Dewey Mallard's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Dewey Mallard wanted to write the song that a whole generation would sing back at him, but after six years fronting Stillwater Drift he had never finished one. The band had noodled the same lazy riff for three hours in the loft. Hoot's guitar circled the same four notes. Nobody stopped him, because Dewey was the guy who kept things loose. He grinned and nodded like it was fine. It was not fine. A hook is the part people can't forget, and they had no hook. Hoot let the riff die and set the red guitar across his knees. "That's not a song," he said. "That's a warm-up we never leave." Dewey laughed it off. "It's a vibe." "It's a loop," Hoot said. He didn't push. He said it once and stopped, and that was worse than shouting. A knock rattled the loft door. A red-haired stranger in a black leather jacket walked in without waiting. He carried a notebook packed with loose paper. "Jay Bird," he said. "I track lost songs. Ones nobody wrote down." He looked at the amp, then at Dewey. "Heard you three hours from the street. Same eight bars. You're circling something. You don't know the top of it." "The top of it?" Dewey asked. "The hook," Jay said. "The line the riff is reaching for. You keep playing the road to it. You never get on." Dewey wanted to make a joke. Jay didn't leave room for one. He opened the notebook and set it on the floor. Every page had cracks written in, wrong notes circled, gaps marked where a melody dropped out. "I write down what's missing," he said. "Not just what's there. Try that." Hoot leaned forward. Dewey had never seen him lean forward for anything. Dewey picked up a pen. For once he did not fill the quiet with a joke. He hummed the tired riff. Then he stopped it early, on purpose, at the exact spot where his voice always wanted to jump. He let the silence sit. "There," Jay said. "That gap. Sing the gap." Dewey sang it. Four words came out, plain and lazy and easy to remember. He sang them again. Hoot caught the guitar under him without being told. The four words landed on the beat and stuck. It was a hook. It was theirs. "Write it down," Jay said. "Cracks and all." Dewey wrote it down. By dawn he had a full song, start to finish, the first he had ever finished. He should have felt only relief. Instead Jay was already at the door. "The rest of that melody isn't up here," Jay said. "It's in the Hollow Vaults. People go in for it. They don't come out. Your hook is the first line of it. If you want the whole song, you follow it down." He left. Dewey held one finished song and the news that the best part of it was buried somewhere that killed people.