He knelt at the edge and sniffed the air above the water. There was something relaxing about it. He couldn’t see the bottom. The basket weave of thick, rough roots appeared to continue below the surface, but that was only a reflection of their upper segments. His breath formed wispy ribbons of mist that clung to the water. The odors, both foul and sweet, were stronger down here, so close.
Billy banged the Maglite against his thigh a couple of times for good measure, then twisted the emitter back and forth. Nothing. Maybe that placed a merciful limit on his curiosity. Maybe it was better not to see too deep into the pool.
But then he did see, all at once in a flash, as if lightning had formed in the heart of a mud cloud deep in the water, hovering over the bottom of the pool. In that flash, he saw the white corpse of the witch, laced with a blue web work of gossamer thin veins through her throat and breasts, staring up at him from the twin tunnels of empty eye sockets picked clean by fish. He imagined how their thorny teeth would have peeled those eyes like boiled onions. Her lips were also gone—her mouth an abomination of shredded tissue dancing in tendrils around her bloated, black tongue.
His breath caught in his throat, but as he saw the harrowing image of the corpse, he also continued to see the flat impenetrable surface of the pool reflecting the tree roots and the setting moon and his own silhouette. That deeper vision had to be in his mind’s eye. It was scary how vivid his inner vision was getting—maybe he was going insane—but it was only that, a vision of what he expected to see. Not what was actually there in the water now, but perhaps what had been there once, long ago.
What does she want me to see?
Could she help him somehow? Was that why she wanted his attention? Was it possible that she was not the Devil’s servant, but one who had found a way to escape his grip? He felt a rush of hope as physical as a surge of blood. She must have! How else could she persist at all as a spirit on earth unless she had evaded the snare of Hell? But then his heart contracted as quickly as it had opened.
Maybe that was the definition of Hell—wandering these woods forever, freezing and starving and haunting the place where she had been executed. Or maybe this ghostly guide was just an echo. He had to admit that for all his inarticulate fear of the arch villain of his childhood religion, he lacked a coherent notion of the soul and its anatomy. Perhaps what the witch had left behind was merely the residue of who she had been and what she had done in life. The real substance of her consciousness could have been devoured lifetimes ago, or it could be elsewhere right now, like an animal in a trap, suffering all this time. Or maybe Rail had plucked her from the underworld and given her a job on the ground for a little while—play with Billy Moon. Toy with what little sanity he has left.
What if she never knew Rail? This thought surfaced in a voice that wasn’t his own, but Jake’s. Maybe she was falsely accused. It could have been hysteria, like in Salem. It could have been a rumor started by a woman in the congregation who noticed her husband’s musical appreciation was on the rise.
Whatever she was, maybe she did mean to help him. The moon was low enough now to illuminate Billy’s face and cast his reflection onto the surface of the water. The shadows under his eyes were long.
“I look like shit,” he said aloud, and lunar light or not, he knew that he did. He suddenly felt bone tired. The weeks, no, the years, were catching up with him.
“Look at you, losing your fuckin’ marbles. Ghosts and devils and wolves, oh my.”
His jeans were soaked through the knees and his calves were cramping, but he felt like he could fall asleep kneeling there. He leaned forward to take the weight off his calves and let out a long exhalation. When he breathed in, he tasted ozone on the air. He looked at his haggard face, framed by his long black hair and saw that he was going gray. How had he missed that in the mirror in the mornings? Then he realized that the gray hair wasn’t the only thing different. He stared, transfixed, at his own face, and watched it transform.
His nose elongated into a snout. His eyebrows turned snowy white, curling upward at their ends. His eyes remained green, but the pupils expanded. The transformation of his face into a goat’s was completed by a final dramatic cadence in which his ears grew outward, parallel to the ground, while heavy gray horns spiraled out from his temples. And yet he felt none of this in muscle or bone as he watched it happen.
He raised his right hand to his face and saw it in the mirror pool, just as it appeared before his eyes—a human hand. Touching his face he felt only flesh—not fur—and the same features he had known his whole life. Turning his head from side to side while keeping his eyes fixed on the face in the water, he saw that it did not pivot with him. The face looking back may have used his reflection as a basis to take form, but it wasn’t him.
If seeing his face become that of a beast had failed to terrify him (his slow-dawning reaction had been more akin to fascination), this knowledge, that the goat face was independent of him, plunged him to the very bottom of the deep well of fear he had been drinking from of late. He dropped like a bucket breaking free of its frayed rope, filled with the knowledge that what he was seeing was not in his mind’s eye in the same way the vivid image of the witch’s corpse had been. This wasn’t a flash of what he feared to see. He was seeing it.
“What are you?” Billy asked.
A third eye opened in the creature’s forehead as the other two closed. Billy felt the hair on the nape of his neck rise, but he could not look away. Vines appeared and formed a crown around the goat’s head, leaves writhing and crawling, red-globe grapes blooming into existence. Then a horrible thought occurred to him, and he forced himself to turn his head, sure that he would see the creature standing over his shoulder. He saw only a hanging grape vine drooping down from the branches of the rowan tree beside the pool, the tree the ghost had pointed at. When he looked at them, the grapes popped like boils, spraying his face and neck with dark juice and pulp, making him jump.
Slowly, he turned his head and looked into the pool again. The face was still there. In a resonant baritone, it said, “I am the blood.”
“Are you the Devil?”
“So say some. I am the blood. I am come.”
Billy didn’t know how to continue. For a time, the only sounds were his own pulse in his ears and the rustle of the wind in the boughs.
“What do you want from me?” he asked.
“I want not. I am the blood. I hiss and foam in your very veins. Close your eyes and I am there, open your flesh and I am there, spit your seed and by the feast of be-with-us, I am there. I want naught but unremitting surrender to me in thee.”
“I don’t understand,” Billy whispered.
“You lie. I am the truth. I am the blood. I would taste your inmost fruit, unsullied by the machinations of your mind. I am the spark in every fish, the flame in every egg, the apocalypse in every star. When you coughed out the fluid of your mother’s womb and drew breath, you sucked me in. When you screamed your first wail, sang your first song, I was there. When you first ate of the fungus of madness and felt the girders of your soul tremble, you knew me. Behold.”
The face was obscured by a rippling of the water. A pallid sheen spread across the surface, flickering like a film screen. Billy watched a silver and black image take form. In a barren field, the dome of a mushroom broke the dirt and sprouted, leaning to one side under the weight of its cap, transforming as it grew, morphing into a penis. It glowed as if an incandescent filament had been ignited at its core.
The light spread outward until it blasted stark shadows across the ground, emanating from the little clumps of soil that had fallen around the stem. A flash, and the earth and sky were erased in the fury of that light. When detail returned to the image, it had become a towering pillar of dirt and smoke vomited against the stratosphere, mushrooming against heaven’s floor.
Billy’s field of vision swarmed with purple phosphenes, but he managed to maintain consciousness while the water dimmed again and all he saw was
the horned head staring at him, wavering in the black mirror. The creature’s heavy eyebrows arched sternly below the expressionless third eye, and its snout drew back, revealing teeth. It bellowed, “You have betrayed me. You will suffer.” The water vibrated with the words.
“I haven’t betrayed you! I did what you wanted. I’m still doing it.”
“You haven’t begun to honor me. Defy me again and you will know me next when the hemp rope snaps your neck and the nectar of your last spasm lands upon my tongue.”
As if to illustrate the threat, a serpentine tongue dropped from the creature’s open jaws and traced a slow orbit in the atmosphere of the black water.
Just when Billy thought he couldn’t take any more, the face softened and withdrew into his own reflection once more, his own head, but now with a thick, rough rope around his neck. Physically, he felt no such thing, but the sight of it made him retch. Then the mirror picture shifted slightly, gaining depth of perspective, and he saw the rope extending upward behind him into the tangle of grape vines in the tree branches.
He tried to turn his head away, but the pull of the pool was too strong. He was transfixed. But he had to look, had to see if the rope was somehow really there. He was about to force his head to turn, half expecting to feel the coarse rope burning his neck despite the absence of its weight on his shoulders, when his reflection transformed back into that of the goat creature. The noose was gone.
Billy said, “Are you the true face of Trevor Rail?”
A clawed hand appeared below the face. It reached toward Billy. He recoiled from it, but when it reached the place where it should have penetrated the surface of the water, he heard a sharp tap. The water had become a solid sheet of black ice. The claw scratched thin white lines across the surface, forming crooked letters, with a screeching sound. Billy watched the letters form, four of them, appearing from right to left on his side of the black mirror.
L I A R
Billy’s vision swarmed again. He fell forward into darkness.
Part III
And the Forest Will Echo with Laughter
Fourteen
“Don’t you know there ain’t no devil?
There’s just God when he’s drunk.”
-Tom Waits
Rachel Shadbourne stepped out of hiding when she saw Billy fall face-first into the puddle he had been talking to. Tossing her caution like clutter from the top layer of her purse, she ran to him, grabbed a fistful of his hair, and pulled his head out of the water.
He didn’t cough.
That wasn’t good.
Her leather pumps sank into the mud under his weight—bad footwear for this midnight Girl Scout expedition, but she didn’t own anything more appropriate. She had never been a Girl Scout, never owned a pair of hiking shoes, never learned CPR.
“Fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck,” she whispered, dropping him to the ground. She realized she was afraid to touch him and almost laughed out loud. Here was her idol, alone with her in the dark woods, perfectly vulnerable, and after dragging him out of the water, she was afraid to touch him? But she was aware of her limits: all she knew of resuscitation was what she’d seen on TV and in movies. And how did that apply to someone who had inhaled water?
Did you need to do something different, or just start pumping their chest like usual? She had seen countless actors over the years, rolling victims onto their backs and lifting under the neck to clear the airway. But what if rolling him onto his back made him drown? Was she supposed to do the opposite and try to drain the water out of him? Force him to expel it with that Heimlich thing? Oh fuck, indeed.
She knew that if she did nothing, he would probably die. But the caution and self-protection she had tossed when she’d left her voyeur’s post behind the tree were crowding in around her. You’re a crazy fan who’s been stalking him. If you touch him and he dies, people will accuse you of killing him.
Superimposed on the face she knew and loved so well, now glazed with a thin coat of muck, she could see the front page of a newspaper.
Below
KENNETH STARR TO ADDRESS HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE,
a smaller headline,
ROCK SINGER BILLY MOON DEAD AT 27, FEMALE FAN SUSPECTED OF FOUL PLAY.
Rachel rolled Billy over and tilted his head back. He wasn’t breathing and he might have water in his lungs, but she didn’t know what had caused him to pass out in the first place. Heart attack? Was he on drugs? Which ones? This was a subject she knew a little more about. Coke could give you a heart attack but it wouldn’t make you hallucinate a conversation with someone who wasn’t there. Acid might get him talking to his reflection, sure, but it wouldn’t give him a heart attack. Heroin? She didn’t know. It didn’t matter. Could be a combination. Nothing she could do about it.
She placed her hands on his stomach, one atop the other and pumped three times. She knew it wasn’t CPR but hoped it would make him throw up the water and maybe even some pills or something with it.
No reaction.
She squeezed his jaw, and his mouth opened. She could smell garlic on his breath. Was that Chinese food? Gross. Not quite how she would have imagined getting this intimate with him. She put her finger down his throat, careful not to scratch him with her long black nail.
Nothing. His gag reflex was disconnected.
Now she tried her best imitation of CPR, pumping on his sternum and puffing hard into his mouth. The fear of cracking his ribs made it a half-hearted effort, but that other fear—that he was slipping away to a place where even paramedics wouldn’t be able to reach him—was fast eclipsing the first. She pumped harder.
The thought of paramedics brought her cell phone to mind but even if she could get a signal, it would mean abandoning the resuscitation attempt at the crucial moment. There was no time.
But I don’t know what I’m doing. I could be killing him. Her own heart was pumping enough beats per minute for the both of them. It occurred to her that she hadn’t even checked him for a pulse. Now she tried, feeling his wrist, then his throat, but all she could feel in her fingertips was her own.
She didn’t know if you could get 911 on a cell phone, and even if it worked, where would she tell the dispatcher to send the ambulance – the woods near Echo Lake Studios, by the tree and the puddle? Yeah, right.
What the hell was he doing out here in the middle of the night, anyway, talking to a puddle? Just what in the hell was he doing, flirting with death when he was supposed to be finishing his new album? Without thinking, she slapped him across the face, hard.
You like his Gothic death trip just fine in the lyrics and photos. What’s the matter, girl? The real thing a little too real for you?
She wound up and slapped him again. Harder. Three things happened. He sprayed blood from his nose, spewed swamp water from his mouth, and drew a loud, ragged breath. Her eyes widened. She used all of her strength to roll him onto his side and beat the heel of her hand between his shoulder blades.
He squinted through a coughing fit, then rolled onto his back of his own volition, his head settling in her lap. He blinked, confused, at the dark shape of her against the indigo sky now infused with the first dirty light of November dawn. His brow furrowed. He said, “You’re real.”
“Shh. Don’t try to talk yet. Take it easy.”
“Why did you lead me to him? What do you want from me?”
She didn’t know what he was talking about, and for a moment, she no longer knew what she wanted from him. She brushed wet hair from his forehead. Billy swatted her hand away, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and looked at the blood on his fingers. Then he was reeling like a cornered animal, scrambling in the dirt, trying to get his cramped legs under him, muttering, “Get away from me. Stay ‘way from me.”
Rachel held her hands up, not moving but ready to catch him, watching him try to stand. Billy stumbled, but when she reached for him, he pointed a finger at her, staggering and groping for the nearest tree with his other hand. Now that he was conscious,
he looked dangerously deranged: eyes blazing from his dirty face through a mask of blood and drool. Then he said something she'd never imagined hearing from him, “Get back, witch!”
She laughed. She knew it probably didn’t help to laugh when you were being called a witch, but she couldn’t help it. It was just such a relief that he was alive, even if he was out of his mind on some crazy trip. But the laughter seemed to make him worse, so she shut up. Then, gathering her composure, she said, “Billy, you almost died. Calling me a witch is a funny way of thanking me for pulling you out of the water. You hafta calm down. And I always kinda thought you were into witches.”
For a little while he said nothing, just stood there swaying from a branch, examining her in the fast-growing light. She rummaged in her purse.
At last, he said, “You’re not Olivia.”
“Rachel,” she said, holding out her hand to him, a small cellophane-wrapped peace offering glinting on her palm in the first real rays of sun through the misty air. “Mint? Might do you some good. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt and chalking all of this up to low blood sugar.”
Billy took the candy and looked at it like it was a fuel cell for a jet pack from the third star in Orion’s belt. Clearly, he was reassessing the situation. When he unwrapped it like an idiot child and popped it in his mouth, she took a wad of tissues from her bag and dampened them in some crushed snow. “I’m going to clean that blood off your face, okay?”
“Uh-huh.” He nodded.
Wiping his face clean, she got a pretty good look at his eyes. The pupils weren’t overly dilated for someone in low light. It struck her as strange that she knew those eyes so well and yet this was the first time she’d seen them in person.
The Devil of Echo Lake Page 16