Let’s get out of here, he couldn’t. Ramirez gripped Jack’s hand in a tight fist. Red marked the edges of the matching gauze and blood seeped out, wetting Jack’s skin.
“Hey, Jackie.”
Jack fell into a daze, and his friend led him back to the chair. He handed over a flask for Jack’s nerves, but he wouldn’t take it. Ramirez leaned into his ear and whispered, “You won’t regret it.”
“He has his papers?” Derek asked.
Jack closed his eyes.
“You want it, don’t you?” Ramirez whispered from his shoulder.
Jack grimaced and reached into his jacket, taking out his folded-up sheets of music paper. They detailed out all of Jack’s wants, all of his dreams, down to the last detail, describing the great orchestra conductor he hoped to be. Even his name would be greater than the cheap timbre of his birth. He handed them to Derek who looked them over.
Reading both sheets, he said, “This is only half. This … is the carrot.” He turned the papers over onto their backs, placing them on the table before Jack. “This … is the stick.” Taking out a pen, he wrote in capital letters atop the first page, Burning, and dropped the pen down in a harsh clack for Jack to use. “Detail it out,” he said. “Your death...”
A long beat passed, and Jack wiped his sweaty hands on his pants. The furnace groaned and Jack looked through its scorched, barred doorway, imagining what it would be like inside. The idea slithered and constricted like a nylon string, and in that heat, under that moment, something from within impelled him to take up the pen.
He detailed it out: the heat, the smoke, the bubbling sizzle of flesh, the curling of hair, the charred, inhuman object that would be left behind. His death.
Once at the end, Jack hesitated to sign it, so he put the pen down.
“Come on, Jack,” Ramirez said in his ear.
Squeezing his eyes shut, Jack picked the pen up again and wavered over the parchment. One last fleeting sparkle of goodness held back his hand. Ramirez gripped his shoulder. Jack wrote, but he only penned down his last name, Brown.
“Imagine how history will remember us,” Derek said. “The great musician, the great anthropologist, the great psychologist, and … the great conductor.”
Jack stared down at the inky words. It had all poured out of him so easily. He didn’t look away from those papers, not even when Derek took his hand and the cold steel of a knife’s edge gently laid against his palm.
A moment of hesitation gripped Jack’s guts, and then he squeezed hard around the knife. Derek yanked and sliced the skin.
Jack hadn’t flinched. The white-hot-flash of a deep and penetrating wound commanded him to squeeze it shut, and the ache sank deeper down into his wrist. His hand burned hot and felt so wet. Blood dripped down his delicate, pale wrist, but Jack still stared at the papers. He went along passively to what Derek did to him next. Over the papers, Derek conducted Jack’s bloody hand, letting the hot red elixir coat each page. A large glob fell flat onto the name Brown.
Giving Jack his hand back, Derek collected the wet parchment and took it to the furnace. He opened the latch, not concerned about burning himself, and tossed the papers inside.
The ink bubbled first as they sizzled and went black, curling at the edges, charring into flaking bits, leaving nothing behind. The wood beneath cracked and collapsed as if the mere papers had turned to bricks.
Jack felt how wrong this was. Magic or not, he felt like a cheat. He hadn’t considered it would actually make him feel different, maybe even confident. And now, it was too late to go back. He had wanted to be the best, but not like this.
He watched as merit itself died in that furnace.
Ramirez applauded and smacked Jack on the back, but Harry just kept staring at him.
When Derek turned back, presenting as a dark silhouette before the fire, his eyes appeared like an animal’s on a darkened road when they flashed an inhuman, yellow reflection. Jack stared in horror, not believing what he was seeing. And Derek said, “Welcome to the club.”
