Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird

by Jesse James Freeman

  It's still amusing to me they blamed it all on that custodian. The man was, without question, disturbed and would have eventually snapped. Maybe I saved more of their lives than I took.

  Looking back on it now, I didn't realize fully at the time what was happening to me. How calm things had become. How hunting and disposing of them never became too much of an issue because I wasn't feeding. I had cast it from me - the blood desire. I began to soften, mentally and physically. Wasn't as strong or as fast and lost that evil stare that said to them “Speak to me and die before your sentence ends.”

  I smiled more. It was Sarah who one winter semester was unpacking her sweaters as I walked cautiously into my newly invaded dorm room. Sarah was the one of them, for the first time, who just gave me a smile and not a philosophy book's worth of questions along with it. In spite of myself, I was so pleased to see this new one that I turned and smiled back.

  That's how it began, my first human friendship. We drank wine we'd sneak into our room and smoked and listened to really awful music that we both loved. We shared clothes and stayed up until all hours of the night. She would have made a perfect one of my kind as she hated sunlight and never felt comfortable in it. She was a night owl. Sarah had her secrets that I never really pulled out of her, but she never unearthed mine either. It didn't seem to matter because we understood one another and didn't feel we had to give our entire life's stories in trade for the friendship. Neither of us ever explained the events that led us to this place and who we were. We were in lust with just being.

  That's who I was then, just Ana. I had no agenda or secret plot burning a hole through me from inside out. I was fascinated with doing the most pedestrian things. I no longer considered my troubled childhood or wondered what the future held for me. Sarah and I didn't share a bloodline, but we shared a spirit. She allowed me to open myself to possibilities I hadn't considered. I was able to lower the drawbridge and let the world peek inside, even if I was still too leery to cross the moat.

  Do not get the wrong impression when I tell you now that I loved her. I was in love with who she represented and it never crossed into any place beyond that, but it in and of itself was a tremendous step for me.

  Or so I had convinced myself in those weaker days.

  Regardless of which shade of rose-colored glass you observed through, where I was at that time one truism remained. The true borderland I inhabited had everything to do with reaching a place where I wasn't committed to either side. I wasn't fully living as a human yet, but I certainly wasn't acting as a vampire.

  I was very close to crossing over, though, and never looking back.

  I was eating their food with them. Wearing their clothes and watching their television. I now enjoyed their get-togethers and tasting their drink. It was barely apparent I'd ever had fangs, and I couldn't harden my skin or sharpen my nails. I no longer sized up a room for who was easy prey among them. I never looked now for their weaknesses just in case fighting began. I didn't immediately want to harm them. I wanted to learn, to dance, to talk and to laugh.

  And I never, ever thought about him. Ever.

  I can't remember the first morning I realized that I hadn't made it home before sunrise and I was walking around in the sunshine. I just remember realizing that it had been going on for some time, and after the initial shock and raised heart rate, the literal blinding realization of it all. I think I finally forgot what it had been to grow up in the dark.

  Everything was so bright.

  My former life was now a repressed childhood memory, a dream that I'd not been able to wake from for so long. Time eventually smoothes out the rips and troubled memories. Contentment was mine to be had finally.

  Sarah went to grad school on the West Coast, and I was sad for the first time in a long time, but I didn't let myself dwell on it for very long. I had barely said farewell to her when I found myself finally adapted to their world fully and moving in with Thomas. Our relationship had grown because he refused to stop coming around. I liked how he made me feel. How innocent he was on the inside, but how he projected that exterior they all do. Like nothing can touch them.

  I liked how he made me feel like a girl.

  I didn't travel much in the night anymore. I had shifted to days long since and enjoyed being out with them in the light. Since I'd met Thomas and he'd broken down the last of the old me, I identified with Mother's side fully. I no longer considered myself to be apart from them. So, on that night, it was strange that we would be out at all. We were both homebodies when the sun set, but I'd wanted to see a movie. I have no idea why - I think I'd heard some girl in class telling how her boyfriend had taken her to see it and I had decided that I wanted to do that too.

  I held close to Thomas in the cold, which I felt more and more every winter. I think I even had the sniffles. Thomas kept his arm around me and tried to shield me from the wind, and everything else in the big new world, as we weaved through the lampposts and manicured trees in the center of campus towards our apartment on the western side. The side of the city furthest from the old shipyards – the place where I grew up and had nearly forgotten.

  There he was, just standing there along the path, his black coat hanging down like the long dark locks that ringed the side of his bald head, a leering Franciscan. I'd forgotten how dark their eyes got at night. I knew he'd seen me coming long before we entered the park, how he could smell me from the time we'd left the theater's popcorn buttered and candied lobby. His claws were in his pockets, and he didn't smile.

  He just stared, my old school master –the one Billy named Uncle Priest.

  I pressed my face into Thomas's neck and pretended to laugh along with him as he talked quietly with me on our walk. The Priest made no move, just held his ground. I can't be sure if Thomas actually saw him. After we'd passed the vampire, I looked back, and of course, he wasn't there. Their kind moved much too fast for me now.

  But I knew he was real.

  It was never easy to pretend again after that.

  A month later, while I stood shaking in our bathroom and trying to see myself in the mirror, fear overtook me. I pulled out my quivering lip and tried to make out if I saw any remnant of fangs. Seeing Uncle Priest had convinced me fully that I wasn't crazy, that vampires did really exist.

  But for the life of me, I couldn't remember if I'd ever been one or not.

  “What if it's a monster?” That's all I could say to myself in the mirror, and I said it over and over and over again. “What if I'm a monster?”

  The time it was taking to know these answers was ticking by so slowly. Hadn't time once moved so fast?

  There was Thomas then, pushing open the door and looking in at me. I was crying, and my make-up ran dark down my face. I had no control over myself. I just began to bawl and I reached out for him, but he wouldn't move towards me.

  “Who's Billy?”

  “I don't know.” I think I was serious.

  “What about Billy?” I asked after the pause. Time so slow. “I don't know who that is… anymore.”

  “You say his name in your sleep.”

  “Billy Purgatory?” That name sounded ridiculous to me, like he wasn't real. “He's just this boy I knew. A silly boy.”

  I really didn't know what to say. I looked back at the counter and that's when Thomas's attention was directed that way too. To that awful green marble tile and the little white drugstore test sitting under a reflection I no longer recognized in the mirror.

  Thomas was faster than me. He snatched up the test as I lunged for it.

  “What is this? Who is Billy?”

  I clawed at him. “What does it say?” I begged for an answer.

  “Who is Billy? Tell me.”

  “Tell me what I am.” I demanded now.

  Thomas held me back - I was restraining myself. I was beginning to get crazed, but I wouldn't yet allow myself to lose life's clarity that I'd fought to gain. I wouldn't yet allow myself the satisfaction of giving in to that place where
my childhood desperation remembrances were pulling me.

  To his tremendous credit, Thomas never laid a hand on me, even after I nearly scratched his eye out. I broke my nail on the hump of skin and cartilage at his nose. I had cut the slightest hint of a scar across his face.

  He didn't push me - I slipped all on my own - and as I fell backwards, staring at the fresh slash I'd made across Thomas' face, I remembered who Billy was. That unbelieving stare of horror and fascination he shot down at me was all too familiar.

  What was he looking at? How could he love it?

  Thomas touched his face, his breathing was heavy. Then he looked down at the pregnancy test he held before tossing it at me as I lay sweating on the cold floor.

  “You're negative.”

  Thomas turned to leave me there, and I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't do what my body now urged me to do. I'd at the very least give him a head start. I heard the door, and I saw the light cast from its opening as Thomas walked out into the sunshine, and I turned my face from the light's reflection in the mirror because it burned.

  I remembered now that it was supposed to burn.

  That night when I met with Uncle Priest out near the rusting ships, he had little to say about what had become of our people or how he survived. I didn't care to learn much of that anyway, and, almost like he was trying to bed me, he said all the right things.

  “We've new Masters now,” he told me. “They want you to do something for them.”

  “What?” I asked, no longer feeling the effects of the cold on my pale skin.

  “Find him.” Uncle Priest smiled and showed his fangs.

  I had already turned to go, so excited was I to leave this city behind for good, but before we fully broke and he stepped into the waiting limousine. I did once more look back.

  “Who are these Masters and why do they want him?”

  “Never ask, pretty,” said the Priest. “Five full knowing Satan's hold. Rotted fingers, dripping gold.”

  It's as if he signed on just for the riddles.

  “Bring me the boy, fulfill the only task you'll ever be worthy of,” called the Priest from the car.

  And then, we parted ways.

  The red-eye to San Diego was a pleasant flight. I asked the girl who kept offering me the nuts they like so much if she'd plucked them from the tree herself as her hairy ancestors had. I scratched under my arm when she gave me a dumbfounded look. I laughed at the gold wings she wore on her breast. Silly human, not even as useful as a bat.

  I bit my own lip in anticipation.

  Humans are simple creatures. Rather than question how something can be one way or another, they force a square peg into a round hole. Logic is lost on them, and she was drunk anyway when I walked up to her at the party. I got a lot of “Oh my god, I can't believe it! What are you doing here?” She talked a lot more than I remembered, rarely shutting up. I made sure she had one more glass of wine, but I abstained as we moved to a quiet patio to look out across the water, and she lit a cigarette. The smoke was vile.

  “I've missed you.” She smiled, and for just long enough she was that shy but clever girl that I fell in love with in that dorm room. It was all the memory I needed to move in and brush my lips to hers, just a sweet bump of flesh to flesh like the breathers are prone to do.

  I stopped at her ear.

  “I blame you for all the pain, Sarah.”

  Then I tore open her neck.

  Chapter 19

  I Shot Miles Davis In The Face At The Chelsea Hotel

  When Billy and Lucinda arrived together at the Chelsea Hotel the kid behind the counter smiled and called him “Mr. Purgatory” and made an awkward pointing motion his way as if to indicate Billy was something that he was not.

  Important.

  Lucinda held close to Billy, and the kid let them go towards the elevators while playing with a stack of plastic Aztec coins he'd caught at a street fair. A blue-plumed girl had tossed them the kid's way, and her smile followed them down from the float and he felt lucky to have something she'd touched.

  The kid behind the front desk felt lucky to think for that instant about love, because it's not something people think about much anymore. That's what the kid had come to realize.

  As the elevator doors closed Billy remarked, “I rented a room this time.” When the elevators doors opened, they were already pressed to one another and focused on the kinds of loving entanglements promised by blue-plumed girls. They did eventually make it into the room. You can't ride the elevator forever.

  “When I was a kid I was a skateboarder.” They shared a cigarette and were warm in each other's arms. “All I cared about was how fast I could go or how big a curb I could jump.”

  Lucinda listened with her ear to his chest. Billy couldn't remember ever being quite this close to another person. It was so good it didn't seem quite real, but it was better than anything he'd ever known. “I was a screwed up kid with an overactive imagination.”

  Lucinda took a drag from the cigarette and watched the orange glow sheen off the silver pistol she hadn't noticed him placing on the bedside table during all the excitement of undressing. Lucinda wanted to reach out for the gun and touch it and know that it was real. She didn't, though, and passed the cigarette back to Billy so darkness could once more hide what she was going to now try to ignore.

  “Are you in some trouble, Billy?” Lucinda almost laughed at how she'd only been able to take the gun from her mind for that half second before she was questioning him about it.

  Billy thought about it and pressed the butt dead into the ashtray. “No, I thought I was.”

  She climbed up him and kissed him. Billy couldn't help but touch her hair, and she kept him distracted with her lips while she reached her left hand off the bed.

  “I've seen things, Lucinda. Things I can't explain.”

  She shushed him with her mouth in a forceful way, but he kept talking like a drowning man gasping for one last breath, ever fighting with the sea of her lips.

  “I thought a monster took me…”

  Her kiss was warm.

  “There was this giant chicken.”

  She pressed into him now with unyielding intent to bring silence to the room.

  “I swore she had fangs.”

  Billy gave in, and Lucinda's hand kept drifting until she met cold gun-metal to her fingertips. Her hand stayed with it and her mind was split between this strange man she was kissing now and the weapon he'd so casually but purposefully placed at their rented bedside.

  What was he? What was he into? He was illegal, dangerous, and not entirely safe?

  Then her hand slipped from the gun, and she smiled at not being able to remember the name of the other boy from her other life who had two days ago asked her to marry him. Try as she might she couldn't focus enough to concentrate on it, but to be fair she didn't try very hard.

  II

  Billy Purgatory left his broken suitcase open while he showered, and Lucinda saw her prize peeking out from under a grey sweater, and she pulled it into the light of the morning window. It was the very same record they'd listened to in Las Vegas, and she carried it into the next room away from the hiss and steam spilling from the bathroom doorway.

  There was an old RCA turntable attached to the TV and wrapped in deep stained wood. The needle was well-used, and the left speaker popped more than it sang, but Miles Davis began to play.

  “He stole it for me.” Lucinda smiled like Bonnie Parker during a bank job.

  “What?” Billy called over the shower noise from the next room.

  “You stole the record for me.”

  Billy turned off the shower and Lucinda leaned against the door facing holding the album cover and letting the music fill in the gaps of their conversation.

  Billy stepped before the mirror with a clean white towel tied at his waist. “Oh, yeah. Miles.”

  He smiled but the foggy mirror cast no smile back at either of them as Billy spun on the hot water and lifted his
razor.

  Lucinda watched him at the mirror and wished he'd brush it clean so she could see his smile. Deep down Billy Purgatory was a teddy bear. “Don't be so flippant about it. You stole something for me. It's wrong and kind of magical.”

  Billy filled his hand with shaving cream.

  Lucinda held the record cover close to her heart now in spite of herself and almost fell into a trance there, caught between rooms. Once again, between worlds.

  She had the thought that her face must look funny with her nose twisted up. Then she realized why exactly that nose twist was occurring.

  It was a definite peeh-uewww moment.

  When Lucinda's brain caught up with her body she felt she was going to pass out from the stench. The tingling on her neck now became painful and the music skipped.

  …and skipped.

  …and skipped.

  “What's that smell?” Lucinda found herself completely light headed. The stench was uncategorizable to her senses at first because when humans are faced with a puzzle of that sort they are prone to examine every possibility they consider plausible until ultimately they take things back to their most primal state…

  Hunger.

  Fear.

  Death.

  “It's not me.” Billy laughed as he ran his left hand over the mirror to look back at Lucinda and froze when he took in the dark shape towering behind her.

  What he saw was death walking a sunlit path. Pure terror with no darkness hiding it to mask its full-frenzied unnaturalness. A demon crossing a park filled with blue sky and puppies, never cowering from the rainbows shining all about it.

  A nightmare completely out of place in a perfect world.

  Evil had come amongst them without the slightest hint of humbleness or regret. It announced itself with nary a thought as to how it might be received.

  As Billy turned, he was struck with the full force of the stench, and he remembered. He jumped then as if he were kicking himself off a curb on his board and he sailed through the air towards the bed and he went for the gun.