Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (2 page)

"Like a therapist?" Heather-Jon asked.

"Yeah, but you don't have to make
appointments, and most folks could do it themselves even though
sometimes they hired other people to do it for them, which is not
as good but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick (which
was all the devils had for them). Anyhow, for a space there—and
y'all may not be too well aware of it, but me and my compadres
were—these devils by killin' and connivin' managed to get rid of
most of the most important singers of the songs and make everybody
forget the words to songs people had been singin' for hundreds of
years.

“
After a while, they even
made people forget the melodies, so the songs were gone from memory
in this country. Everybody forgot every song sung by every dead
singer. When the great Sam Hawthorne died on the very day the
Library of Congress folk-music collection got blowed up, almost all
the songs in the country were wiped from people's minds. You notice
I said people's minds. Sam had this magic banjo that he passed on
before he died, and it remembered the songs, though nobody knew how
come. Now, this magical banjo eventually passed into the hands of a
very small group of people. One of them was this woman I'm tellin'
you about, Ms. Gussie Turner. Others were the women I mentioned
previously, Julianne Martin, Anna Mae Gunn, Ellie Randolph, and
Terry Pruitt. All fine musicians except for Gussie and Ms.
Randolph, who was a more academic kind of lady. Then there was Mr.
Brose Fairchild, a gentleman of more than one color who was a
crackerjack blues man and purveyor of Baltic ethnic tunes. And last
but by no means least Mr. Willie MacKai, who used to work right
here on this ranch where we are now working—though that's another
story. These were the people who came together and ended up as the
guardians of Lazarus, Sam's magic banjo.

"Well, Lazarus knew good and well that
Gussie and Willie and their friends couldn't get back all those
forgotten songs as long as they stayed in these United States, so
the banjo helped them write a song in which it told them to go
overseas to the British Isles, where the roots of much of American
folk music were still dug in deep and sendin' out shoots. They went
over there and with some help from a bunch of ghosts, includin'
that of the famous writer Sir Walter Scott, his ancestor the Wizard
Michael Scott, and a bunch of their kinfolk, they got back the
songs. Then they went after songs from other places than Scotland,
such as Ireland, France, Spain, and the like.

"In the meantime Ms. Gussie, who had become
a hell of a storyteller by virtue of bein' possessed—though mind
you in a very respectable and respectful way—by the ghost of Sir
Walter, came back here to do a little low-profile advance
publicity.

"Now there was one of these devils, a
redheaded user of many aliases, who was a little more complicated
than the rest of them and tougher to figure out. She was the chief
devil in charge of debauchery. Among other things the musicians
learned in Scotland, one was that she used to be the Queen of
Fairyland and had come down in the world since then. So she was the
one who both helped them and hindered them when the musicians
wanted to go into the ballad world to reclaim the old songs that
would help them release the rest of 'em. Of course, as a devil she
was bound to uphold what the rest of the devils wanted, which was
to try to keep the musicians from living through the songs, making
them their own, and bringing them back to this country to revive
all the other songs with the powerful magic contained in the oldest
and strongest ballads.

"However—as she told the other devils—as the
official Debauchery Devil she was in charge of wine, your less
enlightened and self-respecting kind of women, and song. Musicians
were some of her best people, and she was always a little
ambivalent about the whole devilish operation to kill them off
along with the music. Also, she was always a little wild, as if she
was high on some of her own stuff. It seemed to Gussie that the
redheaded devil's unpredictableness made her the worst devil of
them all—she was like the old mule who'd be nice to you for two
weeks just to get a chance to kick you.

"So Gussie was wary when this carrot-topped
character plucked her off a nice reliable bus to give her a wild
ride in a fast red sports car."

* * *

At least there was nothin' dull about this
new life of hers, Gussie Turner thought as she held onto the
dashboard for dear life. Beside her the redheaded woman held a
quart-size Sipeez cup full of alcoholic beverage and gunned the red
sports car down the mountain.

The redheaded woman—who wasn't a real woman
at all, as Gussie knew, but the Debauchery Devil herself, formerly
Her Majesty the Queen of Faerie—turned red eyes and sharp teeth in
Gussie's direction and grinned. "So. Long time no see, ducks. It
took a bit of doing to catch up with you. Whatever have you been up
to?"

"Oh, a little of this and a little of that,"
Gussie said. "I might ask you the same thing. Last time I saw you,
it looked like you were going to have some explaining to do to all
your buddies in the Department of Bad Works. Then you tell me
you've been rehabilitated, and I'm afraid I don't quite understand
what that means. Habilitated back into what? A better devil, a
fairy queen or—dare I hope—maybe a relatively reasonable human
being?"

"There's no need to get
lewd
, dear. Actually, I suppose you
could say I've been pursuing both the first and the last of those
choices—in a way. Once one is in the Company, you know, one is well
and truly in, and there's nowhere to go but down. Naturally they
weren't very pleased with me for letting your lot out of my spell,
but as I told them, you cheated fair and square and I had no choice
in the matter at all. I did hold out hope that you'd been the
teeniest little bit corrupted, however. So now I'm on probation,
more or less, under the direction of the Shame and Guilt Department
and am also answerable to the Corruption and Repression people. I'm
still pretty much in the same line of work, I just feel deliciously
naughty about it now."

"Serious drugs are a little more than
naughty," Gussie said.

"Spare me. You sound just like my
supervisor. Of course they are, but I'm not allowed to use them
nearly as much now. The boss has withdrawn support for them in
favor of something a bit less gauche, he says. But I shouldn't talk
about such things with a civilian. Look at you! You look—well,
excuse me, but you look old. What have you been doing with yourself
while all of your little friends have been tootling away in
exile?"

"Part of the time I've been in exile too,"
Gussie said. "But you knew that. You know everything that's been
going on, don't you? I've had reports of you followin' me
around."

"Don't flatter yourself, lovey. If you could
see my schedule, you'd know how ridiculous that sounds. And what I
have to do these days—and do straight most of the time, mind you—is
just too sordid for words. Besides, a lot of it's boring. Spiking
the punch at AA picnics, hooking business people on prescription
drugs, convincing housepersons of the joys of clandestine tippling
and visiting neighbor housepersons of the opposite gender."

"Serves you right," Gussie said. "But I'm
afraid I wouldn't worry about bein' bored for too long, if I was
you. People are a lot like cats—lock 'em out of one place where
they can make trouble, and they'll wriggle into another."

"Well, sure, and they already have.
All that humanitarian nonsense left over from the lefties who
dominated the sixties—and everybody knows, thanks to my colleagues,
that all of
that
sort were
very immoral and did a lot of drugs—all their ideas are out the
window in favor of the old-fashioned American values. Equally
deadly, of course, and every bit as destructive in their own way,
but the problem is that they're not my way. I can't even persuade a
lot of these uptight asses to relax a little, let up the tension.
Guilt, shame, and psychological pressure twisted tighter than
thumbscrews—that's what's driving people bonkers now. Absolutely
nothing in it for me."

"Don't you worry, honey. These things come
in cycles. People can only take so much tension, and then they find
some kinda outlet again."

"Do you really think so? That's what I'm
hoping, of course. Why do you think I've come to meet you? I'm very
glad to see those friends of yours returning here, if you want the
truth. The boss is smug about the progress he's made with his
programs here and in the Middle East, Russia, and the People's
Republic of China. Backed off on the British Isles, of course,
though he doesn't put it that way. Still too many amateurs doing
the music there."

"We know," Gussie smiled.

"And he thought it would be so easy in
Canada, but there's an unforeseen complication that crept in while
his attention was elsewhere." She sounded rather pleased as she
cleared her throat and said, "Some of my former subjects, it seems,
migrated up there after my downfall and somehow or other have
bonded with the native bogies and sprites and whatnot. And of
course, my people have always been very involved with the sort of
thing
your
people
do—"

"Music, Torchy," Gussie Turner said, not
unkindly, using the name by which she had known the Debauchery
Devil in Britain. "Folk music. Can't you even say it anymore?"

"I suppose I could," Torchy said. "But I was
trying to give you a break and not call attention to this little
conversation. If I were to start tossing such terms about, someone
might turn out to be listening, you know."

"You were saying about Canada?"

"Well, anyway, with my former subjects so
lively in the cities and countryside, all sorts of people are still
actively singing and playing you-know-what. Even though there are a
lot of paid performers and festivals and such happening, the power
is still coming from a wide population base, and the boss hasn't
been able to do more than seal the borders so the—er—perpetrators
can't cross from one border to the other."

"I knew that," Gussie said. "So would your
boss if he weren't such an illiterate sonofabitch. What's happened
to music and the Faerie in Canada is in all of Caitlin Midhir's
books. A couple of Lettie's musicians, Charles De Lint and Eileen
McGann, turned us on to them."

"They're out of print in
this
country," the Debauchery Devil
sighed. "Chairdevil used the Accounting Department to see to that.
So Canada will have a bit of a reprieve, but ultimately we'll
achieve our aim. You must know that."

"And just what is that aim?" Gussie asked,
accepting the proffered Sipeez cup from Torchy as the redhead drove
into a highway tunnel clinging to the mountainside. Gussie took a
long swig from the cup, which held a mixture of her own invention
called a tequila sunset.

"Why, honey," Torchy said, switching accents
and personas so that she was no longer
Torchy-Burns-the-English-pub-singer or the slightly more upscale
former Queen of Faerie, but her American, Texican self, Lulubelle
Baker of Lulubelle Baker's Petroleum Puncher's Paradise. "I thought
you'd never ask. In some ways I'm just real excited about it
because, as you may know, one of my former titles was Queen of the
Air. If I'm not queen, at least I'm veep in charge of certain
aspects of what goes into the air. Now we control all that, you
see. What's on the air, what's in the news, what people read and
hear and see. With that power, it's just a matter of time until we
get at what we eventually mean to do.

"I am not givin' away a thing when I tell
you this. We mean to corner us the market on myth. When we do,
we'll have it all changed around and remade to suit us. You mortals
will follow along like little of baa-lambs. Hell, honey, all you
gotta do is take off your blinkers and look around you right now.
It's happenin', sugar. It's happenin' already."

Gussie, who was from Amarillo herself, was a
little more comfortable with Lulubelle, the persona the redhead had
adopted in South Texas when she first attempted to seduce the late
Sam Hawthorne's magic banjo, Lazarus, away from Willie MacKai. At
least Lulubelle talked like a regular person and didn't pretend to
be better than she ought to be.

Lulubelle was given more to smirks than
upper-crust smugness and continued: "The songs are just a start,
but they've been a pretty big obstacle. Don't think it's going to
be easy for your little buddies to get back into the good old U. S.
of A. and bring back them foreign songs we done lost in these
parts. Americans want 'merican things now and no whiny songs about
people that ain't good enough or don't have the gumption to have a
nice house, three cars, and all the other necessities of life."

"Those would be truly dull songs," Gussie
said.

"You bet your cash box, sugar. That's why
there ain't no more songs a-tall," Torchy-Lulubelle said.

"
You're
overdoing it,
sugar
," Gussie said. "You sound more like a John
Wayne movie now than a South Texas hooker."

"That don't make no nevermind. Give me
another swig of that, will you? Bless me if it ain't dry as a
desert out here." Then she cackled at her own wit because, as they
emerged from the tunnel, the headlights no longer picked up snow
and deep valleys but sand and cactus. "Welcome to Nevada," a sign
said.

"What happened to the mountains?" Gussie
asked Torchy-Lulubelle.

Her cackle faded to a silly giggle. "I
thought I mentioned I'm not s'posed to get high anymore."