Frank wanted nothing more than to kneel down and catch the tattered rags of his respiration but with Django and Chavvy practically dragging him toward the Door
Club, all he could do was gasp his disapproval at Rosie and know that it would do him no good. He couldn't face Petra right now. Someone or something was trying to kill him or at the very least dismember him; not a good time for facing old flames that are on your mind day in and day out.
The other thing he didn't need right now was that mind numbing, high-pitched squeal coming from inside the club. "What is that?" wheezed Frank.
"What is what?" said Django with a smirk. "Don't you be thinkin' we ain't draggin' yo ass in that club."
"That noise," Frank implored, "it's making my head feel like it's gonna split in two."
"I don't hear nuthin'," Rosie barked through years of cigarette smoke. “Don’t think for a second that you’re not going in that bar.” Frank stared in disbelief; how could they not hear that? His head continued its attempt to split open at its seams. Desperate, he tried furiously to jam the tails of his shirt into his ears, anything to block out the din of that insidious noise. The look Rosie was giving him made him wonder if he truly was going mad, but in the split second as the two locked eyes, the pitch of that tone went off the map as though some unseen evildoer were cranking a crazy-high-pitched-noise knob past eleven.
Just when the noise could seemingly get no higher, it stopped climbing. Frank, mad with pain, was forced to the rain soaked ground, writhing in agony. His limbs were suddenly immensely heavy. In that moment there was a sudden clarity and silence unlike any Frank had ever known. Slowly he sat up. He knew suddenly what would happen next but was impotent to do anything about it. His open mouth streaming expletives, he wasn’t even aware he was shouting. Frank stood up and began lurching slowly toward the Door Club.
“Well, let’s go with him, you twits,” Rosie said with little inflection. “We were taking him in there anyway, so what if he’s gone crazy? We still need him to go through that door.”
Django and Chavvy set off after him, but the explosion knocked them off their course. Frank went wide left, narrowly avoiding the barely living corpse of the doorman as he went sailing past with the force of the detonation. More reports rang out as several more fire bursts rose from the wreckage that had once been the Door Club. Django, Chavvy and Rosie glared at Frank as he lay on the ground, dazed, and in disbelief at the conflagration before him.
The remains of the Door Club rained down around them, the big pieces first. Chavvy was nearly cut in half as the men’s water closet came sailing down from a great height. Frank watched in amazement as what little was left burned with what seemed to be ever-greater intensity. He had never seen a fire that seemed to grow larger, hotter and ever brighter as it burned. The flames licked the sky above turning from yellow and blue to purple and producing so much heat that the rubble around it began to look as though it might lose its rigidity at any moment.
“Why doesn’t it go out?” he asked. “How is it burning hotter? It should be going out. What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know who went and tried such a damn fool thing anyway,” said Rosie pulling herself up from the tarmac. “Shoulda know’d better though. Ya can’t blow up, tear down, or burn what wasn’t built by no man to begin with. Might as well have tried to comb out Mama Cass’s beehive. Weren’t built by no man, won’t be brought down by no man.”
Frank didn’t know what the hell she was talking about and he was growing more sure all the time that he didn’t want to know. What did she mean “it wasn’t built by man?” How else does a nightclub end up in the middle of a city block? What did Rosie have to do with all of this? He wasn’t even aware that she had any friends and these two fellows Django and Chavvy were about the last thing he’d ever suspected. Aside from all of that, what the hell did he have to do with all of this? Well, he thought, now was the time to stop being stupid and ask all the questions on his mind. He wheeled on Rosie facing her defiantly, pointed one long sausage-like finger at her, and screwed up his face with as much determination as he could muster. “This is it” he thought. “I’m taking charge, she’s giving me some answers, or else.”
Just as his jaw hinged downward to begin his dissertation, the high pitched squeal returned but this time it was too much. It was louder and seemingly more direct in its assault on Frank’s body and all of his joints turned to jelly. He crashed to the ground with a mighty thud; not so much as if he’d fallen, but more like his body had crumpled in on itself with amazing suddenness.
Frank watched in horror, as the great incendiary mass in front of him grew hotter and more intense as though being fed by a giant bellows. He was sure that everything around them would melt in its place and the building itself had done exactly that. The fire began to levitate now, and what was left of the building had melted into an enormous quivering ball that looked much like a giant drop of mercury suspended in air. The debris that lay around them (the remnants of the once smoky Door Club), also began to perform the flaming, levitating, quivering ball of mercury trick.
Django stood up then, staring around himself in terror and turning circles on the concrete parking lot. His mouth stood agape and it appeared to Frank that he’d gone mad, and who could blame him? Django’s jaw began to work rapidly, at first emitting no sound, at least none that was audible, but he quickly geared up into an all-out fit. Frank didn’t recognize anything Django was saying, but there was a clear pattern and dialect to it and Frank was suddenly sure that Django didn’t know what he was saying either.
The flaming balls of silvery, former debris seemed to resonate with the tone and one by one they began hurtling toward the giant mass floating over the spot where the Door Club had previously stood. Frank dove for cover, using the curb as a shield as the molten masses shot past all around him. He watched from the cracked pavement as one of the balls went clear through Django’s chest. The chanting went on for a second, now with a throaty gurgling as blood began to pour from Django’s torso and mouth until his lifeless corpse landed in a rumpled heap a few feet from where Frank lay.
And where was Rosie during all of this, what had become of her and Chavvy? Frank turned his head with some effort to see that they lay still on the pavement nearby, having not moved since before Django had begun speaking in tongues. They seemed oddly calm, as though they knew what they were watching and Frank was suddenly sure that was true.
Frank turned back to the place where the Door Club now hovered, boiling in the air as the high pitched squeal began to abate once more. The giant molten mass began to lower itself back into place, the flames receding simultaneously. As the blob began to touch down, the earth swallowed it hungrily until there was no evidence of the molten glob or the building that had once stood on that spot.
He felt it first, a slight rumble in the ground below him, and it grew to an outrageous din, like that of a hurricane or tornado. He looked on as a small, thin, vertical, almost antenna-like form emerged from the Door Club’s former address. As it progressed, the point revealed to be attached to a spire and so on as a tremendous gold and jewel encrusted temple sprang from the earth as though sprouting from a seed buried just below the surface. Frank stared at the spire as it glinted in the sun hundreds of feet above the earth when, with a crash, a bolt of lightning streaked from the sky blinding him momentarily.
As he blinked away the pain in his eyes from the flash, he looked back up toward the spire to find that it was no longer there. His gaze followed down along where the temple had been only seconds before to find that in its place once again stood the Door Club. Revelers poured in and out of its doors as though nothing had transpired. He looked back to Rosie and Chavvy, both looking as though they only dared him to speak. Django’s corpse lay on the ground next to them, blood hissing from his nostrils. Despite the giant hole in his chest, he remained alive.
Frank looked at his watch, but he could not believe it. He shook it half-heartedly but he knew he could not be entirely surprised. It had been a mere two minutes since the wail of that high-pitched squeal had begun.
