Rose Whyte: Part 2 - The Musician's Ballad

In which Rose Whyte accompanies her seven friends to a Fetish Ball leading to an attempt on her life...

The Second Part

The Musician’s Ballad

 

            Hey, my name is Johnny, Johnny Deformed and I’m the lead singer of my band Se7enth Adversary.  I got my name on account of the fact that I was born with six fingers on my left hand.  It doesn’t make playing the guitar any easier either, in case you were wondering " you’d never guess I was bashful about it when I was a kid; now it’s like my trademark, funny eh?  You’ve seen all that stuff that’s been in the papers and magazines about that missing heiress lately, right?  Well, we were right in the middle of it; nearly split the band up and everything, but you know what they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.  I suppose you want to know all about that s**t:

            Well, okay…

We’d been out gigging and got back to the hotel late after some pretty extreme partying, as usual the corridor leading up to our suite was swarming with drugged up groupies; crack w****s and drunk chicks gagging for rock c**k.  We had our minder Angry Bob steer them out the door; there is such a thing as being too tired you know, yeah, yeah I know, so much for rock and roll - bollocks.  Well anyway, somehow one chick had managed to sneak in and hide herself in my room, created one hell of a security brew-ha-ha, I can tell you.  Our manager, Mickey ‘Doc’ Halliday, was pissed big time, citing hotel security measures and whatnot.  I thought Angry Bob was going to bust a f*****g gut over it, big fella to upset too, s**t!  She looked pretty upset so we didn’t throw her out on her a*s; she was also pretty cute too.  Apparently she was some rich chick and had run away from daddy or something, I was too tired to really listen " that and I was up to my eyeballs on Chuckle too, so I told her she could stay the night but no funny business, not that I could have managed it.  Of course, had we known who she was and what was going to follow, we would have had Angry Bob launch her though the door there and then. 

Next morning over breakfast (black coffee and cigarettes) she told me the whole story; seems a pretty rough deal for a girl to have her stepmother take a contract out on her.  To be honest, we took what she said with a pinch of salt, we have known a lot of fucked up chicks.  I told her she should go to the cops but she wouldn’t listen, apparently daddy’s business deals were probably a little shadier than the authorities would like.  She was a smart girl though, gutsy too and I think she wanted to sort things out in her head, so we let her hang out, besides the boys had taken to her pretty well.  Doc didn’t seem to be overly pleased to have a wayward heiress hanging out with his band but there you go and Angry Bob was still smarting from her sneaking past him; I think he warmed to her in the end, but he never said, the grumpy old b*****d.  We advised that she stay with us in the hotel for a while and we could keep an eye on her, we had no idea how much trouble that chick was going to cause us.

The first time came a few days after we had gigged for ‘The House of Thwacks’ Fetish Ball at Papa Vanity in Vertigo City.  It was a totally hot venue… and we totally rocked the tits off it.  Anyway, Rose was sick of being cooped up in the hotel suite and so we smuggled her backstage to watch us play, turns out she was a bit of a fan.  We spent the night drinking shots, dropping a few pills and snorting from a pile of Chuckle bigger than a sack of f*****g flour, Columbian stuff, expensive but really smooth.

Anyway, at the post-gig party, Doc got talking to this fetish clothing designer; he’s got a thing about girls in latex; whatever.  I think he was angling for a gimp masked blow job, but it never happened. Halfway through their conversation, this designer notices Rose and reckons that she has a killer figure, perfect for fetish modelling.  She says she’ll send one of her girls over to fit her up for a corset free of charge; they’re all the rage in the fetish scene apparently.  Rose, like any girl was up for the idea of free stuff so we gave her the address of the hotel.  The designer said she’d send someone round the following day.  We thought nothing of it; f**k me was that a mistake.

 

True to her word, the fitter arrived shortly before we left for the studio; a nervous looking woman, kind of retro-punky, the way kids used to look in the 1970s.  We were late getting out the door, we had banging hangovers and our bass guitarist, Badger, was still smashed of his tits on Chuckle and pills the dopey b*****d.  Anyway we left Rose and the fitter in the penthouse and drove to the studio to lay down a new track we’d been working on called SexLax; it’s going to be massive.

But try as he might Badger can’t play for toffee, pulling allsorts of wrong chords and everything.  Halfway through SexLax he starts going into the chorus of Lost Daughter " that was like three albums ago.  Well, Doc is furious, the studio is charging us by the hour and Badger is just f*****g things up and wasting time.  Doc’s on about dropping him from the band completely, that starts Jimmy the drummer off and there’s a big argument.  (That’s unusual because Jimmy’s a good lad and being addicted to Viagra and Prozac he’s usually the happiest bloke in the band).  A window gets broken, an executive gets punched in the gob and it all kicks off.  Doc tells us all to sod off out of it, go to the hotel and get cleaned up.

We got back to the hotel about 5pm and it’s funny, but I had a feeling something was wrong the moment I walked in " there was just a weird feel about the place.  The boys wanted to go to the hotel bar but I suggested we check on Rose first, good job too.

The door to the penthouse had been left open.  Straight away that got my heart going, Angry Bob pushed in front (him being the biggest, hardest and bravest, I suppose) and flew straight in.  He gave a shout from inside, Christ my heart nearly stopped in my chest.

Rose was dead.

Well, as far as I could tell.  She was slumped down in the doorway between two rooms, her face almost grey, her hands twisted up behind her back as if grabbing at something.  I’ve only ever seen one other dead body and it looked pretty similar to that.  It was at a party in London, big bash, loads of pills and powder and vodka pretty much plumbed into the water system.  We were celebrating our third number 1 and someone found a dead chick in the toilet, overdosed.  Shame she was very cute… or at least would have been; a real f*****g waste.  Anyway…

Rose was dead.

Angry Bob, got to her first, he’s first aid trained or something.  You have to do a pretty s**t hot course in medical stuff when you become a bodyguard; in case you’re not that good at your primary job, I suppose.  “It’s this f****n’ thing,” he said, reaching to his belt.  By the time we had gathered round, he had pulled a clasped knife and thumbed it open.

We stood around in shock, not understanding at all what had happened.

“Ah man, this is fucked up,” Jimmy said, pushing a pill between his lips and swallowing. “This is waaaay too much to handle.  I mean, Christ, look at her waist…”

I’d not noticed it at first; I mean Rose had a pretty small waist anyway but the corset she had been lashed into shaved inches off it.  It looked horrendous, almost like when you pinch a balloon in the middle.

“Cal, hold her head to the side and make sure it’s tipped back so she doesn’t swallow her tongue,” Angry Bob said working feverishly to saw through the tethers at the back of the corset.  Our lead guitarist, Calvin ‘Lightfinger’ Lynard, held her head gently; I could see his hands trembling.  We were all feeling the same, shitting in our pants.

Angry Bob was sweating and swearing.  “Look, these clasps at the back are locked into place, you can’t open them.”  He continued to cut through the lashings.  Within minutes he was through and pulled the corset off, tossing it angrily across the room.  He put his ear to her mouth and laid a hand on her chest, feeling for the rise and fall of it and listening for the passage of air (so he told me later).  She was breathing and before long the colour began to return to her cheeks, the blueness fading from her lips " even in that state she looked highly kissable but s**t, this was not the time.

Gingerly, Angry Bob pressed at her sides feeling along the bones, his face serious.  “A couple of ribs might be broken, hard to tell without X-Rays.”  Angry Bob shook his head and went to examine the corset.  “She’s lucky her lungs weren’t punctured, Jesus Christ.” 

We carried her gently to the bed and laid her down, she was already looking better.  It’s funny, we’d only known her a few days but the boys were beginning to get quite attached to her.  “What went wrong?”  Billy the Sleepy Fish asked, rubbing his eyes " he’s our keyboardist and the worst sufferer of hangovers and post-drug come downs you’ve ever seen.  I was amazed he was still awake to be honest.

“Looks like she collapsed,” Jimmy said, covering her up with a quilt, “too many pills I reckon.”

“Pills my arse.” Angry Bob grunted holding the corset up in one hand. “It was this f****n’ thing.  Someone put this on her, tightened it so much that she couldn’t breathe, snapped these clasps shut and left her here…”

“Left her here?”  Jimmy said.  “Why…”

“They left her here to die,” Angry Bob said.  “We’ve just had an attempted f****n’ mob hit in our suite.  Someone tried to kill our girl here.”

“A mob hit?”  We all looked at each other.  It seems that Rose’s tale about her stepmother might just be right

“Wow,” Jimmy said, pushing another pill into his mouth, “that f****n’ rocks.”

 

 

 

 

Reviews

[The Viking]

Loved this take on the seven dwarves - it turns them from cute, huggable little fairy tale fellows to badass rockers, well acquainted with heavy drug use, violence, and parties that last till 9 am. I love it. I also like how you weave each of the names of the Dwarves into the rockers' personalities - "the dopey b*****d etc." Only problem I have with this is the beginning - it's a little on the weak side. I know this is supposed to be told in that kind of first person narrative, but it sounds a bit too spontaneous and doesn't really hook the reader. That's just my take though, other than that I thoroughly enjoyed this and am looking forward to the rest.

[Killer]

very good this is really great it makes me die alittle everytime.