We Sold Our Souls Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  PAPERBACKS FROM HELL

  Winner of the Bram Stoker Award

  “Pure, demented delight.”—New York Times

  “It’s a gorgeous, lurid deep-dive into horror’s heyday and a must-read for any self-respecting horror fan.”—Tor.com

  “Horror fiction is alive and well, and Paperbacks from Hell is a grand, affectionate, and informative celebration of the genre.”

  —NY Journal of Books

  “Fans of horror fiction will love this funny and insightful history.”

  —Library Journal, starred review

  PRAISE FOR

  MY BEST FRIEND’S EXORCISM

  “National treasure Grady Hendrix follows his classic account of a haunted IKEA-like furniture showroom, Horrorstör (2014), with a nostalgia-soaked ghost story, My Best Friend’s Exorcism.”—Wall Street Journal

  “Take The Exorcist, add some hair spray and wine coolers, and enroll it in high school in 1988—that’ll give you My Best Friend’s Exorcism…Campy. Heartfelt. Horrifying.”

  —Minnesota Public Radio

  “Readers who thought Heathers wasn’t quite bleak enough will find this darkly humorous horror tale—filled with spot-on 80s pop-culture references—totally awesome.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  PRAISE FOR

  HORRORSTÖR

  One of NPR’s Best Books of 2014

  “Horrorstör delivers a crisp terror-tale…[and] Hendrix strikes a nice balance between comedy and horror.”—Washington Post

  “…wildly fun and outrageously inventive…”—Shelf Awareness for Readers, starred review

  ALSO BY GRADY HENDRIX

  Horrorstör

  My Best Friend’s Exorcism

  Paperbacks from Hell

  This is a work of fiction. All names, places, and characters are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Grady Hendrix

  All rights reserved. Except as authorized under U.S. copyright law, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Number: 2017941584

  ISBN 9781683690122

  Ebook ISBN 9781683690214

  Ebook design adapted from printed book design by Doogie Horner

  Cover photo by Viorel Sima/Shutterstock

  Production management by John J. McGurk

  Quirk Books 215 Church Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19106

  quirkbooks.com

  v5.3.2

  a

  Cover

  Also by Grady Hendrix

  Copyright

  Title Page

  True as Steel

  Welcome to Hell

  Powerslave

  Reign in Blood

  Under the Blade

  Appetite for Destruction

  Destroyer

  Awaken the Guardian

  Holy Diver

  From Enslavement to Obliteration

  Countdown to Extinction

  High ’N’ Dry

  Theatre of Pain

  Fighting the World

  Destroy Erase Improve

  Let’s Rumble

  Sleep’s Holy Mountain

  Stay Hungry

  Don’t Break the Oath

  With Oden on Our Side

  Twilight of the Gods

  Master of Puppets

  Into Glory Ride

  Little Sparrow

  Toxicity

  In the Nightside Eclipse

  Diary of a Madman

  Devil is Fine

  You Can’t Stop Rock ’N’ Roll

  Troglodyte

  For Those About to Rock We Salute You

  About the Author

  ris sat in the basement, hunched over her guitar, trying to play the beginning of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.” Her mom had signed her up for guitar lessons with a guy her dad knew from the plant, but after six weeks of playing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on a J.C. Penney acoustic, Kris wanted to scream. So she hid in the park when she was supposed to be at Mr. McNutt’s, pocketed the $50 fee for the two lessons she skipped, combined it with all her savings, and bought a scratched-to-hell Fender Musicmaster and a busted-out Radio Shack amp from Goldie Pawn for $160. Then she told her mom that McNutt had tried to watch her pee, so now instead of going to lessons Kris huddled in the freezing cold basement, failing to play power chords.

  Her wrists were bony and weak. The E, B, and G strings sliced her fingertips open. The Musicmaster bruised her ribs where she leaned over it. She wrapped a claw around the guitar’s neck and pressed her sore index finger on A, her third finger on D, her fourth finger on G, raked her pick down the strings, and suddenly the same sound came out of her amp that had come out of Tony Iommi’s amp. The same chord 100,000 people heard in Philly was right there in the basement with her.

  She played the chord again. It was the only bright thing in the dingy basement with its single 40-watt bulb and dirty windows. If Kris could play enough of these, in the right order, without stopping, she could block out everything: the dirty snow that never melted, closets full of secondhand clothes, overheated classrooms at Independence High, mind-numbing lectures about the Continental Congress and ladylike behavior and the dangers of running with the wrong crowd and what x equals and how to find for y and what the third person plural for cantar is and what Holden Caulfield’s baseball glove symbolizes and what the whale symbolizes and what the green light symbolizes and what everything in the world symbolizes, because apparently nothing is what it seems, and everything is a trick.

  This was too hard. Counting frets, learning the order of the strings, trying to remember which fingers went on which strings in which order, looking from her notebook to the fretboard to her hand, every chord taking an hour to play. Joan Jett didn’t look at her fingers once when she played “Do You Wanna Touch Me.” Tony Iommi watched his hands, but they were moving so fast they were liquid, nothing like Kris’s arthritic start-and-stop. It made her skin itch, it made her face cramp, it made her want to bash her guitar to pieces on the floor.

  The basement was refrigerator cold. She could see her breath. Her hands were cramped into claws. Cold radiated up from the concrete floor and turned the blood inside her feet to slush. Her lower back was stuffed with sand.

  She couldn’t do this.

  Water gurgled through the pipes as her mom washed dishes upstairs, while her dad’s voice sifted down through the floorboards reciting an endless list of complaints. Wild muffled thumps shook dust from the ceiling as her brothers rolled off the couch, punching each other over what to watch on TV. From the kitchen, her dad yelled, “Don’t make me come in there!” The house was a big black mountain, pressing down on Kris, forcing her head into the dirt.

  Kris put her fingers on the second fret, strummed, and while the string was still vibrating, before she could think, Kris slid her hand down to the fifth fret, flicked the strings twice, then instantly slid her hand to the seventh fret and strummed it twice, and she wasn’t stopping, her wrist ached but she dragged it down to ten, then twelve, racing to keep up with the riff she heard inside her head, the riff she’d listened to on Sabbath’s second album over and over again, the riff she played in her head as she
walked to McNutt’s, as she sat in algebra class, as she lay in bed at night. The riff that said they all underestimated her, they didn’t know what she had inside, they didn’t know that she could destroy them all.

  And suddenly, for one moment, “Iron Man” was in the basement. She’d played it to an audience of no one, but it had sounded exactly the same as it did on the album. The music vibrated in every atom of her being. You could cut her open and look at her through a microscope and Kris Pulaski would be “Iron Man” all the way down to her DNA.

  Her left wrist throbbed, her fingertips were raw, her back hurt, the tips of her hair were frozen, and her mom never smiled, and once a week her dad searched her room, and her older brother said he was dropping out of college to join the army, and her little brother stole her underwear when she didn’t lock her bedroom door, and this was too hard, and everyone was going to laugh at her.

  But she could do this.

  CALLER: …you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

  KEITH: You sound like a hippie, Chester.

  CALLER: I tell it like I see it. You guys are asleep. Your Texas owners tell you what to play. Why don’t you play real music that talks about what’s going on in the world?

  CARLOS: We love what we play, Chester. You don’t like it, get satellite radio.

  CALLER: I dare you to play Nervosa, or Sepultura, or Torture Squad. You’re too [censored] to play Rage Against the Machine.

  CARLOS: How’s the weather in your mom’s basement, metalhead?

  —96.1 ZZO, “Keith & Carlos in the Mornings”

  May 10, 2019

  ris stood behind the reception desk at the Best Western off US-22 in navy slacks and a vest, watching a naked man walk through the sliding doors, his penis flopping from side to side. Even though he had a pillowcase over his head, she knew exactly who he was.

  “Mr. Morrell,” she said, “We’re going to have to charge you for cutting eyeholes in that pillowcase.”

  “Fuck you, skank.”

  “Okay, I’m calling the police.” She picked up the phone.

  “I’m not Josh Morrell,” Josh Morrell said.

  Kris dialed the station house number from memory.

  Josh Morrell reached over the desk and slapped down the hook switch, disconnecting her call. That was when Kris realized that it was 3 a.m. and she was the only clerk on duty in the middle of a half-empty hotel in the center of a mostly empty parking lot with a naked man wearing a pillowcase over his head. If she wasn’t a woman, it would have been funny.

  “We have cameras recording the lobby area, Mr. Morrell,” Kris said, her voice getting thinner even as she tried to make it sound firm.

  “I’m not Josh Morrell,” Josh Morrell repeated.

  He was so close Kris could smell Old Spice and light beer. She could see his eyes glittering through the two holes he’d cut in the pillowcase. She could see the fabric going in and out over his mouth way too fast. Kris knew any movement she made was dangerous, so she froze.

  Josh Morrell took two steps backwards and cut loose with a massive stream of urine, turning his hips from side to side, making sure he sprayed the entire front of the reception desk. Its ammonia stink crawled up Kris’s nose. Its stream drummed hollow on the wood and high-pitched on the tiles.

  Once upon a time, Kris Pulaski had beaten entire rooms into submission. Once upon a time she’d walked into strange buildings in faraway states where the only people who knew her name stood next to her onstage. She’d stood, surrounded by crowds who hated her in Eugene, and Bangor, and Marietta, and Buckhannon, and calmly tuned her guitar in front of those jostling drunks who put bullet holes in the band van, who tucked notes under their wipers that read “Metal faggots get AIDS,” who once threw a shit-dripping diaper onstage, who started fights because they wanted to beat without mercy anyone who came from more than fifty miles away.

  Kris had stood in front of those cross-eyed, thick-skulled, small-brained cow tippers whose veins flowed with Blatz and Keystone instead of blood, who stunk of Schaefer and Natty Boh, and Lone Star, and Iron City, and she waited quietly for the drum intro to begin, then strummed in lazy on the downbeat and started building her first riff, and then the bass slid in easy behind her, and the other guitar followed her lead before suddenly breaking free and starting to crunch over her rhythms with violent arpeggios, and the first blast beat smashed out of the bass drums and they leaned back into the pocket, thrashing that room without mercy, beating those bearded faces with a wall of sound until their heads started nodding, their shoulders began to twitch, their chins went up and down against their will—until the one with either the least impulse control or the most to prove shoved the person in front of him, and the pit began to swirl in front of the stage.

  The aggressively casual thrashers in their long-sleeved black tees and long black hair, the old metalheads in their battle vests and beards, the milk-white school shooters, skinny wrists cuffed with underage wristbands—Kris had turned these haters into dancers, fighters into lovers, hecklers into fans. She had been punched in the mouth by a straight-edge vegan, had the toes of her Doc Martens kissed by too many boys to count, and been knocked unconscious after catching a boot beneath the chin from a stage diver who’d managed to do a flip into the crowd off the stage at Wally’s. She’d made the mezzanine bounce like a trampoline at Rumblestiltskins, the kids pogoing so hard flakes of paint rained down like hail.

  Now she stood watching Josh Morrell piss all over the floor of the Best Western at three in the morning, and she was too scared to do a thing about it. When he finished, he shook the final drops off his boneless dong, turned around, let out an enormous wet fart, and marched back through the automatic doors.

  Reflexively, before she could stop herself, Kris called after him, “Have a great stay.”

  Then she waited for her hands to stop shaking, picked up the phone, and called the police.

  Half an hour later her brother showed up. She let him into the lobby and he stopped short before the puddle of urine on the terracotta tiles.

  “Aw, c’mon Kris, that’s nasty. You didn’t even clean it up?”

  “He’s in room 211,” Kris said.

  “Probably just drunk,” Little Charles said.

  “I have to set out breakfast in two hours,” Kris said. “Everything has to smell piney fresh before people start eating their little Danishes.”

  “I’m not filling out an incident report.”

  “The guy peed at me,” Kris said. “The evidence is right there. I can show you the camera log.”

  Little Charles didn’t get angry with Kris anymore. Instead he turned it back on her.

  “You sound stressed,” he said. “Did you do the candle and flower like Dr. Murchison showed you? Breathe in the flower, blow out the candle. Want to do it with me?”

  “I am not stressed,” Kris said. “I’m pissed.”

  “I hear a lot of tension in your jaw and chest.”

  “I’ll do candle and flower,” Kris said, “if you please take care of this guy for me. He’ll come down and do it again the second you leave.”

  “It’s okay, Kris,” said Little Charles, in the same tone of voice he used whenever a woman was upset. “I’ll take care of it. You wait here and clean up. It’ll all be okay. I’ll go talk to the man.”

  Once, in Wichita, an owner refused to pay the band’s cut of the door. He’d told Kris that if she wanted the $200 so bad she could suck his dick. The instant he turned away she leaned over the bar, grabbed his entire cash box, and ran. Scottie already had the van running, and they tore out of the parking lot, spraying gravel like the Dukes of Hazzard.

  Now, twenty-two years later, she just said, “Thank you, Little Charles.”

  The sliding glass doors whisked him outside and Kris watched him walk up the sidewalk to the guest rooms, and she inhaled the flowe
r and blew out the candle five times, which didn’t work because the flower smelled like Josh Morrell’s pee.

  For eleven years, Kris had been able to go anywhere in the world by picking up the phone. She’d cold-called clubs and mailed out demos and swapped slots on bills with Corpse Orgy and Mjölnir and mailed letters to kids who organized shows. Then they’d gotten in their van with its secret loft for the mics and its “No band stickers” rule they’d made after it’d been broken into four times, and they drove all over America playing shows.

  Kris had survived one thousand three hundred and twenty-six shows, emerging at the end of each one with her ears ringing, forearms sore, hair dripping, blood crusted beneath her nails. She’d played shows to eight hundred people, and she’d played shows where she knew the names of every single person in the bar. She’d played a few times to five thousand people who were there to see Slayer.

  She’d played the humiliation shows, the favor shows, the fuck-you shows, the going-through-the-motions shows, the endless shows that kept rolling for one more song and one more after that, the shows that were over in eleven minutes because there were too many bands on the bill, the out-of-control shows, the empty room shows, the shows where no one gave a shit about the band because they were just there for the beer, and the tear-off-the-roof shows whose only possible conclusion was to burn the venue down, Viking funeral style, when it was all over. She’d played shows where there was no difference between the stage and the crowd, kids sitting behind her, beside her, crawling on the stacks, knocking beer bottles off the amps. She’d played shows from a high riser that looked down onto steel barricades holding back a surging crowd that formed multiple pits.