Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird

by Jesse James Freeman

  He told himself at times, that it was the raging fire in the frosted Cypress Grove that drew them out of the dark and to the place he watched the rocks along the bank of an ice-laden stream. As the water slowed and became thick, so did time and his perception of the woods.

  Even the wind got quiet and didn't hide the footfalls making their way towards him. Billy watched the smoke of the fire he'd made of the dead leaves. It boiled the ice crystals from the twig and revealed itself as smoke snakes twisting upon one another and trying to feast upon their own tails.

  Billy should have held the slightest bit of apprehension inside him as the smoke first began to yellow the porcelain of the Lucky Cat before turning its painted red smile and whisker black. The cat shook a bit atop the pyre of the broken cypress dreams. It whistled to the footsteps in the dark and would soon begin to crack and finally burst.

  Billy Purgatory knew the Witch would be at him soon, cackling and warming her cold hands at his fire, clutching her bag of wishes.

  And curses.

  The strange woman was revealed at first in the gasping firelight as a collection of white and black streaks of hair, knotted and braided together and held in place by antique golden ribbons, frayed until they were tiny bits of wild strings. She had wide eyes and stared at the boy with the skateboard as if he were the most fascinating and beautiful thing she had ever stumbled upon.

  Like most things in Billy's world, she had been beautiful once. She resembled an ashen porcelain doll, not unlike the face of the Lucky Cat before it was sent to the stake. She breathed in a panting rasp, as if she had already been dancing wildly about the bonfire.

  Her sharp features blurred as Billy exhaled in the cold, and she was close enough to him that he noticed no such condensation left her own lungs when she wheezed back to him. Her own body furnace had long ago extinguished.

  The white lace she wrapped her body in blended with the sparse snowflakes that fell, and Billy took a step back towards the fire, for she was a sight that close. Her dress blended with the snow and darkness about it so that she looked to be a pair of hands and a head floating towards Billy.

  She didn't speak as much as she shrieked at the cold air that formed the only barrier between her mad animal movements and the ever-frightened boy.

  Billy lifted the skateboard as a knight's shield against her, just as his mother's Lucky Cat cracked into a thousand shards atop the fire he'd regretfully made.

  “You're not the Witch of Wishes!” Billy proclaimed this as if it mattered, as if this thing before him could even form the words to answer back.

  Her mouth opened much wider than any human jaw should accommodate and her face was near comical in a horrid joke of a way.

  Reason was lost to her, cast aside as the flakes that danced the air. This was no witch, no crossroads demon. The fangs filling her jagged mouth sent the message Billy should have heard before starting this journey.

  This thing was out for blood and blood alone.

  The boy let instinct take over and reached into the fire, taking hold of the cold end of a hot burning log, and he thrust forward with it towards the creature. It had only been his intention to frighten her into backing up so he might get away.

  Billy Purgatory watched the white lace burn, wrapped so tightly upon the body of the vampire woman. The look of sadness on her face when the realization of just how flammable she was calmed her savagery and the razor grin became a frown. The vampire woman's knees went into the snow, but the cold and wet arrived far too late for her.

  As her soul burned before his eyes, Billy didn't have the heart to jab her again with the burning tipped fire log.

  Billy thought then of Anastasia.

  The two males that had run after her were stopped at the edge of the Cypress Grove. In their black suits their faces did not hold the same righteous fierceness that had painted the burning woman's upon her arrival into the break of trees.

  They were astonished at the sight of it all. Billy considered ever so briefly who was really the monster in this place on this night. The woman wouldn't stop burning.

  The vampire man with the crew cut hair and the bushy brow clawed into the bark of the tree. He might well have been doing so to avoid falling to his knees as the woman before Billy had. He and the other man were the saddest monsters Billy had ever seen then.

  “Mother…”

  And then the second vampire man said the same word, “Mother!”

  The first one's face twisted up and grew dark when the black tears began to fall to the snow at his feet.

  Billy held aloft the burning sword-log. “Monsters don't have…”

  “Mother!”

  The second, short and squat, raked his nails into the tree, taking off a chunk of the trees hide.

  “Listen! I had to. I didn't want to hurt that lady.” Billy backed away from the fire. The woman, their mother, was a heap of burning bone that began ever so gently to lean backward and then finally succumbed and transformed into a smoking, charred snow-angel.

  The vampire men began to advance. “She was overtaken by the blood needs. The sickness.” The explanation couldn't possibly make sense to Billy or excuse the fact that she was intent to murder him by firelight, sucking him dry at the neck. Words from either side couldn't make this any better.

  “Stay back or I'll burn you too, mister!” The wind laughed at Billy Purgatory and extinguished his burning stick.

  “You could have just given her a taste!” The brother's teeth began to chatter and they hissed as they moved through the snow toward him.

  “Mother was a good soul.”

  Billy watched the last of the broken shards of the Lucky Cat vanish into the embers of the fire he set for the Witch.

  “You will join her now, with no coin to pass into the next place. You will wander with her for all time and you will tell her you are sorry.” Billy saw them move through the dark, their eyes glowing hot with blood and anger, the sadness that moved with them was something then that even Billy could appreciate.

  Mother.

  Even Monsters have mothers, and is it ever right to take that away? From anyone or anything?

  Billy was certain then that he could finally hear his own mother's words that had been suffocated on the wind for all these weeks, and he hadn't needed a witch's help to listen.

  “Run, baby, run away.”

  That's just what Billy did. He ran.

  II

  Billy Purgatory used his board to slide down a snowbank. He'd never felt a rush like it, and he couldn't wrap his head around the idea that this idea was actually working.

  Not that he had much time to consider his greatness regarding his latest trick, when the left truck caught a rock that sent him into the air and then tumbling down the rest of the hillside. He slammed his torso into a pine tree, and it pushed every last cold store of precious air from his lungs and bruised his ribs. He jammed two fingers on his left hand and cut open his shirt; then he rolled to a stop at the bottom of the hill, covered in Jack Frost.

  It was so quiet, and he heard far above him the gnashing of fang on fang as the vampire brothers had no intention of not following him.

  Billy huffed it double-time with a limp. He was pretty sure nothing was broken, but it felt like his bones jingle-jangled beneath his skin. His insides felt like broken shards of a Lucky Cat.

  Grabbing a big limb to help him round a corner, he stopped just long enough to hear the bereaved brothers coming off the snowy hill he had just left. One was below him now, skipping over rocks and following the creek. The other would show himself to Billy through the trees on Billy's left flank and try to make the boy run towards the other fang licking brother's open clawed arms.

  Yes, Billy could hear him to the left, snapping tree branches on purpose, stirring up the birds so they would leave the warmth of the nest to do a flyover out of instinct.

  There went the owls, too. Big wings beating in the treetops.

  Billy caught sight of the vampire, making a
big show to draw him out.

  Billy could hear Pop's voice as clearly as he had heard his mother, “Delta! Cut the triangle. Move!”

  Billy ran to the furthest point from both of them, towards the old stone bridge over the drainage tunnels that he'd tagged his name on the summer before.

  The high ground of Purgatory Bridge would be his last stand against them.

  Billy's breath was quick and he couldn't do anything about how loud he was. He could hear them behind him. They were well into Plan B, give chase. They were faster than Billy and uninjured save their broken hearts.

  Billy's own heartbeat made his ribs ache, and he was sure his leg would fall off any second, and if his leg gave out beneath him and he fell, Billy knew he'd never get back up.

  Billy Purgatory didn't so much fall as he caught the snow with his foot and sailed through the air like he'd just shot himself out of a cannon.

  High in the air he saw his own name in white and black letters upon the rocks of the frigid bridge. He almost allowed a smile.

  He lost a tooth when he landed, and his skateboard rolled from his fingertips and into the snow.

  She was sitting there in front of him, wearing jeans and fur-lined boots. She had red mittens and a scarf of black. Her little coat was loose about her, and the hood down at her back. Snow melted into the wild curls rising off her head.

  Like always, those eyes that fell soft to most anyone else questioned and condemned Billy.

  Lissandra held a baby deer in her arms, keeping it pulled close to her and guarding it from the cold.

  Billy pulled himself up barely, such a prisoner to the ground and the frost that blanketed it, and met Lissandra's gaze. “Tell me, gypsy girl, why am I cursed?”

  Lissandra raised a finger to her lips, and as Billy rolled with much pain and rose fully with his retrieved skateboard in his hands, he met the vengeful vampires breaking into the clearing. He put himself between Lissandra and her baby fawn. His last stand might at the very least give them time to get away.

  But the vampire brothers stopped their advance and bared fangs and sharpened nails into the open space in the center of the woods.

  Billy watched, transfixed, as the night became much more weird.

  The deer began to show themselves at the trees and encircle all within the bridge clearing. The bucks moved forward from the ranks of the herd.

  Tooth scraping and claw sharpening of the vampires was met with the noise of a hundred hooves scraping into the cold earth.

  The racks of many deer touched the earth too and then raised towards the blood monsters. Sudden galloping began and the threat to the vampires of being impaled upon many horns was a threat no longer.

  III

  The night Billy got caught in the snowstorm, burned a Vampire Mother to her death and was nearly killed by her two sons was the first time he ever kissed a girl. Well, the first time he kissed a girl that didn't bite and try to eat him.

  Anastasia's lips at his neck had been soft and inviting. Lissandra's were colder than the snow at their feet. The only thing warm about the kiss was when he felt her breath on his cheek. She said, “I'm not kissing you, Billy Purgatory.” She said it soft though, and Billy had already moved in and when he went for her lips she kissed him back, even if she said she wasn't going to.

  They faced one another, their knees in the snow in a center ring bordered of ice, blood and deer tracks. The Vampire Brothers had lost their battle for revenge and Lissandra had been stand-offish until the deer had all jumped back into the safety of the woods. As if she didn't want them to see because the deer would make fun of her if she let herself kiss that boy standing before her whose heart raced just as fast as hers did.

  They both had trouble catching their breath, both had it in their head that it was from adrenaline caused by the events which had taken place in the clearing by Purgatory Bridge moments earlier. Billy was banged up like he'd never been before and the pain was extreme, but he forgot all about that for those few seconds.

  Maybe it was true what those sappy love poem's say: kisses do make it all better.

  Lissandra didn't let it last long, and she rose to her feet, breaking away and standing with the little fawn she'd cradled in her arms when Billy had stumbled into the clearing.

  “I have to go with them,” she said. “The deer won't wait for me.”

  “My ribs are hurt…” Billy regretted trying to make her stay as soon as the pained words slipped out of his mouth.

  Lissandra cut him off completely, “You're not so hurt that you couldn't just…” She wouldn't look at him. “That did not just happen.”

  “What didn't happen?” Billy leaned back, looking at her.

  Lissandra cut her gaze from the retreating deer and the line of woods to his eyes. That gypsy fire was burning hot again. “It didn't happen.”

  “Okay,” Billy smiled. “We didn't just totally make-out.”

  Lissandra got the disgusted look on her face that she normally wore anytime she was in his presence. The one that literally screamed Billy Purgatory, you cheapen everything.

  “We did NOT make-out!”

  Billy pulled himself up on one knee. The pain in his ribs throbbed with every beat of his heart, but he wasn't going to let Lissandra see that.

  Billy made a motion with his hand for her to go run with her deer. “See ya, sweet lips.”

  Lissandra clenched her fists and turned to run off into the trees with the little fawn springing after her. It was hard to tell, but Billy was pretty sure he could hear the Wish Witch laughing just under the sound of all those hooves.

  IV

  Young Billy Purgatory sat on the coffee table. Pop had stoked up the fire in the wood heater, and the living room felt warmer than it ever had before.

  Pop's first aid kit was spilling out all over the table to Billy's left. Pop had punched and probed Billy's chest and ribs with his big fingers.

  “Keep your arms raised, boy.”

  Billy watched as the crooked scissors sliced open a package of heavy tan bandages. Pop began to wrap the strand around Billy's torso.

  “I'm gonna look like a mummy, Pop.”

  Pop pulled the bandage tight and made another round. “You're lucky you didn't break a rib or two this time.”

  Pop took his other hand and knocked on Billy's forehead and Billy looked up surprised from the rib wrapping. “Ow, Pop! What was that for?”

  “You know how you make a mummy, boy? You pull out its brain. I'm starting to think you're well on your way.”

  “I ain't knocked out my brains, Pop.”

  “Yet. I'm not entirely sure that hard head of yours isn't filled with rocks.”

  The wrapping continued, it hurt and felt good all at the same time. “What were you doing out in the woods in the middle of the night anyhow?” asked Billy's Pop.

  “Skating.”

  “Bullshit, boy. Even you ain't thick enough to think you can roll through snow.”

  Billy raised his arms higher. “Pop, what's the deal with girls anyway?”

  Pop didn't say anything until he tied down the bandage, and then all he came back with was an, “Oh.”

  “Oh what?”

  “You ran off into the snow because you're chasing a girl. No wonder.”

  “I didn't chase a girl into the woods, Pop.”

  This, of course, was a half-truth. The reason Billy ran into the woods in the first place had everything to do with his Mother and the Lucky Cat.

  “But, I mean, there was a girl in the woods when I got out there…”

  Pop's eyes went to serious slits. “What girl?”

  “Just this girl. She hangs out in the woods.”

  “You need to steer clear of any girl that's out in them woods, 'specially one that's gonna be out there in a snow storm.”

  Billy tried to give a reassuring face. “She's a girl from school…”

  “Your age?”

  “She's in my grade.”

  Pop leaned back and propped his
wooden leg up on the now closed medical kit. “You ain't never gonna figure out girls, son.”

  Billy pulled his T-shirt back on. He still hurt like he hadn't ever hurt before, especially where he just got bandaged. “I already figured out they were unfigure-out-able.”

  Pop shook his head. “Ten years old…”

  “Eleven,” Billy proudly corrected.

  “Eleven and you're already chasing girls through the woods.”

  “Did you chase Mom through the woods, Pop?” Billy couldn't stop himself from asking. He and Pop had a good conversation rolling, and Billy couldn't stop himself from wrecking it by bringing up the one subject that always made Pop clam up.

  Pop swung his leg around and it impacted with the floor, made a knock of wood on wood. He pulled himself up. Billy stayed on the coffee table. Pop was still strong, and his arms flexed as he pushed up, standing. He grabbed his beer can and headed past Billy's question-filled eyes towards his bedroom.

  Billy pulled his own arms to his chest, wondered if they'd look like Pop's when he was much older than eleven. Wondered if he'd look just like his father one day.

  Pop paused before he disappeared into the dark hallway, his back to his son.

  “It was the jungle. I chased your momma through the jungle.”

  Billy imagined that, his mother this feminine phantom form. His mind tried to fill in the blanks of her features. He was excited suddenly; Pop had actually said something about Billy's mom. This hadn't happened in forever. Billy stood and was opening his mouth…

  “Stay out of them woods.” Pop was serious, and Billy didn't push it any further. He just let the other questions back up in his throat. There were so many it felt like they might choke him at times.

  Billy Purgatory lay in bed all that night with a half twisted ankle, a new scar threatening to form across the line down his right leg, and bruised ribs. The wind never stopped, but his Mother's voice was no longer among its howls.