To Disturb the Harmony~Chapter 16

After pretty much having to choose between helping Apollo or listening to line after line of his poetry, we picked the lesser of two evils. Apollo informed us that someone was about to steal a guitar blessed by Apollo himself, which belonged to some kind of rock star before he died. We went to the address written on a piece of paper given to us by Apollo and we saw a large sign welcoming us to Graceland Mansion. It was a huge yellowish house that had been converted into a museum apparently.

“What a minute, I know this place. This is the home of Elvis Presley!” Aisling said excitedly as she jumped up and down.

“You mean that old rock star from forever ago?” I asked. While pretty much everyone knew who Elvis was, I had never really listened to his music as he was way before my time. Heck, he was before even my grandma’s time probably.

“Old rock star? He is the King!” Aisling protested as she crossed her arms and stuck her tongue out at me. I looked over at Kimi for some back-up, but she just shrugged her shoulders and looked back at the mansion. Obviously she hadn’t listened to Elvis either, but Aisling looked like she was about to jump out of her shoes with excitement. We managed to get tickets inside and quickly joined a tour group.

“And this is one of Elvis’ favorite guitars, his 1967 Fender Wildwood VI,” the woman said as she motioned to the guitar hanging on the wall behind a display case. The room was filled with things from the singer’s career, including things like his outfits, sheet music, and even a pair of old fashioned sun glasses. The room was filled with similar display cases filled with stuff. There were also tacky statues of Elvis painted in gold with his own set of golden backup singers.

“That is what Apollo told us about,” Kimi whispered in my ear so that no one could hear us. I nodded back and motioned to Aisling, who seemed to be in her own little world. I looked around and saw a door next to us, so I took a quick look around and saw that the guide was distracted by someone’s question. I turned the doorknob and Kimi slid inside, but I had to quickly pull Aisling by the collar of her jacket into the room.

“Hey, I wanted to go on the rest of the tour,” she protested, but I put my hand over her mouth and placed my ear close to the door to make sure no one noticed our absence while Kimi placed her finger to her lips to get Aisling to quiet down. Eventually, the tour group moved on and I could finally let go of Aisling’s mouth. When I removed my hand, she snapped her teeth at me like she was a dog and then huffed at me before looking around the room.

“Oh, this is so much cooler than a tour, this looks like his recording room,” Aisling said before walking over and playing with the microphones in the room and pretended to be a rock star. “Hello Memphis!”

“Just don’t make too much noise. The museum…house…whatever, is about to close soon and if we can’t save this guitar, Apollo won’t help us,” I said, hoping security didn’t show up and wonder why three teens were hiding in a mansion filled with Elvis stuff.

“Plus, considering he was the one that got us off track in the first place, any help would be appreciated,” Kimi added, and I had to agree that it this unscheduled stop was Apollo’s fault.

Kimi and I passed the time by playing Crazy Eights for awhile while Aisling was trying to figure out how to work the music equipment to try and give us a live show. Meanwhile, Nala had snuck out of Aisling’s bag and started playing around with some of the loose wires hanging down from chairs or whatever else. Looking at her in her cat form made me almost forget that it was actually a monster. However, the hours seemed to pass and the sun eventually went down. For a few ADHD demigods stuck in a small room waiting for something to happen, the hours passed so slowly that I was ready to grab a microphone and sing something just to pass the time.

“Did you hear something?” Kimi said as she took a few steps toward the door. We all listened and heard something that sounded like scraping metal.

“Is that a security guard?” I asked quietly, not wanting to alert the thing on the other side of the door that we were there.

“Sounds more like a trash compactor,” Aisling said as all three of us had our ears against the door listening in. Then we all heard the strum of a guitar and jumped out from the room, with Aisling and I both pulling out our weapons as we got into a battle stance.

“Hey, what’s going on here? Come to see my show?” said a man completely covered in gold. After looking at it closer, I noticed that it was the golden statue of Elvis I had seen earlier, but it had grabbed some of the old clothes from the other display cases and put them on so it looked just like a golden Elvis.

“Not exactly, we are here to stop you from stealing that guitar,” Kimi said wide eyed, not really sure how to react to this whole situation. I mean a golden Elvis was standing in front of us about to put on a show, it was really weird.

“Stealing? This guitar belongs to me,” the statue said confused. It then placed the strap around his shoulder and played out a few tunes.

“Oh come on, let him play a few songs before we kick his butt,” Aisling suggested.

“That sounds like an awesome idea. Thank you one and all for coming out tonight, now let me introduce my back-up singers, the Keledones!” the Elvis statue cheered and a few of the golden statues of the female singers jumped from their positions and set up behind Elvis, grabbing a few microphones in the process.

“Alright, let’s get this party started!” Elvis said and strummed the guitar, sending out a large shock wave of sound that sent us flying backward and shattering several of the glass displays and a few windows.

“Ok, maybe letting him get the guitar was a mistake…” I heard Aisling say over the ringing in my ears.