Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird

by Jesse James Freeman

  Lissandra was completely in tune with how man might have been, perhaps should have been. She represented harmony to him, and always had. Billy wasn't drawn to harmony under normal circumstances. He had no concept of the concepts of peace, unity or Zen.

  Billy was a raging force of a different kind of nature. He was only happy when he was rattling the cages surrounding every part of the world.

  He wasn't happy just being free. Billy found his happiness in the wild attempts to be free.

  It was far too soon to be thinking about Lissandra like he was starting to think about her. It was hard not to, though. He couldn't help but remember her as she had been so long ago. When they were kids and how she had pretended to hate him so. Billy hoped she had been pretending anyway.

  Their paths had forked harder than Snake's tongue years ago. She wanted to stay here in her woods and she had always known that it wasn't Billy's place and never could be. They had been brought together out of loneliness.

  That only lasts for so long though.

  Billy's heart still ached from the Time Zombie taking Lucinda from him in the Chelsea Hotel. It had only been five days ago. The more he thought about it, the less he wanted to think about it. It was a dull numbness, and at times he wasn't sure if his heart was still beating and he had to remind himself to breath.

  Try as he might now, Billy couldn't remember any of the happiness he and Lucinda had been a party to. All he could see was her face. That face ever twisting into a scream as a monster took hold of her body and pulled her into nothingness.

  How was it that something so beautiful could meet such an end? This is how Billy knew that there was nothing in any high place watching over anyone. This is how he knew that no matter what bonds are formed and how much energy we let break from ourselves to build and hold our souls to others, it all ends the same way.

  That wrenching sweat trigger of the muscles waking drowning in nightmares. All that's left to take the place of these horrors is the nothingness we cloak ourselves in and let seep inside us and overtake every cell.

  There was no way he was going through that again, no matter how good Lissandra looked in her blue dress and gypsy scarf. Not that it mattered anyway, for he was ruined now. Billy would never be able to get her face out of his head.

  He'd forever see her dark eyes and pale skin.

  That sly smile in a rainstorm with only the barest hint of the danger that rested beneath those lips.

  Wait, no. He meant Lucinda, not Anastasia. Why couldn't he call up Lucinda's face?

  “Her hair was blonde.” Billy said this to remind himself, and put the other, the dark one, out of his mind.

  Billy came around and realized that he and Lissandra sat across from one another with an aged tree stump between them. The stump was so old and long ago cut down that the remains had become silver and petrified.

  “Who has blonde hair?” Lissandra asked.

  “Nobody.”

  Lissandra stared at him a long time. It made Billy completely uncomfortable and he wondered why he had put so much effort into finding her. Lissandra, not breaking the stare, set the old hand painted black card deck on the stump top.

  “Is this what you want?” she started. “Tell me fortune telling isn't why you came looking for me?”

  “I was just asking myself the same question.”

  “I know,” she continued. “Your eyes tell me that.”

  “Always begins with the eyes.”

  She nodded. “You're easy to read, between lustful glances.”

  “It's not like that.”

  She smiled. “Oh really?”

  “Really, last thing on my mind now is lust, for anyone.”

  “You want me to pull Death from the deck? The Devil? The Tower?” Lissandra shuffled, but never stopped looking at him. “Maybe the Lovers, Billy?”

  Billy couldn't look her in the eyes. He couldn't look at her at all and found his gaze focused on his own interlocked fingers at his lap.

  “What was her name?” Lissandra asked.

  “I can't talk about her.”

  “What else is there to talk about?”

  Lissandra pulled The Empress from the deck. She was a blonde. Billy stared at her, then to Lissandra. “Her name was Lucinda. I loved her.”

  Lissandra set the deck down atop The Empress. “Hardly.”

  “The demon woman in the forest told me she was my escape.”

  “If you saw a woman in the forest, Billy Purgatory, it was no demon.”

  “Whatever she was, she was wrong and you are too.” Billy was quiet, very un-Purgatory of him.

  “Did she tell you this Lucinda was a substitute for your mother?”

  Lissandra let another card slip from the deck and laid it to rest before Billy's misanthropy.

  The woman was dark and beautiful and the night stars made up her cloak. He could see the fangs smiling down at the fallen hero at her feet. The card read THE VAMPIRE.

  Billy stood, but didn't run this time, or look away.

  Lissandra began to pull more cards from the deck, letting them come to rest in a line beyond the card with the obvious image of Anastasia.

  He took in the cards: The Fool, The Ship, and The Empress again.

  Lissandra placed one finger on The Fool and another on The Ship. “Your mother again, but this time it signifies your birth and the journey you undertake.”

  “I don't know anything about my birth,” Billy said quietly.

  “You will,” she assured him. “You've still much to learn according to this.”

  Lissandra took her hand from the two cards and then placed a finger over the face on The Vampire card, covering it up save for the mouth of fangs. “It's alright that you love her. We all understand.”

  Billy knelt down, as if he were trying to hide in the grass as the deer had done.

  “Oh, you understand, do you?” Billy's tone was almost mocking.

  “I understand that you have a compulsion when it comes to, Anastasia. A sickness maybe.” Lissandra didn't try not to be cold.

  “She's a monster,” Billy said quietly. “Monsters can't love.”

  “Which makes it all the more tragic and twisted.”

  “I have scars from her.” But Billy wasn't about to show Lissandra his neck.

  Lissandra nodded. “There are more to come I'm sure.”

  “I know she's evil. So don't tell me that I love her, Lissandra. Don't act like you know more about what's going on in my head than I do. Give me that much respect.”

  “Fine,” began Lissandra. “If you want respect then don't come to me pretending that that poor distraction of a girlfriend truly mattered to you in the first place.”

  “You can't imagine the horror…”

  “Oh I can.” And Lissandra was angry. “All I've seen is horror. Give me the respect of the acknowledgement that Billy Purgatory isn't the only person who takes note that this world we are forced to travel through is a complete horror.”

  “He ripped her apart. He pulled her into God-knows-when and he tore her soul open.”

  “I'm sure that he did. It's unspeakable and you should let it go and not keep dancing over her corpse singing 'Why me?'”

  “Time has gotten to you.” Billy hated that he used that word. Time. “It's made you unfeeling, Lissandra.”

  “If anything we feel too much. You wanted to run away from your childhood, and you didn't have the courage to run alone. It's one thing to turn from your destiny, but you do so at your own peril, and you opened her up to what happened to her when you took her hand and whispered to her that everything will be alright because we've got each other.”

  “It's not my fault.” Billy knew this was a lie and such an obvious one that Lissandra didn't even call him on it.

  “The only real question here is whether or not you're going to run again. If you do, will it be straight into a vampire's fangs?”

  Billy laughed in spite of himself and looked out over the moonshine lake. “You're actually
jealous, Lissandra. Anastasia has plagued me almost my entire life and you're jealous.”

  Then she laughed with him. “You are the most self-important tortured bastard who has ever lived.”

  “So save me from her.” Billy came as close to begging as he ever had. “Save me from myself. You've got all the answers.”

  He turned, and she was before him. So near and her presence so bold.

  “Is this how you want it, Billy?” She wasn't afraid of Billy Purgatory or his taunts or his angst.

  She pressed herself into him and he placed his head into the crook of her neck and stared down at bare feet. Her hand slipped down his back and the other ran up his chest and pressed into his heart.

  “Do you feel it?” Her words were loving for the first time all night, for the first time in a long time.

  He should have been elated. This should have been the answer he was looking for and why he had put all the effort into searching. Billy couldn't lie then, even when lying is one of the things he was best at.

  “No, Lissandra,” he said with much pain. “I feel nothing anymore. Not until I find her.” They both knew who he meant and where he had to go. “I finally know what my mission is. I have to find my mother, Emelia. I have to know. Until I understand my family, where I really came from, I feel nothing.”

  Lissandra kissed Billy's cheek and pulled her body away from his. She walked in her blue towards the trees.

  “That, Billy Purgatory, is what you will run straight to: nothing.” Billy noticed the deer were on the move again, and he didn't know if they followed her or the reverse.

  “What was that thing in the woods? It wasn't a demon?” Billy called out to her. He knew he wouldn't see her again for a long time.

  “It was a goddess. Artemis.”

  “There's no such thing.” Billy felt that pull to run with her, and the deer. That pull to run from destiny.

  “Did she say anything about me?” Lissandra turned, smiling and continuing to walk away, backwards. Billy wasn't sure how she was smiling considering their conversation, but she was. Like she knew something.

  “She told me all wrong stuff. Said I'd find you in the Brickstaff Mansion hiding in smoke.”

  “Then that's when we'll meet.” She walked, taking her time.

  “But there is no Brickstaff Mansion anymore. It's burned to the ground.”

  “See you there, Billy Purgatory.”

  Billy turned to the lake before Lissandra made it into her woods. He couldn't shake the vision of the rippling reflection of the world consumed by flames and all the trees burning to cinder totems.

  In that flash of nightmare, Billy stood there all alone. Try as he might, he was the only thing left standing in the whole world that wouldn't catch on fire.

  Chapter 23

  Restless Graves

  Billy Purgatory had been driving the Oldsmobile towards the mountains. Pop was one of the few people he hadn't seen on his tour of his past he had undertaken in his home town.

  He couldn't remember the last time he'd headed north on the old highway, but he had been a boy and it was probably when Mudder Kelroy had rescued him from Anastasia and that creepy vampire teacher Uncle Priest after she'd revealed herself to be a smack-talking harlot.

  Billy still couldn't believe that she hadn't shown her face to rub salt in the remnants of the puncture marks she'd left long ago on his neck.

  Anastasia had been nowhere to be found.

  “Not that I'm looking for the trick,” Billy told himself.

  Billy had stopped the car on the side of the highway and had left it in park with engine running for more than an hour. The sun had begun to make its daily fall from the sky's grace and night would be quick upon him. He barely noticed the soft idle of the engine and static from the radio as he stared across the road at it.

  The wall.

  All he could hear were the words his Pop had said to him so long ago when he had asked him about Billy's mother, Emelia.

  “Last time I saw her she was on the other side of that wall.”

  Billy didn't bother to shut off the engine when he finally stepped out of the car and began to cross the road towards it.

  He didn't turn on the flashlight until after he'd scaled the eight feet of crumbling, vine-choked stone and landed on the other side. When Billy finally pressed thumb to switch and light shot from the metal tube, he swept the beam over the crouched waist-high formations that had done their best to hide from his eyes.

  Billy's heart sank one more time that night as he found himself in the silent company of tombstones.

  It was slow work moving up the rise of the cemetery; he had to take his time. What other choice did Billy have left to him that night? He had to know.

  At first he would stare at the headstones in darkness, cautiously raising the flashlight beam to reveal the name etched upon it. He ever so gently picked up the pace with each reveal, until he found himself walking at a steady pace and not even stopping as the light slipped over one name after the other.

  None would show themselves to be the bearer of the name Emelia Purgatory.

  At the top of the rise, Billy found himself standing under the arch at the cemetery gates and studying grave markers no longer, but a building.

  It was years abandoned, and Billy walked towards it with a renewed sense of purpose as the rusty cogs in his head began to spin once more and open his mind to the possibility that perhaps it wasn't a grave he was supposed to find at all on the other side of the wall.

  It might well have been a birth.

  A hurricane fence had been erected around the front façade of the building, but Billy pointed the flashlight beam to the front doors and then up to the stonework above them and read the name aloud to himself, and perhaps to the dead at his back.

  “Piney Point Hospital.”

  Billy took hold of a dented and dangerously leaning light pole. It had long ago given up trying to illuminate what was left of the drive towards chained and boarded Emergency Room doors.

  Billy remembered the cards: His mother, his journey, his birth.

  “This is the place I was born.”

  When Billy turned the car around and began sailing its rust green back the way he had come all thoughts of the past had left the forefront of his brain.

  That night had become all about birth, and most especially, re-birth.

  II

  Anastasia had been watching Billy from the roof of Piney Point Hospital. It had been a sad display for her to take in, watching his mind try to think. All monkey brains work slow, especially if your last name reads Purgatory.

  She sailed down into the night, landing inside the chain-fence and moving to the overgrown opening on the side of the hospital where the doors had been ripped off and tossed onto the grounds, overtaken by weeds. Something had long ago torn its way into this place - or torn its way out.

  Within the dark of the nurse's station, Anastasia found Uncle Priest, studying what was left of a steel door, barely hanging on rusty hinges.

  Whatever had happened here long ago must have been horrifying to the humans. They hadn't even tried to repair the place or mop up the blood.

  “He's on his way,” she remarked in an uncaring fashion to the Priest. “A long journey for Billy Purgatory.”

  The Priest turned to her, his eyes a sickly gold in the sparse light of the room, “More wandering…”

  Anastasia pushed herself up to sit upon the nurse's desk. She'd worn the red dress, just in case. She clicked her heels together. “Every time he goes aimlessly into the world is another opportunity for us that he might find the book.”

  The Priest stared at her, as if watching her words slip out of her mouth and form talk balloons above her head. “Should I follow?” she asked – fighting any hint of apprehension or excitement.

  Uncle Priest took slow steps towards her and, when he arrived at her left, produced a map that he set on the counter at her hip, and pointed with his ragged fingernail at a circle drawn on it
.

  “There will be other times for your games. Those who think themselves our masters watch us closely of late.” He let his finger trace the circle on the map in conjunction to his words of warning.

  “Ah yes, the mysterious Satanic Five.” Anastasia always almost giggled whenever she spoke the name.

  She wasn't fast enough to stop the hand of the Priest take hold of her neck and close on it, his sticky fingers groping the side of her face as he let his fangs show when he spoke. “This is not one of your games, Anastasia. There were more maps such as the one I have just given you, and there were many more circles.”

  “What do I care of your maps or your silly circles?” And she too let her fangs show to the old vampire. He was undeterred with her show as he pulled her face close to his and let his words fly into Anastasia's ear. “The circles marked vampire enclaves, places that I had tried to keep hidden from our masters. I was forced to strike them from my maps as they found them all and erased them from this world.”

  The Priest let his hand drop to his side and stepped back from her as she spoke, “You told me ours was the last. What do you care what they have done to the remnants of our kind? It was you used my rage to trick me into setting fire to our own homes and killing our former lord, the proud and pathetic Helkross.”

  “Our home and our lord had become a cancer of overfed sloth and misguided destiny. We could have joined the others and rebuilt our civilization to the point to which we could have opposed The Five. Yet they wipe the world clean of us faster than we can move forward.” The Priest's words were dripped in poisonous disgust.

  “There is still hope.” Anastasia tried to provide a silver lining before her teacher was completely enraged. “The book. It will lead us to the forgotten places, The Old Country.”

  “Only if the boy ever finds it, and only if you can take it from him for us.”

  “It was prophesized by Helkross, the gypsy girl, and her grandmother. Billy Purgatory will gain that book for us.”

  The Priest moved quickly and was once again at Anastasia's side. His finger dug into the circle on the map with such force that it pushed a dent into the counter on which Anastasia sat. “Which is why, first, you will go where I send you. Warn them to scatter if they wish to live and search whatever relics they most likely don't even know they have for any answer.”