66 1/6 RPM

“Hot Wax records and comics, Casey speaking, how may I help you…yeah…yes we do…lemme check…yeah, just a second.” Casey set down the beige corded phone and walked out into the vast rows of CDs that comprised Hot Wax, he passed the CDs and 7” singles and walked up the broad stair case into the vinyl loft. The soothing strains of Sammy Hagar assaulted him as he walked past an ancient speaker. He spent a good three minutes pawing around before walking back downstairs.
“Naw, sorry man, doesn’t look like we have that, I can check and see if we can order it…Ah, well I can check our warehouse, we have lots of out of print stuff there, it’ll just take me a second…yeah just a second,” Again Casey set down the phone and walked to the computer at the counter and began searching the New Deal Recordings warehouse inventory.
Bapatista Mutantes, there’s a new one, thought Casey as he browsed through the primitive interface. Holy shit, miracles do happen I guess. Casey walked back to the phone, “Yeah man, looks like we have a copy at our warehouse, I can have them send it up, but it won’t be in ‘til tomorrow…no sorry man, it’s not open to the public. Just need your name and phone number and we’ll have it for you tomorrow,” Casey picked up a special order card and a pen from the register, “Alright, Brian Sharpe we’ll have it waiting here for you. Have a good one.”
Casey threw the card into the outgoing mail and got back to his issue of Inferno it was a slow day in San Ignacio, hot and slow. His coworker Greg was going on about his latest drinking escapade.
“So there I was, three fuckin’ cops, right there, I was about to be all ‘No man, I’m totally sober’ and I got as far as ‘No –‘then I fuckin’ puked all over the lady cop. It was alright though; the cops were pretty chill about it.”
Greg was 23 and firmly believed in the fast and wild life of a record store clerk, most of his wages went to drinking and partying, but he seemed to enjoy himself. Tall, gaunt, and covered in piercings, Greg looked every bit the part.
“You ever heard of a band called Bapatista Mutantes?” Casey interrupted the part where Greg got the cop’s phone number.
“No man, sounds pretty fucked up though, is it metal?”
“Dunno man, not really anything on allmusic for them. Whatever.”
About an hour later a heavy-set black man with short dreadlocks walked in, breaking the comfortable drone of Greg’s time wasting. He was perhaps 30 and wearing an AtmosFear t-shirt and a pair of Dockers that had seen better days.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for a record could you help me?”
“Well we do have a few of those, what were you looking for, man?”
“It’s…obscure, and out of print, but the band is Bapatista Mutantes, it’s a self titled release, only available on vinyl, I doubt you’d have it, but it never hurts to check I suppose,” The man had a very concise, cultured way of speaking, and it immediately endeared him to Casey.
“Whoa, that’s some crazy synchronicity right there, man; some guy actually just snagged our last copy from our warehouse like an hour ago. Trippy.”
The man seemed perturbed, “That’s too bad, any way I could talk to the lucky winner?”
“I can leave your name and number with his order when he comes to pick it up, but I can’t give out his number. Unethical y’know.”
“Indeed, well I’ll be back,” The man strode out with his shoulder slumped.
“Fuckin’ weird, dude.”

The next morning Casey rolled up on his bike to two cop cars in front of Hot Wax. The owner, a burned out ex-hippie, was talking to the police with all the fury he could muster.
“Carl, what the hell happened,” Casey jumped off his bike midsentence.
“Dunno, someone smashed the front door and broke in, didn’t look like they took anything but they trashed upstairs, it’s a mess. They also broke into the shed”
“Looks like it’s time the new people start earning their keep, I say,” Casey tried to keep his tone light.
“Looks like you have a busy morning ahead of you,” Carl growled.
“Well shit, I tried.”

The day passed slowly, Casey found himself alone with Isaac, a new hire, in a near empty store. The phone jangled and broke the stifling silence.
“Hot Wax Records and Comics, Casey speaking how may I help you?” Casey droned.
“Casey, it’s Tim down at the warehouse, do you guys have a copy of…Bapatista Mutantes on vinyl?”
“Why the fuck does everyone want that album all of a sudden?” Casey was more confused than anything.
“Well someone ordered it yesterday, and it turns out that even bootleg CD copies go for a couple hundred bucks and we were about to sell an original for ten…so if we don’t have two copies this guy is boned.”
“We don’t have any, I would have seen it. That’s kind of shady isn’t it?”
“Whatever, this thing could be worth a fortune. Anyways, it got sent down to the store on accident if you see it come through send it back up. I’ll talk to you later.”
The door chime sounded and a middle aged man, dressed in a gold print t-shirt and baggy jeans strode in with grim purpose. Some people need to learn when to give up on being young… Casey thought to himself.
“I’m here for an album I ordered,” His voice sounded like he gargled whiskey and gravel then got in a shouting match with Tom Waits. “My name is Brian Sharpe, I ordered Bapatista Mutante.”
“Sorry man, uh they couldn’t find it in the warehouse, I guess the catalogue must not have been updated,” Casey hated lying for the shady bastards he worked for. “You might try SelecTrax up on-“
His face turned bright red, “You’re joking, right? I just came all the way down here and now you don’t have it?”
“I’ll see what I can do, maybe it just got misfiled or something.”
“Good,” with that the aging hipster walked out the door without further conversation.
“What the fuck was that guy’s problem,” Casey wondered out loud, “Whatever, motherfuckers need to learn when to hang up the band t-shirts and start acting normal.”
Casey wandered over to the cabinet where special orders from the warehouse were stored, right in the cubby labeled “S” was a single LP with a cheap flimsy jacket and “Sharpe, Brian” printed neatly on the side. He pulled it out of its slot and turned it over in its hands. The artwork was black and white line drawings, in the style of an old punk cover; the artwork itself looked like a scene out of a medieval woodcut. The scene depicted a young boy standing on a table, he was surrounded by nine people in peasant garb, two held him by the arms while one seemed to be cutting open his stomach with a scalpel. Each person had a label over them in what looked like Latin. BAPATISTA MUTANTE was penned in blackletter on the top edge of the album.
“What’s so great about you?” Casey mumbled. Casey quickly decided that the urge to play the record was supplanted by the urge to not have Brian Sharpe come in while his record was playing. Casey put it back in its slot and then set back down at the counter.

8:30 P.M
The night was warm, with a light breeze. Casey slumped over the counter, a mere thirty minutes until he could close up, an hour before he’d be walking back to his apartment. Jim Morrison softly crooned over the old speakers wired up in the rafters. Bored, Casey took out the Bapatista Mutante album again and examined it more closely. There was no copyright date on the jacket, just a small sticker proclaiming it to be from Producciones Iempesa, catalogue number 22. Casey pulled out the vinyl itself. It looked clean, barely played even. The center label looked Xeroxed and didn’t have a track listing or a copyright date either. Casey eyed the store record player cautiously, and then looked around, seeing no one in the store he killed the CD player and the Doors clicked off. He switched the receiver over to PHONO and stuck the plain looking record on the turntable.
“You better be good you piece of shit,”
Casey stabbed the play button with a hint of viciousness. The stylus swung over and dropped, just as Isaac walked out of the back room.
“Is this Kraftwerk?” Isaac stopped for a moment while the reverberating voice echoed through the store. Mechanical noises and a droning voice seemed to all this record had to offer.
“Naw man, it’s that freaky –“ Mid sentence Casey slumped forward into the counter, Isaac staggered on his feet and dropped the till he was carrying with a loud crash.
“Wha, a, bwa, nnn,” Isaac squinted and then fell on to the spray of change from the dropped drawer. The eerie drone continued in the now silent store. The overhead fluorescents began to flicker, there was a loud pop and the computer snapped off with a puff of acrid smoke. A sound like that of a hammer on an anvil began to accompany the drone. The CD player below the phonograph was still on and its LED display began to flash a stream of seeming gibberish numbers before it too died with a loud crack of IC boards heated to breaking. The temperature of the store was steadily rising, metal surfaces began to shimmer and glow, an unopened can of Coke on a shelf below the register burst open with a hiss.
8:39 P.M
Casey opened his eyes and was immediately aware that he was soaked with something; he backed away from the counter and realized he was poured sweat over everything. The store felt like it was perhaps 100 degrees inside. The short black guy from earlier was standing behind the counter looking at him with something between concern and amusement.
“You boys are lucky I was hoping to see who was going to pick this up, another fifteen minutes and you would have been cooked.”
“What the fuck just happened man, and what the fuck is up with this fucking thing” Casey looked around in a daze, some of the records that hung from the ceiling on fishing line had melted and dripped onto the floor. Casey walked over to the door and snicked the lock shut then flipped the open sign to closed.
“Well, to start, ya’ll just had a paranormal experience as it were, you probably wouldn’t have died, without the right accoutrements the recording just causes some unpleasant effects. In short, that record is one of the only analogue recordings of an obscure Peruvian cult and playing it can do some serious things.
“Well who the hell are you, and what do you want with it?” Casey stammered.
“My name is Jean and I’m a record collector.”
“That’s not as helpful as you might think, man.