Bone Music (32 page)

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 play.

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.

He called them by name (they have the names of angels, and maybe they’ve taken them or maybe they were born with them) and they smiled like they’d met a brother at reunion, and as they did some great rift in the nation’s heart began to heal as it never could before.

“I love you,” Furry Lewis said. “You are my brothers and I love you.”

The Blind Lords didn’t answer, and long as the four Kings of the Delta waited they never answered, but their silence neither embraced nor denied the love the King proclaimed.

Two of them were white, now, and one was black. These things change from time to time, depending on the circumstance and the context. They aren’t nearly so important as they seem.

Because we are the nation that the crossroads built, and after that what else matters?

“You’ve come at a fine moment,” Furry Lewis said. “You come to help?”

The Blind Lords didn’t answer. No one who saw them could be exactly sure what that meant.

“We aren’t here,” the darkest of the Blind Lords said, “but only seem to be.”

That was true, of course. The Blind Lords of the Piedmont may neither tread in Hell nor upon the Mississippi Delta; it’s a consequence of their nature, just as they are a consequence of ours.

“I don’t get it,” Vaughan said. “If you aren’t here to help, what are you doing?”

And the Blind Lords smiled. And the first of them (or was he the third?) struck an unmasterable chord as his companions touched the fallen tower —

Which exploded in a palisade of light and sound like an explosion, but musical and fundamental manifest: and when the light went dim every solitary fact about their circumstance had changed.

Where a moment previous the broken citadel had towered, now there stood a gleaming structure as glorious as it had been the day the angels erected it, and where grey ashes had sifted in the wind now there was a mist as beautiful and pure as the cloudy wisps that decorate the heavens, and where the cacophony of battle had permeated the air now there was a music like the ringing of the spheres.

“Lord, Lord,” said Washboard Sam.

As Red fell to his knees and began to pray.

A moment later Furry Lewis joined him. Vaughan and Sam just a moment later still.

When their prayer was done Vaughan looked around him and saw a crowd was gathering.

“Where are they?” he asked. Furry Lewis cocked an eyebrow to ask him what he meant. “The blind men, the Lords, where are they?”

Furry Lewis shrugged.

“Gone,” he said. “As if they never were.”

“But we need them!”

Furry Lewis shook his head. “No,” he said. “They’ve done everything they can.”

Leadbelly’s directions only ended up getting them more lost. When they’d driven ten minutes through the chiaroscuro of the dark and burning city Emma realized that they were back where they’d started, on Loyola, not far from the French Quarter.

And then she saw it, gleaming glorious as an icon through the Hellish dark and burning: the Tower.

So beautiful, that Tower. Beautiful and Godly in the midst of the awfulness of that night where the world had turned to Hell, and the moment that she saw it she knew it was their salvation.

She pulled the car over, got out of it, and walked toward the Tower. Leadbelly called after her. “What the Hell you think you’re doing, woman? Where do you think you are?” But Emma ignored him. Which was just as well; half a moment after he asked those questions he got out of the car, slammed his door, and ran to catch up with her.

And followed Emma to the edge of the Revival.

Vaughan stood on the steps, looking out at the crowd. He tried to pick out faces, pick out people, sort the living from the dead — but it wasn’t easy. Some of them damned, come up from Hell, and some were the living breathing people of New Orleans. None of them repentant, but none of the damned among them were damned beyond all hope of salvation — no one who was damned through and through could abide the sight of the Tower as it stood in Heaven, he thought. When they saw the light it drew them, and that attraction marked the decency inside them.

Then someone whispered, It’s the Jubilee, and a murmur went back and forth through the crowd, and Vaughan felt it begin to happen all around him. . . .

There is a thing some people call the Carnival and some people call Mardi Gras, and other people call the Jubilee; some of them celebrate it at the Easter season and other people observe it in high summer. Evangelicals call it a revival, and that’s as true a name as anyone could give it. They call it any time it comes to them, and it came to them that night when Hell became New Orleans.

Washboard Sam, still wearing his uniform of authority, knew it in his heart. Because he knew it he directed it. He stood on what were once the steps of City Hall — they faced south from the Tower — and sent Furry Lewis south before him. He sent Tampa Red east and Stevie Ray Vaughan west.

“Sing it out,” he said. “Sing it to the people of the city — let them hear the Good Word of the Lord.”

“Sing what?” Stevie Ray Vaughan asked. “I don’t understand, what do you want me to sing? And why?”

Washboard Sam smiled, and he said, “There’s a song inside your heart, Stevie Ray Vaughan. Find it and sing it, and that song will show the way.”

And then he began to sing himself.

Inside the four points of that compass, there before the steps that led toward the gleaming Tower, their song made a place where no wholly evil thing could walk, a place that drew men and women with the shadow of Salvation in their hearts as surely as a light will draw the firefly, and when they came they stood mystified before the gleaming Tower that once was the Blessed Jewel of Heaven.

When Emma and Leadbelly got to the corner of Loyola and Perdido they found a throng of people crowding around the Tower, so many of them pressed so thick that there was hardly room to pass. Leadbelly stopped at the back edge of the crowd to peer at the Tower, at the crowd, at the bluesman singing endlessly hypnotic jam somewhere just out of sight — and when he got a good look he started to back away.

“What’s the matter?” Emma asked him. “Don’t just stand there — we’ve got to go inside.”

Leadbelly scowled. “No, woman,” he said. “Woman that ain’t the place for men like me.”

Emma looked at him crossways. “You’re wrong,” she said. “I know you are.”

“I’m not,” Leadbelly told her, but Emma wasn’t having none of that. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him half off-balance into the crowd, and when he resisted they both stumbled and ended up falling forward as the crowd gave way —

— gave way —

Gave way to reveal the singing deadman, and that was Furry Lewis.

Now Leadbelly and Furry Lewis had some history between them, and it wasn’t pleasant stuff. But there was no way Emma could know that. When Emma saw that man her knees like to collapse beneath her, because she knew he was a man who’d heard the Lord’s voice whisper in his ear, and that voice carried through his song as truly as a night gives way to day, and day to night thereafter.

But Leadbelly didn’t see him till he got up from his stumble and found himself face to face with the man who was first among the Kings.

“Come on,” Emma said, pulling Leadbelly past the bluesman. But her pulling was no use, because there was a barrier where Furry Lewis sang, and that barrier was hard as steel so far as Leadbelly was concerned, no matter how nobody there could see it.

“I can’t, Emma Henderson. Like I said, that place is not for me.”

He turned away from Furry Lewis. And where he might in some other circumstance have pulled a knife on the deadman, or threatened him, or sneered at him and walked away, in that moment in that place on that night Huddie Ledbetter, known most commonly as Leadbelly — Huddie Ledbetter felt himself ashamed.

And in his moment of shame Emma pulled his wrist again, and now he fell through the barrier as surely as though it had never stood before him in the first place.