Bone Music

by Alan Rodgers

  So brave, that Huddie Ledbetter. Brave and venal and foolish, all those things at once. He sliced the Devil’s throat, and kept on cutting; tore his Devil head clean off, so it rolled onto the floor, and picked the thrashing body off the Devil throne and heaved it half across the room.

  Someone screamed, and someone else screamed, and Leadbelly said to Emma Henderson “Girl we better run,” and Emma took it kindly because even if she wasn’t any girl she liked it when a body thought she was one.

  “This way,” Emma said. “I saw a door behind that curtain.”

  The Fallen City Firgard

  Hell

  Timeless

  We need to clear the passage,” dead Elvis said. “This water feeds into the shrine that holds the Eye of the World. The Eye got broken years ago; it’s the water that holds its lens together.”

  Dan stared at him blankly.

  “The lens is all that separates Hell from the world. If the basin goes dry, the Eye is broken again — and God only knows what will happen.”

  As he spoke, Elvis waded into the water and began shoveling great handfuls of mud and debris away from the aperture. After a moment Polly waded in after him, and started shoveling, too.

  “C’mon, Dan Alvarez,” Polly said, “we need you here. You have to help.”

  And what could Dan do? He waded into the spring and started hauling broken stones out of the water.

  It went quickly, with three of them working; in a few moments they’d all but cleared the aperture.

  “I need some help with this one,” Elvis said. He was braced against the boulder that half-blocked the aperture, trying to lift it and not having any luck.

  “All right,” Dan said — and he stooped to press against the boulder, heaved —

  And Polly screamed.

  “Not that way!” Elvis shouted as Dan heaved the great stone, rolling it up and over the aperture —

  Elvis tried to stop him.

  He really did.

  But by the time he did it was too late. The great stone already rested on the aperture, and now there came the sound of twisting roots and collapsing soil as the great stone’s weight crushed the stream passage, blocking it entirely.

  As spring water roiled up to flood the square.

  As the sky went dark and the Hellstones screamed and night collapsed into the day.

  The Shrine of the Repentance of Shungó

  Blue Hell

  Timeless

  Lisa stood at the edge of the brook that cut across Blue Hell, staring into the water. Staring at the basin as the water that fed it slowed and slowed now to a trickle.

  Stared at the lens that was the Eye of the World.

  For a moment, now, the Eye swirled open, and Lisa could see through it — it looked out onto a bluff in Tennessee, and Lisa knew that bluff, but she couldn’t remember where she knew it from, maybe from a dream. When she looked close she could see the lens was broken, and that the water held it whole.

  But every moment that passed the water was lower, lower, till now it hardly covered the Eye of the World.

  “Fifty years ago,” Robert Johnson said, “I sang to the Eye of the World. I broke it, damn near. It would have broke, too — but the Santa heard me sing, and she went to the Eye and held it whole.

  “She held the shards in place, but she couldn’t mend them back together. When the Devil broke it again, she hid it here in the water where no evil thing can go. But the water’s drying, now, and the Devil knows. Every devil in Hell knows. They’re waiting, out there in the brush — waiting for the stream to dry.”

  Lisa turned to the Santa. “What can we do?” she asked. “We’ve got to stop them, don’t we? That’s why you came for me, isn’t it?”

  The Santa frowned. She looked very sad.

  “No, child,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do to contain them.”

  As the last trickle of water in the stream ran dry.

  And the loa descended upon them.

  The Fallen City Firgard

  Hell

  Timeless

  Polly screamed as Dan and Elvis scrambled, trying to push the stone away from the collapsing passage, and now the sky flickered dark and white and blue and bright as Hell came tumbling down around them, and the city metamorphosed, and somewhere so so close an infant child screamed in mortal terror for her life.

  As Hell came true to the world, and the barrier that pares damnation from the toil of mankind collapsed around them.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Elvis swore. “Oh Sweet Jesus we’re too late.”

  As Hell became New Orleans.

  The Mansion Called Defiance

  As Hell Becomes New Orleans

  The Present

  The whole Mansion started shaking as Emma and Leadbelly ran for the door. It was an earthquake, Emma thought, but everybody knows you don’t get earthquakes in New Orleans, and you don’t get them in Hell, either, do you?

  But the walls shook and the floors shook and great pillars tottered all around them as Emma pulled the curtain away from the side door and ran like hell.

  Ran like hell.

  Down a long, musty corridor, and now she realized this was the Mansion’s basement, there, that door was the Mansion’s wine vault and now ahead of her the root cellar, and Emma said “What the hell are we going to do?”

  And Leadbelly said “We’re going to run, that’s what,” as he pushed past her into the root cellar all dark and musty, and everything here smelled of dust and soil —

  “It’s too dark in here,” Emma shouted, stumbling through a pile of something soft and wet and unidentifiable.

  “Come on, damn it,” Leadbelly said, rushing through the dark as though he knew where he was going.

  As thunder blasted and blasted all around the Mansion.

  “I can’t,” Emma insisted. “I can’t see where I’m going!” And as she said that she ran smack into a post, bruising her face, damn near knocking her off her feet. Maybe she started crying then, or maybe not; later on she wasn’t sure when the crying started.

  “You’ve got to get up,” Leadbelly shouted. “The stairs are over here. You coming or aren’t you?”

  As a dozen voices screamed in the hall behind them.

  “I’m coming!” Emma shouted, trying to find her balance, trying to disentangle herself from the post, trying to figure out which way through the dark —

  As the latch Leadbelly was pounding on broke free and hinges screeched and Leadbelly threw open the cellar door.

  And sunlight flooded the root cellar.

  “This way,” Leadbelly shouted.

  But he didn’t need to say so. Nobody had to tell Emma Henderson twice — not once she’d seen the light.

  The Fallen City Tumbling to Earth

  In Arabi, Louisiana

  Near the New Orleans City Line

  The Present

  As they worked, trying to reopen the stream, the Fallen City metamorphosed around them. Dan was working so hard trying to open up the aperture that he hardly saw it happening around him — but he felt it, all the same. The fetid Hellish air gusted away to be replaced by the blustery wet wind that roils through New Orleans just before a storm; and now it began to rain fat wet tropical droplets like you get every afternoon along the Gulf of Mexico. Gulls cawed in the air around them, and Dan knew it was too late — he knew that no matter what happened to the stream, the transformation was complete, and nothing he could do would ever change it.

  “I need help again,” dead Elvis said.

  Dan looked up to see the deadman braced against a great slab of rock — it looked as though it’d once been the roof of the passage, but now it was fallen into the water.

  “From me?”

  The deadman nodded. “Be
careful this time,” he said. “We need to wedge it from here,” he pointed at the edge of the slab that was nearest to his feet, “and roll it there.”

  Dan did as the deadman asked him — bent, heaved, lifted as dead Elvis pushed and guided the stone —

  And something went wrong.

  So wrong.

  Where Dan had expected the resurgence of the stream to push the shadow of the world away, it did the opposite — every solitary thing around them transformed as the water burst through the reopened passage. The Fallen City disappeared around them, as though they’d never stood inside it, and Hell subsided as though they’d never sailed the River Styx to reach the Lake of Fire.

  Where a moment before they’d stood in the ruins of an enchanted fountain, now they stood in the wash from a broken fire hydrant, staring down into the pipes of a crumbling sewer.

  “Something’s wrong,” Dan said. “This isn’t Hell anymore. It’s, it’s — where is this?”

  But he knew where he was.

  Just as he’d known where he was going all along, from the moment he first climbed hobolike onto the boxcar, and there was the sign, right there beside the dusty weather-beaten road:

  Welcome to the City of New Orleans

  The Devil’s Quarter of New Orleans

  The Present

  They’d run half a mile before it came to Emma that they were back where they’d started that day — in the Devil’s Quarter of New Orleans. It was an understandable mistake, some ways; this part of the city had collapsed on itself years before. The houses and the shops were gone, rotted to mulch or razed by fire, and even the streets were sandy and overgrown with brush.

  She stopped, set a hand on Leadbelly’s shoulder, and asked him to wait.

  But Leadbelly wasn’t having none of that. “What do you mean, woman?” he asked her. “They right behind us, don’t you know? You better watch out. They kill you if they can.”

  Emma looked over her shoulder at the Mansion half a mile back. She didn’t see anyone or anything coming after them, but she could feel it, all right — something big and terrible, not just something, not just one, but — hundreds.

  “What are they?”

  “The loa,” Leadbelly said. “Devils. Come on! They’re getting closer.” He pulled her wrist — but Emma stood her ground, and pulled him back.

  “We need to get the car,” Emma said. “We can’t run far enough or fast enough to get away from the Devil. But maybe we can drive.”

  Leadbelly scowled, and for a moment he looked like he was about to argue with her — and then there came the sound of footsteps from exactly the direction he was about to run toward, and Emma screamed and they both stopped thinking. They just ran, was all, ran for their lives as some hungry thing chased them, roaring, fetid rotting breath so close Emma could smell it, so intense the smell like to make her ill, and Emma screamed.

  Not thinking, not planning, not doing anything at all but running for their lives, but they couldn’t have run better if they’d tried, because there was the car, the battered old Buick waiting for them like the answer to a prayer.

  “Get in the car,” Leadbelly shouted. “Get the engine running.”

  And then he did the bravest thing Emma ever saw.

  He turned to face the thing that hunted them.

  Hauled his fist back and struck the awful thing that Emma couldn’t see, but when he struck it it bled profusely, and the blood was plain to see.

  Blood everywhere on the demon, covering its reptilian hide like paint that spattered everywhere, and everywhere it touched the ground it burst afire.

  For three long moments as Emma hurried toward the car, the demon reeled from the blow Leadbelly struck it. But then it found its legs, and lunged at the hoodoo King —

  But by the time it reached him Leadbelly was gone, running for his life down along the river road.

  Emma found her keys and jammed them into the door; unlocked it, climbed behind the wheel, started the ignition, and got that vehicle in motion.

  I’ll catch up with them, Emma thought. Let him jump onto the hood and drive us both away.

  Only it didn’t work out like that, and it never works out like that, because it never does, nobody can jump onto the hood of a moving car without stumbling and getting run over by the tires, and Emma saw that as she got close behind them. It just wasn’t going to work, and no matter how long she followed in the car it wasn’t going to work, and if she didn’t do something real fast the devil would have its hands around Leadbelly’s throat, and it’d rip him limb from limb from limb —

  And Emma did the only thing she could think of doing.

  She stepped on the gas, and crushed the devil under the heavy chrome-plate bumper of her battered Buick.

  It made the most disgusting sound. Hideous — a nightmare screaming sound as the Buick crushed its unearthly flesh and bones, and great ugly sulfurous clouds rose up from under the Buick, and Emma thought she’d set the car afire but no, no, it was running fine as she could please, and then tumble tumble crunch the devil corpse passed under the car, and Emma hit the brakes, put the Buick in reverse, and rolled back over the smoking carcass for good measure.

  When it was passed back under the front Emma stopped the car again, and spent the longest moment staring at the thing she’d killed, feeling dirty, foul as a murderer, awful, awful, how could she kill like that?

  Leadbelly climbed into the passenger seat.

  After a while he whispered, “We better go,” and Emma knew he was right, because there had to be more like that coming for them now, any moment now descending on them —

  And she put the car in gear, and drove back toward New Orleans.

  After a while Leadbelly said, “We shouldn’t be here.”

  That took a while to sink through. But when it finally did it scared the hell out of Emma.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “That cellar door doesn’t lead back to the world,” he said. “It comes out in the garden of the Mansion — the one that looks over the Lake of Fire.”

  The Fallen City Come to Earth

  Arabi, Louisiana

  Near the New Orleans City Line

  The Present

  Dead Elvis took a flashlight from the pocket of his vest and gestured at the open sewer. “We’ve got to follow it,” he said. “No matter what it is.”

  Dan looked at the deadman and the sewer and back at the deadman again, and he wanted to say You’re out of your mind. He almost said it, too. But there was something in Elvis’s voice that told him not to argue, and told him that the deadman was right.

  “Where are we going?” Dan asked.

  Polly put her hand on Dan’s shoulder. “The shrine,” she said.

  Dan turned to face her, confused. “Shrine? I don’t understand.”

  Polly blinked; she looked — dumbfounded. But why would that question confound her?

  After a moment Elvis cleared his throat. “The Shrine of the Repentance of Shungó.”

  “The Lady,” Polly said. “We’ve got to go to the Lady’s place.”

  Dead Elvis was already halfway down the sewer hole.

  “Ain’t no Lady in that sewer,” Dan said. But even as he said it he knew that he was wrong.

  Polly grimaced. “Be quiet, Dan,” she said. “This ain’t the time to argue.”

  As she climbed down the stinking hole after the deadman, Dan shouted after her — “Come back,” he shouted. “Come back, damn it!”

  But she didn’t pay him any mind, and maybe that was for the best. Because there wasn’t anything real in Dan’s reaction. The whole notion of crawling through the sewers disgusted him, and he was afraid of what he’d find there, and, and —

  — and he kicked the dirt and cursed and shouted five long minutes
after his companions disappeared into the sewer. But when he heard a scream from somewhere deep down in the earth, Dan Alvarez didn’t hesitate.

  Not for an instant.

  He went down the manhole ladder faster than he could have fallen, and kept running, running like a devil through the slog and the shit and the filth that grew all along the sewer walls, ran so far so fast that he was sure he’d gone a wrong turn, sure he had to turn back the way he came and run in the opposite direction —

  And then Polly screamed again, so close Dan could almost taste the sound of her, and Dan rounded a corner to find her, to find them both, Polly and dead Elvis beset by devils and all but overrun, big powerful devils who towered above them like carnivorous giants, slashing with great razorous claws and fangs, and it was bad, so bad, blood and battery everywhere, Polly and Elvis had nothing to fight back with but their bare hands and the flashlight swinging back and forth across the tunnel, light arcing back and forth to graze the blood and the horrors glinting red and hateful in the broken dark —

  Their hands, the flashlight, and their song.

  No, not their song — Polly’s song. Elvis wasn’t singing, and no matter how they needed him to sing he wouldn’t, but Polly sang so fine, sang “John Henry” right and true with all the words and verses nobody can record, and her words and her music were so powerful and true that they set the devils away from her, and near kept them at bay.

  When she came to the chorus Dan joined her, and as he did the pathetic flashlight in Elvis’s hands became a saber made of light, so brilliant and bright it lit the sewer damn near white as day, and brighter than that now as the devil caught inside the light screamed in burning agony and tried to run but couldn’t run, the sword-light burned its legs away in great sulfur-fuming clouds of smoke, Dan choked and damn near started hacking when it rushed into his face, but he held the cough back no matter how it hurt because he knew he didn’t dare stop singing and the burning demon screamed hideously in agony, screamed a nightmare sound that haunted Dan for all his life and on into eternity that sound so hideous to hear went on and on as the other demons broke and ran. . . .