by Alan Rodgers
Then things got crazy as the damned fought among themselves, crowding one another away as each of them tried to press the other out of the way so she could have Dan to herself — and now Dan floated to the surface like a bloated corpse.
He tried to swim ashore, but when he tried to move his muscles refused him. He was paralyzed, he realized, and probably as damned as the ferry-thieves bickering down there on the murky bottom —
And then someone grabbed him by the collar and began to drag him ashore.
At first Dan thought it was the deadman come to save him from the fate he’d already once tried to warn Dan away from, but no, no, it was a woman, Dan saw, a beautiful frail girl who lifted him from the water, onto the damned shore; turned him over, dragged him away from the water, and began to force the water from his lungs.
“You’re sick, Dan Alvarez,” she said. “Your sins have festered down inside your spirit.”
Now she placed her lips on his, to draw more water from him; and when the water was all gone she breathed into him, forcing air to fill his lungs. Dan felt — strange. Sensually aroused, almost, but in a way that only seemed erotic.
This is what it’s like to be in love, he thought. And maybe that was right, or maybe it was just desire obscuring his imagination.
She breathed into him three times, each breath more intense and dearer than the next, and then Dan felt his paralysis give way.
“What did you do?” he asked, reaching up to touch her cheek. As he touched her he realized that he had no business touching her, that no matter how he felt they weren’t lovers and there was no intimacy between them, no love but the love we each have for the ones we see in need. He pulled away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean —”
She shook her head, and took his hand, and pressed it back against her cheek. “Hush,” she said.
And that was all the words between them.
For the longest while.
And then after that long while, Dan realized that the deadman Elvis was standing a few feet from them, watching them, waiting for them. He looked up to face the deadman and he felt so ashamed, so naked and embarrassed, but what could he do?
“Elvis,” Dan said. “I didn’t know you were here.”
The deadman’s frown deepened. “Don’t call me that,” he said. “Especially not here.”
“Don’t call you what?” the woman asked. “I don’t understand.”
The deadman just shook his head. “We’ve got to go,” he said. “We’re wasting time.”
Dan wiped the water away from his eyes. “All right,” he said. “I’m ready.”
The deadman turned to the woman. “You’re coming with us, aren’t you?”
“I —” she said, “I —”
Elvis knelt beside her, touched her shoulder, looked her in the eye. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “Come with us. You’ll be fine.”
And then she cried and cried and cried, and Dan wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her, because he ached to hear her in such pain.
But he couldn’t.
Because she was in the deadman’s arms, and those were all the arms she needed.
There was no wind when Dan climbed into the boat, but that didn’t seem to worry the deadman. He untied them from the withered ash, pushed their boat away from the shore, and opened up the sail. As soon as he did the hot wind found them, and the boat sped downstream more quickly than Dan ever imagined that it could.
He took his seat by the boat’s stern, and watched the shore. He tried not to think about the damned ones below him in the water, and he tried even harder not to think about the girl.
It wasn’t much use. He knew the damned were down there, and the girl — he still hurt every time he caught a glimpse of her. He didn’t want to know why. He didn’t want to imagine!
But he knew, and his imagination ran away with him, and away, and away. It brought him awful things that left Dan shivering and ill.
That was just the water, Dan tried to think. He’d took too much water in his lungs, and it wasn’t just water but the damnable water of the River Styx, and of course it gave him vapors. Of course!
But Dan knew better.
A while after dark he felt sick and very tired, and he went belowdeck to find his bunk and rest.
After a while he slept, and as he slept nightmares came to him. But no matter how bad those nightmares were, they were better than the troubles that plagued his waking mind.
Somewhere in the night the girl came to him — he woke to feel her slip beneath the sheets beside him, and now she pressed herself against him as close as close could be.
Dan thought, no, no, I can’t do this, I can’t go sleeping with some other guy’s woman, and he tried to tell her that he couldn’t but the words wouldn’t come to him. And then it didn’t matter whether she was his or Dan’s or nobody’s woman but her own, because she touched him and he wanted her and the desire was on him intense beyond thinking, and Dan was lost.
Lost inside desire and away away in Hell.
He wanted her more than anything or anyone he’d ever wanted in his life, and he was sure, and he knew in his heart that if he could marry her that moment he would.
When he thought that thunder pealed long and slow somewhere a thousand miles away, and Dan knew he’d plighted himself.
“I love you,” he said, and she said she loved him too, and she kissed his lips so gentle and so intimate and true, and God he wanted her, and loved her, and needed her as dearly as we need life itself.
There was something very different, now. Dan could feel it. Different about them, about their surroundings, about the world and damnation and everything that surrounded them.
“Take me,” she said, and he did.
A long time after they were done Dan looked up from their bed, looked out through the door swinging freely on its hinge, and saw that they’d left the river.
He knew that the moment that he looked up, because there was fire everywhere all around them, fire and light and the embers of damnation, and they were sailing on the Lake of Fire toward the Bosphorus of Hell.
Memphis, Tennessee
September 1952
The celebration on the ridgeline over Memphis was a party no one ever could forget. The food was better than it could be; barbecue more pungent, spicy, and intense; the companionship dearer and more lively than any other fellowship of man.
But it didn’t do anything for Robert Johnson.
All he could think about was his wife, and his darling daughter not even three days old, and how the hell could destiny take him now from a life that he’d only just come to prize. . . ?
But it did. It always works that way, doesn’t it? The things we lose before we come to love them are things we might just as well have never owned; but when life leaves us without the things we love we mourn them till we rail against their loss.
Furry Lewis saw him alone and mourning in the shadow of three pines, and he asked him what was wrong.
“I miss my little girl, is all,” he said. “I hardly even know her.”
Furry Lewis frowned and nodded. Furry Lewis wasn’t any deadman. He was alive — he was one of maybe seven dozen living bluesmen who’d come to play that song upon the ridge. He didn’t have a family himself, but he could see the ghost of Robert Johnson’s loss. “I take you down,” he said. “I take you down, if that’s what you want. We got a little time.”
“To Memphis. . . ?”
“If that’s what you want.” He kicked a stone, and sent it rolling down; it could have rolled forever down that ridge for all that Robert Johnson saw.
“All right, then. You say we got the time, let’s go.”
Greenville, Mississippi - Emma
The Present
Emma woke jittery and
covered with sweat late in the warm Greenville afternoon. When she woke she saw Leadbelly still sat in the seat across from her — he was deep asleep, but he was still holding his guitar, and his fingers still rested on the strings, caressing faint and beautiful music from them.
“I saw her,” Emma said. “I saw my baby in my dream. She was in New Orleans, scared and lost and all alone.”
The deadman’s eyes flickered open drowsily. “You dreamed your child?” he asked. “I knew you would.”
“I’ve got to go to her,” Emma said. “My darling needs me.”
The deadman nodded. “Yes,” he said. “She needs us both.”
“Us both. . . ?”
The deadman nodded. “I’m coming with you,” he said. “I know the Mansion in New Orleans.”
And Emma should have known then, she really should have. Because she hadn’t mentioned the Mansion, and till that moment hadn’t realized what to call it.
But she didn’t realize, and she didn’t think too clearly, because after all she was still half asleep. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Leadbelly stood up, slung his guitar over his shoulder, and started toward the door. “I’m already waiting,” he said.
And then he was gone.
When Emma got out to her car she found him waiting for her in the front passenger seat, no matter how she had the keys, no matter how she’d locked things tight when she’d got out of the car the day before.
Five minutes later they were on the road, rolling south toward New Orleans as quickly as Emma could drive. Three times that night she was sure she’d get pulled over for a ticket, but every time the deadman sang and the policeman faded away with the distance in the night.
They got to New Orleans three hours before sunrise that next morning — but it was a long while before they found Lisa.
Memphis, Tennessee - September 1952
Robert Johnson felt like a burglar as he opened the door to his own home. He’d only been gone for hours, but that little wooden house down by the Memphis waterfront was already strange to him, and he felt like a trespasser to walk in without knocking.
“Ginny. . . ?” he called. “Baby, I got company, all right?”
His wife was upstairs with the baby. She was in bed as she’d been abed three days now, recovering from her labor.
“Is that you, Tom?” Robert Johnson’s wife called him Tom because that was how she knew him, as Hinky Tom.
“Yes, baby, it’s me. Are you decent for company? I got a friend here wants to meet you and baby Emma.”
“Come on up, Tom,” she said. “I’m pleased to meet your friend.”
Robert Johnson nodded to Furry Lewis, who was still out by the car, waiting to see if he were welcome. “It’s all right, Furry,” Johnson said. “C’mon on up. Door ain’t locked.” And then he hurried up the stairs to see his woman and his daughter, not bothering to look back and see if the other man followed him.
His wife Virginia smiled when she saw him — but only for a moment. Because it only took a moment to see the expression on her husband’s face. And that expression was a mask of fear and dread — the kind of countenance that passes from one love to another as though it were wildfire; as though it were some plague as contagious as the cough.
“What’s wrong, Tom?” Virginia asked, already half as frightened as her man.
“It’s come to something awful, Ginny,” he told her. “I come back to say goodbye.”
“Oh Tom,” Virginia said, and now she was a woman made of tears where before she’d been an angel made of gossamer and gold. “Tom.”
And what could Robert Johnson do? He went to her and wrapped his arms around her, and he told her that he always loved her and that he’d be back for her, no matter if the maw of Hell should devour him.
He didn’t mean it badly, but that oath was as false as it was sincere, profanely false, and it damned him as surely as the trueness of his song. Because it grew naturally from his love for his wife and child, it was a grave oath and a precious one; he loved his family too dearly ever to repent it.
Then like out of nowhere there came the sound of a throat clearing just behind them, and Robert Johnson whirled around to face the intrusion —
Which was Furry Lewis, come to call on them just as he’d been invited.
“You folks need some time alone? — I can wait in the car, if you like.”
Virginia raised a hand and eased her husband just far enough aside that she could look the visitor in the eye. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I want you to know my daughter.”
And then she lifted her sleeping infant in her arms and lifted her high enough for everyone to see. “Her name is Emma,” Virginia said. “She’s precious as the stars.”
New Orleans, Louisiana
The Present
When Emma and Leadbelly got to New Orleans the deadman told her they had to get a hotel room.
“I don’t understand,” Emma said. “What do we need with a hotel room? — I’m here to find my little girl, not to visit.”
“Your baby’s at the Mansion,” Leadbelly told her. “If you going to get yourself presented at the Mansion, you got to make yourself presentable.”
Presented? Presentable? — those were words that made no sense to Emma. “I saw a mansion in my dream,” Emma said. “I didn’t see no presentation.”
“Trust me,” Leadbelly said. And Emma shrugged and sighed and worried some, but she didn’t see how she had any choice but to do like he said.
So she trusted him.
Which was something that she never ever ever should have done.
They found a cheap and sleazy rendezvous motel a mile and a half south of New Orleans, and Emma checked them in as Mr. and Mrs. Smith. That was a mistake, just like the others, but it wasn’t the worst mistake she made that day — not by half.
There were two double beds in the room; Leadbelly went to the nearer one as soon as he got in the door. He sprawled himself out in the center and folded his arms behind his head and smiled like the cat who caught a jaybird.
“We might as well get some rest,” he said, still smiling. “They won’t have us down to the Mansion till after midnight.”
“Midnight,” Emma said. “Is that so?”
“It’s a natural fact.”
“I see,” Emma said. She pursed her lips. “Well, you go ahead and get some rest, then. I’m going to get myself a shower while I can.”
She carried her suitcase into the bathroom, turned on the hot water, and closed and locked the door behind her.
She took as long and hot a shower as she could bear to, but no matter how she washed herself she couldn’t scrub away the greasy gritty feeling all those days of travel had pressed into her skin.
I need to soak, she thought, and decided that she might as well. Pressed the drain lever and closed the shower valve to let hot water stream out the faucet into the tub, then eased her aching body down and put her tired feet up on the rim of the tub.
And rested soaking in the steamy water for hours till the bath went cool. Maybe she slept that way, or maybe she only rested numbly half awake; later on she was never sure.
When the water was cool enough to chill her, Emma lifted herself from the tub, dried herself and dressed in her warm flannel nightgown.
Gathered up her dirty clothes and left the bathroom to tuck herself beneath the warm soft blankets on the empty bed —
Only it didn’t work out like that. Because the moment she stepped out the bathroom door the deadman was all over her like a lover, touching her and whispering in her ear and making promises he never meant to keep.
“What are you doing?” Emma asked. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Baby,” Leadbelly said. “Oh baby. . . !”
Emma kneed hi
m, hard. The deadman groaned and went limp.
Fell to the floor, holding himself. Where he made the saddest sound, a piteous sound, almost — as if he weren’t the man who’d just damn near tried to force himself on her, but some poor mistreated child.
Emma ignored him. She stepped away, crossed the room to find her bed —
As the deadman glared up at her with eyes that glinted wildly, so full of lust and rage and indignation —
“You want me,” he said. “You know you do.”
Emma shook her head. “I don’t.”
He looked — like a predator about to leap. Like he was about to attack her, to grab her and rip off her clothes and have her whether she wanted him or not —
And then the promise of violence in his eyes began to fade.
“Baby. . . .”
“Don’t you ‘baby’ me,” Emma said.
“You want me to help you find your little girl or not?” Leadbelly asked.
Emma scowled at him. “Of course I want your help,” she said. “But I want you to keep your hands to yourself, too. If that means you won’t help me, then I’ll help myself.”
Leadbelly swore under his breath, but he didn’t raise a hand to her. He just sat there on the floor, glaring at Emma as she tucked herself beneath the covers and tried to settle off to sleep.
After a while he sulked away to his bed. When she heard him move Emma thought What am I doing here? I got no business sleeping in a room with a man like that. That was right, wasn’t it? She needed to get up and go out to the car, lock the doors and put the seat back and try to pretend she was someplace safe — but every time she got up to move she found herself still lying abed in the hotel room, and it was like she was in a dream, and then she realized that it was a dream, and she’d only got up and left that place a dreaming, not for real, and she got up and left only to discover that was a dream too, and on, and on. . . .
After a while the deadman seemed to sleep, and Emma thought that maybe it was safe here after all. But even as he slept Emma could feel his anger — all seething and bitter like the vapor from a man who’s met an insult he can’t deny or answer.
