You could say I kind of went off the deep end trying to find the right people to make our final tour something special. Something that shifts your perspective on things. A turning point—for our fans and for the band. I had to go indeepto find the right people for the job.
If you want something unique, you search places no one else would think of.
Our lighting team used to work for the Nightmare Circus.
We plucked our costumiers directly from Nova Entertainment, the movie studio that specializes in off-beat movies with monster leads.
We chose the stadiums and arenas based on how good a vibe we got from them. And although you can count the number of tour dates we’re doing on two hands. We’ve got some that fit 15,000 souls at a push and others that fit eighty thousand.
Yeah, this tour’s going to be different. Hence why I also spent close to a year tracking down Ms. Sinjin Murphy, formerly known as Saint Madison.
I know so much about her, I could write her damn biography.
Finding her—or more to the point, what she can do—happened by chance.
Like most demons, I feed on powerful emotions. Some of my kind have a preference. Or they can only absorb specific emotions,like lust fuels Incubi. Normally, when we’re touring, I’m satiated, since having a few thousand people losing their shit screaming your name is enough to keep me fed for weeks. But when we’re not touring, I have to feed differently.
I was walking past this building one evening, and this building just called to me. There was so much pain and fucking catharsis in the air, I couldn’t keep away if I tried.
Turns out, I’d stumbled on a support group for people leaving controlling situations.
A bunch of attendees used to belong to this little-known cult, called The Path. The ex members all turned out to be real Chatty Cathys. They explained how ‘The Path’ and their regular ‘Awakenings’ used to be all they thought about for years. It sounded like a bunch of woo-woo bullshit to me, but they’d all been obsessed. Addicted. They said their Awakenings made them feel like they could walk on water and rule the world.
Until something changed, and the whole thing started to crumble.
It might make me sound like a heartless asshole, but their story intrigued me, so I started looking into these cult meetings. I stumbled across video footage from the cult’s heyday a few years back.
The look on the audience members’ faces caught my attention. They were off their fucking tits on life and it wasn’t thanks to the smarmy prick on stage in an overpriced suit.
The comments sections of the videos were a goldmine for information. They explained the bottom fell out for The Path when one of their key members left. And it was like the magic of the cult left with her.
I got this feeling in my gut that said whatever hinky shit was going down at these meetings. I wanted to see if we could tap into it for our gigs.
Not that I want people to lose their fucking minds over us—or, at least, not in a creepy, mind-control kind of way. But the more I dug, the more convinced I was thatthiswas the missing piece that was going to make all the difference.
We needed their secret sauce.
But it was like this ‘Saint’ person, the apparent key to the cult’s success, disappeared off the face of the planet.
I could have given up after months of searching and hitting a bunch of dead ends. But thankfully, I’m a persistent fucker.
Something told me that big things would happen once I found them. That’s what has driven me over the past eleven months to track her down. Following my gut is instinctive. And it’s never steered me, or the band, wrong yet.
I went as far as employing the services of a tracker, someone more used to bounty hunting than finding tinkerers with poor decision-making skills. He led me to an interesting individual called Elara, who turned out to be Sinjin’s weak link.
She sang like a canary when I got in touch with her.
Apparently she’s a fan of ours and all it took was one breathless phone call before she was giving me all the information I could need about Saint—or Sinjin, as she goes by these days.
When I explain as much to Sinjin, she shoots me a murderous scowl. “Fucking Elara. What did she tell you?”
I pause, because she really doesn’t want to know the answer. I know everything. A lot more than she wants me to know, that’s for sure.
Settling for a vague answer that’ll tell her all she needs to know at this point, I reply, “She told me about your gadgets and how you can use them to pump up a room. That’s what we need you to do, to turn our gigs into something spectacular. I want them to leave feeling like they’ve experienced somethingextraordinary.”
She eyes me for a moment, seeming to weigh up my words, then nods. “I could do that. You were saying you’d want me to spend the next month with you?” she asks.
I nod. “We do. We haven’t got much time left before the tour starts and it’d be intensive work until then.”
