Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five (45 page)

Well, it was fun all the same.

Better than the hot water was the steam that it created. She took it into her body as if breathing were necessary, and let it seep into her pores. She found that she didn't really feel the hunger anymore, and that the warmth of the sauna she had created for herself was doing much to wake her up out of the haze that had been clouding her mind for some time.

It felt good to move again. Better still, it felt good to move without having to do so to accomplish anything specifically. At that moment, practically anything felt good, fresh, and new.

She looked herself over through a fun house wall of mirrors mounted over ancient white sinks. There were towels there that were actually clean. Better still, there was a washing machine and dryer in
the gym, and her clothing would be warm and clean in a few moments when the machine stopped its spinning.

She leaned over one of the sinks and rubbed the towel over her hair. Maybe there was a discarded brush, forgotten by some teacher in a desk drawer. That's the next thing she wanted, to brush her hair.

She looked up and let the towel fall out of her hair and onto her shoulders. “I wonder if he would brush it?” She smiled at her own reflection and knew that he would if she really made a point of it. He would complain the entire time and pretend that he didn't find something joyful or strangely erotic about it. He'd do it though, which is why she vowed she would never ask him to.

Just knowing was good enough sometimes.

She sat on a wooden bench and pulled on her clothes. She was long since sick of the black tight top, but she liked the jeans and loved the snake skin cowboy boots. “I am never wearing heels again.”

She dug around in the gym office and found a box labeled Lost and Found. Lots of hair clips and pencils. The ugliest jacket she'd ever seen. “I wouldn't be caught dead in this even if I'm dead.” She tossed the teal and pink rhinestone Frankenstein over her shoulder. She held up a pair of jeans and spread them out at the waist. “Hey, those should fit.” It seemed a good idea to have another good pair of jeans.

The score was the girl-T with the Hawk on the front. “Talons,” she read the team name under the hawk out loud. “I like that.”

It smelled clean enough and she pulled it on as she walked out of the office, down the hallway towards the music.

Billy would listen to a part of a song, write down lyrics and notes to himself. Rewind the music and make sure he'd gotten it right. Then start the process all over again. He looked up to Anastasia with a pencil in his mouth and mumbled something about “hot red shirt”.

She was still pulling her hair out from the collar and looked down at it. “It just barely hits my waist. My belly button isn't going to put you in any distractive mortal danger, is it?”

Billy Purgatory gave Anastasia the finger as she sank into the chair across the table from him. His work station included empty bags of potato chips. Anastasia lifted one to her nose and made a face. Garlic.

“I smashed the glass on the vending machine in the teacher's lounge.”

“I'm sure that was fulfilling for you on so many levels.”

“If that means that boyhood dreams came true — then yeah, it was.”

Anastasia began reading what Billy had been writing. The fact she was doing so with it upside down and reversed was not the challenge; Billy's handwriting was.

“I'm sort of impressed that you can make anything that looks like words.”

“I know how to read and write just fine. I just don't have much use for either.”

“The world wouldn't have you any other way.” She focused on all the drawings he was making off to the side: Crosses, “X”s, roads intersecting. “What's all that?”

“That woman, Chimera, who gave me this tape, it's her grandfather singing. He was friends with my Grandpa, ‘Catfish' Purgatory.”

Anastasia raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. This Walter Hoof Scratch guy talks about crossroads and Catfish and deals a lot. Well, most of the time, some girl leaves him and he's going down to the place where three roads meet up.”

“That sort of thing is called hoodoo, but the stories usually just have to do with where two roads intersect.”

Billy nodded and took his pen and drew two lines intersecting each other. “Right. Like this.”

Anastasia touched the end of each road. “North, South, East, and West.”

“Or,” Billy looked up, “Earth, Fire, Air, and Water.”

“The elements.”

“Yeah, he talks about them a lot too. Especially in the early songs on the first side of the tape. It starts out like you said, with just two roads crossing. It's all earth, fire, air, and water. Then he starts talking about ether.”

Anastasia pointed to the center of the two roads. “This point, the summoning place, that would be ether.”

“He goes on like that for a long time, yeah. Then, he changes what he starts calling the roads.” Billy took the end of his pen and started hitting the four points. “Flower, Moon, Owl, and Broom.”

Anastasia leaned back. “The Satanic Five? Wait…”

Billy touched the center with his pen. “Key.”

“He says that specifically in those songs?”

Billy flipped back a page and started to read:

You wish the door, you wish the gate
Know it's the hour and not the date
Nighttime slumbers ‘round the five pecked tomb
Flower, Moon, Owl, and Broom

Billy flipped the page back to the drawing and then drew an X and intersected the center with a straight line. “Now, this is three roads crossing, or it's how I see it in my head. Now we have six legs.”

“Seven areas, if we're counting the center.”

“It's some kind of code. Chimera said that it all means what the opposites of the Satanic Five are. Like for every one of them, there's something that can defeat them.”

“Billy, you realize that you must be one of these opposites, don't you? You did kill Broom.”

Billy nodded. He had been so busy trying to figure out what the lyrics were trying to say, he hadn't factored him or anything else into the equation. The only thing he had considered so far was The Devil Bird, and how Chimera had hinted that not only was it real, but that it would seek Billy out.

“I guess, Anastasia. Chimera said that she and Mudder were going to go and find some of these other opposites. They also told me to stay put while they did it.”

“We do need to find a secure place so we can study this more and keep you out of sight. This school won't be abandoned forever.”

Billy reached across the table, set a book down before Anastasia, and flipped it open. Anastasia realized it was an atlas, and the pages that spread out before her were of Mexico.

“Seriously?”

“Isn't that where outlaws always head when they're on the run?”

“In western movies, yes.”

“I cannot believe you've ever seen a western.”

“I like horses.”

Billy shook his head. “It's perfect. And if Mexico is too hot, we're just a border jump away from all of Central and South America.”

“It would seem to limit the reach of the FBI a bit.”

“Right, and we just make one more stop on our way out.”

Anastasia looked up at him. “What stop?”

Billy flipped to the next marked section in his Atlas. He'd drawn all over the coastline with his ballpoint pen. “I know the bunch that Lissandra was kind of running with. They're biker thugs that make this run through the mountains and then along the coast…”

“We've already looked for Lissandra and her goddess, and you saw the trouble it caused. Why is any of this relevant?”

Billy looked up. “Well, for one, Hoof Scratch sings about fortune tellers and gypsies a lot. Second, Lissandra's grandma knew all about this kind of stuff, and I was thinking that maybe the three roads crossing might have to do with laying out tarot cards or something. She used to lay the cards out in this pattern sort of…”

“You don't need her.”

“No, I think we do kind of need her. I think she could help us a lot in figuring all this out.”

“I certainly don't need anything from her, and you definitely need even less.”

“Ana, the goddess talks to her.”

“That same goddess has spoken to both you and I, and nothing that came out of her mouth helped either one of us not to end up in this mess. Lissandra was a silly girl who had some minimal ability in fortune telling. She was much more skilled in parlor tricks, moping about pretending she was in tune with nature, and drawing you right into that web.”

“Are you jealous of Lissandra?”

Billy watched as Anastasia's fingernails sliced into the map. “I am most certainly not jealous of Lissandra. What I am tired of, is every time you're presented with a problem that you have to use your brain to solve, you use her as a crutch.”

“I think she can help us.”

“I know that she cannot.” Anastasia removed her hand from the shreds of paper that half the atlas had become and brushed the hair from her face. “We had a plan.”

“We never came up with a plan.”

“I thought we understood the plan. You and I were going to figure this all out, and stay alive until we found a way to fully remove ourselves from danger, and then…”

“Then what?”

Anastasia pushed herself back from the table and stood. “Fine, we look for Lissandra on our way to the border, but we don't tarry.”

She turned in a blur of red shirt and black sweeping hair and faded into the darkness across the library. Billy listened to the doors that led to the hallway close behind her, then reached across the table to press play.

Billy heard the last notes of the song he had been listening to when the tape played out. Then, over the static, he heard the speaking voice of Walter Hatchett:

“Do you know about the place where three roads cross?

“Ain't some place you decide to go, it's someplace you end up. Everybody's lost somehow. Men's hearts got broken compass and backward road signs.

“When you find this place, it ain't never daytime, always night. It's just like love: you find the place when you stopped looking for it.

“You can look down the road as far as you want. Got six directions you can stare in. Don't none of them lead no place special.

“Only two ways out of three roads' cross. Up or down.

“You can't never find your way back the way you came, because you ain't never the same once you done got in the middle there.

“I was a bluesman by trade and by design. My daddy was a waiter on a riverboat All he ever done was go up and down that river. He seen lots of places from the water, but it was just like looking at a long hallway of paintings. Daddy never got off the boat.

“He stopped off long enough once in a place where he found my Mama and cooked me up. Neither Daddy or Mama wanted me. Mama said she got me out of a spell she made. In a big gumbo pot full of witchin' herbs.

“She said I fell out the smoke.

“I seen two men fighting over a guitar when I was a baby boy. They fought hard, and didn't seem like they would never stop. So I got tired a watchin' them and realized I done grown up. I took that guitar and started walking, leavin' them fightin', wondering where I come from and where I was going to.

“I let them do the wonderin'. I didn't much know. I just knew I was leaving.

“I wanted to see all the places Daddy never paid no mind to. I never once did set foot on a riverboat.

“A girl taught me how to play that guitar, and I loved me some girls ever since.

“I found me a girl that'd tell me my fortunes and all she asked was a song in trade. She'd only let me come' round during the day. I had to make tracks at dusk.

“‘My old man,' she told me, ‘they call him Crooked Crowtoe. He used to be a Indian, but times is tough.'

“I asked her what a man's job turns into when he stops being an Indian?

“She said, ‘He stopped being more than that. He done changed his whole outlook on life. He just takes and takes now and don't never give nothing back.'

“‘Robbin' clothes, diamonds, and guns,' I sang to her ‘bout him.

“‘Firewater tradin' what he does now,' she told me. ‘He keep a stash in the knot hole of a dead tree. Knot hole full of the sweetest honey man can lose.'”

“‘Can't nothing we got be that sweet,' I told her before robbing a kiss.' Nothing sweeter than you.'”

“‘Lots is sweeter than me. Souls,' she come back. ‘Sweet, sweet souls.'”

Billy started to run the tape back, but before he could get hold of the switch the music started up again and he found himself caught up in the new words and rhythms:

Black eyes coming, bushel presents coming too
Black eyes dreamin', that you ain't gon' know what to do
If you get a wish, don't let crow whisper words untrue
Black eyes dealin', but he can't mark your X for you

~38~

P
ERVERTS

SHERIFF RUPERT DEVERAUX DID NOT LIKE PERVERTS. He had sworn by the good tax payers of the county to uphold the “no pervert” policy he so firmly believed in. Far as he'd ever been concerned, the founding fathers of this great land could have just put one damn sentence in the constitution, and if you had half a brain and was only kind of paying attention, it'd be plain enough what was right and what was wrong.

We the people of the United States of America decree: No perverts.

Sheriff Rupert had thought about swinging by Hollis's house and rousin' him out of bed to come help him take this one in.

Hollis was a good boy though, and a decent deputy; if he said he had the flu, then Sheriff Rupert didn't guess he had no reason to perjurize himself. Besides, Sheriff Rupert was a big guy and farm fed. He had a big black beard like a grizzly; his wife called him her “big fuzzy-scruffy bear”.

This one was tall and lanky, but he didn't have nowhere near the meat on his ribs that Sheriff Rupert did. He hadn't pepper-sprayed then blackjacked anyone since before the last election anyhow, and it might look good in the local paper if he took this old boy down like that.