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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/beardify on 2024-09-23 15:32:57+00:00.
I saw another one today. It was spray-painted above the entrance to a sewer, along with an arrow pointing downward into the darkness. Twenty years later, MVSH is finally back in town.
MVSH. Four little letters. I know it's stupid to be scared of them, just as I know that no one is likely to remember me as the person I was twenty years ago. None of that helps when the memories come flooding back.
The summer I turned seventeen, my life was about music: grimy basement mosh-pits, drunken field concerts where the amps were plugged into some survivalist’s gas generator, night drives with the windows down and the radio blaring. A part-time job at Sundown Records paid bums to buy beer for me and kept my gas tank needle half an inch from empty. My parents bit their nails about my future, but I didn’t care: why shouldn’t life just go on like this forever?
Working at Sundown Records had another perk as well: I got to spend time with Dylan Fughes. He was a big name in the local underground scene, and his music shop reflected it. The walls were covered with the concert flyers of bands he’d discovered and made great; the high-end sound system played only music that met his own exacting standards.
My interview at Sundown was just to listen to three songs and tell Dylan what I thought of them. When I told him I thought they all sucked, a polished white smile flashed across his face; he put his crocodile-skin shoes up on his desk and told me that the job was mine if I wanted it.
Dylan gave me tips on all the most exclusive shows, even let me borrow albums from the shop. He was charming, he was worldly, and unlike the boys in my high school, he actually knew how to dress himself. It wasn’t long before I was head-over-heels in love with him. That was how it started.
I was breaking down cardboard boxes in the hallway beside his office when the phone rang. My heart skipped a beat: nobody dared to call Dylan after five PM, not unless it was an emergency. I still remember the giddiness in Dylan’s voice when I pressed my ear against the door to eavesdrop:
“Really? They are? I’ll be there.”
Dylan burst out into the hallway just as I got back to my heap of cardboard. Big news, Vee, he was yelling. MVSH is playing this weekend!
I’d missed a key word in there: it had sounded like his mouth had suddenly filled up with half-chewed meat. Dylan rolled his eyes at my blank expression. Apparently, “MVSH” was the hottest thing on the scene right now. No one knew who the band members were, where they were from, or even how to pronounce their group’s name; MVSH didn’t even sell tickets to their concerts. The only way in was to show up with a specific food item: it served as proof that you had been told about the show by someone close to the band.
I nodded along to Dylan’s story, not trusting myself to speak. When I was alone with him, my words tangled themselves into stupid, humiliating knots. I always wound up talking to my shoes, and half the time I had no idea what I had actually said to him. I was thinking about how unfair that was when I realized that Dylan had just invited me to go see MVSH with him.
Sure, I guess, I finally managed to shrug. My boss must have seen right through my attempt to look careless. There was a sneer on his face as he peered out into the shop: he wanted to make sure no one overhead what he was about to say next. I got goosebumps as he leaned in close and whispered:
“Well, then. There are a few other things you’re going to need to know…”
I had it all planned out. I waited until my father had finished three-fourths of his coffee and reached the sports section of the newspaper before I asked him if I could stay over with my friend Sara on Friday night. We had a biology exam on Monday, I lied, and Sara wanted to study together.
My father glanced up sharply, and I knew I was busted. I had been an idiot to suggest that I cared about school; he knew me better than that. He gazed out the window, brushed some crumbs off of his tie, and sighed:
“Sure, honey. You can go. But you’re bringing Raquel.”
Trying to hide the horrified expression on my face, I gave him a quick hug and bolted out the door. This was going to ruin everything.
The difference between my sister Raquel and I was clear just by looking at our notebooks. Hers were neat, detailed, each perfectly-shaped letter contained inside the lines; mine were jumbled and chaotic–filled with stickers, doodles, and my friends’ phone numbers. If I tried to leave Raquel alone at Sara’s, she would rat me out for sure. My only option was to bring her to see MVSH as my guest–and hope that I could convince her to follow Dylan’s bizarre instructions.
The afternoon before the concert, we raided the heaps of donated clothes in the Methodist church basement. We were searching for the ugliest, filthiest stuff we could find. Dylan said that MVSH didn’t let anyone in unless they looked like they had been sleeping in a dumpster for a few weeks; I told Raquel that we could throw everything away after the concert anyway.
“Gross.” My sister made a face.
I took a deep breath and did my best to explain to Raquel that seeing MVSH live was a life-changing experience. Did she really think that Dylan Hughes would be wrong about something like that?
If she did, she kept her mouth shut about it, finally settling on a pair of paint-splattered khaki pants and a greasy orange T-shirt. The jeans and tuxedo vest that I’d picked out for myself were in tatters, but at least they fit me and (sort of) matched. I was especially proud of a leather belt I’d discovered in a dusty corner beneath some trash bags. Its steel buckle was brick-heavy and handmade in the shape of a grinning skull. Now there was just one last stop to make before we caught a bus to the location that Dylan had given me.
“What’s with the soup?” Raquel asked later, when she saw me pocketing two packets of bullion cubes at the mini-mart across from the bus station.
I repeated Dylan’s instructions:
“When you go to a MVSH concert, you’ve got to bring something that shows you know somebody cool. You know, like a password. This time, it’s chicken soup cubes. We got lucky. Dylan says that one year it was oatmeal, and last time, it was pig’s blood.”
“Hey!” Raquel hurried after me, whispering: “You’re going to pay for that, right?”
I got us a coin locker across from some broken-down payphones. As we stored our stuff, I reminded Raquel that she couldn’t bring anything into the show with her: no wallet, no phone, nothing.
“For punks, these guys sure have a lot of rules.” Raquel complained–but handed over her shoulder bag anyway.
When the bus arrived, Raquel sat in the front seat, her spine straight and her hands folded neatly in her lap. I lounged beside her, drumming my fingers impatiently on the windows and hoping she wouldn’t realize how nervous I was. I had assumed that Dylan would be fine with me inviting one extra person…but what if he wasn’t?
Our stop was near the end of the line, its crazily-leaning sign barely visible in the amber streetlight glow. I was expecting some gritty industrial club with steel shutters and a line of leather-clad hipsters at the door, but the sidewalk was empty. The factories and warehouses looming over us were either closed down or partly demolished; mangy cats prowled through the weed-choked lots. The only sign of life was a pair of white semi-trucks backed up against one of the decrepit buildings. For the first time, I found myself doubting my boss’ intentions. What if Dylan was just toying with me? What if the whole thing was just some kind of cruel joke?
Raquel and I slipped through a gap in a chain-link fence, then turned down a blind alley. At the far end, MVSH was spray-painted above a rusted factory door. A crowd had already started to gather: their clothes were just ragged as ours, and there was a packet of bullion cubes in every hand. I spotted Dylan’s silky smooth hair right away. We had made it.
As my boss approached, that feeling of relief vanished. Without his expensive clothes and soft lighting of the record shop, Dylan looked…old. He licked his lips when he saw me, and suddenly I wanted to puke. I wondered what an adult man was doing inviting a teenage girl to an event like this, then wondered why it had taken me so long to ask that question in the first place. The hungry expression on his face soured when he saw Raquel at my side:
“Who’s this?”
“My sister Raquel.”
“I specifically told you that there’s only one invite per guest!”
“Right. You invited me, and I invited my sister.” I found myself getting angry on Raquel’s behalf. Who did Dylan think he was? She had just as much of a right to be here as anyone else! “If its a problem, we can just leave–”
“No, no problem.” Dylan clearly still thought he had a chance. He looked at Raquel’s outfit and snorted. “Just act like you don’t know me when you get to the door, okay?”
“That won’t be hard.” Raquel snorted. There was a sarcastic edge to her voice that I had never heard before, and it occurred to me that maybe my sister was more than just the whiny teacher’s pet that I had always believed her to be. Maybe during these long years of high school, she had changed, too.
A breeze blew down the alley, carrying dust, ripped-up plastic bags, and soggy newspaper pages. One of them stuck to Dylan’s pants and he pried it off with two fingers as though it were...
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