Thirteen

 

 

Billy stepped outside and looked around. There was a half-moon beginning its descent toward the southwestern horizon and enough clouds around it to confirm that he would need the Maglite. He twisted it on to check the batteries, and a puddle of milky white light splashed out between his fingers onto the snow-frosted grass at his feet.

It was just about three hours before dawn, and the night was cold. He pulled his leather jacket close around his chest and walked into the field toward the road. Looking back at the church from this vantage point in the middle of the field, the little white building was backlit by the half-moon, the stained-glass windows dark. The place looked peaceful standing alone in the virgin snow against the black spires of the forest. The wind picked up, raising the pine boughs with a gentle murmur. He thought of going back inside and burying himself in thick fleece blankets. From here, the church looked like a safe place in contrast to the dark forest. He felt a coldness that seemed to emanate from underneath his coat, from under his skin; he knew that tonight, whatever spirit haunted this place, it awaited him not in the church but in the woods.

He squeezed the flashlight, rubbing the texture of the scored grid that served as a grip into his palm, finding in its tactile reality the resolve to go there. Maybe it was all in his mind. Maybe his poet’s imagination was extracting too much meaning from the random chaos of his life. There was a way to put that theory to the test now. Follow the tracks. Follow the thread of meaning to its end and see what he found: an overstressed mind thrashing and drowning in its own secretions or the tangible teeth of a soul eater.

Billy forced his feet forward, toward the tree line, where he could hear the icy brook gurgling. As he pulled his combat boot from the suction of the muddy ground and took the first step, the moon seemed to sink like a stone dropped in water through the underside of the cloud cover, suddenly illuminating the thin crust of snowfall covering the field in patches.

There was an unbroken skirt of snow around the church where the shadows of the pines had sheltered it from the slanting rays of the afternoon sun. Now, as the cold moon reflected that same light down from high above, it revealed a pattern of small shadows, little craters running in a circle around the building. Backtracking, Billy saw what they were—wolf tracks, preserved like fossils by the night freeze. They encircled the church and then ran beside the creek before vanishing into it at a shallow place, then continued on the other bank, climbing up the snowy slope between mossy stones.

He walked across the running water, splashing his black jeans. The combat boots were waterproof, but they were old and worn and some icy water sluiced through around the tongues under the laces, making him catch his breath. He shone the flashlight on the ground ahead. The tracks vanished for a couple of yards where the overhanging boughs had caught the snow. As he stepped over the stones and under the conifer canopy, his beam fell onto a sparkling crust of snow up ahead, and the paw prints resumed—the trail of the pack of gray wolves that had paid him a visit while the ghost of a witch whispered over his shoulder into his microphone.

So it wasn’t railroad tracks he was supposed to follow. He thought of how that Robert Johnson song had been inverted in a way. Now it’s me on the trail of the hellhounds.

He focused on the beam of light shuddering ahead of him. What if he found their den and they attacked him? The thought made him stop to consider just what he was doing. There would be daylight in a few hours. He could borrow a shotgun, just to be safe, come back, and see where this led without the prospect of a pack of hungry wolves lunging out of the dark at him. But he didn’t know how long the trail was, and daylight might melt it before he reached the end. If he waited, the opportunity to find out what it meant could literally evaporate. With that possibility in mind, as urgent as it seemed to make haste, his growing fear that the flashlight beam would catch the golden fire of lupine eyes at any moment almost corroded his will.

His intuition told him to trust whatever had summoned the wolves, summoned the snow to take the impression of their tracks. Whatever purpose he was serving, it had to be greater than feeding the pack this night. And he needed to know. If a dead witch was leading him on, he needed to confront her and get some answers about the nature of his situation. If she had once walked the same path, made the same deal, she could tell him what lay ahead.

 

Follow the tracks.

 

He pressed on.

The soft laughter of the creek faded in the trees behind him. An owl hooted somewhere off to his left. Pinecones hit the ground at odd intervals, triggering his taut nerves. Every animal sound sparked his synapses and spiced the air around him with fear pheromones like tendrils of blood in shark-infested waters.

At one point, he heard what sounded like footsteps behind him—twigs crackling and leaves crunching with the slow impact of stealth. He spun around and swept the beam of light across the woods in an arc.

“Who’s there?” he called and held his breath.

Silence.

He could have called again, could have demanded that his pursuer step out, but talking to the shadows would only grant uncomfortable credence to the notion that he was not alone, so he moved on, straining to listen through the sounds of his own stride for evidence of another.

Dense pine and oak branches now blocked what little remaining light was cast by the setting moon. The trail faltered in places. Twice he had to stop and scan the ground with the flashlight to find the next spot where the gaps between the trees widened enough to allow the snow crust he depended on for continuity. Each time when he found the tracks again, he felt a strange sweet-and-sour reaction in his stomach.

At length he came to a moonlit glade in the heart of the forest. Here the pristine snow formed an unbroken disc of crystal cover around a large pool of still, black water in the center. Over the past hour, he had often seen the tracks of other animals bisecting the wolf trail. There had been deer tracks and those of some small animals. But he had scarcely noticed these while he was focused on the distinctive shape and direction of the wolf prints.

He realized now how ubiquitous those other tracks had been when he registered their total absence here. In this clearing, only the wolf tracks cut the snow. They spiraled inward, the overlapping pattern of the pack thinning out as the spiral closed until only the sparse tracks of a solitary wolf completed the final circumambulation around the brackish pool, then vanished at its edge.

There was only one way to read it. The tale these tracks told, even to an urban eye, was singular and impossible: a pack of wolves trotted into this glade, encircled the pool and vanished one by one into thin air, or condensed their numbers one into another until a lone wolf remained—the pack leader—and this wolf then dove into the pool and was gone. Gone as if the pool were a window to another world.

Billy no longer wanted to know what was going on here. He had found the end of the trail. Now all he wanted was to turn tail and run through the woods as fast as he could with no concern for the branches that would cut and bruise him along the way. This had been a bad idea. It would be an even worse idea to stay. Time to haul ass. Time to find out if his pack-and-a-half-a-day lungs could pump his boots back to yonder haunted church before the Devil could catch him.

But then what? Didn’t he have a session scheduled with the Devil at noon this very day? Wouldn’t he also be running to the monster, if he ran? At least if he confronted the undisguised threat here in this primeval place, he might see things as they really were, without the pretense that the relationship had anything to do with the everyday concerns of people like Jake and Danielle, profit and loss. Here the game would be stripped of the civilized trappings that kept him wondering if he was going insane. Burning out. Wouldn’t it be better to stare it in the face?

Maybe not.

Something stirred the air around him. He picked up a fluttering of blue-violet light in his peripheral vision, like a wavering propane flame or the afterimage of a camera flash on closed eyelids. Only, when he turned toward it, the image didn’t flee in the direction of his gaze as if riding his vision – it clarified itself: an ephemeral body standing beside him, a naked woman drawn in migraine-hued light.

Her figure was voluptuous, her face darkly beautiful, with strong, northern-European features. Her long hair was braided and wrapped around the crown of her head, exposing sensuous shoulders and the milky hollows of her collarbone. He could see the trees through her skin. It was like looking through wet rice paper he had seen in Japan. She turned toward him and he saw that her nipples were hard, as if she could feel the winter chill in the nocturnal air. 

Maybe she’s always cold now, since she’s been dead.

The ghost raised her hand toward him and he recoiled. But she didn’t reach to touch him, she merely cupped her hand over the lens of the flashlight. It went out like a snuffed candle.

Now he could see her more clearly, her own light seeming to glow more brightly in the absence of the profane electric stuff. She almost looked solid as she walked into the center of the clearing and touched the surface of the water with her toe, like a timid little girl deciding whether it was warm enough for a swim. The water didn’t exactly ripple from the specific point she had touched, but rather quivered as if a gentle breeze or an electrical current was stirring every atom. Then she raised her hand again and gestured toward a solitary tree at the water’s edge.

The moon dropped through the clouds again, and she was gone.

Billy swallowed. His mouth tasted like he had been sucking on an old penny. He approached the pool in the pale light, noticing as he did that a tangle of thick roots were woven into the earth around the hole, reaching down into the dark water. He saw some silver thing flash and dart away in the depths. A fish? Was the water clearer than he had at first judged by its blackness? Any mud would have settled to the bottom in its utter calm. The smell of it was not as swampy and stagnant as he expected it to be. He detected a note of rot, but there were also overtones of rosewater and cut grass. These seemed impossible in late November with snow on the ground.

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.