Variations on a Theme Read online

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  I had a strict Scottish Protestant upbringing. Church every Sunday, with Sunday School afterwards, Religious Education classes at High School, and prayers every morning at assembly.

  It didn't take.

  I grew up, not atheist, but agnostic. To me, organized religion was an oxymoron… the two were incompatible. I had no belief in an overarching figure sitting on high meting out punishment or pleasure based on rules he gets to change when he feels like it.

  That all changed last year.

  One wet night in Spring I prayed, for the first time in over thirty-five years. I prayed, not to my god, but to my parent's god.

  They needed him. They were both in their seventies and dying. Not quickly, but slowly, agonizingly, from a range of ailments too painful to list.

  And I could do nothing but watch. After one particularly harrowing hospital visit I found myself kneeling on the floor by my bed with little idea as to why I was there. Part of me remembered though.

  I was there for two hours. I prayed and I cried in equal measure. There was no catharsis. I crawled into bed feeling just as shitty as before and more than slightly disgusted with myself.

  I didn’t expect an answer. Then again, maybe that’s the best time to get one.

  It came that next night. Rob came over for a beer and I got maudlin. Six or seven beers in we had reverted to the teenagers we’d left behind too many years ago – we speculated about prayer, and religion, and Rob showed me a new party trick.

  He took a pocket watch from his jacket and let it hang on the length of its chain. It hung straight down, unmoving.

  “Put your hand below the watch,” he said. “Palm up.”

  I did as he asked.

  The watch started to move. First it swayed from side to side then slowly started to spin in a circle that widened until the watch rotated slowly above my hand.

  “Take your hand away,” Rob said.

  Again I complied.

  The watch stopped moving and went back to hanging dead on the end of the chain.

  “Now you try it,” he said, handing me the watch.

  I took it from him and held it by the chain. The watch hung dead until Rob put his hand under it, whereupon it immediately started to spin in a circle.

  When Rob took his hand away, the watch went dead again.

  I examined the watch.

  “You’re doing it wrong,” Rob said. “You’re looking at the dancer rather than the dance.”

  He took the watch back and held it over his beer. It swung in a much wider circle this time.

  “Everything has a vibration. Even the beer,” he said.

  “Let me try again,” I said.

  I took the watch from him and held it by the chain, letting it still before putting my hand under it.

  “It will also answer questions,” Rob said softly. “Your unconscious knows a lot more than it tells you, but you can fool it and get an answer using the pendulum.”

  “How?”

  “Just let it hang and ask a question you know the answer to,” he said. “It will respond with either a yes or no, true or false.”

  Here goes nothing.

  “Is my name Pat Doyle?”

  The watch started to swing, slowly at first then gathering momentum until it swung, in a tight three-inch circle.

  “OK,” Rob said. “You’re a clockwise positive.”

  “What?”

  He pointed at the watch.

  “Clockwise spin for a true response.”

  “Does it do any other tricks?”

  Rob laughed.

  “This isn’t a trick. There’s something going on here. And yes, it does other tricks. It picks up on emotion. Laugh, and it’ll swing faster, use it when you’re hungry and it’ll rotate in a big slow circle… that kind of thing.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” I said.

  “No. But it is indicative of something. To quote the Bard, This is wondrous strange. It gives me hope, that there is more to life than just blood and flesh, that there might just be a point beyond just staying alive as long as possible.”

  I wasn’t really listening to him. I had been watching the chain hanging from his hand, and my gaze moved to my guitar. Whether by happy accident, or by some magical design, the old Gibson chose that moment to hum.

  “Obviously it works through some kind of harmonic detection,” I said. “And if that chain works, then so should guitar strings.”

  I hooked the instrument up to the Variaxe set up and turned up the gain. It was a very small effect, but there was no denying it was there. Simply by placing my hand a foot above the strings, there was a noticeable sympathetic harmonic being set up in the strings.

  We started to experiment – me making chord shapes with my left hand while Rob ran a gamut of emotions and concentration exercises near the pickups.

  We soon identified that different chord structures were indicative of different emotions – A Minor for hunger, G Major for laughter, F7th for anger, and on, in a seemingly limitless set of combinations. D Minor 7th proved to be the one that gave me the breakthrough. Rob had been getting steadily more excited, more joyous. The strings vibrated in sympathy. I fed the resulting chord through the Variaxe, amplifying and double, triple then quadruple tracking it until it sounded like an angelic chorus. I turned the amp up and blasted the chord through the room.

  The feeling of ecstasy that blew through me was overwhelming, leaving me panting and exhausted, a huge smile plastered over my face.

  It was like a light switching on over my head.

  Did I mention that I work in advertising?

  I started small.

  An animated web advert for car insurance was due to run over the whole of the Scottish demographic for two weeks. I slipped some music into it that I’d composed while thinking about my mother getting better.

  Two weeks later her cancer was in remission, she was sitting up in bed, and thirty thousand new members had joined various churches in the Highlands. After that I ramped it up a notch or two, slipping my power chords into national campaigns across the net and on network television.

  Within three months both my parents were up and walking. Church attendances all across the country were up by over a hundred per cent.

  Somebody noticed.

  He was waiting for me in my office one Monday morning, sitting relaxed behind my desk as if he owned it. I recognized him straight away… Jim Reader ran one of the biggest Ministries on TV. Friend of politicians, kings and pop stars, his smile and charm headed a multi-billion pound empire that stretched all across the planet.

  He wanted more. When he mentioned the amount of money he could put in my pocket, so did I.

  That very day we started placing chords in ads across the media, both domestic and international. They had all been composed while focussing on a picture of his grinning face. Within a week his ministry had doubled and there were reports of new converts to Christianity, via his Ministry of course, all across the third world.

  Towards the end of that week my mother called to say that she wasn’t feeling too well. I knew exactly what to do. I placed a couple of chords in ads and went back to subverting the campaigns of automobile companies.

  The money rolled in. So did the converts. We used the cash to get into more ad campaigns, in more countries, for more time.

  By the end of that first month tensions in the Middle East were running high due to the numbers of new Christian converts. Jim Reader went on TV to calm the troubled waters. His face appeared in TV, newspapers and magazines across the world. We used the opportunity to place more chords in more ads.

  Mum got worse and Dad started to feel ill again. Jim Reader’s subliminal ads took up all my available slots, but I hired the best doctors that money could buy and went back to working on the campaign.

  Two months later Jim Reader announced his intention to run for President of Europe. His war chest filled that same day. More screen time followed, with more of
our introduced chords embedded. The next day showed that he had an unprecedented ninety per cent approval rating in the polls. A clamour arose for his immediate elevation to the presidency.

  Mum and Dad went back into hospital the same day that Jim Reader changed water into wine at a wedding for one of his flock. I ran chords in as many ads as I could – but I had left it too late. Mum died the day Reader entered Brussels on an open topped bus to a ticker-tape welcome. Dad died as he was being sworn in.

  I refused to work for him any more. I cited my parent’s deaths as a reason for a need to pull back on my involvement. His people were very understanding. I never got to know what Reader himself thought as he was by now in an elevated world surround by twelve disciples who filtered any access to him.

  Just this morning the UN handed him supreme power.

  Which is why I slipped an extra chord into the backing music that would be played before his acceptance speech. It was composed while staring at a single picture, of Reader nailed to a cross, and a simple message.

  HE IS THE ANTICHRIST.

  A lot of people will hear it.