Soul Music

barrels. Glod leaned on the door.
    “I don’t need the money,” he said. “Just let me get out of here with my life, that’s all I ask.”
    “Oo ownt ave oo orry—” Cliff began.
    “You’re trying to speak with your mouth shut, Cliff,” said Buddy.
    “I said , you don’t have to worry, you’ve got der wrong sort of teeth,” said the troll.
    There was a knock on the door. Cliff slammed his hand back over his mouth. But the knock turned out to belong to Asphalt, who was carrying a tray.
    There were three types of beer. There were even smoked rat sandwiches with the crusts and tails cut off. And there was a bowl of the finest anthracite coke with ash on it.
    “Crunch it up good,” moaned Glod, as Cliff took his bowl. “It may be the last chance you get—”
    “Maybe no one’ll turn up and we can go home?” said Cliff.
    Buddy ran his fingers over the strings. The others stopped eating as the chords filled up the room.
    “Magic,” said Cliff, shaking his head.
    “Don’t you boys worry,” said Asphalt. “If there’re any problems, it’s the other guys who’ll get it in the teeth.”
    Buddy stopped playing.
    “What other guys?”
    “’S funny thing,” said the little troll. “Suddenly everyone’s playing music with rocks in it. Mr. Dibbler’s signed up another band for the concert, too. To kind of warm it up.”
    “Who?”
    “’S called Insanity,” said Asphalt.
    “Where are they?” said Cliff.
    “Well, put it like this…you know how your dressing room is next to the privy?”

    Crash, behind the Cavern’s raggedy curtain, tried to tune his guitar. Several things got in the way of this simple procedure. Firstly, Blert had realized what his customers really wanted and, praying forgiveness from his ancestors, had spent more time gluing on bits of glittery stuff than he had on the actual functioning sections of the instrument. To put it another way, he’d knocked in a dozen nails and tied the strings to them. But this wasn’t too much of a problem, because Crash himself had the musical talent of a blocked nostril.
    He looked at Jimbo, Noddy, and Scum. Jimbo, now the bass player (Blert, giggling hysterically, had used a bigger lump of wood and some fence wire) was holding up his hand hesitantly.
    “What is it, Jimbo?”
    “One of my guitar strings has broke.”
    “Well, you’ve got five more, ain’t you?”
    “Yur. But I doesn’t know how to play them, like.”
    “You didn’t know how to play six, right? So now you’re a bit less ignorant.”
    Scum peered around the curtain.
    “Crash?”
    “Yes?”
    “There’s hundreds of people out there. Hundreds! A lot of ’em have got guitars, too. They’re sort of waving ’em in the air!”
    Insanity listened to the roar from the other side of the curtain. Crash did not have too many brain cells, and they often had to wave to attract one another’s attention, but he had a tiny flicker of doubt that the sound that Insanity had achieved, while a good sound, was the sound that he’d heard last night in the Drum. The sound made him want to scream and dance, while the other sound made him…well…made him want to scream and smash Scum’s drum kit over its owner’s head, quite frankly.
    Noddy took a peek between the curtains.
    “Hey, there’s a bunch of wiz…I think they’re wizards, right in the front row,” he said. “I’m…pretty sure they’re wizards, but, I mean…”
    “You can tell , stupid,” said Crash. “They’ve got pointy hats.”
    “There’s one with…pointy hair…” said Noddy.
    The rest of Insanity applied eyes to the gap.
    “Looks like…a kind of unicorn spike made out of hair…”
    “What’s that he’s got on the back of his robe?” said Jimbo.
    “It says BORN TO RUNE,” said Crash, who was the fastest reader in the group and didn’t need to use his finger at all.
    “The skinny one’s wearing a flared robe,” said Noddy.
    “He must be old.”
    “And they’ve all got guitars! Do you reckon they’ve come to see us?”
    “Bound to have,” said Noddy.
    “That’s a bodacious audience,” said Jimbo.
    “Yeah, that’s right, bodacious,” said Scum. “Er. What’s bodacious mean?”
    “Means…means it bodes,” said Jimbo.
    “Right. It looks like it’s boding all right.”
    Crash thrust aside his doubts.
    “Let’s get out there,” he said, “and really show them what Music With Rocks In is about!”

    Asphalt, Cliff, and Glod sat in one corner of the dressing room.