Love Song for the Dead

By Jack Forge

David Orff is an incandescent rock star with a history of drug abuse that will not fade into the past. His love for Rydia Ryan has changed his life, but his former drug connection, Risto, threatens their happiness. When Orff's bride disappears, he forsakes his music career to find her. In doing so he rouses forces beyond his control.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jack Forge
• Release date: May 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476221878

Jack Forge

Born John Stephen Rohde in Los Angeles, California, I focused my academic study on the liberal arts and I have striven to create worthy art most of my life.

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LOVE SONG FOR THE DEAD

A Novelette

by

Jack Forge

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 John Stephen Rohde

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Lightning ripped the nightsky over New York City. With thunder as basso profundo, an electric guitar was shrieking throughout Central Park. In the middle of the commons, an outdoor stage amid a swarm of screaming spectators glowed in unearthly light focusing on a solo guitarist.

David Orff played and sang like a god. His music transfixed thousands of ageless heads that had gathered for him in the city park. Fused in their common absorption, they focused as one organism on the star in the center of the lights, their faces like night flowers troping to a midnight sun, their souls abraded and soothed by the magic of the music pulsing through the hot, wet summer air--an invisible current ionizing the atmosphere. Across the blueblack sky inferior stars glittered in silent concord with the reverberating synthesis of the young maestro's sound, a moment of perfect harmony attuned to the turning Earth.

The stage glowed in a matrix of solar heat that hyper-charged the spectators. Around the footlights garishly painted young women, groupies who pressed frantically upon security guards that stood like gigantic automatons among them. The groupies howled at their idol and shuddered with ecstasy, as profane priestesses at a mythic ritual. Yet within their passionate display lay a latent treachery, revealed by glimmers of fury in their harrowing eyes. Throughout Orff’s performance they were chanting in tones so low they seemed to issue from a subterranean cavern, a womb deep in the earth. And they called to him. Migo, migo, migo, migo.... they cried.

The musician's response amplified through a digital maze of electronics that seemed to rouse the spirits of the earth; indeed, his hypersonic frequencies could have modulated heaven itself, or hell. Standing alone on the radiant stage, his lean body crisscrossed by spotlights, his head glowing with the spectral color changes of the laser lights, Orff appeared transfigured into pure energy. His white satin clothes clung to his steaming flesh. His pale, glistening face looked down as if an ascetic in prayer. At times his blue eyes flashed as mercurial meters on the stirrings of his mind. Behind him clouds of gas coiled and writhed into the darkness like ghost dancers, in contrast to the voluminous howl that rose from the audience with the crescendos of his music. Bending their minds to his sounds, he was playing and singing like a god upon a lyre. And the power of his art fused the atoms of their beings into a power beyond their own imaginings.

From three angles around the stage, video cameras followed the artist, as if surveying a fantastic organism from another world. These cyclopia absorbed his image just as the microphones overhead captured his voice. On the camera view screens, he was reproduced in miniature and transmitted to hundreds of millions of television sets around the globe for everyone to see and believe--an omnipresence.

With artful grace Rydia Ryan concentrated her long, lithe body on the dance. More spirit than physique, like a divine nymph she was dancing the finale to a mythical story of death and rebirth. Alone on the stage, she was a high priestess performing a solemn ritual that touched the fundamental impulses of human nature. Her body undulated as a flower in timelapse, her arms waved to the rhythm of the sea, as her hair drifted in the musical motion of the dance.

People in the intimate hall were silent as they heard only the music and the soft scuffling of her slippered feet. They watched her as if she were offering a human sacrifice on their behalf. Women in the audience held their chins high, men their eyes low. Surprisingly nobody made a sound, as though in fear the dancer would shatter like glass.

In a box seat, high to one side of the stage David Orff sat enraptured by the vision Rydia Ryan was creating. He smiled like a kouros, as though he knew secrets about the dance not even the dancer knew.

When Rydia Ryan pirouetted offstage in a