The Devil of Echo Lake by Douglas Wynne

time.”
    Rail lit a cigarillo and cast his gaze around the church in silence, taking it all in before heading back to his black BMW and disappearing up the dirt road toward the main building.
     
    *  *  *
     
    Jake was busy setting up equipment for the rest of the day while the pale light drained out of the sky. At seven-thirty Rail called the control room to ask if Moon had arrived.
    “No sign of the artiste yet, eh, Jake? Alright, then. Take a dinner break and call me when you see the Moon,” Rail said and hung up.
    Brickhouse sighed and drummed his hands on the Neve console’s leather palm rest. “So now we’re starting at what? Eight, nine, or ten? Man, I don’t know if I’ll be awake by then.”
    “There are a few beds upstairs,” Jake said. “You could take a nap, and I’ll wake you up if Billy shows.”
    “That’s tempting. But I’ve been up for almost seventy-two hours already. If I go to sleep now, I won’t be worth shit in two hours. I’ll just feel worse.” He rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “Do you know if I’m bunking here anyway?”
    “Eddie said Billy wants to sleep here so if he gets an idea in the middle of the night, he can just come down and grab a guitar. You have the house across the road to yourself. It’s the old church rectory. Rail’s up the hill in the mountain house.”
    “Well, if I’m staying right across the road, I may as well go unpack my saddle bags. Be back in a bit.”
    Jake took the cordless phone with him and went upstairs to watch TV and wait for Billy.
    When he came back down after an hour of back-to-back sitcoms, he found Brickhouse in one of the isolation booths using a tape-splicing razor blade to cut lines of cocaine on the metal surface of an empty tape flange. He watched as the engineer snorted up through a plastic straw, shook his head with a little shiver and glanced up at Jake through the window. Brickhouse pointed down at the little pile of coke with raised eyebrows. Jake held up his hand and silently mouthed the words, “No, thanks.”
    Jake busied himself with filling in the hourly log on the work order for the day’s session, which so far didn’t entail much. He walked back into the big room to brew another pot of coffee, heard a couple of piano notes cascading down from the loft and froze in his tracks. He looked up, expecting to see no one, and instead saw a thin figure in a black T-shirt and tight black jeans hunched over the keys, face obscured by a mass of wavy black hair, cut straight at the chin. Jake let out a little plosive breath that was equal parts laugh and sigh.
    He turned on his heel, went back into the control room, and dialed the mountain-house extension on the phone. “Billy Moon is here.”
    Trevor Rail entered the church ten minutes later. Jake was threading a fresh tape onto the multi-track, Brickhouse was scrolling through the LCD screen of a signal processor, and Moon was still poking around with an arpeggiated chord progression on the grand piano up in the shadowy loft above the hanging lamps that cast pools of yellow light on the scratched and tape-marked wood floor of the big room.
    The piano playing stopped when the double doors closed behind Rail. Jake watched through the control room glass as Billy Moon slowly floated down the spiral staircase and leaned against the banister near the bottom, staring at the producer. Jake could read the tentative body language, but not the expression on Moon’s face—there was more light in the control room than out there and Jake’s own reflection was superimposed over the reunion scene as Rail approached and then embraced his artist, cupping Billy’s head in his large hand, then looking him in the eyes with their foreheads pressed together like lovers about to kiss. Rail was saying something. Moon was nodding a little. Jake wished the talkback mic was on out there.
    A moment later the pair came into the control room, and Moon gave a pat on the arm to Brickhouse, who