The nightmare's arms were closing about Lucinda now and she was frozen with fear. Black limbs rotted and spent as an Egyptian museum relic and fingers long and sharp and mostly bone. The smell of ozone caused by the electricity that danced from one black probe to another fused to the crown of its head. A closed mouth came into view from around Lucinda's blonde hair on the left side.
Billy believed in something again beyond love.
Horror.
The thing's arms closed tightly around Lucinda and pulled her back towards its chest. There was one last leer as all the clocks in the room threatened to break from hands spinning like windmills.
The monster gave Billy a knowing stare.
It's true that Billy Purgatory did grab the gun that morning and he fired three shots that should have been straight and true and that he might have by some luck or skill blasted the monster off Lucinda.
Had his hand been able to grip the pistol right and not let it slip in the mess of shaving lotion and sweat.
There was a drop in the room like turbulence, and for too long Billy had no idea what was ceiling, what was floor. The air left Billy's lungs, and he felt he might piss out his soul.
The demon had pulled Lucinda hard against its own chest and the large glowing control knob that caused the world to unleash its grip on the thing and whatever it had in its clutches. That madness that made time no longer matter and reality a random annoyance.
When it vanished along with Lucinda and Lucinda's scream, she'd let go of the record jacket and Billy's shots caused Miles Davis to take three to the side of the face before the cardboard fell to the floor.
The monster and Lucinda were already no more and she never would be again. Not in this time and not in this life. Lucinda was lost to Billy forever.
That's the day that Billy Purgatory realized that he wasn't just the grown shell of a mixed-up kid. He knew then that the monsters under his bed had been real.
It's the day that it became clear to him that this monster, this Time Zombie, which he had always considered to be a random horror, wasn't that way at all. It had enough of a brain left to remember Billy Purgatory and to hate him. To come for Billy when his guard was down.
How, Billy couldn't say then, but he knew somehow it had tracked him across time and had not been at all forgiving of their previous meetings.
The Time Zombie had picked this day of all days and waited until Billy had found something worth stealing.
The look it gave just before it vanished had told the tale. For the longest time after that day, Billy had hoped it was just a random twist of the light or some twitch caused by the mechanical rot that powered and gave the monster life. Billy wasn't that much of a fool, though, and he was out of the business of lying to himself about the cruel and painful nature of the world.
When the monster had Lucinda, just before it vanished with her, it had smiled at Billy.
The undead son-of-a-bitch actually smiled at him.
Billy Purgatory left New York City that day, never to return, and he never listened to Miles Davis ever again.
Chapter 20
Back To The Old House In 8MM
The family home was quite literally as Billy had left it just before his nineteenth birthday. A two story aging wooden job that had been slowly disintegrating since it was constructed. Billy's Pop hadn't made many home improvements to the fixer-upper, and paint peeled, cracked windows were taped or covered in plywood and the yard around it sprawled madly, the only element of the half acre it sat on that was healthy or vibrant.
The back taxes notice on the front gate was new, and Billy had to jump the gate because he had no key to the padlock the taxmen had chained securely to the wrought iron enclosure. Nobody watched from the other houses. Billy's street had never been vibrant, and he figured that all the neighbors, ancient when Billy was a boy, had all passed on. Not even a stray dog anywhere, much less another human.
No one had bothered adding another lock to the front door. Pop already had eleven locks on it of all shape and size. Thankfully, Billy's keys still worked, and he soon found himself pushing at the door and staring into the living room.
Pop wasn't sitting there watching TV.
Billy had known in his heart that his father wouldn't be here to greet him. Billy had mixed emotions regarding this theoretical situation. Billy missed his father, of course, but he hadn't much felt like talking to anyone during the three days it had taken to drive here from New York. Billy had barely said two words to anyone since the morning Lucinda was snatched away from him by the Time Zombie. He hadn't done much of anything since she'd been stolen from him but drive.
He'd said what he had to. Convenience store clerks had gasoline and cigarettes. That's what he'd needed and he had nodded and “Yes'd” and “Hello'd” them. Billy had waved at a group of kids in the back of a station wagon who were waving at every passing car on the highway. Their mother and father in the front seat and all their worldly belongings packed around them in the car. People crossing the country to start a new life, which is what Billy was doing too.
Billy didn't have a family to pack into a station wagon with him though. He never would.
Pop had boarded up most of the windows on the lower floor, and the house was like a Minotaur's maze. Billy had no string, but thankfully the power still burned and dim yellowed lights that hadn't become completely decrepit with age came to life when the switch was thrown. The light cast showed that the house was still as dirty and unorganized as Billy remembered it to be.
Billy searched his head for a happy memory that might show itself to be as familiar as the dim house revealing itself around him. Billy could think of nothing concrete.
Billy figured that his Pop had finally sailed off the deep end and abandoned the city, probably staking camp in the cabin he supposedly owned atop the mountain. Billy had been close to it when he was a boy, the night Mudder Kelroy and his motorcycle gang had dropped him off near the wooded road where Billy had been reunited with his Pop. One of the last nights Billy could remember where Pop was close to being as he was when Billy had been a boy.
Maybe the last night that Billy really believed that his father had all the answers.
Billy fought the urge to sit on the couch and let his brain turn to mush. The glass of the TV screen was busted, but Billy didn't need the idiot box right now to slip into a coma and try and forget the world. He should sleep, but if he did, the dreams would start again. They always did, starting happy and descending quickly into madness and horror. If Billy stopped, he would only see Lucinda's face again. That look of helplessness as the Time Zombie wrapped its arms around her and pulled her from Billy's world.
That pleading call for Billy to save her. The bastard had barely given her time to let out a scream.
Billy didn't bother turning on any lights in the hallway and pushed open the door of his old room. Everything was still just like he had left it. The skateboard wasn't in there. Billy thought he could remember leaving it in the closet between the door to the garage and the busted dishwasher. That dishwasher was one of those portable jobs that rolled around and had never worked. Pop didn't throw anything out and always said he'd fix stuff one day. Pop just rolled it into the hall and stacked old newspapers and Time magazines on it. When Billy had left, they were near stacked to the ceiling.
Pop never got around to fixing anything he said he was going to.
Billy didn't even walk into his room. He closed the door after deciding that he had, in fact, grown up in there. That it was a truism, undeniable - unlike so many things in his head. Billy hadn't exceedingly doubted that part of the equation, but he had no idea what he would find when he eventually went out back to look over what his memory said would be the pen for a giant rooster. Billy wasn't so sure about Devil Birds.
“There's no way a giant chicken really lived in the backyard.”
Billy, at times, was almost able to talk himself out of all of these things during his years in the army: vampire girls, g
hosts in the woods, giant chickens. It might have been a pretty easy sell as he got older and more in tune with the world. Pop had been his only partner in growing up, he could have made up some imaginary friends out of boredom.
It was all an easy sell. Easy until a time traveling zombie kidnapped the girl he had fallen madly in love with out of his hotel room in New York City.
And of course, there was always Anastasia. It was impossible to forget she was a vampire, so he tried his best to wipe her from his memories.
Billy was good at making stuff up, but he wasn't that good.
Now it was Lucinda Drew he was pushing out of his mind again; thinking about it made his heart a pincushion for poison needles.
Billy found the remnants of a six-pack of cold ones in the fridge. Two magical cans of beer, or not so magical, for if they were the granting of a wish there'd have been sixteen more of them. Billy fought the urge to close the door and try and trick reality into giving up more and reached in to pull a can out and crack the lid. That they were tall boys meant that God didn't completely hate him. For all Billy knew, they might have been sitting in there for five years, but they were cold, and Billy had washed down things far worse than stale beer.
Pop's bike was gone from the garage; however, Billy did find the sledgehammer leaning in the corner along with a snapped broom handle and a nine iron. It was a ten pounder and would work just fine for what Billy had in mind, which was the only thing that Billy Purgatory knew he was good at.
Destruction.
Beer in one hand and hammer in the other, he passed the old closet by the dishwasher. He had bigger things to look for before he got to digging through there.
Billy pushed the dining room table away from the wall closest to the center of the house and set down his beer. He pressed his ear to the wall and began to lightly tap with the sledge. The wallpaper pattern was some type of gold floret paisley swirl atop what had been a cream-colored background that had been yellowed by age and nicotine heavy air.
Tap.
Tap..
Tap…
Billy went about it with the care of an ancient safecracker from a black and white heist movie.
From everything Billy had ever known Pop's room had always been at the opposite end of the house from his own. Billy grew up in what could be best described as a kid's room. Twelve by sixteen or so, and not much bigger than a prison cell. Pop's room measured out about the same, if not exactly.
Pop avoided talking about Billy's mother above all else. Billy hadn't pushed it, even though he had been a mouthy kid who asked way too many annoying questions. Pop would get that look on his face that Billy wore currently, that love lost look. Billy didn't like seeing his father heart-broken and so it was easier just to not bring it up and it got so easy that she was never brought up.
Ever.
One of the few things Billy did know about his mother and father is that they had lived in this house together before Billy was born, yet there was never much evidence that she had done so. If this had been her home, then she would have had things. All that had ever junked up this place were Billy and Pop's things. So maybe Pop had given all her stuff away.
Pop never threw away anything, though; he was a hoarder, and even if he was trying to forget she ever existed, Billy could barely fathom that Pop would have given away his mother's things.
There wasn't anything to suggest that she had actually existed, though. Nothing (well, there had been one thing Billy had found as a boy, but…)
All Billy knew about his mother was her name, Emelia.
Billy had never even seen a photograph of her. “We were poor, didn't have a camera,” wasn't cutting it anymore in Billy's head. It hadn't made any sense for a long time; Billy hadn't been THAT naive a kid. People come to an understanding over time though, especially with the ones they love and care for the most.
The understanding that Billy and his father had that was most concrete was that Billy could do most anything he wanted except question the past. If he was going to question it, keep those questions to himself.
Pop had retreated from the world now, and Billy had no one to interrogate except the old wall he tapped on then with a giant hammer.
Billy stopped when halfway down the wall the timber of the tapping noise changed.
He'd had a lot of time to consider this possibility. He had all that time in the army and then being sent to the jungle. Pining for the girls he wanted to see and hoping the one he never wanted to see wouldn't stumble back into his life again. Billy could focus on other things when life was good, and he thought he might have a chance to find someone he could really care for.
When Billy's life would take a turn south, he would find this wall staring back at him. The one with the ugly wallpaper that didn't fit the rest of the house. The only one that wasn't bead-board and plaster.
Billy had three days to obsess over it while he drove here from New York.
If Billy really had a mother and she had really lived in this house, then she hadn't shared that tiny bedroom with Pop. The upstairs was a renovated attic, and the two rooms and a closet it held were even smaller than the bedrooms downstairs.
It had to be here.
Billy backed away from the wall and let the sledgehammer handle slide in his fingers and the ten-pound hammer tap the floor at his feet.
“This wall doesn't belong here.”
It didn't square up with the rest of the house.
Billy grabbed the handle with both hands now and flexed then swung. Billy swung again and again.
He tore into the hollow space he'd found in the wall and it gave way to an empty alcove that contained a door that had long ago been boarded and floated over.
Billy kept on swinging until there was nothing left to swing at.
II
The air wasn't as stale as he'd imagined it would be, but no one had been in this room for a long time. Surely for as long as Billy had lived.
He forced the door open in the new space he'd revealed and found the light switch to the left of the dark cold room, but nothing happened as he flipped it. Billy had a flashlight in his back pocket and used it instead.
Billy found a stuffed animal in the shape of an alligator staring back at him in the flashlight beam. It had beady button eyes and floated on a crushed velvet bedspread that was the color of yellow cake frosting. The alligator didn't say anything or tell him to go back, so Billy swung the beam of light across the room.
There was an empty closet with not even a coat hanger, and a chest of drawers, minus the drawers.
Not a picture. Not a stitch of clothing. Not a clue.
Billy was about to turn in disgust when the flashlight picked up the reflection of the metal footlocker at the end of the bed.
Billy stepped closer and recognized the army stenciled letters on the lid. The house address and the name above it:
Emelia Purgatory
Billy fell to his knees before it and propped the flashlight in the crook of his neck. The footlocker was aluminum and was structurally sound, but it was very scratched and in need of a good polish. The leather handles on either side were all but wasted to dust, and the left front hinge was busted, but it was the only thing in this house that had a place for a lock and didn't have one occupying that place.
Billy lifted the lid.
An army jacket was rolled around something long and slender. There was a metal box that had a round disk attached to an indenture in the side of it. The box seemed designed to be unlatched by a series of metal clasps at the corners and had a handle molded into the other side. Something else lay in the bottom of the footlocker alongside the metal box, a something wrapped in a small drugstore paper bag.
Billy took first the jacket and knew it had been his father's from the war. When he lifted it from the locker, Billy's heart raced as he caught a look at an old black-and-white photograph that had been sitting beneath the jacket for all these years.
It couldn't be a picture of her. That would be
way too good to be true.
Billy was lucky he hadn't gotten his hopes up. As he refocused the light, the picture was of a much younger version of his Pop. Billy marveled at how much he and Pop looked alike. Billy considered that when this was taken, Pop had been younger than Billy was now. That was hard for him to comprehend.
Pop wasn't scruffy looking back then. Just from the buzz-cut Billy knew that this photograph was from when Ulysses had been in the army. Pop was dressed in his fatigues and had a stoic look on his face as he shook an unlikely hand.
Pop was facing and apparently receiving thanks from the then commander-in-chief himself.
LBJ.
Pop wore a newly pinned medal on his chest.
Billy considered how he'd grown up and the state of his father and his current place in the world. Billy had never realized that Pop had been anybody else's hero, but from the looks of this photo, he had been.
Billy cast the photo back into the box, and it landed face-down in nearly the same spot it had rested before. Only now, the back of the photograph revealed the outline of Texas drawn in ballpoint pen.
There was a star in the space where the hill country around Austin was and written beside the star, with the same level of care someone would doodle into a phonebook while on hold, were the words:
Atlantis Ranch
Beside that were latitude and longitude.
Billy had no idea, of course, what any of that was supposed to mean, if anything at all.
Billy turned his attention to unwrapping Pop's jacket. It was held in a tight roll long ago by a rubber band that had since succumbed to dry rot. The jacket had Pop's name above the pocket, and digging through it yielded a crumpled pack of Japanese cigarettes, the medal Pop had received from President Johnson, and a well-worn sharpening stone.
Billy laid the jacket out on the floor to unroll it the rest of the way. Billy had half-expected to find a broken pool cue or walking stick in it, but that wasn't what was there at all.
Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird Page 17