Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird

by Jesse James Freeman

  Where its head should have been on the floor, there was a broken television set which Augusta had drawn a happy face on.

  A happy face with fangs.

  Augusta sat next to him on the floor and kissed the top of the television. “He caresses my dreams.”

  Anastasia lowered her lips to her sister's forehead and gave her a final kiss. “You're very lucky, sister. I love no one.”

  Anastasia straightened and made her way to the door, leaving Augusta to her valiant lover.

  “When I return here, they'll make me murder all of you.” This Anastasia promised her.

  Augusta's face lit again. “Murder Billy too, then we can all be together in the human Heaven.”

  Anastasia looked down at her sister for a long time. “What do any of us monsters know of heaven?”

  “Not much, but it's the only good idea the monkeys ever came up with.”

  The glow of Augusta's face stayed with Anastasia into darkness as she searched what was left of the only remaining vampire kingdom for that which she had come to steal from them.

  As always, traitor to her race.

  Chapter 25

  Medusa

  Ugliness made her whole. This is truth.

  She relished the solitude and invited it. Becoming horrible was spiritual awakening. Before then, she always felt as half a person. As though all those around her wanted and desired her, longing after her beauty only. They wanted a gift from her that she did not possess, this gift of romantic love, and therefore could never freely give. She was an empty festival in this way.

  Sunlight was not her hour. She would cry at the solstice. She had no gate and no lock for the purity she held in her heart and gifted freely to those undeserving of it. She placed her prized possession in the center of the marketplace for all to walk past and ignore - even the most desperate of thieves would not steal it from her.

  Her heart's lonely gift, her deep and pure intellect - her mind and desperate but open spirit - were her offerings to all. None in her time were so in tune with the law as she. It was the only law that mattered: harmony of existence. She knew best the turning of the earth and the babbling of the sea. The library of hidden human knowledge.

  She had much to teach them, but no students gathered. Nothing living would listen to a simple girl. She had no place among the world of our fathers, that patriarchal suicide watch which accounted for their ways and their wars, pride and foolish gods.

  So she did the only thing she felt that she could to lose herself in it all. She became a priestess, and she prayed to a block of marble dressed as a wild mother woman.

  She had searched for quiet atop Acropolis. The rock lips of her goddess could provide just as much instruction and wisdom as the cold plateau at its hem and sandal.

  Medusa was her name.

  She prayed to Athena, but she never believed in her or the silly magic of Athens.

  The glass and concrete of your modern age is prison still, the only difference being your Olympus is higher from that ground your madness will send you to.

  Like the baby bird who flies the nest too quickly.

  Anything that looks outside itself for answers is lost. Anyone who holds up another's ideals as a worldview is sick. Your gods cannot resist what you offer; they are just as much a slave to you as you are to them. If you make your mind a puppet the drool of some madman will become your strings. Those who are self-assured have no time for this sort of play.

  She was violated as much by her patron Goddess as the vile fishmonger who raped her - perhaps even more so by that mother. Saints and sinners beg for any sign or symbol that could reveal to them the unquestionable existence of a higher mind. That creator parent-lover to distract from the pain of living on their knees and the longing of their songs of love and death. Signpost, please point us to the gates of heaven. Even a devil will do, if that's all the universe can fetch up for us.

  Medusa's devotion was repaid to her in torture, this is without question. The only sound coming from her lips during the act was a mantra she'd lost hope of ever breathing into the temple air. Over and over, she let it slip from her lips - this truth about what she was learning of gods, like a broken dog at the end of a lash.

  “They're real. They're real. They're real.”

  What a way to be finally divinely inspired.

  I would guess that the loneliness she felt after the fact was the hardest.

  The other sisters shunned. Gone were the proud men who had visited the same terrors on her in their lust-fit dreams. The men feared now that their shark god might see fit to do the same to them were they to touch what he had so deliberately claimed.

  A fear of folly, for after he crawled back to the sea he never thought of Medusa again. He was done with her.

  But he will remember one day - I promise you this.

  Poseidon had forgotten, but Medusa's goddess was just waking up to her broken follower's presence. Never noticing her as she begged the old stone girl to know her before, yet now that she had been abused in the temple under Athena's own lazy gaze, suddenly my Medusa mattered.

  So it was decided to banish her, to make it all go away.

  It was then that Medusa's beauty was married to the same hell her soul had already fallen within. A goddess who wouldn't take her hand in spiritual union made Medusa then into a dead thing. A face matched now to the murder done to her heart. Her beauty died that day she was thrown into a tiny boat and cast upon the raging deep that made up her rapist's crown. She was truly afraid, and so was everything around her, it seemed. The churning glass of the ocean fled from her and wouldn't stand still long enough for her to catch sight of the pain that called itself now her face.

  Medusa many times wished for death adrift. Who she begged to I cannot say with any more clarity than I'm sure she could have - simple gods had abandoned her words. She was near starved and lonely: the fish wouldn't swim to her and the birds which came near her would go grey and frozen winged then vanish beneath the sea foam about her. Sinking like stones.

  Medusa cursed the gods one final time, not because the boat capsized and was lost to her by the pull of Poseidon's world. She cursed the gods that she did not drown.

  I heard her curse, though I knew that going to her would be fruitless. She would never listen to the sister of her former goddess. Worse still, she would never take aid from the sister of her rapist.

  If I could not right the wrongs of my kin directly, then I, the goddess Artemis, decided I would find someone to send in my stead.

  Chapter 26

  If You Meet The Buddha…

  Billy Purgatory had just enough money to make it down to the docks. He mostly bummed rides, leaving the Oldsmobile in what he had considered to be a safe place.

  He had an army issued duffel that was big enough to hold everything he owned in the entire world, which amounted to just a bit more than jack-shit packed tightly into drab green. There was a skateboard, his mother's sword scabbard, and a picture of his father with LBJ that had stapled to it the last remaining frames of film containing any known image of Emelia Purgatory.

  Maybe if he was lucky, he had stolen Mom and Pop's souls by holding those images so close to him. Maybe this would keep them safe. He had no idea what to do with the ghost of Lyndon Johnson, though. Surely someone would take it in trade.

  Billy had to travel south near seventy-five miles to an actual active port. With Lucinda dead, Lissandra lost to her woods, and Anastasia dangerously off the grid, there would be nobody to see him off as this new journey towards the East began.

  He imagined a conversation with Pop where he got a pat on the back and an, “I'm proud of you, son. Go get 'em.”

  Fantasy was in full effect on that imagining, but Billy couldn't allow himself to dwell on any of that nonsense for long without a laugh-track playing over it, or maybe a chorus composed of vampire Lord Byron Helkross, the stag-horned goddess Artemis, and the Devil Bird. The Time Zombie could scream out the guitar parts.

  B
illy found himself in a knife-throwing contest with a group of Taiwanese rogues and Russian cut-throats in the alley behind The Swollen Goat Tavern. The women of the evening watched from the balconies above, keeping track of who was the biggest winner and who was drunk enough to be relieved of their winnings.

  Desperation tied them all together in perfect harmony.

  Billy was sure he saw her walking out onto the balcony with the other girls to watch the end of the drunken dance of blades. Nobody seemed to notice that she wasn't one of their particular sisterhood or that she brazenly smiled with fangs showing.

  Billy couldn't be sure if she had been the dream thing he hoped she was or if she'd actually been really waiting for him to climb the stairs behind the Swollen Goat for a goodbye kiss.

  In a strained moment of clarity, Billy made himself stare up at the balcony and realized that the girl in question was just a girl with dark hair and too big a smile and was not in fact Anastasia.

  He didn't really remember much about being caught up in the sailors headed down the dock and to the ships. He had it in his head much earlier in the evening that he'd join up with the Thais because that seemed to make more sense in regards to the direction he thought he had to go on his ocean voyage.

  Thus began Billy Purgatory's journey across the sea in search of his mother. The ocean voyage would be long and arduous, and Billy found reason, or was asked to leave, four ships after leaving the lonely port in the Americas.

  Billy could have probably stayed on the first ship and ridden a deck-swabbing mop all the way to Southeast Asia, but he couldn't shake the feeling that he was being followed. Preposterous wasn't in Billy's limited vocabulary, but lots of other words dealing with trust issues were.

  Who, other than himself, even knew where he was going or what he was doing? Who would even care?

  The fact that Anastasia wasn't there is what made him so jumpy. As much as Billy was off the radar now, it was even worse that she was. So much worse in fact.

  One last big fight under the seagulls would have done the trick. A very theatric walk up a gangplank was what was missing from his piece of mind then. Being able to look down at her standing by the rocks and waving a handkerchief in the moonlight as he set sail for adventures across the sea.

  His mission.

  Anastasia hadn't been there, of course. That would have been far too easy, and nothing about what he was doing now, or ever, was easy. The hard way was the only way. Blown opportunities and no second chances and being able to turn his back to her and walking away would have provided the end he so needed. She had been following him from shadow in some way or another since he was nine years old.

  He knew that she had to be following him still.

  Or what if she wasn't?

  He had left everything he'd ever known behind. This was truth as concrete as the streets he used to glide down. Anastasia was surely back where he'd left, and he was out here under a very unforgiving sky of nada. He had beaten her, maybe. He had given up the land of his birth to her and whatever foul cousins and inbred evil that leaked from her petrified family line. They could have it, Billy's horrible past, he told himself over and over. They can have it all.

  Whatever it was they had convinced themselves they needed from Billy Purgatory no longer existed. He had taken the crook in the road nobody had counted on and he was to soon forge for himself a new life in a distant land that he hadn't even seen yet with his own eyes.

  Anastasia be damned; Billy was free of her. He'd been held in their claw for his entire life and he had escaped it. He had cut himself hard on their bloody fingernails as he squeezed through, but ultimately he had done the deed and achieved the impossible.

  Two women had ruled his life - others had come and gone of course - but there were only two who had ever interplayed into his destiny. The one most foul who'd almost caged him, those cold fingers of hers drawing a heart into stone around a rattrap. He had waited her out, waited for the sun to rise and gone to find the other.

  Billy never had to think of Anastasia ever again.

  Billy knew that his mother was little more than a ghost at that point in his life. So much time had passed that little possibility whatsoever that she lived existed. Billy was naive in many ways but not so in this. Everyone who had ever known her looked away when they spoke of Emelia. Pop had all but come out and said that she was long since dead.

  Billy knew that Pop had found her in the place he sailed to, in the jungle, somewhere on the borderland of Vietnam and Laos. If Billy's father had found her there, then perhaps Billy could too.

  There was a terrible difference between Billy's circumstances and that of Ulysses Purgatory's. Pop hadn't been looking for her when he found her.

  II

  Billy Purgatory was no stranger to the jungle. His time in the army had taught him well the ways of tree and vine and every living thing intertwined in them choking with deadly poison. Billy had spent his time in the army between loving and losing Lucinda Drew in the tiny South American city state of San Martier.

  Billy's first night in the jungles of Vietnam had him keeping watch over a vast snake all night long. Billy's camp was a fire of bamboo embers and his pack. The snake had made its way down a thick tree and slowly crept towards the wandering skateboarder. Billy had never seen a snake that big and couldn't tell what type it was in the dark. All he could see was the girth of the thing, and the line of its body trailing back into the jungle, the end of the tail still halfway up the tree.

  Billy had a knife in his pack that he never went for. The snake, which could surely have swallowed Billy whole, never made that particular move or got too close. Its fat head rose and stared Billy down as the bamboo firepit popped. The serpent was a very muted green in such sparse light, but the fire reflected in its eyes cast a golden glow.

  Billy had no reason to move, and neither did his fireside companion it seemed, so they both stayed put. The face of the biggest snake Billy ever would see did not chill him to the bone; in fact, it caused no emotion nor panic whatsoever.

  Billy had seen the face of something far more horrifying in that other jungle far away in South America. There had been twelve men, including Billy, on that mission, and there were at least twice that many tribesmen who had partnered with Billy and his unit. Billy and his men were cut off from civilization, and this made them ill at ease; the tribesmen were just as uneasy even though the jungle was all they had ever known.

  Billy remembered how he had felt then. In that time when he was firmly entrenched in the world of the army, and wasn't keen on believing in what he considered fairytales from the past.

  There was a ghoulish presence just outside of the peripheral of everyone's mind's eye down there. The tall warrior had seen it come in the night and take his friend. The native men had taken Billy into the jungle just outside of the camp and brought him to a place where a fallen boar lay rotting. The boar carcass had been picked at by insects, and its innards were now a sweltering gas-filled orphanage of maggots. It was rank lying there and Billy thought he really might puke. Making it all the more worse, the tribesmen were all holding back their own release of their stomachs as some sick test of will as to who would be the one who'd loose it first.

  The tall one threw his arms up and tried to communicate that when the thing, this monster, had come that this was the smell. Rotting infested meat in the hot sunlight.

  He made his arms much bigger then and made a noise, like thunder crossed with a hiss, like electricity. Then with motions much bigger than before, he drove his spear into the side of the carcass and released a stench which sent them all turning away. Billy grabbed a tree and almost went down on one knee it was so unbearable to be that close.

  It was like a scratch and sniff instruction manual for death.

  Billy was on his knees and had pulled himself further away from the dead boar and his ears rang and he heard vaguely the sound of grown men spitting up like babies behind him.

  Billy meant to stand, but the d
irty spear of the tall one pierced the dirt in front of Billy's eyes, and he felt this man he could not communicate with only minutes before put his hand on Billy's shoulder.

  Billy watched the speartip draw in the soil.

  The drawing was simple: little more than a mouth with a row of rotted to jagged teeth and eyes inset into what looked like a skullcap.

  It wasn't hair that the tall man drew then upon the monster's head. Billy had seen this thing before in his nightmares, but it had been only that, hadn't it, a nightmare. The probing electrodes took shape jutting from the drawing's head. The tall man drew the lighting that arced from each probe to the next.

  Billy thought about himself and Anastasia on the train long ago. What was it that she had said? That Billy was making up stupid names?

  Billy's palm pressed into the ground and he felt his lips move but the sound of his own voice came from far away.

  “Time Zombieeeeeeeeeeee.”

  Billy felt the rest of the men at his back then and he rose as he remembered something that wasn't supposed to have happened, something that couldn't have happened. Billy had seen this thing, touched it and traveled somewhere with it when he was just a boy.

  The tall one nodded and his own mouth mimicked the sounds Billy made.

  “Zom-beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,” agreed the tall man.

  Before Billy Purgatory and his men would leave the tiny jungle country of San Martier, Billy would find himself and the tall tribesman tracking the nightmare through the jungle together.

  Billy would be the only man walking away from the village when it was all said and done.

  As the monster would leave an impression on Billy, Billy would find upon his return to America and his leaving the army that Billy had made an impression on the Time Zombie as well.

  When Billy Purgatory awoke the next morning in the jungles of Vietnam, he found himself leaning back against the trunk of an ancient tree. The bamboo fire and the giant snake were both long gone. Billy stood and threw his pack on and cursed that there was nowhere to skate in a jungle.