Forty-seven years ago today, Jimi Hendrix died. If you want to find out who killed him, you can read the below sample chapter from my novel Wannabes, available for much cheapness at the Amazons.
12
The 1960s
At Murmur’s leaving party, his drinking buddies from Souls Receiving filled him so full of harpy piss that when he teleported to an unoccupied toilet cubicle in New York’s Biltmore Hotel the next morning, his first act as a field agent was to vomit into the bowl. He stayed there for thirty minutes, groaning and listening to his acidic bile sizzle through the porcelain, before he managed to get his feet under him and stagger out into the lobby. He checked in under the name of Brad Pine—identity and reservations provided by the travel office—and flopped into bed to sleep it off.
When he woke disoriented in the darkness, he found his molecules had snapped back into demon form while he slept. He would have to pay for the sheets his talons had shredded, which wouldn’t be a problem, although explaining the damage might. Under the bed sat a suitcase stuffed with $50,000 in used bills, which he had to account for through expense forms. Even field agents couldn’t escape paperwork.
He reassumed his human shape to avoid further damage to the upholstery and pulled back the curtains. His pulse raced as he drank in the alien environment. Light-studded buildings, so different to Hell’s ragged stalactites and stalagmites, rose straight and true above vehicles that trundled along a grid of roads in orderly fashion. As he followed the lines of one of the tallest buildings to its pointed spire, he became aware of the yawning vastness of the sky above. He dropped his gaze to dampen the dizziness.
Across the busy junction, people streamed in and out of Grand Central Terminal, maintaining an invisible compact to behave in a regularized manner, rather than snapping and tearing at each other as demons were wont to do in similar situations. In Hell, he only saw humans through the viewing screens at torture chambers, a popular pastime amongst the low-borns. His personal favourite was the shit pit. Generally the viewing screen revealed blank brown sludge, but occasionally a human would float against the glass to scrabble goggle-eyed and frantic. To see humans free of torment now felt wrong, but it emphasized the wonderful strangeness of this new world. Here was the clockwork conformity to a system that Satan craved. Yet Murmur felt a giddy sensation of freedom, for he didn’t have to conform to this system. Out in that sprawling human world, he could do anything, go anywhere—as long as it involved killing musicians.
Reminded of his mission, he flicked on a light and reached for the radio to sample his first taste of the forbidden fruit. The sense of incredible possibility evaporated as the chunky device unleashed a cacophony that forced him to curl up in a ball, hands clapped over his ears. The din, imbued with unrestrained joy and energy, bludgeoned through his defences. His soul seemed to be trying to claw its way out of his body. It took every ounce of will to uncover his ears so he could reach up with a shaky hand to stab at the “Off” button. Once the music died, the immediate agony vanished. In its place came an indefinable sense of loss and longing. He sat on the carpet, hugging his knees and staring out of the window at the night sky, searching for what, he didn’t know.
He spent the next few days in near-constant torment. As he wandered the streets to buy clothes to combat the biting cold, music ambushed him from the doors of bars and restaurants, clobbered him from passing cars and assaulted his senses from the lips of people humming and singing their favourite hits. Only earplugs and a steady intake of sense-dulling whisky allowed him to function as he set about identifying and tracking his first victim. Elvis had been pencilled in as a top target, but Murmur had discovered that he was on military service and all the records being released had already been recorded. There seemed no point killing him, especially since the name on everybody’s lips was that of Holly. His choice to kill the bespectacled guitarist proved the right one. The deaths of Holly and his friends caused a huge outburst of grief and despondency and showed the disruptive force his tinkering could bring to bear. When a delighted Satan handed him a six-year mandate in response to the instant success, Murmur set to work laying the groundwork for his long-term campaign.
With the immediate pressure to prove his worth eased, Murmur began carving himself a niche in New York. Despite the music, he found the mad energy of the city exhilarating, particularly after two hundred years in which losing a paper clip counted as drama. His innate demon ability of speaking in tongues allowed him to carry out daily interactions such as finding an apartment, although initially he hid away as much as possible: he still struggled to control the fire that longed to burst from his face. In keeping with his solitude, he assumed the identity of a struggling writer and morphed his human shape to look more appropriate to the role—tousled black hair, pale skin, soulful brown eyes behind thick glasses, and a set of perfect teeth in contrast to his real dental chaos.
Cooped up at home, he engrossed himself in television and radio to familiarize himself with the music scene and thus formulate a longer-term target list. He’d accepted that he would have to listen to music in order to understand it, although he kept the volume low and tried to limit his exposure to an hour a day initially. Like nerve endings deadened by repeated trauma, his soul adjusted and the visceral initial reaction faded. The aching sadness didn’t, however. After two months, he managed to get his emotions largely in check and the molecular itch of maintaining the human shape receded to manageable levels, although it never went away. Every time he went to sleep, he woke up in his true shape as his mind and body relaxed. He even began to adjust to the cold, which was a blessing since his heating bill had been eating up a large chunk of petty cash. Finally, he felt ready to pick up where he’d left off with Holly.
As the bewildering number of bands popping up testified, rock music was taking off. Yet only when he began attending concerts, earplugs in place, did he understand the power of music to inspire humanity. Time and again, he felt the collective lifting of woes and worries as the music reached a part of the human spirit inaccessible to the long talons of Hell. Their spirits strained upwards and they began to glimpse the possibilities of change and beauty in their own lives. The afterglow could last for days and be reignited by the simple act of placing a particular song on the turntable and letting the conscious mind, normally so locked-in to the day-to-day grind, unfurl in the soft swirl of melody. Music, he realized, would permit humanity to rise beyond Hell’s clutches should they be allowed unfettered access to its buoying swell. He set to his sabotage with grim purpose.
At first, he focused on Rock’n’Roll, careful not to take too many high-profile targets and thus start people asking questions. Jesse Belvin bought the farm in 1960 in an opportunistic moment of tampering with the steering of his car. A blown-out tyre, helped along by Murmur’s sharp talons, took out Eddie Cochrane in the same year. Yet the more music he listened to, the more he realized that he couldn’t focus on this one strand alone. R’n’B, Blues, Jazz, Soul and many other old and new musical styles were causing similar amounts of enlightenment. He broadened his focus to include them, first sending Patsy Cline down in another plane crash. People killed people all the time, with or without Hell’s proddings, so in 1964 he set up a stooge to shoot Sam Cooke. In the same vein of varying his MO, a gaggle of cancer cells implanted into John Coltrane’s liver took care of the jazz legend. Then another plane crash, for old times’ sake, put paid to Otis Redding. Murmur again toyed with the idea of killing Elvis, but by this point the singer was making formulaic Hollywood films and seemed to be a spent force.
He made no effort to deal with classical music, even though the pain he felt when listening to swelling strings indicated just how powerful it was. Most musicians appeared to be playing music by composers who’d been dead for a long time, and it appealed to such a small group of people that the effort-benefit ratio didn’t justify diverting his limited time and resources—although the large size of orchestras would have made it easy to ramp up his body count by collapsing a roof or starting a fire during a concert.
While Baal had warned of Heaven’s behind-the-scenes role, Murmur saw nothing to support these fears until 1966, when he killed Paul McCartney in a car crash in an effort to halt the meteoric rise of The Beatles. Murmur had stood over the bloodied corpse, yet two weeks later McCartney was back shaking his mop top as though nothing had happened. Whether Heaven reincarnated Lennon’s partner-in-crime or sent down an equally talented doppelganger, Murmur didn’t know. But he knew for sure that other forces were at work and so didn’t try to kill the new McCartney. While he didn’t believe Heaven was on to him, hitting the same target twice would definitely alert them to his machinations. The day would no doubt come when they discovered him, but there was no point in hurrying it along. There were plenty more targets; the new talent that kept popping up far outstripped the pile of bodies he’d created. It was that last fact that made it clear he couldn’t manage on his own, so when Satan called him down for a face-to-face performance review at the end of 1965, he resolved to ask for some help.
***
On the morning of the meeting, Murmur popped into his old office to catch up with his former workmates. Within two minutes of gathering round the water cooler with his two closest friends, Gergaroth and Tarsis, and the rest of his old crew, his jaw ached from the strain of clamping his mouth shut to stop blurting out the details of his mission. With his reticence apparent, the conversation soon turned to the standard old tales of the juicy sins contained in that day’s admission forms. Little fires crackled up as laughter rippled around the group, and Murmur felt a burst of homesickness. It lasted until the section boss popped up to herd everyone back to work. His friends slumped in unison and the fires fizzled out. He watched them file back to their desks, all individuality swallowed up the moment they sat down. The injustice he’d nursed down his years as a clerk returned, this time for his friends. He’d escaped, while the others remained trapped in Hell’s rigid social structures like flies caught for all eternity in an abandoned spider’s web. As he listened to the scribble of pen on paper and the thump of stamps, sounds that sometimes still haunted his dreams, it occurred to him that he could be the claw that cut through that web.
He left the office, mind churning with new possibilities, and flew over to meet Satan on the golf course modelled on Gleneagles, with fire pits instead of bunkers and boiling tar replacing water hazards. Satan was wearing a pair of plus fours in black and yellow tartan and a matching cap. Despite the jaunty headgear, jammed awkwardly between his long horns, Satan looked as morose as ever. In response to Murmur’s formal greeting asking after his health, he didn’t hesitate to have a good moan.
‘I am exhausted,’ Satan said, rubbing his eyes to emphasize the point. ‘I cannot remember the last time I had a holiday, but nobody from this disorganized rabble can run the operation in my absence.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, my Lord.’
Satan let loose another of his sighs, so old and weary it turned the hair of his human caddy instantly grey.
‘We need more demons like you,’ he said. ‘Demons with a can-do attitude.’
Murmur hid a smile behind his hand. He knew several demons just like him.
After Satan swiped his ball straight into a fire pit, Murmur stepped up to the tee. He’d never played golf, but it seemed simple enough once you figured out the best way to hold the club was to dig your talons into the rubber sleeve rather than try to grasp the slippery metal shaft. His ball sailed onto the green of the par three. They tromped around the course, Murmur filling Satan in on developments upstairs. The boss’s mood worsened as Murmur detailed the explosion of new bands and styles, laying it on thick to support his case. By the time they reached the fifth hole, Satan had fallen into a glowering silence. After he’d hacked another ball into the rough, he tossed his club over his shoulder, catching the caddy full in the face. The human began to weep.
‘Why does he love them so much?’ Satan said softly.
‘Sorry?’
Satan snapped his head round, his lips twitching. ‘I said, “Why do they love this so much.” Humans. This game. There’s no combat, no drama. Only lots of walking. I loathe it.’
A faint picture formed in Murmur’s mind, like the flickering images amid the static just before his television locked into the channel he was searching for. Satan began to talk again, far louder than usual, and the coming insight slipped back into fuzz. ‘Yet play it we must, for so many of the decisions that matter are taken on golf courses. We need to understand it, so we can understand those who govern the world above.’
The by-rote recap of Hell’s standard position on Satan’s obsession with all things human didn’t ring true. Murmur filed the exchange away for later examination and lined up his shot. Satan coughed. Out of the corner of his eye, Murmur saw an avatar drop to the ground, turn green to camouflage itself, and set off in the direction of its master’s stranded ball. Murmur pretended not to notice. He’d hoped to wait until Satan played a few good shots before tackling the day’s business. That didn’t look like happening. So, as they set off in pursuit of the errant ball, he launched into his pitch.
‘About the humans, Sir. I could do a lot more if I had some minions.’
Satan looked at him askance. ‘You know only Lords of Hell have minions. You are doing a good job, but you are asking me to change millennia of tradition and give a low-born command.’
‘I understand that, my Lord, but I can do much more with some help. There are tens of thousands of musicians up there, all of them making people disgustingly happy. I can’t tackle them all by myself.’
‘What do you propose to do with these resources?’
‘We can’t kill all of the big stars, but we can take out the next generation before they become big, as well as the best session musicians, managers, agents, everyone who is involved. We don’t even have to kill them. We can addict them to drugs, mislead them and otherwise sabotage their careers.’
‘I suppose that is a good idea.’
They reached Satan’s ball, which unsurprisingly lay on the edge of the fairway. Satan glanced at Murmur, who said nothing. The King of Hell pulled out a five iron, settled into a powerful crouch, and hacked at the ball. It travelled all of thirty yards.
‘Execrable human game!’ Satan roared. Six-foot-high pillars of flame burst from his horns, setting his hat smouldering. He tossed it to the ground and pounded it with his club. When the hat was suitably chastised, Satan turned to Murmur. ‘Fine. I will give you a score of demons to do your bidding. I will take them from Lucifer’s house. He has been even more annoying than usual lately, demanding we destroy this and pulverize that. He needs put in his place.’
The mention of Lucifer set Murmur’s skin crawling. He hadn’t forgotten the boardroom confrontation, if you could dignify his cowering submission to Lucifer’s aggression with such a word. Nor had Lucifer. Earlier that year, Murmur had woken to find a pair of red eyes floating in the darkness of his bedroom. Lucifer had said nothing, merely staying there for a few more seconds before vanishing. The message was clear: I’m watching you. Having the minions comes from Lucifer’s legions would give the demon another reason to want to make good on his threat of multiple Filofax insertion, which Murmur supposed at least gave him added motivation to succeed and keep in Satan’s good books.
‘That would be wonderful, Sir, although I do have one request. There are two demons I used to work with, Gergaroth and Tarsis, who I believe would be valuable additions to the team.’
‘More low-borns unattached to a great house? I am not sure.’
‘We low-borns are hungry, and that makes us hard-working. I guarantee they will do a great job, as I have done. You did say you needed more demons like me.’
Satan prodded at his charred hat with a yellow toe talon. ‘I will release them. Just be aware that this does not make you a Lord of Hell. You are still a low-born, if a capable one. Now, let us proceed directly to the nineteenth hole. We shall call this round a draw, yes?’
Satan stomped off without waiting for an answer and Murmur followed, fire playing around his lips. Yes, he wasn’t a Lord, and a score of minions didn’t constitute a legion, but it represented another rung up the ladder. And he couldn’t wait to see the looks on his friends’ faces when he told them they would be joining him upstairs.
***
As expected, Gergaroth and Tarsis were grateful and far more active than Lucifer’s lot, who resented being placed under the command of a low-born. Lucifer’s minions—who reminded Murmur of snobby English butlers from movies, servants themselves but somehow believing they were better than everyone else—still did what was asked of them, although far slower and more sloppily than his friends. As well as providing him with drinking buddies, Gergaroth and Tarsis’ dedication freed Murmur up to devote more time to research. He began attending as many music festivals as he could. At the 1967 Monterey Festival he finally saw one extraordinary individual whose name he’d been hearing for some time.
He started the evening watching The Who from the back of the crowd, wondering if he could arrange for an electrical fault to fry the lot of them. Inertia brought on by the four joints he’d smoked, a habit he’d initially taken up in the hope it might dull the impact of the music only to find the drug intensified it, stopped him. He couldn’t be bothered elbowing his way to the front or sending out an avatar to scuttle through the forest of legs. That all changed when a wild-haired man with God in his hands, sporting a pink feather boa, took to the stage. Murmur found himself edging forward. As the guitar, bass and drums drove out their frenetic and mesmerizing sound, Murmur looked at the rapturous faces of the audience. They’d been transported away from their miserable lives, eyes glowing and tawdry souls reaching out for Heaven. He felt a seductive upward tug on his own soul that made him want to give in to the beauty of the music. Somewhere deep within him, he heard the ancient chime of harps and felt an appalling sadness.
He teleported away from the concert with renewed conviction that Heaven was at work through musicians such as Hendrix. Yes, they had a very public policy of non-intervention, but Murmur had learned in his short time on Earth that governing bodies were adept at saying one thing and doing another. If God created mankind in his own image it stood to reason that Heaven could be just as dishonest.
Murmur bought Are You Experienced? and listened to it repeatedly on his Moerch turntable, hurting from the pain the sweet music brought but unable to stop. As soon as Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland were released, he snapped up copies. Each record drove home the message that Hendrix needed to go. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to do the needful. Instead, he made increasingly half-hearted attempts to snuff out other artists. At the Altamont Festival in 1969, he whispered in the ear of a drunk and paranoid Meredith Hunter before passing him a gun to take out as many of The Rolling Stones as he could. A Hells Angel stabbed the assassin before he got a shot off, and Murmur didn’t feel as disappointed at the failure as he probably should have.
He may have been better possessing Hunter, but taking full charge of a human wasn’t as simple as stuffing your hand up a puppet’s behind, as movies and books seemed to portray. The human mind’s intricate networks of neurons, conflicting emotions and hidden desires made it more akin to controlling a feisty, uncooperative puppet with a thousand unlabelled strings that kept getting tangled. It was hard enough sober; drunk possessing was damn near impossible. So, Murmur always preferred to use his powers of suggestion. It wasn’t a complete loss, however. It only took a firm boot to the side of a Hells Angel’s motorbike to turn the atmosphere sour. There wasn’t much peace and love that weekend.
After Altamont, he took the decision to move to London. It made more sense given the number of bands sprouting up in England. He bought a house in St. John’s Wood with the stash of money Satan sent up and filled it with all the latest gadgets and trendy furniture, which he used with pleasure now he no longer had to contend with claws and scaly buttocks in his human form. Gergaroth and Tarsis moved in with him, while the other minions were despatched to less salubrious digs in the East End. He kept the cover of a struggling writer, but changed his appearance to bring more of a British feel to go with his accent. He selected dodgy teeth, a shaggy shoulder-length mop, pasty skin and a gangly body, and assumed the name of David Ainsworth. The cold bothered him less than he’d imagined it would, although he still kept the heating in his apartment at full blast for much of the year.
Then in 1970 the moment came when he could no longer put off dealing with Hendrix. Despite his growing record collection, he hadn’t killed anybody high-profile for a while, and Lucifer’s minions kept asking him why such an obvious target remained unharmed. Concerns would be raised downstairs if he didn’t carry out his duty and that could lead to him being recalled in disgrace to Hell, where Lucifer would be waiting. To avoid being ripped apart, he had to ensure he returned a hero. And that meant sticking to his task.
And so, one September night, Murmur stood across from the Samarkand Hotel in Notting Hill as Hendrix and his girlfriend pulled up outside the building’s stone façade and intricate black railings. The musician looked haggard and leaned on Monika Dannemann as they stumbled down to the basement flat. Murmur waited another thirty minutes before teleporting into the bedroom, where they were both asleep. An uncapped container of sleeping pills beckoned to him from the table at Dannemann’s side of the bed.
When Murmur placed his hand on Hendrix’s chiselled cheeks and squeezed to open his mouth, the guitarist woke with a start. Murmur stared into his eyes, rocking his head until Hendrix followed suit and his eyes glazed over. He paused for a moment to inspect the guitarist’s long fingers, searching for some residual trace of heavenly tinkering—a white glow or angelic symbol perhaps.
He rattled the pills in his cupped hand and then sighed.
‘I’m afraid you’re just too good,’ he said.
Faint traces of fire lit up the frown lines on Murmur’s face as the pills went in. He waited, the only sound the soft whoosh of Dannemann’s breathing, until Hendrix arched his head back. Murmur put his hand over the guitarist’s mouth, feeling vomit gurgle up against his palm. Hendrix began to choke, his eyes open and panicked now that the hypnotic effect of Murmur’s gaze had worn off.
When Hendrix went still, Murmur teleported home. He poured himself a Jack Daniels and pulled out Axis: Bold as Love. The warm crackle of vinyl hissed through the speakers before the intro to Little Wing soared through the living room. He imagined Hendrix’s fingers racing up and down the fretboard like a possessed spider to produce the impossibly complicated and gorgeous riff. Then he thought of Satan, staring upward from Hell’s caverns and hating the man who’d banished him and the music he’d created. He knew he should hate it too, if only for the pain it brought him. And yet, although his fingers hovered over the arm of the turntable, he couldn’t bring himself to turn the record off.