Excerpt: MY EX, THE ANTICHRIST by Craig DiLouie
From Bram Stoker award-nominated author Craig DiLouie comes a horror novel with a twisted tale of love, heartbreak, and the apocalypse. We all have bad exes. Lily Lawlor’s just happens to be the antichrist. Sometimes, love can be hell…
Read an excerpt from My Ex, The Antichrist (US), available now, below!
IMPERFECT CONTRITION
THE BASKET CASE CONCERT TOUR
OCTOBER 2010
Lillian Lawlor—Lily Lawless to her fans during the Shivers years—was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on the first day of spring in After founding the Shivers in 1999, she led the group to become one of America’s loudest and punchiest rock bands, dominating the poppunk scene for a blistering decade.
In 2010, the party came to a crashing halt.
LILY LAWLESS (singer / lead guitarist, the Shivers): I should warn you, this story has some religion in it.
No, I’m not religious. It’s not that I’m atheist or agnostic or anything. Far from it. When it comes to God’s existence, I’m actually a true believer. In fact, I’m one of the very few people on the planet who knows with absolute certainty that a supreme being is out there pulling strings and keeping score.
I know this because I dated the Devil.
What I did back in 1999, I paid for the only way I knew how. In my old religion, it’s called imperfect contrition. It’s when you’re sorry for sinning but not because you fear God. Otherwise, I can’t say where I stand with the big man upstairs after I messed with his grand plan. Being all-knowing, I’m pretty sure he knows what I think of him after everything that happened and what’s still to come.
I see you not reacting. You’ve got a great poker face. I can’t tell what you’re thinking, but I can guess.
Hey, you asked for it. The secrets we kept for twenty years.
The truth is rarely pretty. Sometimes it can be quite ugly. Every now and then, it sounds completely crazy.
If you want to keep going with me on this, you’re going to get both.
LUCAS KELLY (manager, the Shivers): Lily Lawless knew how to putthe teen experience into song and light up an audience. Inspire fifty thousand people to hop and scream her lyrics back at her at a concert.
With her carefree punk image, you’d never guess she was one of the hardest-working, most professional women in rock and roll.
I’ve seen artists rise and fall. The ones who let the fame go to their heads. The ones who fall off their crutches of drugs and booze and face-plant. The ones whose creativity goes to rot and wind up playing way past their expiration date.
Lily proved a different animal. She lived for rock. She didn’t make it a lifestyle. She didn’t confuse the real thing with the fantasy.
She never quit.
Every album better than the last, the albums releasing like clockwork, the music resonating on enduring themes of teenage longing, angst, and a desire to never grow up. At least one song in constant rotation at the top alt radio stations. The endless touring, cities and countries and continents.
One thing I’ve learned: Someone goes at that speed for that long after reaching the top, it isn’t about the chase anymore. They’re usually running from something.
She ran straight into a wall.
LILY: The night I lost my shit, I was limbering up before our concert at the Bell Centre in Montreal, though back then it was called the Molson Centre. One of the last shows on an eight-month, thirty-city concert tour promoting Basket Case.
The warm-up routine: You stretch and flex your fingers. You do some taps and rolls. You run through scales and arpeggios. Then you get on stage and play the song that you’ve played a thousand times before, on body memory.
Only, I couldn’t find my collar.
You might recall that at my shows, I’d wear a party dress or a long tee or my old school uniform but always a spiky leather collar. Over the years, that crappy little collar became a signature look, though it was more than that. It hid something I wanted hidden. I couldn’t perform without it.
I stormed around the green room, ransacking it. The band stared at me in wide-eyed silence as empty beer cans and bong water splashed across the floor. Some girls from Chick Whiz, who were opening for us, laughed and smoked in the hall. I started yelling at them, and that’s when my voice crapped out.
Every part of me suddenly hurt. My back out of whack from shouldering my Gibson for too long. My throat scratchy and hoarse. My fingers rubbed to calloused marble by the strings. My brain turned to mush. My body shaking.
The next thing I knew, I broke down crying. An all-out panic attack.
All those years, I’d never missed a chance to perform. Years that now seemed to avalanche on top of me. A decade-long blur of nonstop planes and hotels and buses and dressing rooms and stadiums packed with screaming teens.
I wanted to tear my skin off.
Lucas helped me find my collar, which I’d somehow managed to hide from myself. A rock doc showed up and shot my ass full of vitamin B12. Then he made me say Ahhhh while he injected cortisone directly into my inflamed vocal cords so I could sing. My heart raced at the edge of seizure.
Mascara streaked down my face like black tears as I took the stage. The fans loved the look. It became a hashtag. They thought it was part of the act.
LUCAS KELLY: Lily played that show with a ferocity I hadn’t seen in years. I had no idea it would be her last.
“I think I need a break,” she told me after it was over. “Can I take a break?”
The Lily I knew didn’t take breaks. And she never asked my permission to do anything. This was new. But having witnessed her pre-show freakout, I understood.
I asked her what she meant by a “break,” and she told me she didn’t know. I asked if she could finish the tour, and she said she didn’t know that either.
I had a business to run. Lily was a golden goose. Canceling Cincinnati and Chicago would cost us money and set the venues and fans to rampaging.
You get clients that think they can do better than you. You get clients that wind up hooked on whatever drug keeps them up or helps them come down, sometimes both. You get clients that hate each other’s guts over creative differences and want you right in the middle of that shit, picking sides.
But some clients, you like them. You start to think they’re your friends. Then they are. I could tell what happened before the show wasn’t a stumble but a crash. Lily had reached a breaking point. She needed this.
I told her to go for it. Go take her break and rest up. I’d handle the details. I said, “Lady, take all the time you need.”
She’d have to be the one to break it to the band, though.
LILY: I braced myself to tell Ramona, Malcolm, and Eric that I was ending the tour to take a breather. I expected them to throw bottles or at least smash a guitar, you know, the kind of mayhem you expect pissed-off rockers to do.
We had rules, see. Don’t talk about Drake, that was one. Protect each other. Always make the music our way.
And most important: Never, ever give up.
Now here I was, breaking the big one.
They didn’t say much at all. At first, they just stared in disbelief, which was somehow worse than their throwing a fit. They sagged. Tears glistened on faces that suddenly struck me as looking older than they were.
Eric said, “Okay, Lil. We’ll take a break.”
Malcolm said, “Good.”
They didn’t look pissed. They were actually relieved.
“Thank God,” said Ramona. She walked straight out the door.
I said, “I didn’t know. Shit. I’m sorry.”
All this time, I thought they’d shared my passion for the music. And if not, they’d kept going because they had their own crosses to bear. Right then, I wondered if they were still at it after all these years because of me.
Malcolm said, “Now we’re even.” Confirming it.
LUCAS KELLY: Lily said she wanted to go home to Bethlehem. I thought, Okay, that’s cool. I thought, This could be a good thing.
All along, I imagined she’d been running away from home. I’d sensed some bad blood there. I thought maybe she’d finally have a showdown with her demons, work out some shit, and storm back into the studio after a few months.
It wasn’t until later I learned that what she’d been running from wasn’t the kind of thing you could ever escape.
LILY: The prodigal child goes home to learn not much has changed, both the good and the bad. Sometimes you know all this, but you go anyway. You need to go home. You just do. So you go, and then you remember why you split.
Mom and Dad wanted a big family, but they couldn’t make a child. Then I came along, their miracle baby. Growing up, I received all the attention, which had been good until I reached an age where it became stifling.
Like my band, they had rules too, and a lot more of them. The big kind: how I should behave, what I wore, who I could have as friends. While I lived with them, they had my whole life locked down and planned out.
I hadn’t been back in a decade, the kind of time where you blink and go, Wow, has it really been that long? To my surprise, I found my old room almost exactly as I’d left it, a little museum of my angsty and yearning teen years. Mom had always prayed I’d come home and kept the proverbial candle burning in the window.
I reached under my mattress and smiled at the still-familiar feel of my old stash of music magazines, Spin and Pulse! and Rolling Stone. I slid them out and relived my teen yearnings gazing at my guitar heroes, snarling Joan Jett and dreamy Kristin Hersh and all the other rock goddesses.
Safe and warm under my parents’ thick wings, I slept an entire day. Dinner was Irish comfort food: shepherd’s pie. Everything here was the same. Stable, predictable, reliable. I needed this. A hard reset.
The only problem was, everything remained the same, including Dad telling me how to live. Over dinner, he said the rock-star thing had been fun, but maybe it was time to start living a real life.
Go back to school and finish my accounting degree. Find a stable job and marry a nice man and have children. Making it sound like I might just be ready to stop fooling around and finally grow up.
Mom said, “Grandchildren would be nice.” Another candle in the window.
Okay, Dad wasn’t entirely wrong.
The long blur of my twenties was almost behind me. To put it bluntly, I’d grown a bit long in the tooth to be a rock star.
My generation had traded their skateboards for laptops and cash registers. For ten years, I’d lived the life of a rocker, but it didn’t feel all that free anymore. Half of it was image, the rest answering to an endless parade of managers, agents, video directors, engineers, and suits.
Everyone looking out for me, though no one did, not really. That was my job.
At some point, I’d have to question if there was life after rock. Whether I should interpret my hitting the wall as some kind of omen that I needed a big change.
Yeah, fine. I just didn’t want to hear it from him.
The father who never let me date, take risks, have fun, even choose my own career—which is, that’s right, how I ended up pursuing an accounting degree. My teen years divided between oppressive days at a Catholic school for girls and suffocating nights at home.
I remembered how I’d announce that I was going upstairs to do homework but instead practice my guitar until my fingers bled like stigmata and I’d finally mastered a Clapton riff. How I lied after my guitar was discovered by claiming it was for a school project. How I’d tell my parents I was going to the library and instead skip over to the skate park to watch the cute skater boys fly around.
The prodigal child returns and falls right back into old patterns. Hearing Dad tell me what to do made me want to do the exact opposite, but I hadn’t come home for this. I’d come to reset and think and plan, not simply react.
I said, “I think I’ll go check out the old library.”
Dad knew I was avoiding. He said, “That’s what you do, Lillian.”
As for me, I was getting angry again. I had to get out of here.
He said, “You don’t finish. You run away.”
Before we ended up in a repeat of the blowout my leaving home ten years earlier had caused, I did just that. I bolted.
DANNY RODRIGUEZ (A&R representative, Echo Harbor Records): Lily Lawless still ranks as the most stubborn woman I ever met. And the easiest artist I ever managed. She made me nervous.
Artists and Repertoire, that’s what A&R stands for. To America’s musicians, I was the devil at the crossroads selling you a crack at fame and fortune in return for every ounce of creative juice you’ve got.
That was the fun part of the job, scouting and signing and then coaching a band into a professional team that packs the right sound and style and swagger. A lot of it, though, is babysitting.
You blow smoke up asses to inspire confidence. You provide. You are cheerleader, priest, psychiatrist, sometimes legal aid. Whatever a band needs to keep the party rocking. Anything to keep it confident, playing hard, and bringing in the bucks today, right now, always right now, before the party ends.
And boy, did the Shivers need hand-holding. The keyboardist and his megalomania, the drummer a bona fide kleptomaniac, the bassist falling into bouts of depression and compulsive eating. Compared to them, juggling the odd coke fiend and assault charge seemed simple.
As if to balance it all out, Lily didn’t want anything at all from me aside from making sure Echo Harbor kept its basic promises.
You’d think that’d be cool, right? You’d say, well, that’s less work for you, one less problem to worry about. Just keep your promises and you’re fine.
It kept me up nights.
Lily Lawless was the frontwoman. She was the Shivers. Long before, word had come down from on high to keep her happy. If Lily didn’t like how things were going, see, she might sign with another label.
Music is a people business, and it’s based on trust. Sometimes you have to put in the extra effort to convince an artist she needs you.
The harder I tried, though, the more contrary she got.
I’d tell her how well the last album did in terms of sales and that the Shivers should maybe stick to the same groove to be safe. She’d completely mix things up for the next record by adding some ska in the vein of Operation Ivy and a cover of a goddamn k.d. lang cowboy punk song. I’d tell her Phoenix had never been a great market, and she’d insist it be the very first stop on the tour.
Seriously! I’d call Lily, she’d hear me out, and then she’d do her own thing. She made me crazy because she didn’t make sense.
Every day was opposite day, dealing with her.
LILY: The prodigal child returns to her past to discover who she is now. Sometimes you leave for so long that home is no longer really home for you but instead just a collection of feelings and memories. The old places look the same but different, though they never really change.
Unlike many of the kids who listened to our music, I didn’t grow up in suburbia or some dying small town. I was raised in blue-collar Bethlehem, one of three sprawling cities dominating the Lehigh Valley on the state’s eastern side.
Named for Jesus’s Judean birthplace, it got nicknamed “Christmas City USA” during the Great Depression. Bethlehem Steel operated here, supplying materials to build everything from warships during World War II to New York City skyscrapers, before the company shuttered the plant in ’95 and everything changed.
I now explored and reclaimed the old neighborhood from memory. The tobacco shop a few blocks down had folded, replaced by a boutique clothing store. The record shop I used to frequent still stood next to it, however. I’d bought my first vinyl there with babysitting money, Dookie by Green Day.
The shop’s window appeared bright and yellow and welcoming in the chilly night. A handful of kids riffled the CDs and records, seeking their separate paths to salvation or simply a little musical self-medication. The scene made me smile.
Then I spotted my snarling face on a poster in the window. Exactly what I’d come home to escape from. I kept on walking.
At Johnny Ray’s Music a few doors down, I admired the guitars and gear in the window display. I’d bought my first axe here, a secondhand Fender acoustic with the original hard-shell case.
I didn’t go inside this old haunt either. The walking was doing me good, a journey that offered its own destination. For once, I headed nowhere, even if it was all familiar. As always when a tour ended, the world seemed to keep rushing around me. But the ground under my feet had started to feel a little more solid, which struck me as progress.
And I thought, Screw having a real life.
I had one more good album in me. Dozens of performances in communion with an audience. All those beautiful moments of raw power on stage, letting it all hang out under blinding white light, bouncing and thrashing, hair dripping sweat.
Perhaps more than one album.
Shit, maybe I’d never quit my dream. Maybe I’d live forever free and young. I’d be like Ozzy Osbourne and the Who, signing off in a blazing farewell tour only to come roaring back for another encore a few years later.
Maybe I hadn’t come home to escape so much as remember why I kept going.
DANNY RODRIGUEZ: When I heard what she’d done after going home to Pennsylvania and that the band was falling apart, the executives yanked me into the home office for a grilling. What did I know. Who did I call. Did I do enough. Why won’t she let us give her legal help. Did I realize what this disaster would cost the company. Did I understand this might just kill the gold record goose.
It was a nightmare.
LILY: I found myself rolling by Holy Ghost Church. One part of my childhood from which I expected zero change, and it did not disappoint. The lights blazed inside, illuminating tall arched stained-glass windows depicting familiar scenes of ministry and suffering.
I hadn’t been here in over ten years. Hadn’t set foot in any church, actually. My relationship with God is complicated. My relationship with religion is toxic. My last visit to a church had exploded in surreal horror. The last time I’d been face-to-face with a member of the clergy, he’d tried to kill me.
Then I heard the music.
An angelic alto, singing to an organ melody. Choir practice. I’m a born sucker for music. Rock, grunge, country, whatever. Even choral hymns. It doesn’t matter where the light comes from. If it’s bright, it’s bright, and I’m a born moth.
Despite the growing knot in my gut, I figured I’d go inside for a peek.
The smells and brooding atmosphere triggered long-buried feelings of dread, boredom, tension, and a little spark of wonder. This too felt like a homecoming. You know what they say. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.
First Communion and a whole lot of Sunday mornings spent internalizing even the odd errant thought as deeply wrong and requiring penance. Endless incantations to ask for forgiveness for being born with sin.
I pushed all that aside to receive the music, the most profound and direct form of worship I’ve ever known. Sound that provoked God’s attention. Sound that to me was God itself.
And what music. The boy could sing.
It reminded me of a part of life that I’d lost. Communing with something bigger than myself. That beautiful sensation of connecting to everything and catching a tiny glimpse of what it must feel like to be God. Surrendering to it. If God is love and joy, then singing with love and joy makes you divine. Worshipping from the heart, not the head.
It reminded me of Drake.
EXCERPT FROM “A LILY AMONG THORNS: THE SHIVERS’ FRONTWOMAN TALKS PUNK AND POP FOR THE MILLENNIAL GENERATION,” INSTRUMENTAL, 9/2006
Alicia Parker (writer): You were one of the first women to break into the pop-punk scene. What was that like?
Lily Lawless: The labels wanted to see more girls coming to the shows and buying records. They were into it. The male bands we played alongside were fairly welcoming, you know, aside from the usual juvenile stuff. Some of the female musicians were honestly tougher to be around, as a feeling of tokenization created intense competition of who’d get to be that one girl doing pop-punk.
Alicia Parker: Some say you trailblazed for artists like Avril Lavigne. Bustle recently labeled her the reigning queen of pop-punk. How does that make you feel, given what you achieved?
Lily Lawless: I love Avril’s music. Otherwise, I’m working too hard to pay attention to who says what.
Alicia Parker: Some punkinistas would say you aren’t punk rock at all. They say the Shivers sold out. It’s an old rift as punk continued to go mainstream, vexing bands like Green Day—
Lily Lawless: We play a genre of punk music, but I never claimed to be a spokesperson or role model for the punk scene. I’m a musician who plays music and then wants that music to be heard by the largest audience possible. I’ve always been that girl. Everyone is invited to the party, not just the cool kids.
Alicia Parker: They also say the Shivers strayed too far from its roots.
Lily Lawless: Real punk isn’t purity tests and just “Don’t tread on me.” It’s a call for change with the understanding that the more certain things change, the more they stay the same. It’s a call to keep trying. Our music is us struggling to evolve.
Alicia Parker: And evolve you did. In its early days, the Shivers had a different sound. How would you describe it?
Lily Lawless: Ramona—our drummer—used to call it demon disco. Our first songs were about telling people to be free. After that, we decided to free ourselves.
Alicia Parker: Drake Morgan was the lead guitarist then. Back in ’99, before he formed Universal Priest. I’ve heard some wild stories, urban legends.
Lily Lawless: If you know that, then you know we don’t talk about him.
Alicia Parker: From what you’re saying, it sounds like Drake controlled—
Lily Lawless: No comment.
Alicia Parker: Let’s shift gears then. By all accounts, Drake was your lover. Ever since, you haven’t had a serious—
Lily Lawless: This interview’s over. Is that punk rock enough for you?
LILY: Led by a young priest in a black cassock, the choir practiced in the chancel. They sang the chorus, and then the boy swung back into his lilting solo. Singing about the Lamb of God, whose obedient sacrifice results in victory over death.
My mind flashed to Julian bolting out of Our Lady of Victory with a rocket launcher on his shoulder, with all hell at his heels. Before I could get sucked down that particular memory hole, I focused on the boy.
He was as beautiful as his singing. Nine or ten years old, face shining with innocence and youth. The light from a stained-glass crucifixion formed a halo behind longish hair angelically winged from prior wearing of a baseball cap.
The choir started another hymn. And the boy sang:
O Jesus, Thou the beauty art
Of angel worlds above;
Thy Name is music to the heart,
Enchanting it with love—
The boy froze. The choir faltered.
He now stared at me, his face a mask of fear. He actually looked terrified.
Slowly, everyone turned to give me a stink-eye stare.
The prodigal child returns, and what is lost is found. The criminal returns to the scene of the crime hoping to undo what she’s done. Hoping to make things right.
I went back outside.
And walked straight to the police station, where I confessed to a terrible crime that had happened in 1999 but even now feels like only yesterday.
See, in all those years of music and roaming, I’d learned something. A truth that trumps what you desire and what you dream.
Just because you choose to live free doesn’t mean you get to live free of responsibility.
LAWLESS PROPHET
NOVEMBER 1998–JANUARY 1999
The year 1999 saw President Bill Clinton acquitted in the Senate, the Dow Jones topping 10,000 for the first time, and the Columbine High School massacre.
Shakespeare in Love won Best Picture at the Oscars. The music downloading service Napster went online. Woodstock ’99 ended in disaster.
Europe and Asia witnessed a total solar eclipse. Everywhere, people worried about the Y2K bug threatening a global collapse of computer systems that might crash civilization.
In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a first-year Lehigh University accounting student named Lily Lawlor dropped out to start the Shivers with Drake Morgan. Concerning Drake, no official records exist, suggesting he lived under an assumed name.
LILY: When I first met Drake, he said, “Follow me and live free.”
It wasn’t until way later that I realized this was an oxymoron.
Drake. My man Drake. Mandrake.
Our silly private joke.
Eat a little mandrake, and it can work as a strong sedative, narcotic, and hallucinogen. Eat a lot, and it can kill you.
That was my Drake, intoxicating and dangerous.
My devil in black jeans.
With him, it was always complicated. A man of endless contradictions.
He was my first love. My first serious betrayal. He opened my eyes. He tricked me into seeing the wrong things. He took me out of my cage only to put me in a far different but just as real kind.
In the end, I pitied him. The man who lived free of all convention, though he turned out to be as trapped as everyone else. More so, in fact. In the end, I ended up being the one to free him.
The greatest thing I ever did. My biggest regret.
Freedom isn’t free. Drake taught me that a long time ago.
DR. EDWIN WOODWARD (professor of religion studies, Lehigh University): The Antichrist is a fascinating biblical concept. It’s one of my favorite subjects because it is so open to interpretation. A few relevant passages can be found in 1 John, 2 Thessalonians, and Revelation.
Some regard the Antichrist as purely symbolic, representing rejection or opposition to Christ. Others believe it is various political leaders, with notable examples being Emperor Nero, Pope Innocent III, and Adolf Hitler. Still others see the Antichrist as a future leader who will beguile and take over the world, ushering in the end times.
A handful of references in the Bible produced a vast amount of lore. Like the Devil himself, the Antichrist is a blank slate onto which we project our fears.
LILY: It feels strange after all these years to break my one big rule and talk about Drake. I’m not quite sure where to begin. I suppose I should start over and tell you how we met. That was in the fall of 1998, my first semester at Lehigh. I paced outside the university library, waiting for it to open. Face buried in a textbook, learning about how to put together a balance sheet.
Oh, how I hated my accounting classes. If it were up to me, I would have been studying and making music, but my father had latched onto accounting as a safe career, something reliable that would provide.
Dad was a union man who’d worked at the steel mills until they closed down. The factories and mills now rusted across the valley. Growing up in the Rust Belt, you become an expert on three things: the resilience of community, the fragility of individuals, and the importance of self-reliance.
A voice said, “Have you ever asked what you expect of yourself?”
I looked up and saw him.
God, he was gorgeous. Tall and skinny, shaggy blond hair, and a shy smile.
Frowning, I said, “Of course.”
The moment the words left my mouth, I knew I’d lied, which revealed a truth about myself I’d been denying. The truth being that up until that point, my life was run by what other people expected of me.
A single sentence can break your entire world, right? Drake seemed to know the right words for any given person. He’d utter them like a spell and step back while they seeded you and grew into change.
My second glance took in details, and I noticed he had heterochromatic eyes. His left a joyful blue, his right a smoldering copper.
Both pulled me right in.
At my old Catholic high school, the cool girls acted out, talked back to the nuns, smoked behind the gym, and played Spin the Bottle. They hung out with loud smiling boys who showed off and always wanted more. I’d never participated in any of their games. Not because I disapproved but because I couldn’t afford the temptation.
The rebellious cool they worked so hard to project, Drake embodied in the fullest sense. No neediness. Nothing performative about it.
He told me a dream had informed him he was destined to meet me.
For some girls, this might sound like a red flag, but I was young and super naive and believed in serendipity. If I couldn’t live dangerously, I’d been praying a little danger would come flirting my way.
I skipped the library and the study group I had in an hour. We talked all day until I had to go home. I told him everything I wanted but couldn’t have.
Breathless, I said, “I want to be in a rock band that saves the world.”
My innermost desire. Saying it aloud, it suddenly seemed possible, not caring how corny it sounded.
At the end, I asked him what he wanted.
He said, “I want you, Lilith.”
No one had ever called me that. All my life, everyone had always called me Lillian or more commonly Lily. Lilith sounded mythic and a little dangerous itself. As if he recognized I had an alter ego whose time had come.
Either way, he already had me.
DR. WOODWARD: The concept of the Antichrist, some type of powerful adversary, is not exclusive to Christian belief.
In Islam, some believe Al-Masih ad-Dajjal will appear in the end times to spread corruption and lies until defeated by the true Messiah, the returning Jesus.
In Buddhism, we have Māra, who will oppose the future Buddha Maitreya.
And in certain Jewish mystical traditions, Armilus becomes an anti-Messiah who will conquer the world and persecute Jewish believers until defeated by the true Messiah.
LILY: Drake told me he’d been born at the maternity center at St. Luke’s University Hospital in Bethlehem. He never knew his father. His mother suffered bouts of untreated depression, false memory syndrome, and possibly paranoid schizophrenia. Drake cared for her until his seventeenth birthday, when she finally relented to answer his never-ending question about where he’d come from.
She told the story of his conception. How as a teen she’d danced at an impromptu party by a lake, young and beautiful and entitled. How she’d been seduced and assaulted in the dark by a giant black swan. With obsessive detail, she described the violent, burning thrash of its massive wings, timed to the discordant rhythm of her impregnation.
After hearing this, he left his childhood home and never looked back.
That poor woman. You might wonder whether, with such an upbringing, Drake wound up with low self-esteem, anxiety, depression. Maybe problems with resentment and aggression. Something.
But you’d be dead wrong. I’ve never known someone so enviably fearless and confident, even if it masked an inner fragility, a burning desire to be loved utterly. A vulnerability he showed me and no one else.
In the end, I was the one who wound up with the issues. A constant hunger for his approval. A burning desire to possess something I already had. When he looked at me, I shivered. When he touched me, I thought I was melting.
DR. WOODWARD: Regarding the Antichrist as a future apocalyptic figure, there is enough lore to generally characterize him.
Basically, the idea is his life will imitate the Messiah’s in many ways, only to manifest as its corrupt mirror image. This has been an enduring belief since the Middle Ages. Satan as parody or God’s ape, mirroring the divine but subverting and corrupting it at every turn.
He will be born in the East. Charismatic but deceptive, he will teach false doctrines. He will perform miracles and gain earthly power. He will use that power to proclaim himself to be above God, persecute Christianity, and ultimately start a global war that brings ruin to the earth.
He will also bear the mark of the Beast, which is the number 666. In biblical numerology, six denotes imperfection as it falls short of seven, considered divine.
The Antichrist will reign over chaos until God defeats Satan and permanently establishes his final kingdom.
LILY: Drake never gave me a phone number or made plans. Each time we parted, I’d worry he might disappear for good, as if I invented him. Then he’d reappear on campus, and we’d walk together, talking for hours. One night, we stopped in front of a run-down apartment building, and he said, “This is me.”
And I thought, This is the moment the nuns warned me about. I was about to have my first real sexual experience or get murdered or both.
A thrill fluttered in my chest. Deep down, I didn’t think Drake would hurt me.
Instead he showed me his guitar.
After numerous visits to Johnny Ray’s Music, I knew my guitars and recognized his as a Fender Stratocaster. Black and white, chipped and scarred, and adorned with the kind of random stickers one found on skateboards.
Drake sat on his ratty couch and jacked into a practice amp.
The cold little basement apartment with its bare walls and random secondhand furniture was awful, but that only made it more exciting to me. Where others might see poverty, I saw bohemia, a reality where experience was the primary currency.
Then he played, and that’s when my heart leaped from curiosity to love.
The song started slow, bending the bluesy notes before a smooth slide into a vibrato sustain, the amp dialed for just the right amount of reverb and depth.
Man, he was good.
The song picked up tempo, building to a climax with double stops and aggressive harmonics, and a vision struck me.
Resting in darkness, a crumpled Lovecraftian thing woke to the song and slowly flared to blinding radiance. Three vast pairs of wings unfurled to expose a beautiful face whose imperious gaze flash-burned me to a cinder.
As I gasped, the vision changed. Pealing like a trumpet in battle, Drake’s guitar solo reached its climax. Naked winged giants spilled out of the blazing sun. Swords and shields and crested helmets. They tumbled toward the earth, their screams sounding in a single crystal note.
Then I was back in Drake’s grungy apartment, blown away and speechless.
I finally managed to ask him how long he’d been working on it.
He offered up another one of his shy smiles and said, “I heard it in a dream last night.”
DR. WOODWARD: What would the Antichrist’s life look like before he becomes the Antichrist? Jesus didn’t start his ministry until the age of thirty. Before then, scripture suggests he worked a trade as a carpenter. He lived in Nazareth, a village of no importance.
I would imagine the Antichrist might similarly come from such humble beginnings. In which case, he might attain power by becoming a celebrity in entertainment, business, or religion. Or maybe his origin would be the corrupt counterpart to Christ’s, and he will be born into one of the world’s richest families.
Either way, it begs the question whether he would even know his identity as the Antichrist until the appropriate time. Just as it’s uncertain whether Jesus knew his destiny as the Messiah before John baptized him and Satan tempted him.
I’ve always wondered what Jesus the man thought the first moment he understood himself to be the Messiah. What was it like? Imagine the responsibility he must have felt, believing he carried the fate of the world on his shoulders, a load heavier than any cross.
Now imagine you’re the Antichrist waking up on a typical day and having your own divine epiphany, only this one is a nightmare. That you are an enemy of the universe’s supreme being. That you will reign over the earth for a short time only to destroy it and in the end be yourself destroyed.
I wonder if he’ll regard this as quite a shock, or if he’ll discover simple relief in finally discovering that his unique nature has a purpose.
LILY: A single sentence can break your world. In my case, it was Drake’s song.
Music always shook me from the roots on up.
I had a normal if straitlaced childhood. Catholic school. The nuns warned me about the world’s evils, while Mom and Dad kept me safe from them. They told me what I could wear, who I could hang out with, what they expected in terms of grades and behavior. They defined what a good girl was and molded me into it. Even when they weren’t there, I acted as if they were watching.
I felt God judging me all the time.
Music transformed me. I think for every teen, there comes a day when you figure out there’s really good music out there, and your life changes. During a sleepover, a friend put a record on her turntable and I heard David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” for the first time. I tilted my head, and the world disappeared until it was over. For a short time, I existed outside time and space, and from that moment forward, music lived in my bones.
And then it was one big explosion. The hooks for Madonna’s “Express Yourself,” George Michael’s “Freedom,” and Green Day’s “Welcome to Paradise” lived rent-free in my head for months at a time. A song popped into my brain, and it elevated a quick walk to the corner store into a personal odyssey, my own private music video. I lived in and through music, sometimes an entire life in a song.
When I reached my teens, it wasn’t enough to love the music; I started to crush on the musicians. I wanted everything they were selling, all the good, the bad, and the ugly. I craved excitement, unpredictability, danger, horror, growth. Music sucked all these feelings into form like a kind of exorcism.
When Drake played his song for me, it was like lightning shot straight from my organs to my brain. And I realized a few things.
I didn’t want to be an accountant anymore. I never did. I wanted to create music with this beautiful genius and conquer the world, starting with me.
DR. WOODWARD: The point I’m making is that at any given time, the Antichrist might be walking the earth, and it might be anyone. It’s not like he—or she—is going to be born with horns and hooves.
From descriptions written down for us by medieval saints, you’d think he was Bigfoot or aliens, showing a wide variety of physical traits so strange that it’s difficult to parse the literal from the symbolic. Reddish gold hair, hands reaching his feet, fifteen feet tall, large head perched on a thin neck, eyes like stars.
I’d say if the Antichrist looked anything like these descriptions, he’d be easy to spot. Some even depict him with ANTICHRIST spelled out on his forehead!
If Lucifer is as skilled at deception as he is often credited, I doubt the Antichrist would look like a monster, though the scholars may have been describing his true aspect rather than his worldly appearance. If Christ is the lamb, then the Antichrist will be a wolf dressed up like one.
Like the Angel of Light himself, he’d very likely be quite good-looking, which would enhance his natural charisma. Otherwise, he’ll be some guy who puts his pants on one leg at a time and brushes his teeth before he goes to bed.
If we assume he begins his ministry at thirty as Christ did, then anyone under that age living today could be the Antichrist but not know it yet. Just a stranger sitting next to us on a bus, as Joan Osborne’s song goes.
LILY: It didn’t take me long before I started skipping classes on the regular to hang out with Drake. I don’t know if you want to hear about everything we did, but I can tell you that it was always fun, crazy, and surprising, and that I had plenty of lost time from my teen years to make up. We partied on rooftops, learned wisdom from trees while doing acid on South Mountain, took part in a pillow-fight flash mob at the Plaza, and broke into empty vacation homes during a treasure hunt. I went to my first live rock show, the Benders playing the Funhouse in Allentown.
And every night, like Cinderella, I had to leave the party early. If you can’t tell yet from all the gushing, yeah, I fell for Drake pretty hard. I can’t point to anything he did that was particularly romantic. He didn’t believe in grand demonstrations of affection or even in saying the simple words I love you. I wouldn’t call him selfish, but he was definitely self-centered.
But the idea of him. It filled with me with a mad hunger. The thing is, Drake was everything I lacked, the manifestation of all the things I felt and believed about rock and roll. I craved his confidence, his willingness to try any drink once. The way he lived without fear or shame and entirely on his own terms. His innate and singular genius with a guitar.
In his halo, I glowed, seeing myself as the freer version of myself I’d always dreamed of being.
Every night, he’d say, “Don’t go this time. Stay with me.”
Not on Saturday nights, though. Sunday mornings were for church.
“Say hi to the old bastard for me,” he’d tell me instead.
DR. WOODWARD: Until he ever reveals himself, America’s apocalyptic imagination will continue to play the game of Name the Antichrist. In this country, there are millions who regard the world as a cosmic battleground between good and evil, in which every mundane decision is a contest between invisible angels and demons.
If you win, God loves you. If you lose, God is testing you. If you screw up, the Devil made you do it. Cultural change is interpreted as American decline, and this decay is regarded as the direct result of satanic forces. The Antichrist is always here, and the world is always about to end.
A frightening way to live, though I imagine it’s strangely comforting. If all evil is Satan’s fault, then one never truly has any real moral responsibility.
LILY: Drake believed wholeheartedly in the existence of God, but of course he had subversive views on the matter. He considered the Christian God a cruel, narcissistic absentee dad who said, Love me or suffer for eternity. It amazed him that anyone not only worshipped God but actually conjured up any sort of genuine affection. In his view, humans had two choices. They could be a slave to rules or live a free, authentic life, in effect becoming gods themselves.
Raised in Catholicism’s myriad bureaucratic doctrines and having incanted a million Hail Marys, I’d never heard anyone talk like this before.
A student of ancient religious beliefs, Drake hoped to harness cosmic forces and reach the true God, the being known in Gnosticism as the Unknown Father. On one of my visits to his apartment, he produced a baggie filled with magic mushrooms. He took out a knife and pricked his thumb, which bled into the bag.
“Take and eat,” he said—reverently, like we were exchanging vows. “This is my body and blood, given to you of my own accord.”
Gross, but I had decided to become a student of experience. I ate, completely ignorant of how profound an effect this one decision would have on my life.
The psilocybin kicked in, altering my perception. Colors appeared intense. Colors I’d never seen before, reds and yellows I could taste. My hand seemed like someone else’s, too small, a child’s hand, leaving a trail of shimmering light.
Then I looked at Drake, and I felt connected to him, his blood metabolizing inside me, germinating in my own blood. He blazed with light, but this turned out to be the reflection of a gleaming silver door that appeared, framed in black thorns and engraved with a head with two beautiful faces.
Wow, I thought, I am full-on hallucinating.
He said, “The Gate of Babylon. One of Huxley’s doors of perception.”
His voice too loud, practically booming. Drake slithered off the bed and went to the door. He asked if I was coming.
Surprised he could see it too, I said, “Maybe next time.”
I wasn’t afraid. I wanted to go, I really did. But I needed to hear music. I needed to play music. Because an entirely different door had materialized inside me, bursting open to admit a flood of songs.
At first, they blipped in flashes of sound as if someone cranked the FM dial on a car radio. Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus saying this is growing up, the Descendents’ Milo Aukerman chasing nonexistent dreams, David Bowie pining about life on Mars. My whole brain lighting up, left side for lyrics, right side for melodies, pouncing on these musical fragments like a cat chasing its dinner.
Drake went through his own door, which vanished.
“Oh shit,” I said. He was actually gone.
Then the first crystal-clear melody blazed across my psychic ether. One of those life-changing songs, only I’d never heard this one before. Another followed, and then another. I believed I’d dialed into God’s radio station, where songs wait in purity and innocence to be born.
And I understood. These were my songs. All the songs I would create in my lifetime. I needed to write them down because if I didn’t, they might be lost and then I’d have to wait years to find them again.
Ablaze with music, I got straight to work.
I didn’t see Drake again for three days. He never told me where he went.
CHARLOTTE SKINNER (executive director of public affairs, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops): The Catechism of the Catholic Church includes a statement of belief that prior to Christ’s second coming, the church must pass through a final trial in which all believers’ faith will be tested. The Antichrist will appear as a pseudo-Messiah exalting man over God, promising earthly salvation that comes at the expense of spiritual salvation.
With this deception, the secret power of lawlessness will exert itself and hold sway. The twentieth century witnessed several such movements, including Nazism and communism.
Under the Antichrist’s persecution, the church itself will emulate Christ’s journey through death and resurrection. While she will be destroyed, she will ultimately triumph because the Lord will return to destroy all evil.
Otherwise, the church does not maintain a detailed doctrine about the Antichrist. This allows a great deal of diversity in theological opinion regarding the Bible’s eschatological themes and, of course, clues to the Antichrist’s identity.
On that score, there is little mystery. We will know him when he comes.
LILY: I filled my school notebooks with lyrics and cassette tapes with humming and singing. My head swirled with chords and riffs and melodies.
Simple, dumb songs about wanting a different life, falling in love, going crazy for its own sake. Teen angst music. Reach for the stars and howl at the moon stuff. Snappy ear candy, up-tempo and happy, even if the lyrics often ached with longing.
Back from wherever he went, Drake sat cross-legged on the couch wearing his most attentive expression and asked me to play him one. This had me nervous, as I’d made them just for me. It’d be like reading aloud from my diary.
But I did it. Parked on that ratty couch, I thrashed out a song on my Fender. A tune about a young woman saving up her money to go to Hollywood, where she’d be a star, thinking everything would be better if she were on TV. A whole new life waiting.
The song ended with her watching instead of being on TV, forever living in her dream. It described the desire to escape and the roots that pin us to a certain patch of ground.
When I finished, he said, “I love it, but she doesn’t get what she wants.”
I told him that’s what made the song relatable. Because people often don’t.
Drake said, “She should. Teaching people how will be our ministry.”
I didn’t understand.
He reached under his bed and pulled out a guitar like a rabbit from a hat. A brand-spanking-new cherry-red Epiphone SG Special P-90 electric. Mahogany body. Skinny neck for fast-necking. Totally sexy looking.
Drake said, “Merry Christmas, Lilith.”
Looping the strap over one shoulder, I let the axe hang low at my waist. I stood in front of his mirror and gaped at myself holding this beautiful instrument. I looked like a rock star. I swore I’d never let go of it. I wanted to play it and hear its iconic sound forever.
Drake said, “I had another dream.”
He suffered lucid nightmares that left him pale and trembling. He’d dream about a black sea. A great horned beast rising from the depths to blot out the dying sun, the sky cracking like smoky glass, the beast spraying its rotten breath from scores of nostrils like a symphony of water flutes. A tidal wave of blood.
His nightmares always came with an epiphany. Something he was supposed to do, like meet me or get a certain tattoo. He’d been waiting for another sign.
Drake said the words that changed my life: “We’re going to start a band.”
I ran screaming around the apartment. I screamed my head off. I kissed him for all I was worth. That night, we made love for the first time in candlelight, and he seemed to glow like fire, our bed surrounded by a howling orgy of winged men and women. My last orgasm just about killed me, and I lay there smiling and gasping and thinking: So that’s what all the fuss is about.
Seeing me so happy, Drake gently placed two fingers against my forehead like a benediction and said, “There’s a whole universe in there.”
CHARLOTTE SKINNER: Speaking solely for myself, yes, I suppose it is easy to imagine an Antichrist who bawls at the end of rom-coms and adores children and dogs and always stands on the right side of social causes. I’m sure there were Nazis in the Third Reich who wrote beautiful poetry.
This is the banality of evil. For the Antichrist to hold such sway in the material world during the end times, he will almost certainly be charismatic and even lovable, which allows him to pull off his great deception.
It’s also entirely possible he’ll retain enough of his humanity to be a reluctant agent of the apocalypse. Maybe he doesn’t want to be what he is; he just is what he is. Maybe he’ll have his own Garden of Gethsemane moment, where he agonizes over what he must do and begs the Lord not to assign him his burden.
It doesn’t matter. The Antichrist has a role to play in God’s plan. In the end, he will obey God and his own nature.
Some like to cast Lucifer as a misunderstood monster, but he is not. We understand him perfectly.
LILY: When anything is possible, one gets hooked on finding out what comes next. It was time for me to go all the way. Cut the cord. Burn my ships behind me. Pick whatever metaphor you want. The time had come to move out.
I pretty much lived at Drake’s apartment already, only I didn’t sleep there. This would be the final leap. I would wind up moving in without ceremony, but first I had to evacuate my parents’ house in what felt like a full-scale war.
Mom and Dad had already figured out I’d been lying to them all this time about how I was spending my days, and that I’d earned an incomplete in all my courses. When they found out I intended to live in sin with a slacker and start a rock band, Mom melted down while Dad’s anger volcanoed into all-out rage.
Mom went full maudlin, wailing about how she’d failed as a mother, practically rending her garments. Dad shook the house yelling every hurtful thing he could think of, how I was a good-for-nothing whore hell-bent on ruining her life.
By the end, it was unclear whether I was leaving on my own or being thrown out. I lugged my suitcases into Drake’s apartment and collapsed crying on the bed.
Angry at my folks, he said, “You’re not them. And they don’t get to be you.”
I pointed out they’d created me. They’d given me life. They’d raised me. If nothing else, I owed them for that. I didn’t want to hurt them.
He said, “You don’t owe them anything.”
He said, “This is when you grow up and live on your terms, Lilith.”
I said, “That’s why I’m here.”
To live my life with him. To start a band.
Still, I carried a ton of guilt around with me like a reinvention of original sin. I didn’t share this fact with Drake. He believed in God but not in regret.
I threw myself into the music. As the days rolled by, we’d play for hours at a stretch, coming up with complex melodies as if inventing a private language. Every day, I’d ask if we were ready to actually, you know, start building the band, and Drake told me he was waiting for another sign.
Then it arrived. After he told me about his dream, I said, “Draw it for me.”
We often painted our dreams on the walls of our apartment. Colorful depictions of me as a babysitter juggling a dozen laughing babies, ballroom dancing, making a margarita for David Bowie. Drake’s grim, gray visions of the Great Beast.
This time, his nightmare took a different turn. Drake produced a brush and painted a figure holding a guitar on a stage, one fist raised in triumph. Below the stage, his manic strokes manifested a sea of fleeing, howling faces, each looking like a variation on the distressed subject of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Drake said, “Surround him with golden light. Light reclaimed from Heaven.”
I did, trying to replicate as best as I could the light I sometimes saw during our lovemaking, applying shades of yellow until the guitarist seemed to come alive. All I had on was a pair of denim overalls, and soon my bare arms glowed too.
After we finished, we appraised the disturbing image. I wondered why the figure stood alone. Where was the rest of the band?
I said, “Jesus, Drake. I hope that’s not an omen.”
He said, “It’s Armageddon.”
Drake thumbed some of the black paint drying on the wall and etched a cross on my forehead, like a blessing or a baptism.
He said, “It’s time to start calling the band together.”
I rubbed my hands together fiendishly and tittered like a movie villain. Finally!
He told me Lilith would make a great stage name, but I considered his pet name our secret. A gift from him that I refused to share.
I told him that henceforth, I would be known as Lily Lawless.
I was already finding it embarrassing, but Drake applauded.
He said it sounded perfect. Grudgingly, I thought so too, even if I had to admit the moniker was more aspirational than accurate. From here on, I vowed, I would be ungovernable. Large and in charge of my own life for the first time.
“Now you should name our baby,” he said.
He was right. Our band didn’t have a name yet.
I remembered all my guitar heroes and how every song felt like a promise of a new experience, thrilling and dangerous.
And so I named the band the Shivers.
1998: Lily Lawlor and Drake Morgan form a punk band. Drake inspires faith in some. Fear in others. Lily is a believer.
1999: A Battle of the Bands ends in a shocking death, and a riot that claims the lives of three teenagers.
2009: At the height of her stardom, Lily walks into a police station and confesses to murder.
Now: The band has refused to talk to the press about the night of the riot, Lily’s confession, or anything else. It’s been over a decade, but Lily has finally agreed to an interview. And the band is following her lead.
What follows is a story of prophecy, death, and apocalypse. A story about love and love lost. A story about the antichrist. Maybe it’s all true. Maybe none if it is.
Either way, this is their story. And they’re sticking to it.
