Bone Music (29 page)

“I’ll find them,” the baby said. She didn’t hesitate a moment; she waded out through the running sewage, into the bayou jungle. As she waded through the filth dirty water ran through her open wounds, and Dan wanted to say, Little girl, be careful, that water there is filthy you’re going to get a terrible infection, and he might have done it, too, but Polly put her hand on Dan’s arm and shook her head.

“You’ve got to let her show you,” Polly said. “She saw it all. She knows what to look for.”

Polly was right about that, too. The baby tromped purposely into the broken thicket, stooped, and spent a moment sifting through the debris — and when she stood again she held in her hands the most fabulous jewel Dan had ever seen.

More beautiful than anything he’d ever imagined; more forbidding than his most frightful nightmare.

“The Eye of the World,” Polly said.

Dead Elvis fell to his knees and began to pray.

“That’s it?” Dan asked. “That’s the Eye of the World?”

Polly shook her head. “Only a fragment,” she said. “You’d know it if you saw the whole.”

“We need to help her find the rest, don’t we? — that’s what the Lady said, we had to find it all before dark.”

Polly shook her head. “The girl knows,” she said. “Stand away and let her work.”

As Polly spoke the girl carried the glittering jewel through the sewer, and set it before the Lady’s still-quivering remains. When the girl had trudged back into the sewage Polly crossed herself.

Elvis kept praying. Prayed so hard and clear and true that for a moment Dan thought he’d repented the things that damned him to the world and Hell — but maybe not, because no salvation ever came for him.

Or maybe salvation did come for poor dead Elvis Presley. But if it did it came for all of them. And it was a long long time coming.

The French Quarter of New Orleans

The Present

When they got past the French Quarter Emma saw big clouds of smoke off to her right, and she got a dreadful feeling. Part of her didn’t want to confirm it, but another part — the part she could never deny — had to know for certain. She didn’t have a choice, not really; she took a right, a left, and then a right again, and there they were, just as she’d dreaded — fire trucks all crowded up in front of New Orleans City Hall.

“What you doing, woman?” dead Leadbelly asked, huffing angrily. But he knew — Emma could tell.

“That isn’t any accident,” Emma said.

Leadbelly frowned, and looked away — and as Emma followed the line of his gaze she saw that there were fires starting everywhere around them, everywhere. Flickering flames here, there, half the buildings in the Quarter starting to catch fire. . . .

“We better get out of here,” Leadbelly said. “This whole damn Quarter’s going up.”

It was easier to say that than it was to do it. Traffic was stopped dead by City Hall, and backed up even worse down the one way to their left.

But there wasn’t any traffic at all coming toward them on the one-way. So Emma did the only thing she could — downshifted as she slammed her foot down on the gas and banked hard right, trying to run the one-way before some fool could turn head-on into them, but it didn’t work. They didn’t get halfway down the block before Emma heard the siren and saw the flashes of light from the fire truck’s strobe; before she had time to react the truck was turning to barrel down on them, head-on, slam, crash, it was going to run them down —

And Emma panicked.

Where she should have tried to drive the Buick into a driveway or up onto the sidewalk, her leg twitched almost involuntarily, pushing her foot all the way down onto the accelerator and there was nowhere to go with the Buick’s engine roaring to life, nowhere but into the tiny gap of road between the truck’s left fender and the left edge of the road, but there wasn’t room that way, no room at all, no room for an old full-size car like the Buick —

— no room —

But they made it, somehow. Maybe the gap was wider than it looked, or maybe the Grace of God found them for a reason, or maybe, maybe, maybe God knew what, but they made it through, just barely. Just before they finished passing the truck the Buick’s left side scraped the back end of the fire truck and sent them rebounding into the curb so hard it was a wonder their tires didn’t separate from their rims —

And then they were out on the street, past the truck, hanging a hard right away from City Hall, and never mind the sparks that rose up off the tire rims, trying to set the car afire; if Emma let those worry her she would have gone hysterical.

Four blocks back toward the river with fires breaking out all around them in the Quarter, and then right again for an eight-block dash to the Pontchartrain Expressway.

Up on the highway, and they were safe running for their lives.

They would have made it, too.

Would have got themselves clear of New Orleans and the Hell descending all around it, but something went so wrong.

So wrong!

Before they got halfway to Metairie, they came to barricades, and half an army of National Guards enforcing them with tanks and half-tracks and APCs, like to blow them off the road, Emma thought, and if their guns hadn’t glittered oh so bright Emma would have tried to run the barricade, she really wanted out of there that bad.

But she didn’t run, because she knew it wasn’t any use. Even if she’d managed to jam the Buick past the Guards and the big guns and the tanks and armored cars, she would have run headlong into the fire consuming the highway half a mile down the road — it was serious, serious stuff, that fire, a military convoy that’d wrecked and caught fire, burning wild and out of control, and if she could have run the fire the toxic fumes from the smoke would have killed her anyway. Serious stuff, that fire, and it wasn’t getting anything but worse.

And even if Emma couldn’t know what lay ahead of that road, she knew trouble when she saw it, and she knew what to avoid; when the National Guardswoman with the bright red armbands waved her off the highway, Emma went where she was directed.

Into an awful traffic jam of local streets, and she tried and tried to figure how she was going to run for her life, but there were too damn many cars all around them and the fire was on them, too, there were hints of fire everywhere and any second now the whole damn place was going up.

Any second.

There was nowhere to go. No way to get there, anyhow. But Emma didn’t stop trying, because she knew she didn’t dare. She had to, she had to — she had to think, that was what it was. She had to pull the car off the road and look at the map in the glove box and think.

Think.

Off the road and out of the traffic that was hardly moving anyway, into the parking lot of a weathered-looking Kmart. She found a parking spot up near the front, parked, cut the engine, and sighed.

Her hands were trembling, she realized. She wasn’t sure how long they’d been like that — so long she couldn’t remember when it started.

“What you doing?” Leadbelly asked.

“Trying to figure where we going to go,” Emma told him. “I got to look at the map. You want to hand it to me? It’s in the glove.”

The deadman popped the glove-compartment latch and handed her the map. Emma took it, opened it — spread it out and tried to figure where they were.

Where they were was lost, damn near.

“Late afternoon,” Leadbelly said. “You want to get back on the road. We don’t get out of here before the sun goes down, we ain’t getting out of here at all.”

Emma bit her lip. “I’m not leaving this town till we find my little girl,” she said.

Leadbelly scowled. “Your little girl is done for,” he said. “Ain’t nothing you can do for her.”

Emma swore. “You’re wrong,” she said. “Just wrong, is all.”

“Then you better find her before sundown. Or you ain’t never going to find her at all.”

Emma looked back and forth across the map, trying to figure where she had to go. Out on the left end of the map were the new suburbs, places like Kenner and Metairie, and the New Orleans International Airport. On the right — east by southeast along the river — was Arabi, the run-down little town where they’d spent that night in the motel. . . .

Someone shouted, and Emma looked up to see a couple bickering near the entrance to the store.

“They’re here,” Leadbelly said. “They’re everywhere.”

“What do you mean?”

“Keep watching. You’ll see.”

He was right, too. For as Emma watched the couple their bickering intensified, till now the woman reached into her shopping bag, drew out a gleaming brass curtain rod, and struck her husband with it.

Emma gasped. Leadbelly just laughed, and Emma thought that was the cruelest thing. “Mind your humor,” Emma said. “She’s going to put that poor man in the hospital.” She opened the car door, and started to get out to rush to the man’s side to pull his wife away and stop things before somebody got themselves killed, but before she could get halfway out of the car the deadman took her arm and held her back. She looked back over her shoulder to see him shake his head at her.

“You don’t want to get involved,” he said. “This is devil-work. That man is lucky — the metal stick his wife has got is hollow. Look, look — it’s broke in half already, and he ain’t so much the worse for it.”

Emma started to object, but Leadbelly took his hand off her arm and held it up to silence her. Pointed at the couple, and Emma saw the woman looking stunned and appalled at her own behavior, look how her jaw hung slack, look how her husband looked so dumbstruck. . . .

“You think it would’ve gone any better with you there in the middle of things? I swear to you it wouldn’t.”

The South Side of Chicago

The Present

That evening dead Stevie Ray Vaughan called Furry Lewis in Chicago.

“Did you see the news?” Vaughan asked. “New Orleans.”

“I don’t need no TV news,” Furry Lewis told him. “I can feel it in my bones.”

Vaughan didn’t answer right away. He never did, where it came to knowing things you can’t set eyes upon, but that was Vaughan for you. “You want me to call Red?”

“Red knows,” Furry Lewis said. “He’s going to meet me here this evening.”

Another silence that went on and on. “You need me?”

Furry Lewis sighed. “You know I do, Stevie Ray.”

“Okay,” Vaughan said. And then, because the silence got so large he felt it himself, he added, “I had to ask.”

Furry Lewis laughed real gentle, not derisory at all. “You always think you do, Stevie Ray. But it isn’t so. You ought to learn to listen to your heart.”

Vaughan didn’t like that kind of talk — he never did, not when he was alive nor after he had died. He answered as directly as he could. “I don’t want to hear about it,” he said. “I’ll catch the next bus out of here.”

Bayou Country

Near Arabi, Louisiana

The Present

The baby gathered seven interlocking jewels and set them each in turn before the carcass of the Lady. It took a long, long time — hours, it seemed like, but maybe that was just the way it seemed. Dan wanted to wade out into the filth and help the child search, but every time he even thought about it Polly frowned at him and shook her head. Dan hated that. Bad enough she wanted to stop him, but did she have to know him even when he only thought about things like that? Sometimes she even seemed to know before he did himself, and she’d take his hand and squeeze it and shake her head just so slightly, and Dan would realize she was right, and he was about to step out from the shrine on an impulse he didn’t even realize, and he had to stop — he didn’t know why. Maybe there was something in him? There were devils all around them, he could tell, and maybe some of them were called temptation.

When baby Lisa retrieved the seventh jewel Dan saw how each of the gems was a mate among the others, and when they all came together they’d be a treasure infinitely greater than the sum of their individuality, and more than that, too, because the Eye was alive in a way, and its life was God’s Love for the World and All Mankind made tangible to see, and when he saw that he understood why Elvis prayed, and he fell to his knees —

But only for a moment. Because the moment he began to pray a voice spoke to him. “There isn’t time, Dan Alvarez,” the voice said, and Dan knew that voice — as surely as he knew the rhythm of his own heart. “Stand and face me, all of you.”

It was the Santa returned to life, and everyone who heard her did as she instructed. Polly, Dan, and Elvis climbed to their feet; Robert Johnson straightened out his twisted back and stood as best he could. Baby Lisa stood crying beside the Santa, tugging at her skirts.

“You came back,” Lisa said. “Lady Lady you came back.” And the relief and wonder in the baby’s voice were so intense they were contagious, and Dan like to cry himself, glory glory glory to stand before Our Lady of Sorrows and beg her for her blessing, Dan would have repented there and then if he’d had an idea what his sins were — but he didn’t, not for a moment. Pride is like that for everyone, isn’t it? It hides our foibles from us till their omnipresence consumes us, and then it fades away. . . .

“The night is falling,” Santa Barbara said. “When it comes they will surround us once again.”

Baby Lisa’s eyes went wide, and Dan saw the whole notion terrified her. “Make them stop, Lady,” Lisa said. “Don’t let them hurt us again, please please don’t let them.”

The Lady started to answer — and then she stopped. At first Dan didn’t understand why, but then he saw the Lady look at the deadman Elvis, and when she nodded to him, ever so slightly — so small a nod that no one who’d missed the glance could have known it — when she nodded to the deadman Dan knew the fix was in.

Elvis cleared his throat and crouched to look the baby in the eye as he spoke to her.

“We’ve got to walk back into the city, Lisa,” he said, and that was news to Dan as much as it was to the child. “There’s a tower there that’s the shadow of a tower down in Hell. We’ve got to take the Eye there and reforge it.” He looked away, and Dan knew that the next thing he said would be the hardest news, because it was bad enough to scare a deadman. “Every devil out of Hell will try to stop us when they see us, and when it’s dark they’ll be as real as you and me. Because without the Eye the world is Hell, and Hell is the world, too. There are songs our friends can sing to keep the damned away, but they won’t work forever.”