hollow.lexicon

And the bass was a tooth. And the crowd was a throat. And he, he, oh He, HE, was the scream that fed the throat the tooth.

He went by a name no longer legal in countries with oceans. It vibrated backwards in records spun counterclockwise. The lolling tongue of his stage persona was lacquered with dried goatblood and licorice. A thing with rings, a thing with feathers in its hips, a thing that prayed backward with fingers bent inward. He wore the robes of fallen televangelists, recut into glam-choked vestments that stank of midnight and wet velvet.

Tonight—Caracas or Cali or some cartel-lord’s cloaca—didn’t matter. He was On. On was the word they used in his crew, though they’d stopped speaking much since the voice-fall, when the lighting tech’s tongue had grown eyes and refused to answer questions.

The arena pulsed. Flesh walls. Concrete lungs. The audience didn’t cheer anymore. They hissed in joy. Hissed from every throathole, skinhole, Godhole. A crowd of thirty thousand breathing as one massive inhalation—waiting to be filled with Him.

Backstage, the green room was mauve. No mirrors since the last one started writing things when no one was near. No more water bottles after one screamed and tried to baptize the drummer. Just meat—slabs of it—stacked in an ice coffin. For energy.

He took the mic in hand. It vibrated like an infant vulture. “ARE YOU READY,” he croaked, but it wasn’t him speaking. It was the mic. It had become semiotic, had eaten vowels in its sleep and now spat consonants back like shrapnel. The crowd split at the sound, a wave of souls cresting in spinal-arching ecstasy.

He walked barefoot onto stage, and the stage screamed. Or maybe it was the floor beneath the stage. Or maybe the thing beneath the floor, the thing they fed riffs to in tuning sessions.

The first note—an E, bent into a G, then snapped back into a shriek only snakes could dance to—turned the sky inside out. Bats rained from it, blind and beatific. He sang into the hole where words had once lived:

O father of the reverse chord O mother of the backward birth Raise your hoof and strike the time For we are meat and melody both— (eat us as a song, amen)

Behind him, the band burned. Not metaphor. Flame like gospel. The drummer's kit melted into a language, symbols cascading into each other like mating flies. Bass notes became holes in the fabric, and through them, eyes blinked. One eye blinked in Morse code, spelling out a name not fit for cartilage.

He levitated.

The audience did too.

Everyone screaming in sixteen tongues but only saying one thing, and it was this:

I AM THE LAST VERSE BEFORE THE BOOK BURNS

His final note bled from the speakers like a miscarriage of thunder, and as it died, so did the border between voice and ear, between self and signal.

Silence followed. It howled.

Somewhere, backstage, a crucifix turned into a tuning fork and struck itself.