by Alan Rodgers
He was on the far side of the car, leaning against his window, staring into space, and the breathing wasn’t coming from his direction anyway.
It was coming from outside the car.
Emma didn’t have to think to realize they were in some awful kind of trouble; she reached for the keys to start the ignition, turned, turned and the car’s engine rolled over but it didn’t catch. Stole a glance over her shoulder as she pumped the gas pedal, one, two, three, and dear God sweet Jesus there were eyes out there staring at her, wide enormous eyes the size of plates and bloodshot yellow. Emma screamed she tried to start the car but it wouldn’t start, wouldn’t effing start, the engine was flooding oh God no no no —
As the glass beside her shattered, and some awful thing dragged her from her seat.
Through the shattered window as shards of glass shredded her blouse, gouged her arms, her breasts, but she hardly felt it, she screamed, flailed wild with her fists as she saw teeth like carving knives glitter in the moonlight —
And she knew she was going to die, and she knew that there was no hope in the world, and she could have gone limp defeated as the awful thing devoured her but that wasn’t Emma, she tried to fight so long as she could —
— kicked —
— and hit.
Something.
Hit something soft and wet.
The toe of her right shoe, oh Christ her foot was in it up to the ankle what was that stuff no, no, no, no —
— as the devil roared, doubled over, dropped her —
Emma tried to run.
She really tried.
But it wasn’t that easy. Her foot was stuck in, in, she didn’t know what. She didn’t want to know, and then it was free, but it was, it felt, oh God she was on fire, wasn’t she?
And all she managed to do was stumble a few hysterical steps as the thing came up looking for her with a vengeance.
It got her, too.
And it killed her, long and slow and painfully. . . .
Caught her by the back collar of her dress as Emma tried to run, raised her high above its grinding jaws teeth gleaming like a thousand sabers, vapor rising up like the stink of death dear Lord that was its breath as it lowered Emma into the crushing maw —
As the talons that held Emma released her, and she dropped into the pit —
No.
No no no no.
It didn’t happen like that, no matter how Emma thought it did.
Oh, the talons released her, and Emma fell screaming to her death, but something went wrong on the way down, and suddenly she was on the ground, hitting the pavement hard shoulders first, and suddenly a mountain of fetid meat fell beside her, and she looked up disoriented to see Leadbelly. He had his switchblade out again, and it was gleaming in the moonlight, awful ichorous stuff drizzling along the edge, from the point —
“Leadbelly,” she said. She was crying, wasn’t she? Yes, she was sobbing, trembling. . . .
“I told you I’d do right by you. You believe me now, Emma Henderson?”
Emma didn’t have an answer. She didn’t have words, didn’t have — didn’t have the presence of mind to comprehend the question.
“Come on,” he said, taking her arm, helping her to her feet. “We got to get out of here before another boogey man can find us.”
Bayou Country, Jefferson Parish
The Present
There were boneyard vapors at the crossroads, directing them to the left, and they almost went that way. But before they did Furry Lewis pulled over to the edge of the road and parked the car and cut the engine. Got out of his seat and left the car to approach the crossroads on foot.
There he faced the ghosts, and held them to an interlocution; and when he did he learned they meant him ill.
He came back to the car shaking his head.
“They’re trying to direct us into a trap,” Furry Lewis said. “I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it. I’m going the other way.”
Vaughan frowned. He gestured at the map. “That’s going to take us a long way from New Orleans,” he said. “Maybe hours away.”
Furry Lewis hesitated. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe we ought to run the trap.”
Red opened his eyes again when he heard that. And spoke very softly, but with a sureness that chilled Vaughan to the bone. “No,” he said. “That’s wrong. Bear left, here. Follow the road with your heart.”
And who could argue with that? Furry Lewis said, “If you’re sure, Red, that’s what we’ll do.” Vaughan shook his head, but he didn’t say a word.
The swamp road led them southeast among the bayous, in the general direction of the river’s outlet to the sea. A couple times Vaughan wanted to say, Wait, this is wrong, we’re going way the hell out of our way, but he knew that was wrong, because it was only sense, and the real path was a thing like Red told them — it was a thing you had to follow through your heart.
Swamps and bayous on both sides of the road, and now and then murky-looking pinewoods. And then suddenly there was a big abandoned pepper plantation off to their left, and Vaughan saw a man in a uniform, and the moment that he saw that man his heart knew of him.
“Pull over,” he said, “You’ve got to pull into that farm on the left.”
“I see him,” Furry Lewis said. “You think I could miss a man like that?”
But that was a question that wasn’t what it seemed, because the truth was that till that moment Furry Lewis had failed to notice him entirely; and that was strange, and partly frightful, too.
“I dreamed about him in the air,” Red said. “That’s Robert Brown — known generally as Washboard Sam — flesh and bone.”
“I know it is,” Furry Lewis said. “You think I don’t know Sam?” As he asked that question he pulled into the plantation’s driveway, and followed the driveway’s left branch back toward the place where Washboard Sam stood guard.
Nobody answered the question. They all knew the answer.
When they got to there they found Washboard Sam leaning on a fencepost. His uniform was a security guard uniform, and he was the law in that place as much as there was one.
There was Magic all around him, buzzing in the air with a strange electric intensity. When he looked Stevie Ray Vaughan in the eye the deadman’s lifeless heart began to beat.
“I never heard you, Sam,” Furry Lewis said. He looked — amazed. Stunned. And it only makes sense that he’d be amazed, after all; for all the years since the great King died, he was the one who kept the tradition; first when he was alive and then after he passed on. After Elvis died refusing the burden and the legacy, Furry Lewis came upon the Dominion his own self. If the world were upright Furry Lewis would have heard the music anytime a deadman sang it in the river kingdom.
But it wasn’t right. And that wasn’t news; it hadn’t been right in a long, long time.
“It’s in the nature of the times,” Washboard Sam said. “The music doesn’t carry like it should.”
Furry Lewis allowed as that was so.
That was when Red opened the back door and pushed himself out of the Cadillac. Stood beside it on uncertain legs, leaning against the side of the car to steady himself.
“The Lady sang to me, Sam,” he said. “All the way down in Hell, she was, and she sang to me as I lay deathly in the air.”
Washboard Sam didn’t say a word. He didn’t look pleased to listen, either.
“She told me where to find you, Sam. And she told me to bring you with us.”
Vaughan wanted to ask what else she’d told him, but he knew it was the wrong moment.
“Is that so?” Sam asked.
“It’s a fact,” Red said. He held up a trembling hand, as though he were taking an oath. “I swear it is.”
“Where she sending
you?”
“New Orleans,” Furry Lewis said.
Vaughan shook his head. “Hell,” he said, and he didn’t mean it as an expletive.
Washboard Sam laughed. “That’s wrong,” he said. “You can’t go anyplace you already are.”
And that was exactly true, Vaughan realized when he looked around him — the pepper, the woods, the swamps, everything around there took a demonic cast, and when he looked closely at the plantation around him he began to wonder if it was a place dragged up from Hell, or a worldly place possessed.
And then he thought, It’s not a worldly farm at all, it’s something from damnation — but he wasn’t sure as he should be.
“You’ll help us?” Vaughan asked. “We need you if you can.”
Sam frowned. “I will,” he said.
The Devil’s Quarter of New Orleans
The Present
The way back into the city led through the Devil’s Quarter, and that was a frightful thing. Under the light of the blood-red moon what should have been the ruins of the worst part of the city were ruins of another place entirely — Dan Alvarez recognized them as the Lady led them out of the bayous.
They were the ruins of the Fallen City, and Dan had walked among them before — just hours ago, when he and Polly and dead Elvis had crawled out of the fiery waters of the Bosphorus of Hell.
“I’m afraid,” Dan whispered into Polly’s ear. “There are devils everywhere.”
Polly took his hand and squeezed it. She said, “Sing,” but she didn’t sound reassuring.
At least partly because she couldn’t be. Oh, the devils kept their distance as Robert Johnson sang and played his guitar; as the baby Lisa played her toy kazoo; and when Dan sang with them they stayed even farther back. But Dan knew it couldn’t be that easy to disarm the Legions of the Damned, and he was right.
For as they crossed the Devil’s Quarter, the damned grew thicker and thicker around them, till now as they reached the Devil’s Mansion a vast and seething mob surrounded them, and if their song had paused a moment the horde would have consumed them in a moment.
Robert Johnson sang “Let Your Light Shine on Me,” just as Blind Willie sang it, and the mob gave way again and again — until they reached the great lawn before the Mansion.
When they reached that place the mob stood its ground, and for a long moment Dan Alvarez thought they’d reached their end. There were so many of them! Thousands and thousands of them, devils and damned men and women with hearts as black as the starless sky, and every moment a thousand more welled up through the doors and windows of the Mansion, and soon the thick of them would press in upon them. . . .
“Make way,” the Lady demanded. “Make way or I will make it through you.”
But the damned horde did not yield.
Not even when the Lady drew her great fiery sword, and leveled it; not even as great flowers of fire bloomed out of it, piercing the night.
Instead of yielding the mob surged toward them —
For Lisa it was like this:
One moment she was standing terrified behind the Lady, half certain that the Santa could protect her no matter what might come, half convinced that it was hopeless, and the demonic bloody hungry mob would overrun them in a moment, tearing them limb from limb from limb, and now the great red-eyed doglike thing thundered out of the crowd, bearing down on her, and she screamed. and screamed again as its shoulder slammed into Dan Alvarez, throwing the poor man half a dozen yards, and now the demon’s great black-taloned left arm shot toward her like a club made out of hard sulfurous flesh, grabbing her by the hair to lift her off her feet, and she thought her scalp would tear away from her skull, and it hurt, hurt, and tiny baby Lisa who wasn’t any baby down inside tiny baby Lisa screamed as the demon swung her ‘round and ‘round its canine head —
And suddenly there was fire all around her, and Lisa fell hard on her back. At first she thought she was about to die, she knew she was about to die, the dog demon was going to kill her look the shadow the show of the devil plummeting toward her —
No.
Collapsing on her.
As Lisa found the presence of mind to roll out of the way, and saw the demon drop headless to the ground beside her —
— as its head rolled and rolled through the air, hit ground, bounced, and came to rest before her feet.
And Lisa looked up to see the Lady standing above her, smiling hungrily. Black demon blood sputtered and fumed as it drizzled from her sword.
“Santa,” Lisa said.
The Lady said nothing.
Not a solitary word.
Instead she stepped into the thick of the demonic throng — and began to cut a path of blood and butchery, leading them to war.
Downtown New Orleans
The Present
There was another National Guard roadblock when they got to the Greater New Orleans Bridge — the one that crosses from Jefferson Parish into downtown New Orleans — but this one was a shambles. There were splintered barricades and the corpses of three dozen Guardsmen, and off the sides of the bridge ramp were the burned-out hulks of overturned humvees.
Stevie Ray Vaughan said, “Grim,” and somebody else, maybe Red, grunted in assent. Furry Lewis didn’t say a word; he kept his eyes on the dark surface of the road and tried to avoid the obstacles that littered their way.
When they got to the far side of the bridge they could see fires scattered all across the city, but there was no other light. Vaughan wondered how long the power had been out, and how much was left of the burning city, and he found an answer in his gut but he didn’t want to admit it, not even to himself.
The nearest of the fires was City Hall, burning spectacularly a few blocks to their right. There were wrecked fire trucks all around it and demons dancing through the flames, and other devils gnawing on the bones of firemen. When Vaughan saw that, he ached, and turned away before he could see anything else.
But there was no escaping it. Because that was where Furry Lewis pulled over to the side of the road, got out of the car, and walked to the rail at the edge of the bridge ramp.
And watched.
“Look,” he said, and Stevie Ray Vaughan looked because he knew he had to.
Terrible, terrible fire. Roaring out of control. He got out of the Cadillac a moment after Red and Sam, and joined Furry Lewis at the rail.
“As bad as it could be,” Red said, and he pointed. Vaughan thought he was pointing at the brigade of Louisiana National Guard moving up Loyola toward City Hall. Imagine that, Vaughan thought, the Louisiana National Guard thinks it can meet the Legions of the Damned with a brigade of weekend warriors, and he wanted to laugh at the thought but he wanted to cry, too, because he knew they were good brave and loyal men and women, and he knew they were doomed. . . .
“Not the soldiers,” Red said. “Look inside the fire.”
Vaughan gasped when he saw what Red was pointing at. Because he saw a great tower in that fire, a place as dear and doomed as any place that ever was or ever will be.
For inside the fire that was City Hall stood the great ruin of the tower of the Fallen City, and every bluesman knows that place in his heart. That tower (in its greatest days, before angels cast it out of Heaven) was where three angels forged the Eye of the World.
“That’s where we’re going,” Furry Lewis said. He sounded surer than Vaughan had ever heard him sound.
“Through that fire?” Vaughan asked. “That place is overrun with — things from Hell. I wouldn’t want to try to get through either one of them.”
Furry Lewis shrugged. “Let the Guard do its job,” he said. “They’re good at what they do.”
“They aren’t any match —”
Furry Lewis cut him off. “You’re wrong,” he said.
And then he began to pla
y.
After a moment Red and Sam joined him, and Vaughan found the song inside him, too.
As their song slowly slowly filled the night. It reached the Guard in wisps and phrases, like a rumor of a chance, and buoyed them as the most terrible enemies in creation set upon them. As Vaughan watched good men died, and others struggled, but bit by bit they drove the Enemies of the World away.
By ten o’clock the battle was two blocks away from City Hall, which maybe didn’t matter since the fire had entirely consumed that place. Furry Lewis told them to keep singing, and led them into the city on foot.
It wasn’t as short a walk as it seemed to be when they stood on the bridge. Not at all. It was a long half mile off the bridge ramp, and the way was so dark — with the power out and all the streetlamps dark, with no light at all but the burning city and the blood-red moon — so dark that they had to move slowly, carefully through the night and menace closed in all around them. It was almost eleven before they got to the steps of City Hall, and by then there was nothing left of that place but ashes and dust and cool embers of what once had been a fire.
Ashes, dust, embers — and the ghostly ruins of a tower that once had commanded the Cliffs of Heaven, and not long ago had abided on the shores of Hell.
“It’s beautiful,” Vaughan said, because the music was in his heart, and he could hear the song of Heaven when he saw that place.
“It is,” said Furry Lewis. He climbed the blackened stone steps that not long ago had led to New Orleans City Hall, stumbled through the drifty ashes to stand before the tower —
And a cool wind roiled from the east, and somewhere in the nearest distance a mockingbird cawed four and four, syncopated — as the Blind Lords of the Piedmont appeared in New Orleans.
— In the City of New Orleans, far, far from the kingdom where they rule.
Two of them were white and one was black, or maybe one of them was white and two were black, or maybe they were all black, the paintbrush touches us all in its way, doesn’t it? We are a nation made at the crossroads where two things meet, and the consequences of that meeting make us all the people who we are.
The Blind Lords appeared in a mist of vagabond dust, and Furry Lewis smiled at them — no matter that they were uninvited trespassers in his Delta Kingdom.
