Bone Music (23 page)

For the longest while.

And then after that long while, Dan realized that the deadman Elvis was standing a few feet from them, watching them, waiting for them. He looked up to face the deadman and he felt so ashamed, so naked and embarrassed, but what could he do?

“Elvis,” Dan said. “I didn’t know you were here.”

The deadman’s frown deepened. “Don’t call me that,” he said. “Especially not here.”

“Don’t call you what?” the woman asked. “I don’t understand.”

The deadman just shook his head. “We’ve got to go,” he said. “We’re wasting time.”

Dan wiped the water away from his eyes. “All right,” he said. “I’m ready.”

The deadman turned to the woman. “You’re coming with us, aren’t you?”

“I —” she said, “I —”

Elvis knelt beside her, touched her shoulder, looked her in the eye. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “Come with us. You’ll be fine.”

And then she cried and cried and cried, and Dan wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her, because he ached to hear her in such pain.

But he couldn’t.

Because she was in the deadman’s arms, and those were all the arms she needed.

There was no wind when Dan climbed into the boat, but that didn’t seem to worry the deadman. He untied them from the withered ash, pushed their boat away from the shore, and opened up the sail. As soon as he did the hot wind found them, and the boat sped downstream more quickly than Dan ever imagined that it could.

He took his seat by the boat’s stern, and watched the shore. He tried not to think about the damned ones below him in the water, and he tried even harder not to think about the girl.

It wasn’t much use. He knew the damned were down there, and the girl — he still hurt every time he caught a glimpse of her. He didn’t want to know why. He didn’t want to imagine!

But he knew, and his imagination ran away with him, and away, and away. It brought him awful things that left Dan shivering and ill.

That was just the water, Dan tried to think. He’d took too much water in his lungs, and it wasn’t just water but the damnable water of the River Styx, and of course it gave him vapors. Of course!

But Dan knew better.

A while after dark he felt sick and very tired, and he went belowdeck to find his bunk and rest.

After a while he slept, and as he slept nightmares came to him. But no matter how bad those nightmares were, they were better than the troubles that plagued his waking mind.

Somewhere in the night the girl came to him — he woke to feel her slip beneath the sheets beside him, and now she pressed herself against him as close as close could be.

Dan thought, no, no, I can’t do this, I can’t go sleeping with some other guy’s woman, and he tried to tell her that he couldn’t but the words wouldn’t come to him. And then it didn’t matter whether she was his or Dan’s or nobody’s woman but her own, because she touched him and he wanted her and the desire was on him intense beyond thinking, and Dan was lost.

Lost inside desire and away away in Hell.

He wanted her more than anything or anyone he’d ever wanted in his life, and he was sure, and he knew in his heart that if he could marry her that moment he would.

When he thought that thunder pealed long and slow somewhere a thousand miles away, and Dan knew he’d plighted himself.

“I love you,” he said, and she said she loved him too, and she kissed his lips so gentle and so intimate and true, and God he wanted her, and loved her, and needed her as dearly as we need life itself.

There was something very different, now. Dan could feel it. Different about them, about their surroundings, about the world and damnation and everything that surrounded them.

“Take me,” she said, and he did.

A long time after they were done Dan looked up from their bed, looked out through the door swinging freely on its hinge, and saw that they’d left the river.

He knew that the moment that he looked up, because there was fire everywhere all around them, fire and light and the embers of damnation, and they were sailing on the Lake of Fire toward the Bosphorus of Hell.

September 1952

The celebration on the ridgeline over Memphis was a party no one ever could forget. The food was better than it could be; barbecue more pungent, spicy, and intense; the companionship dearer and more lively than any other fellowship of man.

But it didn’t do anything for Robert Johnson.

All he could think about was his wife, and his darling daughter not even three days old, and how the hell could destiny take him now from a life that he’d only just come to prize. . . ?

But it did. It always works that way, doesn’t it? The things we lose before we come to love them are things we might just as well have never owned; but when life leaves us without the things we love we mourn them till we rail against their loss.

Furry Lewis saw him alone and mourning in the shadow of three pines, and he asked him what was wrong.

“I miss my little girl, is all,” he said. “I hardly even know her.”

Furry Lewis frowned and nodded. Furry Lewis wasn’t any deadman. He was alive — he was one of maybe seven dozen living bluesmen who’d come to play that song upon the ridge. He didn’t have a family himself, but he could see the ghost of Robert Johnson’s loss. “I take you down,” he said. “I take you down, if that’s what you want. We got a little time.”

“To Memphis. . . ?”

“If that’s what you want.” He kicked a stone, and sent it rolling down; it could have rolled forever down that ridge for all that Robert Johnson saw.

“All right, then. You say we got the time, let’s go.”

The Present

Emma woke jittery and covered with sweat late in the warm Greenville afternoon. When she woke she saw Leadbelly still sat in the seat across from her — he was deep asleep, but he was still holding his guitar, and his fingers still rested on the strings, caressing faint and beautiful music from them.

“I saw her,” Emma said. “I saw my baby in my dream. She was in New Orleans, scared and lost and all alone.”

The deadman’s eyes flickered open drowsily. “You dreamed your child?” he asked. “I knew you would.”

“I’ve got to go to her,” Emma said. “My darling needs me.”

The deadman nodded. “Yes,” he said. “She needs us both.”

“Us both. . . ?”

The deadman nodded. “I’m coming with you,” he said. “I know the Mansion in New Orleans.”

And Emma should have known then, she really should have. Because she hadn’t mentioned the Mansion, and till that moment hadn’t realized what to call it.

But she didn’t realize, and she didn’t think too clearly, because after all she was still half asleep. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Leadbelly stood up, slung his guitar over his shoulder, and started toward the door. “I’m already waiting,” he said.

And then he was gone.

When Emma got out to her car she found him waiting for her in the front passenger seat, no matter how she had the keys, no matter how she’d locked things tight when she’d got out of the car the day before.

Five minutes later they were on the road, rolling south toward New Orleans as quickly as Emma could drive. Three times that night she was sure she’d get pulled over for a ticket, but every time the deadman sang and the policeman faded away with the distance in the night.

They got to New Orleans three hours before sunrise that next morning — but it was a long while before they found Lisa.

Robert Johnson felt like a burglar as he opened the door to his own home. He’d only been gone for hours, but that little wooden house down by the Memphis waterfront was already strange to him, and he felt like a trespasser to walk in without knocking.

“Ginny. . . ?” he called. “Baby, I got company, all right?”

His wife was upstairs with the baby. She was in bed as she’d been abed three days now, recovering from her labor.

“Is that you, Tom?” Robert Johnson’s wife called him Tom because that was how she knew him, as Hinky Tom.

“Yes, baby, it’s me. Are you decent for company? I got a friend here wants to meet you and baby Emma.”

“Come on up, Tom,” she said. “I’m pleased to meet your friend.”

Robert Johnson nodded to Furry Lewis, who was still out by the car, waiting to see if he were welcome. “It’s all right, Furry,” Johnson said. “C’mon on up. Door ain’t locked.” And then he hurried up the stairs to see his woman and his daughter, not bothering to look back and see if the other man followed him.

His wife Virginia smiled when she saw him — but only for a moment. Because it only took a moment to see the expression on her husband’s face. And that expression was a mask of fear and dread — the kind of countenance that passes from one love to another as though it were wildfire; as though it were some plague as contagious as the cough.

“What’s wrong, Tom?” Virginia asked, already half as frightened as her man.

“It’s come to something awful, Ginny,” he told her. “I come back to say goodbye.”

“Oh Tom,” Virginia said, and now she was a woman made of tears where before she’d been an angel made of gossamer and gold. “Tom.”

And what could Robert Johnson do? He went to her and wrapped his arms around her, and he told her that he always loved her and that he’d be back for her, no matter if the maw of Hell should devour him.

He didn’t mean it badly, but that oath was as false as it was sincere, profanely false, and it damned him as surely as the trueness of his song. Because it grew naturally from his love for his wife and child, it was a grave oath and a precious one; he loved his family too dearly ever to repent it.

Then like out of nowhere there came the sound of a throat clearing just behind them, and Robert Johnson whirled around to face the intrusion —

Which was Furry Lewis, come to call on them just as he’d been invited.

“You folks need some time alone? — I can wait in the car, if you like.”

Virginia raised a hand and eased her husband just far enough aside that she could look the visitor in the eye. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I want you to know my daughter.”

And then she lifted her sleeping infant in her arms and lifted her high enough for everyone to see. “Her name is Emma,” Virginia said. “She’s precious as the stars.”

New Orleans, Louisiana

The Present

When Emma and Leadbelly got to New Orleans the deadman told her they had to get a hotel room.

“I don’t understand,” Emma said. “What do we need with a hotel room? — I’m here to find my little girl, not to visit.”

“Your baby’s at the Mansion,” Leadbelly told her. “If you going to get yourself presented at the Mansion, you got to make yourself presentable.”

Presented? Presentable? — those were words that made no sense to Emma. “I saw a mansion in my dream,” Emma said. “I didn’t see no presentation.”

“Trust me,” Leadbelly said. And Emma shrugged and sighed and worried some, but she didn’t see how she had any choice but to do like he said.

So she trusted him.

Which was something that she never ever ever should have done.

They found a cheap and sleazy rendezvous motel a mile and a half south of New Orleans, and Emma checked them in as Mr. and Mrs. Smith. That was a mistake, just like the others, but it wasn’t the worst mistake she made that day — not by half.

There were two double beds in the room; Leadbelly went to the nearer one as soon as he got in the door. He sprawled himself out in the center and folded his arms behind his head and smiled like the cat who caught a jaybird.

“We might as well get some rest,” he said, still smiling. “They won’t have us down to the Mansion till after midnight.”

“Midnight,” Emma said. “Is that so?”

“It’s a natural fact.”

“I see,” Emma said. She pursed her lips. “Well, you go ahead and get some rest, then. I’m going to get myself a shower while I can.”

She carried her suitcase into the bathroom, turned on the hot water, and closed and locked the door behind her.

She took as long and hot a shower as she could bear to, but no matter how she washed herself she couldn’t scrub away the greasy gritty feeling all those days of travel had pressed into her skin.

I need to soak, she thought, and decided that she might as well. Pressed the drain lever and closed the shower valve to let hot water stream out the faucet into the tub, then eased her aching body down and put her tired feet up on the rim of the tub.

And rested soaking in the steamy water for hours till the bath went cool. Maybe she slept that way, or maybe she only rested numbly half awake; later on she was never sure.

When the water was cool enough to chill her, Emma lifted herself from the tub, dried herself and dressed in her warm flannel nightgown.

Gathered up her dirty clothes and left the bathroom to tuck herself beneath the warm soft blankets on the empty bed —

Only it didn’t work out like that. Because the moment she stepped out the bathroom door the deadman was all over her like a lover, touching her and whispering in her ear and making promises he never meant to keep.

“What are you doing?” Emma asked. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Baby,” Leadbelly said. “Oh baby. . . !”

Emma kneed him, hard. The deadman groaned and went limp.

Fell to the floor, holding himself. Where he made the saddest sound, a piteous sound, almost — as if he weren’t the man who’d just damn near tried to force himself on her, but some poor mistreated child.

Emma ignored him. She stepped away, crossed the room to find her bed —

As the deadman glared up at her with eyes that glinted wildly, so full of lust and rage and indignation —

“You want me,” he said. “You know you do.”

Emma shook her head. “I don’t.”

He looked — like a predator about to leap. Like he was about to attack her, to grab her and rip off her clothes and have her whether she wanted him or not —

And then the promise of violence in his eyes began to fade.

“Baby. . . .”

“Don’t you ‘baby’ me,” Emma said.

“You want me to help you find your little girl or not?” Leadbelly asked.

Emma scowled at him. “Of course I want your help,” she said. “But I want you to keep your hands to yourself, too. If that means you won’t help me, then I’ll help myself.”

Leadbelly swore under his breath, but he didn’t raise a hand to her. He just sat there on the floor, glaring at Emma as she tucked herself beneath the covers and tried to settle off to sleep.

After a while he sulked away to his bed. When she heard him move Emma thought What am I doing here? I got no business sleeping in a room with a man like that. That was right, wasn’t it? She needed to get up and go out to the car, lock the doors and put the seat back and try to pretend she was someplace safe — but every time she got up to move she found herself still lying abed in the hotel room, and it was like she was in a dream, and then she realized that it was a dream, and she’d only got up and left that place a dreaming, not for real, and she got up and left only to discover that was a dream too, and on, and on. . . .

After a while the deadman seemed to sleep, and Emma thought that maybe it was safe here after all. But even as he slept Emma could feel his anger — all seething and bitter like the vapor from a man who’s met an insult he can’t deny or answer.

And maybe he was insulted, and maybe he was enraged. But whether he was or not he didn’t say or do anything to her.

In some ways that scared Emma most of all — because she could feel how mad he was, and she knew he meant to do something, and the more he waited to retaliate the worse it had to be.

Or maybe not. Maybe he just forgot. Emma waited and waited for him to come to her and ravish her in her sleep, but he never did; and when he woke he treated her well enough, no matter how he wasn’t friendly.

The deadman yawned, sat up in his bed. “Wake up,” he said. “We got to take you downtown for a presentation.”

Emma shivered as she rubbed her eyes. “I still don’t understand,” she said. “I come down here looking for my little girl. What the devil has that got to do with presentation?”

Leadbelly rolled his eyes. “It’s got everything, that’s what,” he said. “Your baby went down to the Mansion. If you want her back that’s where you’ve got to go.”

“I don’t like it,” Emma said. “Not one solitary bit.”

But she went to the bathroom and put on the best dress in her suitcase all the same. When she was done she left the bathroom and asked Leadbelly what he thought, and the deadman smiled at her hungrily.

“You look fine,” Leadbelly said. “You look mighty fine.”

“That’s good,” Emma said. “But don’t go looking at me like that, you hear?”

Leadbelly scowled and muttered something cruel, but he looked away all the same.

“Let’s go,” he said. “It’s getting late.”

Emma shrugged. “If you say it is, it is,” she said. And followed him out the motel-room door.

When they got into the car the deadman started giving her all kinds of strange directions — first into downtown New Orleans and the French Quarter by a roundabout approach, then south along the river road where the French Quarter gave way to a maze of rotted houses, burned-down warehouses, and collapsing docks.

Into a part of the city you can’t find by accident, unless you’re touched and marked, or guided by a soul who knows the Devil.

The ones who know that place call it the Devil’s Quarter of New Orleans. The Devil doesn’t go there often nowadays, because he doesn’t have to — the world has changed across the years, and now it does the Devil’s handiwork without him. These days the Devil’s Quarter is a shriveled deadland, all but empty and abandoned — all of it but the Mansion. The Mansion never died. It never could, and never would, no matter what.

“That’s the place,” Leadbelly said, but Emma already knew. She recognized that place from her Lisa dream back up in Greenville. She remembered every detail of that dream, and she never would forget a mite of it. “You can pull right on up the drive. Valet will park the car for you.”

Emma never had much use for valets; she liked to park her own car. “That’s all right,” she said. “I’ll park out here on the road.”

“Suit yourself,” the deadman said — and then he smiled, bright and wide. “It ain’t going to matter in the end.”

But he was wrong. Just once that night, he was wrong; and after all the terrible mistakes Emma made those days in Greenville and New Orleans, it was an act just as seemingly inconsequential that saved her: the place she parked her car.

But it makes sense, in a way — because the tiny things that led her down the damnable path were honest mistakes, and the thing that saved her was an honest virtue, almost equal. What saved her was her nature and the nature of her heart.

Memphis, Tennessee

September 1952

They visited three hours with Robert Johnson’s wife and daughter, and then he kissed his wife goodbye.

“I’ll miss you, darling,” he said before he left. “I swear I will return.”

Virginia smiled sadly and tried hard not to cry. She didn’t say the truth that ached her heart.

“I love you, Tom,” she said. “Your daughter loves you too.”

“I know she does,” said Robert Johnson, and he kissed Emma on the forehead and promised her the stars.

And then he left without looking back, because he knew that if he did he’d break his heart.

Furry Lewis was already in the car, waiting for him. “Running late,” old Furry said. “Looks like we better hurry.”

He drove his car fast and a little reckless — he hardly stopped at stop signs, and he didn’t read no speed signs, and twice he rolled through stoplights before they changed to favor him. Robert Johnson was certain some policeman was going to pull them over for a ticket, but none ever did. They made damn good time, in fact — five minutes after they pulled away from Robert Johnson’s driveway they were starting up the ridge-road where the moon was waiting for them —

And then that big black Cadillac came round the bend ahead of them.

And swerved hard like it was out of control, back and forth across both lanes, and when it stopped it stopped but good, cutting them off. If Furry Lewis hadn’t had some incredible kind of reflexes he would’ve plowed right into it, killing them both for certain —

And Robert Johnson looked up, and he saw who it was behind the wheel of that car.

Which was Leadbelly.

Smiling at them hungrily from behind the wheel, and right there while they looked at him he reached over onto the passenger seat to get something, and when he came up again there was a short-barrel shotgun in his arms, and suddenly he was blasting —

— blasting! —

Shooting at them with that goddamn thing, and if Furry Lewis hadn’t already had that car of his into fast reverse winding down that bluff they would have gone to meet the Maker, there and then.

Upon the Lake of Fire

Approaching the Bosphorus of Hell

Timeless

On toward midday they sighted land, and for a moment Dan thought they’d found their destination.

“We’re here,” he said. “Where the hell are we?”

Dead Elvis just laughed. “We’re in Hell, all right,” he said. “But this isn’t where we’re going.”

“Oh,” Dan said. “What is that?”

The deadman pointed at a wide gap in the wall of granite rising up before them. “That’s the Bosphorus of Hell,” he said. “Beyond it lie the fallen city Firgard and the Sea of Fire and Ice.”

“We’re going to Firgard, then?”

Elvis shook his head. “No. We’re going past it — through the Sea of Fire and Ice; past the Infernal Hellespont; into the Bay of Ages and across it to the Mansion called Defiance.”