Hellbound, p.9
Hellbound, page 9
part #7 of The Crow Series
Billy looked alarmed. And that was good. The evil in him had been shocked loose, even as it was expressing itself. She had timed her attack perfectly. Now all she had to do was stuff his soul back inside him.
“The body is inside the soul,” she whispered to herself years later, sitting in the garden of Shriners Hospital. She had been strapped down for days after that incident in the library. Unable to use her hands, she had invented astral hands to complete the process. Day and night, she had toiled to stuff the vaporous wraith back inside her mental image of Billy.
Amy shook her head, smiling. The phantasmagoria of her madness amazed and amused her now that her blazing mind had been tamped down, covered over in a protective sheath of biochemical ashes.
Lunch break was over. She had to return to Noir, to needle and thread and the new destiny she was stitching. With the runway show in twelve hours, she should not have taken the time to come here. But it was her first day out of Alliance House, her first day as her own woman. Important as her new destiny was, she would not let herself forget the terrors of her past.
She stood and regarded her darker shadow cast upon the shade of the tree by the filtered sun, and she thought briefly about the soul that surrounded her. She was just one note of the soulful song the world sang under the sun. Billy was another note. And Derek another, more dissonant note. And crazy Nadja even more jarring, yet a note of the world soul nonetheless.
After Amy’s incantation drove the devils from him, he never again talked of killing himself—and he never let Nadja dope him again either. But he did go back to her. For years afterward, Amy could not understand why he ran drugs for that witch and gave himself to her manic sexual frenzies. Only later, when the voices in her head had stopped, when she was strong enough to take the neuroleptic drugs that muted her out-of-control life force, did she grasp that the same demons who had afflicted her from inside had assailed Billy from outside. And it was the demons who had brought them together.
Thartoc moved lumberously among the alternatives of time, shackled by his bond to the satanist Nadja Crimco. She was his anchor to this particular present, where the many strands of the past and the blurred possibilities of the future merged.
The burning ones have made a maze out of emptiness! He groused, confronted with the sparkling creation of atoms that was the stellar universe. The angels are mad—and this welter of particles in its fermenting haze of possibilities is their monster. It must not devour me!
The closer he looked, the less real reality seemed. Atoms were but a froth of electrons and nuclei occupying a bewildering array of possible positions. There was no one reality, no fixed past, no absolute present, no certain future. All possible positions of every existing particle presented themselves to the archdemon, and he was faced with countless worlds and forces shifting endlessly along the chimerical dimensions of space-time.
Far, far away, the satanist called out to him, “Find the bastard and kill him!” And he could feel her slipping in and out of her dreaming, her mind dribbling memories of her boydove into a vat of poison fantasies. She did not want the life of the man she loved so hatefully. She wanted his heart to gnaw, to chew to a pulp and then to mix with dog’s tears and feed to the rats. “Find that bastard! Kill him, Thartoc!”
The archdemon flew headlong across time, noise and darkness dropping down around him like a gale wind in a tunnel. Then silence coughed, and fireflies rushed out of the lightless depths. These were the atoms of existence. These were the droppings of paradise.’ After the fall from the placeless place of origin, after the big bang and the nativity of time, the light that had poured forth from the cosmic singularity, from the bunghole to infinity, began to cool. It chilled to quarks. And the enemies of emptiness, the adversaries of the void, the destroyers of serene forgetfulness and sleep, the manic angels, began building quarks to atoms. Thartoc and his cohorts had tried to stop them. But the angels were too numerous. They had already shaped gravity so that space-time stretched and the freezing light grouped into quarks, and then they forced open the void, exploding light and matter into an endless and accelerating expansion.
More! More! More! Thartoc chanted angrily. Always more!
He hated the burning ones for the mess they had made of what could have been a simple surrender, a beautiful and loving submission to nothing—the nothing that God Herself had prepared for them.
Now look at this horror! He cried to himself. Look!
Space-time teemed with 10” atoms. And he could feel every one of them twisting the void into knots of gravity.
The exquisitely simple emptiness had been lost, bound up by the angels into space-time—a bondage of cruelty—gravity smashing atoms into atoms, igniting raging furnaces of stars, light screaming out of them in bursts of gamma rays, even as gravity fused atoms to bigger atoms, jamming together the elements, then forcing elements into heavier elements—and light fleeing in every shrieking direction.
Sadists! Monsters!
Thartoc could barely contain his fury as he flew through the chaos that the angels had made of the void. Firewheel galaxies spun incandescent sheets of hydrogen clouds and organic molecules, generating ever more stars, more worlds, more creepy, rapacious creatures devouring each other, voraciously feeding on each other’s bodies and even eating their scat!
This vast and complexifying machinery of hunger disgusted him. And he despaired that he and his allies could ever tear it all down. Theirs was a lost cause. Yet they fought valiantly. They would not succumb to the angels’ madness—even though it meant going mad themselves.
Time—the most insane of their insane inventions! Thartoc lamented as he pressed on through the suffocation of atoms. What a vast illusion they have created! The pathetic creatures of these fabricated worlds think time is a straight line, every point either before or after every other point. Ha! Future and past so well defined for their little minds. If only they knew the truth. Time is a plane. Where is the future? Where is the past?
Thartoc stopped muttering to himself when he recognized the blur of quantum clouds that was the waveform of his victim. Like all atoms, these clouds floated in the void, where the demon could see them in every possible pattern as though he stood at the center of a shattered and spinning diamond. The jeweled fire glinting and shimmering around him was the illusion of time: the atoms of the material universe in all their many possible relationships.
In some configurations, these particular atoms did not even shape a man, for this man had not been born within that facet of time. Turning his attention in another direction, Thartoc viewed other conformations, where the same atoms shaped a wholly different man, someone who had never met Nadja Crimco.
With his powerful will and the voice of the satanist stabbing him, the archdemon sought the specific human that Nadja wanted dead, and he located his victim within a haze of possible realities. William Maxwell, Billy Max, a compact, muscular youth with a boxer’s brow, eyes like razor slits, and hair shiny and black as wet asphalt.
William Maxwell, an orphan with no real name, named by the state, appeared to Thartoc as a communion of many selves—many pasts, all originating from a new soul snug in his anonymous mother’s womb.
That woman was not anonymous to Thartoc, who could see across time. But he did not care to look. Instead, he focused on his prey, eighteen years ago a fetus in the whispering deep of his nameless mother’s flesh, in a warm silence full of slick noises, a uterine dark lit with mosaic lights, neural flashes, glimmers of the eyes that would grow out of the dihedral turnings of transfiguring molecules. He was nothing special to notice—just a fleshy bud in the first organic moments of life, another soul called into existence by desire.
After Big Steel Fiarella drove off, Billy Max walked to Charles Street, where Amy had her cellar studio. He let himself in with the key she had made for him and removed his boots at the door, obedient to Amy’s wish for a shoeless living space.
The bright apricot walls he had helped paint were supposed to make the small space feel larger. Shouldering past the coat rack, shoe stand, and umbrella holder, he was not a believer.
He glanced into the bathroom cubicle, and the sight of the red toilet seat reminded him he was supposed to buy a new flapper. Mobiles of tinsel angels swiveled from the overhead water pipes, and the wall of the shower stall bore a Tibetan mandala that Amy had meticulously painted in chivalric blue and crimson.
Billy huffed with amusement at the care taken to protect the latrine from demonic influence. He proceeded along the narrow corridor past the galley, whose drab metal cabinets, studded with magnetic hooks, hid behind chains of red peppers and necklaces of garlic. Under a counter outfitted with an electric cooking plate squatted a minirefrigerator emblazoned by a radiant decal of a golden Buddha.
None of these shields against evil seemed inappropriate when he entered the work area that also served as Amy’s bedroom. Hung from the sprinkler pipes were her paintings—harrowing canvases that were really screams in pigment, furious abstract swatches of black paint: roaring voids, midnight murals, cancerous smears, pupils blown wider than eyes, sockets without eyes, grave-pit rectangles.
In eerie contrast, Amy’s couturier designs dangled on wire over her cot—angelic apparel, silver chiffon blouses, gold taffeta skirts, blue satin scarves embroidered with cloud script that looked like spirit writing. These seraphic garments were her repudiation of the devils that infested her life, and with them she intended to earn a place at Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology.
Billy shook his head, perplexed that Amy had also mounted upon the windowless walls demon seals, each a cardboard circle the size of a human head and filled with infernal designs and letters spelling the demon’s name. While installing them, she had tried to explain the purpose of these to him. They were the signatures of hell’s aristocracy—the personalities who had haunted her, who had stolen her childhood. Keeping their names in her living space reminded her to stay with her medication no matter how muzzy it made her feel.
They seemed worthy decor for the decision Billy now had to make. He sat in Amy’s office chair under a cascade of silver day-light that fell through a ceiling window of cobbled glass from the sidewalk above. In his interior breast pocket, Big Steel’s money pressed against his heart. If he returned it, maybe Big Steel would let him go and forget about him. Or maybe the wise guy would have Buster Watz kill him.
Billy exhaled a nervous sigh. Pain was a story. That was one of the first truths he had learned from the required counseling sessions at Alliance House. Billy swiveled rhythmically in the chair with his pain as if it were music, as if he were with his counselor again, retelling the hurt that shaped his options. Go with the money and maybe get busted and incarcerated. Or return the money and chance the wrath of his boss. He groaned. The pain of this decision sang in him like the racket in a birdhouse.
Big Steel Fiarella had no need for the money he made moving heroin. He was an underboss in a crime family and earned the bulk of his income from construction kickbacks and real-estate shenanigans. The scag operation in which Billy worked as a mule was simply a hobby for Big Steel.
Some men enjoyed trout fishing, others bowling. Big Steel moved small quantities of heroin, small enough not to concern the other underbosses or his superiors in the family. The object was not money, though he always made a profit, but opportunity—a chance to test and train young underlings such as Billy. Those who survived without getting apprehended or killed moved on to become soldiers in Big Steel’s larger endeavors.
Now that Billy had chosen not to move on, there was no point in continuing the risky work of a mule. But how to get out? That was the pain.
Billy peered up through one clear glass cobble at a warped ribbon of sky and incorporeal clouds, free of pain, full of distance, and he wished he had never worked for Big Steel. But then he might as well have wished he was never born, for this pain of moving drugs and making illicit money was the story of his life.
When did it change? he asked himself and realized that was why he had come to Amy’s place, to figure out when her pain had become his and changed the story of his life.
The black paintings offered no clue. They were the shadow denizens of Amy’s soul. And because Amy believed she was a small body inside a soul, these hard-bit shadows were the nameless evil of the world itself.
No—not nameless. The demon seals enclosing the room named these agents of chaos precisely.
Which of them owns me?
His vague eyebrows shrugged. What does it matter? He was owned. Possessed.
How had Amy put it to him? Her demons were inside her head, his were outside in Big Steel, Buster Watz, and the Turks with whom he had an appointment this very day, an arrangement and history whose orchestration was as inevitable as any of the Greek tragedies from lit class that Amy was fond of elucidating for him.
Billy thought back, trying to find the day that his story had begun to change forever, that day—When? Two years ago? Eighteen months?—when he fell in love with Amy and the pain of his raw destiny stopped being an excuse for his wild nocturnal escapades.
He reminisced about the helplessness of his love for Amy and how it had begun at no certain time, on some day unknown, after seven years with her as a friend, his sole friend. How had confiding in her his sexual forays, his ambitions and fears, gone from trust to love? Was it the way she kept trying to pry open his mind with her endless questions, forcing him to find words to explain himself? Or was it simply that she cared at all: how he behaved, how he mistreated his body and neglected his mind?
He pondered this, little realizing how strange it was for him to reflect at all. Billy Max rarely turned his mind upon himself and did so now only because Thartoc the Cruel had fixed his demonic intelligence upon him.
The archdemon, annoyed to be on Earth, unhappy to be drawn away from his larger mission in the abyss, toyed with Billy. He had already manifested as the harelipped Dred, and he entertained the idea of playing further with his victim.
The demonolater had dispatched Thartoc across the range of time to destroy her boydove. Transcendental entity that he was, the archdemon arrived at points in Billy’s life even before finding his way across the field of possible universes.
He saw the boy squatting in the dark at the knothole of Femme Blu. Simultaneously, he witnessed an older, larger Billy working as a novice bouncer at a similar club, one of Big Steel’s nude bars.
Time exploded across the void in burning chunks, full of inaudible voices—Billy yelling at Nadja in her gloomy studio, Nadja laughing, Buster Watz calling to Billy across a laser-cut dance floor, Billy shouting expletives, Big Steel speaking amiably to Billy in a steel gray limousine…
Billy swiveled restlessly in Amy’s office chair and found himself recalling his early years with Nadja Crimco. As hideous as she looked, as cruelly as she had treated him, she attracted him with a force he initially could not resist. She offered an exciting life outside the doldrums of Alliance House. In return for sexual favors with the actresses Nadja used in her movies, he muled small packets of dope to her clients across the city and shoplifted petty goods she wanted, mostly cigarettes and liquor. His prowess at creating distractions and eluding security guards and cameras impressed Nadja—and so did his unbendable determination to stay clean of drugs and free of any further deceptions from her. He even avoided using the cigarettes he stole, aware that the taint of smoke might attract unwanted attention from the guardians at Alliance House.
While Billy mused about his past, Thartoc the Cruel reached through time with his will, intent on learning all he could about his quarry. And while his will searched ahead, the archdemon’s mind in the present moment grew bored with Billy’s reverie.
Thartoc touched Billy with his boredom—
Sleep.
The swiveling office chair slowed, and Billy’s head bowed forward till his chin touched his chest. Upon his glazed brain, a dream glittered…
Billy flitted out of his slumbering body, a shadow cut free of physical constraint. He crossed into outer space. Stars dripped among untouchable veils of neon colors—and he soared across a vastness of nebular vapors, cometary fumes, and incandescent gas clouds twisting in glowing masses upon the endless void.
Galaxies hung in space like glitter caught in a black sponge—sparkling arcs surrounding spaces of utter emptiness. He gazed in wonder upon this cosmic prospect, full aware of his dreambound state, amused to find himself flung so far from Earth, adrift among coral-grown shapes of galactic clusters.
“Behold the universe,” a cavernous voice spoke.
“Who’s that?” Billy shook with surprise. “Who’s there?”
Billy’s flight slowed, and he came to rest upon the margin of creation, a black horizon that curved above the dazzled splatter of galaxies. Above him loomed a starless night of unreckonable darkness.
“I am the Devil,” the voice from a cave spoke again.
“What are you doing in my dream?”
“This is no dream, William,” the Devil’s behemoth voice assured him. “What you see before you is the universe entire. The darkness above is the vacuum into which it is exploding. That darkness is my abode.”
“Am I supposed to care?”
“Are you not awed?”
“This is a dream. It don’t mean nothing.”
“As you say,” the Devil agreed, his thunderous voice almost sprawling to laughter. “You speak more truth than you know.”
“What do you want with me?”
“What does the Devil want with anyone?”
“Trouble.”
“Of the worst kind.”
“You gonna kill me?”
“William—William, don’t you know? The Devil has never killed anyone. Murder is a specialty of people.”
Billy turned around slowly on the frail edge of nowhere. He gazed down at a hundred billion galaxies embroidered upon the void, and they looked to him like a mass of twigs blazing white-hot and giving off no heat—and so much darkness caught in the thorny branches.
