Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five (10 page)

It was in the corner of the grounds along the back stone wall. The limbs of ancient trees stretched out and over the stone barrier to create a type of high canopy over it. It was black with blue bumpers, and the metal legs sank into the grass. The springs made a melodious racket of squeaks and strains; Billy was into the sound. He was not so into the fact that someone had found the trampoline before him, though, and was currently jumping up and down upon it with all the poise of one of those trapeze circus girls.

It was a girl who was flying up into the air, then coming down, only to do it all over again. She had dirty sneakers, like she spent all her time running through the woods. Her jeans were torn at the knees and had splotches of green and yellow stains that could only come from constantly brushing against stuff growing in the forest. Unlike the recent girls, who were actually technically women, who had been falling into Billy's life unexpectedly, this was actually a girl-proper, and she seemed close enough to Billy's age. Her wild brown curls alternated between up and down as she rocketed repeatedly into the air.

She saw Billy walk and let his board hit the ground, then sit his behind down on the deck to rest up after all that walking he'd just done. She didn't stop what she was doing — didn't seem to care.

“What's your story, whistle-britches?” Billy's eyeballs kept going up and down to try and keep up with jumping-girl.

“I decided I wanted to trampoline.” She said it kinda smartass like. She was acting more and more like chicks he knew that were his age. “Nobody ever uses this thing.”

“Yeah well, all that's about to change, Bounce'a'rella, now that I finally found the damn thing.”

“I wasn't aware that it was lost?”

“Well, be aware that it was.”

“How does someone lose a trampoline?”

Up and down — she was already making Billy dizzy.

“Don't you ever wind down? You're gonna wear out the springs.”

“I'm almost done. Now that you're here and I have to listen to you talking, it'll get old really fast.”

“What's wrong with me tossing a little truth up to that curly head of yours?”

“I'd be a lot more into your truths if you kept them to yourself.”

Billy folded his arms and realized his whole head was tilting up and down to follow her. Someone needed to give this girl a jump-rope and point her down a short pier.

“Who the random-girl-hell are you supposed to be, anyhow?”

“My name is Lissandra.”

Okay, that was kind of a cool and maybe hot name.

“Yeah, how come I ain't never heard of ya?”

“Probably because I don't live here. I just decided to borrow your trampoline.”

“So you're trespassin'?”

“Whatever.”

“Not whatever. We got a wall up for a reason, Dixie Cup.”

“Yeah, but is it to keep us out or to keep whatever you got going on in here in?”

Billy hadn't ever thought about it like that. Of course, Billy left most of the thinking to dudes that painted pictures to hang in museums and zoos.

“Well, what you say doesn't matter. You don't live here and don't know nothing about me and my people.”

“Oh, I know all about you, Billy Purgatory.”

Billy stood up from his skateboard bench. “Hey, how do you know how I am?”

“I know that you were just missing and that you've been in Africa. I also know that whatever you might think about this expensively decorated freak show of a compound you live on, it's not Heaven on Earth.”

“You been spying on me, curly-top?”

“Your mother came to my grandmother when you appeared in Africa. Grandma is a fortuneteller and she read the cards for your mother.”

“Yeah, well, just because you eavesdropped on my mom being concerned about my adventures, it don't mean you know nothing about me or this place. I don't care what the Jack a'Diamonds or the Ace a'Clubs had to say to your Magic Trick Granny.”

“Grandmother told me to stay away from this place, because it's evil.”

“Yeah, how come you ain't listenin'?”

Lissandra shrugged as she sprang back into the air. “Evil has a trampoline.”

“Yeah, and you're way past what the nickel you didn't put in the slot'll buy ya.”

Lissandra came down on the stretchy fabric of the trampoline, then pushed up with her legs and shot higher than she had before. Nimble fingers grabbed one of the branches hanging over the wall. Pulling up with her arms, she swung her legs and wrapped them around the tree, then twisted her body over it where she was hugging the branch and looked down at Billy. “It's all yours.”

“Yeah, and stay off it with your trash-talkin' tree hugging.”

Billy moved towards the trampoline to take over major bouncing operations.

“You're lucky the man hasn't grabbed you up yet, Billy Purgatory.”

Billy stopped and looked up as Lissandra rose off the branch. Balancing herself as if on a tightrope, staring down at him.

“What man?” Billy figured this was some crazy girl who didn't know nothing and was raised in the forest by badgers or some such.

“Grandmother saw that in the cards too. You should get out of this place before the evil gets you. The man is coming for you, Billy. Your mother is using you as bait.”

“My mom cares about me, stupid. Lookit all the stuff she bought so she could take care of me and Pop.”

Lissandra smiled at Billy like he was stupid. “Stuff.” Then she shook her head. “It's not you she wants, Billy. It's the man who fell out of the sky.”

“People don't fall out of the sky.”

Lissandra moved nimbly, vanishing into the embrace of the tree branches. “Oh really? Didn't you?”

Billy ran his eyes along the high stones of the wall. He pressed his foot to the edge of his board and grabbed it by the truck.

He didn't feel like bouncing anymore.

~5~

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“WHAT'RE YOU GONNA DO with those dumb mannequins?” Billy had wandered into the stables when he got tired of thinking about men falling out of the sky. He'd been looking across the pond on the back forty. The pond was kind of peaceful, and there weren't any alligators in it, so Billy didn't sit there and reflect very long. Peaceful water was really boring, and it made him think about death.

Dr. Luna had dragged two mannequins out of somewhere or another. He was fastening a kind of metal collar around their necks that he was dangling alarm clocks from. “The nature of my experiments has changed. You've actually given me insight into them, Billy.”

“Whatever insight is, you owe me five bucks for it.”

Dr. Luna haphazardly reached into his pocket to retrieve his wallet as Billy knocked on one of the legs of the plastic standing mannequin. “These things don't move around like robots, huh?”

Billy pressed his ear to the mannequin's torso and took the five bucks the distracted Luna passed his way.

“They are just stand-ins for people. I'm running my first test tonight.”

“Yeah? If they don't move around and just stand here all dumb, what are you gonna do with them?”

“Well, they aren't going to move around in dimensional space like you and I would — but if I'm correct, they
are
going to move. I am going to impact one with an energy field.”

“Like punch it? It can't even fight back, dude.”

“Punch it with energy, Billy.”

“How do you do that?”

Dr. Luna had just finished strapping clocks around the neck of the second mannequin when he smiled down to Billy and held up a finger. “Temporal-Mirrors, as we have seen with your ill-fated trip to Africa, have potential, but are unstable…”

“Yeah Luna, about that whole trip to Africa thing…”

Dr. Luna double-checked that the clocks on both mannequins were synchronized and was on the move. “So, if we can harness the energy and direct it…”

“Luna, I'm talking to you down here…”

Dr. Luna was at his table and turned. He lifted the biggest space-looking ray shotgun contraption that Billy had ever seen into the air. Its barrel was filled with blinky lights and there were thick heavy electrical cables coming out of the stock, which snaked across the floor and into a massive junction box on the back wall of the lab.

“What kinda Buck Gordon space-badassary is that?” Billy had to admit, he was pretty damned impressed with whatever that thing was. It was a big gun; Luna strained to hold the thing up even using both hands. Billy was pretty sure you could kill a dinosaur with that thing.

“This, my young friend, is what will change the nature of how people and information travel across the world — heck — across the universe!”

“Why do mannequins need to travel? They're not real, right?”

“This is my Time Gun.” Dr. Luna proclaimed it proudly to the entire laboratory, which consisted of himself, Billy, and a couple of dumb mannequins with clocks strapped to their necks.

“Who needs a gun to tell time?”

Dr. Luna motioned for Billy to come closer. “Stand behind me, Billy. I don't want to accidentally get you caught up in the scatter-shot.”

Billy looked up at the mannequins and then at the big gun. He figured getting behind Luna was a good idea. “Is that thing loud when it goes off?”

Luna began to aim the weapon once Billy was safely behind him. “It makes a Big Bang.” Dr. Luna laughed; Billy had no idea why.

Dr. Luna flipped some switches and the lights in the room dimmed as the Time Gun began to pull lots of juice. As Dr. Luna lowered the weapon, big red crosshairs were projected at the mannequin on the left. “Isn't it historically ironic, that the first time/space traveler will not have the capacity to tell us about the wonders they have seen on the other side?”

“Oh good, those things can't talk either. That'd be creepy.”

“Brace yourself, Billy Purgatory!”

Billy grabbed onto one of the legs of the stainless steel table. The hairs on the back of his neck began to stand up as the Time Gun began to make a high-pitched humming noise. “Is that normal?”

“Residual static electricity. We're about to push the limits of the town's power grid.”

“You sure this is safe, dude? I thought you were gonna test this thing tonight'er?”

“Too late to stop now — the music of science is conducting the show.”

Billy held onto the table leg tight. If something was gonna grab him and haul him back to Africa, it was gonna have to pull like hell.

He watched as Dr. Luna's finger squeezed the trigger. The gun created a bright flash, like a sun, and the recoil sent Luna and the gun tumbling backwards and over the table to bang hard into the floor. Billy watched the blue, crackling orb of energy the gun had released slip across the room silently and then impact the plastic man. The energy turned the skin of the thing a bright-hot glowing blue, and vast tendrils of arcing electrical energy began to branch out and leap into the air, striking points all about the laboratory. Every place one of them hit singed and sparked, then took on the same blue glow of whatever crazy bullet Luna had fired out of that gun.

Dr. Luna peeked his head up over the table and watched the energy-tendrils flying about the air and striking the roof of the stable.

Billy heard Dr. Luna say the word, “Mira!”

Billy looked out towards the mannequin and then up to the railing at the doors to the stable. Mira was standing there, eyes wide. The stack of papers she had let slip from her hands were slowly
sailing down towards the lab floor. The energy danced around dropped pages of physics equations and too much math, and then one of the blue tendrils was upon her.

Dr. Luna and Billy watched helplessly as Mira went from orange to blue. Then, as quickly as it had all begun, Mira, Mannequin Number 2, and half the lab vanished into time and space.

Billy slowly let go of the table. Clutching his skateboard to his chest, he cautiously began to walk into the lab. The hair on the back of his neck wasn't standing up anymore, but there was an unexplained ache in his chest — a longing.

“Dude, bring her back.”

Dr. Luna stood with his hands gripping the edge of the table, weeping. “Mira.” He cried her name quietly.

“Luna, shoot the gun again and bring Mira back.”

“It doesn't work like that.” He said this through sobs.

Billy had reached the center of the lab and was turned back to Dr. Luna. “Then how does it work?”

“Billy…”

“How does it work? What did you do?”

“I don't know.”

Luna fell back to the ground, curled up into a little ball, and wouldn't stop crying.

Billy was getting angry. Science had zapped Mira out to who knows where — Africa maybe. Mira wasn't tough like him; she couldn't fight off lions and that Shark Cult. “Alright Luna, you're my friend, but I'm coming over there and I'm gonna smack some sense into you until you quit crying like a baby and figure out how to get Mira back!”

Billy only took two steps before he heard the quiet impact of feet onto the concrete floor behind him.

Billy spun around with a smile on his face to welcome her. “Mira!”

The dark figure of the crouching man, who had just jumped the balcony railing and landed like a big cat about to spring, was definitely not Mira.

“The man who fell from the sky.”

The man didn't pay any attention to Billy Purgatory's words and shot up into a run. He was headed right for the boy, and Billy didn't
have any time to run away. Billy widened his stance a bit and raised the tip of his skateboard to his lips and gave it a kiss for luck. “Get ready, board, it's time to crack a spaceman right in the airlock.”

Billy raised his board in both hands and fell into a batter's stance, just like Pop had taught him to do. This guy didn't know what was about to hit him, and would soon be wishing he'd have run the opposite of the way that Billy Purgatory was.