Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five (32 page)

“What the Hell…?”

Moon kept her eyes trained on the scattered fires. “Yeah, kind of.”

“Is that an encampment?”

“It's LBJ's Hobo Village.”

“How could anyone survive so deep in the Earth?”

Moon shook her head at the spectacle of fires so far below. “So much wasted potential.”

Past the window to her right, Lissandra heard the mechanism and hiss of one of the doors opening and turned her head to see. Moon's soldiers had opened another of the doors. They slid open with much creaking and thumping, as a broken elevator would.

Lissandra could feel the pressure change in the room when the seal of the doors broke. A cold wind blew into the room and impacted the soldiers standing in the opening. The gypsy zipped up her jacket and then brought her arms to fold tightly at her chest.

“Where are they going?”

Moon began walking towards the opening doors. “We're going down there.”

Lissandra looked back out the windows at the fires far below. “Down there?”

“Yes.”

“Who's down there, Moon?”

“Plenty of good lessons for you, Lissandra, my dear.”

Lissandra didn't want to learn anymore lessons, but she didn't feel like she had much of a choice. “What are you teaching me this time, Mistress Moon?”

Moon motioned for Lissandra to join her at the open portal, which looked out over the mountains deep below the Earth. “I'm going to show you once and for all that I'm not a Demon.”

Lissandra stole one last glance at the fires as she crossed to the edge of the window. “If I say that I believe you, can I stay up here?.”

Moon shook her head.

The soldiers had filed out into a large open elevator, enclosed by another yellow metal railing. It was frigid out there to a degree that made the hallways they had walked through seem cozy and warm. Ten of Moon's soldiers had already stepped onto the lift, and Lissandra stepped out with them, along with their leader. The track which the lift ran on was cut into the side of the cliff face which contained the window.

Lissandra couldn't imagine that this was actually some enormous cavern deep within the Earth, and stopped herself from internal conjecture as to where she actually was. She knew that questioning Moon would only give her half-truths and more riddles.

If she kept it up, Moon would prove an excellent replacement goddess to Artemis. There must have been some supernatural human resources correspondence course they'd all graduated from.

Moon threw a switch and the lift shook a bit, then began its decent towards the canyon floor and all those torches. The rest of the army stayed vigilante at the door as the lift sank down and away. Twelve of them were going down. If all the tiny firelights Lissandra was staring at over the railing represented a person holding a torch, they would be far outnumbered with only ten soldiers, a psychopath in a unicorn shirt, and a fortuneteller.

Lissandra peered over the railing along with Moon and tried to block the cold wind which blew through the canyon from her mind. “Demonic hobos?”

Moon relaxed and leaned on the railing as she monitored their descent from the big window room. “I really don't have a better name for them. They are the captured and the lost.”

“Why would anyone capture a demon?”

“They went through a phase when it was very en vogue to capture monsters and study them in an attempt to somehow weaponize. The Soviets were doing the same thing.”

Lissandra was no fool, and knew full well that things like demons existed. Her grandmother had told her those stories since she had been a little girl, and her relationship with Billy Purgatory was always bringing some vampire or creature into her life. She had spoken with her goddess, Artemis, and knew the deer that had run with her for much of her life were divinely sent.

“Your aunt, the one who worked for the Brickstaffs…”

Lissandra hadn't thought about the woman in years, not since the night that she'd watched her changed into something that could have no longer been considered her aunt. She had watched Mr. Brickstaff sacrifice the creature her aunt had become, and had run from that evil house forever. “The Brickstaffs were somehow in league with your friends and this supernatural study.”

“I'm sure my confirming that doesn't come as a shock. There are humans scattered all about the world who work for us in one way or another. In some cases, they know what they're doing. In other cases, they just do what they're told, and take the wealth offered them if they play and experiment like the good little pets they're encouraged to be.”

“What do you hope to gain out of all of this?”

“Well Lissandra, you can't very well maintain order with things going bump in the night, now can you?”

The gypsy watched the cavern floor draw ever closer. Moon pointed into the lights and snapped her fingers, and one of her soldiers focused his goggles in on the lights.

Moon gripped the railing as she raised her body back to full height. “And you can't effectively kill things if you don't understand their habits, hopes, and desires.”

“You built them a supernatural zoo?”

“Best definition I can think of to describe this place.” Moon began slipping into her gloves. “What do your cards tell you about where we are, and what we should expect?”

Lissandra shot Moon a look. “I wouldn't know. You stole my cards.”

“Of course you know.” Moon intertwined her fingers and pushed her gloves up tight. “Those cards are a crutch, just like every crystal ball and magic talisman imaginable is a crutch. You don't need those pretty painted scenes of death, destruction, regret, and hope to tap into those energies. How many times have you shuffled your grandmother's cards and studied every line painted on them?”

Lissandra could see every image the cards could offer in her mind's eye. “More times than I could begin to count.”

“No reason to literally count; that would be another useless act, meant more for razzle-dazzle and putting on a good show for me. I'm unimpressed with your toys and the symbology painted on them, I'm impressed with what you see now. The images you hold in your mind are far stronger than any you'd receive if I were to hand you that deck and let you fall back into familiar and boring patterns.”

Lissandra looked up the cliffside and watched the towers of rock rise higher than skyscrapers, becoming lost in complete and unyielding pitch.

“There are no stars in this forsaken place, Lissandra. You've nothing more at your divination disposal than that which you can see and know within you.”

“Pain.” Lissandra closed her eyes; the headaches had begun again, she had just been too distracted with the fantastic and impossible environment to realize it. “All I feel is pain.”

“That's not a message from beyond, that's your body telling you that it's been pushed beyond the lazy threshold you normally set for it. What is beyond the pain?”

Lissandra gripped the railing and tried to put her aches and pains in the same box she had locked the cold and hunger within. She could see the deck shuffling in her mind and closed her eyes tighter than she had when she had been scared she might be turned to stone.

The cards were arranged in a high tower, one atop the other, which rose over the image she held of herself as a little girl. The pictures on the cards shifted and blurred in and out of focus. The Lovers moved
in for a kiss and the Hanged Man swung slowly back and forth from the rope about his ankle — it was all too much movement and chaos for her to keep up. The projection she held in her brain, of the little girl she had once been with the wide eyes and the dangling curls, struggled for focus.

“You're not a little girl anymore.” Moon was whispering in her ear, but to the little girl watching the cards come to life through their little theatre windows, the voice of Moon sounded like the echoing boom of a distant thundercloud. “Grandmother has sailed on to the next life, she won't be coming to tutor you.”

Lissandra saw her own face staring back at her; the face of the woman she had become replacing the avatar of the child she had once been. When the mirror image of herself turned back to the cards, they were no longer cards.

“They are thirsty for blood. They haven't witnessed the light from heaven beaming down judgment on them in so long. They are hungry to make anyone pay. They need nothing from us beyond the sport of tearing at us — ripping muscle and flesh from bone.”

Moon was standing next to the image of Lissandra that she held in her mind. “That is good, but simply hearing the word demon would let both of us know what they would like to do with our bodies if they could have their way. What is beyond their base desires? Look past their hunger and tell us both what it is that they want more than anything. What is the desire which fuels their frustration?”

Lissandra opened her eyes as the lift came to a shaking stop at the bottom of the cliff. She looked to Moon and understood — not guessed — but truly understood.

“Imprisonment is only torture to them because they are endless, and the gift of their endless nature is as well a curse. Their disdain for being trapped in this place is simple: they are wasted when they are forgotten. They desire above all else to be useful again.”

Moon nodded. “Of course that is the right answer.”

“And of course,” Lissandra spoke with the realization that she no longer felt the cold, the hunger, or the throbbing pain in her head, “you knew the answer all along.”

“I needed to hear you say it, Lissandra. To realize it for yourself.” Moon watched as the soldiers raised the gate in the center of the
yellow railing. The first of them stepped off the lift to fan out in the fashion in which they were trained. “Important realizations have begun for you this night, lucky girl.”

Moon followed the soldiers off the lift and motioned in the air for Lissandra to come along.

Lissandra stared at the alien place she had found herself pulled into by the Moon. “How is it that I'm so lucky, Moon?”

“You are lucky because you are taking the baby steps towards becoming the only constellation whose divine instructions you will ever follow.”

Lissandra stepped off the lift. The ground beneath her shoes was coarse, black sand —lava rock. She took another more confident stride to once again find herself at Moon's side.

Moon pointed the way towards the fires. The group marched forth in earnest when she spoke. “You are extra lucky in that now I don't have to leave you down here for a lifetime as you ponder towards enlightenment all alone.”

~26~

T
HE
E
XPLORER

God make sky, devil paint black
God make bird, devil make bat
God make garden, devil grow fruit
God make eye, devil take tooth
God make rain, devil make flood
God make man, devil want blood
—Diary entry, untitled lyrics, blues singer Walter
       “Hoof Scratch” Hatchet, 1937

THE EXPLORER STOOD ABOUT THE STONE of the richly accented terrace at the base of the castle. From here, he could easily see the sprawl of the city below him as it crept out towards the shore. Three fine ships sat in the harbor. Even from so far away, it was no strain to his eyes to see the men who clung to the riggings — the great ladies of the ocean overtaken with their ever-moving labors, as if the vessels were children's toys which had been placed upon an ant hill. Hundreds of men had been working without rest for weeks once the Royal decree had been announced.

The Explorer would have his tiny armada, and his days of crossing the vast ocean would soon begin. Once her ladyship's words had been trumpeted through the streets, there was no stopping the cycle of events set in motion. One would have had better luck trying to lasso the sun from the sky.

The waters stretched from the harbor to ultimately blend with the sky, blue married to blue. As the slow clouds rolled overhead, so did the thick waves below. Each to their own fevered labors, and only meeting to become one at the place where most men's gaze succumbed to the horizon. The explorer knew better; that place did not exist — there was no end.

Though the sky was calm this day, and the clouds bore no omen of rain, the Explorer never saw things in such a way. When he looked upon the great ocean, he always saw it as it had been that night. He always relived the storm which rocked that ship and the flashes of cold clarity the lighting strikes gave.

Slices of a memory, of men clinging to anything they could grasp for their lives, kegs and cannons rolling across the deck to become resident of the depths… of how the rain had coated her soft skin…

The look on her face when the Explorer's grip could no longer hold her… the broken promise he had made to her that he would always keep her safe, and that the god of the great ocean would not steal her for his own.

“You are pleased with the preparations?” The words of the Court Minister were at his back. The Explorer turned from the past and gazed into the eyes of the man who had championed his future.

Tall and gaunt, draped in the official maroon robes of the house of his Lord and Lady, the Minister would have done well in another life as a long-necked sea bird, towering over things with his draped arms extended and sunken buttonhole eyes.

“My officials at the docks say that we are days ahead of schedule.” The Minister was proud of himself as he relayed the information, as if it were he himself who was flying from one mast to the next and chirping out a work song.

“I am ready to begin.” The Explorer did not meet the gaze of the Minister, and looked above him and his gaggle of apprentices as he spoke. The crows were always thick upon the castle walls. Thousands, like an unwelcome black snow, clung to the parapets and could not be melted away, no matter how bright and hot the sun rose into the sky. “I am ready to make good on my claims, Minister. All worlds flow into the next, and the trade routes are no different.”