by Alan Rodgers
The demon screamed for a long long time, smoking and burning all the while. Then finally it burned down into the sewage, and if it screamed in that filth there was no way to hear it anyhow, but it thrashed and thrashed in the filth and even if they didn’t hear the screaming they heard the sound of devil stumps splattering filthy water everywhere for a long time.
“Follow me,” Elvis said. “Keep singing.”
Dan followed and he sang, at least partly because he was too scared to do anything else. Polly followed, too, and she sang so beautiful, like an angel, Dan thought, but if she was an angel she was his angel out of Hell.
Elvis led them for miles through the reeking dark — through sewage and runoff and awful things growing in the dark, and now Dan smelled sulfur and he knew there were devils watching him, waiting in the dark to tear them limb from limb, and he sang hard and loud to keep them in the shadows, and they stayed there. . . .
Deeper and deeper into the filth and the dark till Dan thought they were crawling back down into Hell or maybe they’d never left Hell in the first place, and they were heading toward the fate that always waited for them —
— and then suddenly there was daylight at the far end of the sewer, pure true daylight like the most beautiful sunny day you ever saw, and Dan almost cried for joy but he didn’t dare, he didn’t dare stop singing because he knew the end was on them if he did.
When the light was almost close enough to touch, Elvis said, “It’s okay now,” and then, “We’re safe. You can stop.”
But the things Dan saw as they stepped out into the light didn’t make him feel safe at all.
Just the opposite, in fact.
One moment they were in the darkness where sunlight barely filtered around the last bend of the tunnel, and then they stepped around that final brilliant corner and saw the carnage just ahead of them where the sewer emptied out into a bayou.
The bayou was an unholy wreck. Its water ran brilliant red with blood, and the swamp forest all around hung torn to shreds of leaf and wood and vine.
In the center of it all was the desecrated shrine.
The bayou and the shrine scared him worse than anything had scared him since that last night in LA, scared him worse than Detroit or the Lady or anything he ever saw in Hell, not just because of the destruction, not just because of the fuming stinking devil carcasses strewn across the scene, the thing that scared him worst of all was the desecration. It was a holy place, that shrine, something beautiful and glorious and true that spoke about the nature of creation, and something vast and powerful had harnessed great energies to destroy it.
At the center of the destruction lay three bodies Dan recognized before he even saw them. The tall, dark man was Robert Johnson. The bloody disfigured woman beside him was Our Lady of Sorrows, Santa Barbara.
And before them both was the body of an infant child.
Dan ached worst of all to see the murdered child. It was beaten and battered and bruised, cut from end to end and covered in blood. What hideous beast would stoop to murdering children, Dan wondered — and then he saw the blood wasn’t the child’s blood at all, it was the yellow pus-thick blood that seeps from the corpses of demons, and it wasn’t leaking from the child’s wounds but covering her hands.
“I think she’s still alive,” Polly said.
“They’re all alive,” dead Elvis said. “They’ll recover, anyway. Robert Johnson and the baby both died before. The Santa is an angel.”
Dan glanced at the Santa and he thought Elvis is out of his mind, because the Lady wasn’t just dead, she was a bloody mass of dismembered parts, sinews and arteries and long strings of torn gut strewn quivering in every direction. “Are you sure?” Dan asked.
“Watch closely,” Elvis said. “Even in its desecration, this is still her shrine. If you watch carefully enough you’ll see its manna knit her back together.”
Dan didn’t believe that for a moment, but he didn’t bother to argue. There wasn’t time. Because the mangled baby had begun to come around, and as she woke Dan took her in his arms to hold her, to comfort her —
To try, anyway. Only it didn’t work out like he meant, not at all. Because something shifted in the baby’s gut-wound as Dan lifted her, and the baby screamed! in agony and started flailing —
— and then she swore.
Swore like a truck driver, or worse than that, and for a long hard moment Dan thought he’d took a devil in his arms to comfort, and he like to scream but he was too scared. As the baby flailed and writhed and hit Dan upside the head, so strong, her tiny fists as cruel as rail spikes driven by the hammer that rang like a bell, Dan lifted the child in his arms, lifted it above his head to hold it at arms’ length, and the tiny baby screamed at him all outrage and frustration, “Put me down, God damn you,” she swore, “put me down or I’ll hurt you like you never hurt before.”
And what could Dan do? He set the baby down as Polly and the deadman watched him, and they laughed ha ha ha oh what a joke and Dan wanted to ask them what was so damn funny but he was afraid that if he did it’d get the baby started on him all over again.
“I’m sorry,” Dan said. “I didn’t mean you any harm.”
The baby made a derisive noise. “Keep your big hands to yourself,” she said. “If I want you acting like my mama, I’ll ask you for your help.”
Robert Johnson groaned on the far side of the shrine. Dan looked up to see him moving, twitching, almost, almost as though he were alive no matter how his spine was twisted backward on itself.
“The Eye,” someone whispered, and Dan thought that was Robert Johnson but it wasn’t, it wasn’t him at all, it was a woman’s voice, not Polly someone else and then Dan realized that the voice came from the quivering heap of twisted flesh that once had been the Santa. “You need to gather up the fragments of the Eye. Quickly! There’s only an hour of daylight left. They can’t touch you here while the sun still shines. But the night belongs to Hell.”
“I’ll find them,” the baby said. She didn’t hesitate a moment; she waded out through the running sewage, into the bayou jungle. As she waded through the filth dirty water ran through her open wounds, and Dan wanted to say, Little girl, be careful, that water there is filthy you’re going to get a terrible infection, and he might have done it, too, but Polly put her hand on Dan’s arm and shook her head.
“You’ve got to let her show you,” Polly said. “She saw it all. She knows what to look for.”
Polly was right about that, too. The baby tromped purposely into the broken thicket, stooped, and spent a moment sifting through the debris — and when she stood again she held in her hands the most fabulous jewel Dan had ever seen.
More beautiful than anything he’d ever imagined; more forbidding than his most frightful nightmare.
“The Eye of the World,” Polly said.
Dead Elvis fell to his knees and began to pray.
“That’s it?” Dan asked. “That’s the Eye of the World?”
Polly shook her head. “Only a fragment,” she said. “You’d know it if you saw the whole.”
“We need to help her find the rest, don’t we? — that’s what the Lady said, we had to find it all before dark.”
Polly shook her head. “The girl knows,” she said. “Stand away and let her work.”
As Polly spoke the girl carried the glittering jewel through the sewer, and set it before the Lady’s still-quivering remains. When the girl had trudged back into the sewage Polly crossed herself.
Elvis kept praying. Prayed so hard and clear and true that for a moment Dan thought he’d repented the things that damned him to the world and Hell — but maybe not, because no salvation ever came for him.
Or maybe salvation did come for poor dead Elvis Presley. But if it did it came for all of them. And it was a long long time coming.
T
he French Quarter of New Orleans
The Present
When they got past the French Quarter Emma saw big clouds of smoke off to her right, and she got a dreadful feeling. Part of her didn’t want to confirm it, but another part — the part she could never deny — had to know for certain. She didn’t have a choice, not really; she took a right, a left, and then a right again, and there they were, just as she’d dreaded — fire trucks all crowded up in front of New Orleans City Hall.
“What you doing, woman?” dead Leadbelly asked, huffing angrily. But he knew — Emma could tell.
“That isn’t any accident,” Emma said.
Leadbelly frowned, and looked away — and as Emma followed the line of his gaze she saw that there were fires starting everywhere around them, everywhere. Flickering flames here, there, half the buildings in the Quarter starting to catch fire. . . .
“We better get out of here,” Leadbelly said. “This whole damn Quarter’s going up.”
It was easier to say that than it was to do it. Traffic was stopped dead by City Hall, and backed up even worse down the one way to their left.
But there wasn’t any traffic at all coming toward them on the one-way. So Emma did the only thing she could — downshifted as she slammed her foot down on the gas and banked hard right, trying to run the one-way before some fool could turn head-on into them, but it didn’t work. They didn’t get halfway down the block before Emma heard the siren and saw the flashes of light from the fire truck’s strobe; before she had time to react the truck was turning to barrel down on them, head-on, slam, crash, it was going to run them down —
And Emma panicked.
Where she should have tried to drive the Buick into a driveway or up onto the sidewalk, her leg twitched almost involuntarily, pushing her foot all the way down onto the accelerator and there was nowhere to go with the Buick’s engine roaring to life, nowhere but into the tiny gap of road between the truck’s left fender and the left edge of the road, but there wasn’t room that way, no room at all, no room for an old full-size car like the Buick —
— no room —
But they made it, somehow. Maybe the gap was wider than it looked, or maybe the Grace of God found them for a reason, or maybe, maybe, maybe God knew what, but they made it through, just barely. Just before they finished passing the truck the Buick’s left side scraped the back end of the fire truck and sent them rebounding into the curb so hard it was a wonder their tires didn’t separate from their rims —
And then they were out on the street, past the truck, hanging a hard right away from City Hall, and never mind the sparks that rose up off the tire rims, trying to set the car afire; if Emma let those worry her she would have gone hysterical.
Four blocks back toward the river with fires breaking out all around them in the Quarter, and then right again for an eight-block dash to the Pontchartrain Expressway.
Up on the highway, and they were safe running for their lives.
They would have made it, too.
Would have got themselves clear of New Orleans and the Hell descending all around it, but something went so wrong.
So wrong!
Before they got halfway to Metairie, they came to barricades, and half an army of National Guards enforcing them with tanks and half-tracks and APCs, like to blow them off the road, Emma thought, and if their guns hadn’t glittered oh so bright Emma would have tried to run the barricade, she really wanted out of there that bad.
But she didn’t run, because she knew it wasn’t any use. Even if she’d managed to jam the Buick past the Guards and the big guns and the tanks and armored cars, she would have run headlong into the fire consuming the highway half a mile down the road — it was serious, serious stuff, that fire, a military convoy that’d wrecked and caught fire, burning wild and out of control, and if she could have run the fire the toxic fumes from the smoke would have killed her anyway. Serious stuff, that fire, and it wasn’t getting anything but worse.
And even if Emma couldn’t know what lay ahead of that road, she knew trouble when she saw it, and she knew what to avoid; when the National Guardswoman with the bright red armbands waved her off the highway, Emma went where she was directed.
Into an awful traffic jam of local streets, and she tried and tried to figure how she was going to run for her life, but there were too damn many cars all around them and the fire was on them, too, there were hints of fire everywhere and any second now the whole damn place was going up.
Any second.
There was nowhere to go. No way to get there, anyhow. But Emma didn’t stop trying, because she knew she didn’t dare. She had to, she had to — she had to think, that was what it was. She had to pull the car off the road and look at the map in the glove box and think.
Think.
Off the road and out of the traffic that was hardly moving anyway, into the parking lot of a weathered-looking Kmart. She found a parking spot up near the front, parked, cut the engine, and sighed.
Her hands were trembling, she realized. She wasn’t sure how long they’d been like that — so long she couldn’t remember when it started.
“What you doing?” Leadbelly asked.
“Trying to figure where we going to go,” Emma told him. “I got to look at the map. You want to hand it to me? It’s in the glove.”
The deadman popped the glove-compartment latch and handed her the map. Emma took it, opened it — spread it out and tried to figure where they were.
Where they were was lost, damn near.
“Late afternoon,” Leadbelly said. “You want to get back on the road. We don’t get out of here before the sun goes down, we ain’t getting out of here at all.”
Emma bit her lip. “I’m not leaving this town till we find my little girl,” she said.
Leadbelly scowled. “Your little girl is done for,” he said. “Ain’t nothing you can do for her.”
Emma swore. “You’re wrong,” she said. “Just wrong, is all.”
“Then you better find her before sundown. Or you ain’t never going to find her at all.”
Emma looked back and forth across the map, trying to figure where she had to go. Out on the left end of the map were the new suburbs, places like Kenner and Metairie, and the New Orleans International Airport. On the right — east by southeast along the river — was Arabi, the run-down little town where they’d spent that night in the motel. . . .
Someone shouted, and Emma looked up to see a couple bickering near the entrance to the store.
“They’re here,” Leadbelly said. “They’re everywhere.”
“What do you mean?”
“Keep watching. You’ll see.”
He was right, too. For as Emma watched the couple their bickering intensified, till now the woman reached into her shopping bag, drew out a gleaming brass curtain rod, and struck her husband with it.
Emma gasped. Leadbelly just laughed, and Emma thought that was the cruelest thing. “Mind your humor,” Emma said. “She’s going to put that poor man in the hospital.” She opened the car door, and started to get out to rush to the man’s side to pull his wife away and stop things before somebody got themselves killed, but before she could get halfway out of the car the deadman took her arm and held her back. She looked back over her shoulder to see him shake his head at her.
“You don’t want to get involved,” he said. “This is devil-work. That man is lucky — the metal stick his wife has got is hollow. Look, look — it’s broke in half already, and he ain’t so much the worse for it.”
Emma started to object, but Leadbelly took his hand off her arm and held it up to silence her. Pointed at the couple, and Emma saw the woman looking stunned and appalled at her own behavior, look how her jaw hung slack, look how her husband looked so dumbstruck. . . .
“You think it would’ve gone any bette
r with you there in the middle of things? I swear to you it wouldn’t.”
The South Side of Chicago
The Present
That evening dead Stevie Ray Vaughan called Furry Lewis in Chicago.
“Did you see the news?” Vaughan asked. “New Orleans.”
“I don’t need no TV news,” Furry Lewis told him. “I can feel it in my bones.”
Vaughan didn’t answer right away. He never did, where it came to knowing things you can’t set eyes upon, but that was Vaughan for you. “You want me to call Red?”
“Red knows,” Furry Lewis said. “He’s going to meet me here this evening.”
Another silence that went on and on. “You need me?”
Furry Lewis sighed. “You know I do, Stevie Ray.”
“Okay,” Vaughan said. And then, because the silence got so large he felt it himself, he added, “I had to ask.”
Furry Lewis laughed real gentle, not derisory at all. “You always think you do, Stevie Ray. But it isn’t so. You ought to learn to listen to your heart.”
Vaughan didn’t like that kind of talk — he never did, not when he was alive nor after he had died. He answered as directly as he could. “I don’t want to hear about it,” he said. “I’ll catch the next bus out of here.”
Bayou Country
Near Arabi, Louisiana
The Present
The baby gathered seven interlocking jewels and set them each in turn before the carcass of the Lady. It took a long, long time — hours, it seemed like, but maybe that was just the way it seemed. Dan wanted to wade out into the filth and help the child search, but every time he even thought about it Polly frowned at him and shook her head. Dan hated that. Bad enough she wanted to stop him, but did she have to know him even when he only thought about things like that? Sometimes she even seemed to know before he did himself, and she’d take his hand and squeeze it and shake her head just so slightly, and Dan would realize she was right, and he was about to step out from the shrine on an impulse he didn’t even realize, and he had to stop — he didn’t know why. Maybe there was something in him? There were devils all around them, he could tell, and maybe some of them were called temptation.
