Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (4 page)

Gussie bought her chips and felt totally
intimidated sitting down in her smelly and soiled pink sweats among
all the well-heeled high rollers at the table the redhead
indicated. The other players looked at her like they could smell
her too. But when the dealing commenced, Lulubelle blew a kiss at
the deck. Gussie won without trying and kept winning. It wasn't
even fun it was so effortless, and evidently Lulubelle felt the
same way, because before long she leaned over and gave Gussie a hot
buss on the cheek and wandered off.

Gussie cashed in her chips right
afterward, much to the disgust of the opposing players. There were
two men at the cashier's window. One of them handed her one hundred
thousand dollars and asked if she wouldn't like more chips. She
stared at the money and asked if he had traveler's checks instead.
At that point, the other one stuck out
his
hand, said he was from the IRS and she had
to give him back 30,000 of what she had just won. After she'd done
that and signed the appropriate paper, he very kindly directed her
to an all-night bank in the lobby. All the way to the bank she kept
wondering when her winnings were going to turn into dried leaves or
dust as fairy gold is supposed to. Then she thought, well, it might
disappear for other reasons. The IRS could find reasons to take it
even out of her account without her knowing about it. If she bought
traveler's checks, anybody looking for her could trace her. If she
kept it in cash, she'd probably get mugged. Oh, well, easy come
easy go.

She stepped back into the night and found an
all-night auto dealership. One brown minivan later she was on the
road again, leaving Torchy-Lulubelle to wield her power. It did
cross her mind to wonder why the Debauchery Devil in her Lady Luck
guise decided to favor somebody who was supposed to be her
opponent. But then, that was one thing about the redhead, you never
could tell what was on her alleged mind.

Gussie felt pleased about the van as she
zoomed out of town. Nobody knew where she'd gone or what she'd
bought, and that would make it hard finding her again. As soon as
she was safely down the highway, she pulled off at a truck stop and
climbed into the back on the nice soft, new-smelling cushions to
sleep off the tequila sunsets. Wouldn't do to be picked up for DWI
now that she'd come so far.

Before she drifted off, she wondered again
about the redheaded devil. The woman had blabbed everything she
knew about the meetings where the devils had conspired, had even
described the other devils. All this presumably while under the
influence, but though she had talked drunk, she didn't act any
drunker than usual once they got to the casino. And why had she
just let Gussie win like that? The devil-woman's fecklessness and
unpredictability were oddly familiar to Gussie, putting her in mind
of the way certain musicians used to act. She wondered if Torchy
was really as crazy as she seemed or if she was up to
something.

* * *

"Dereliction of duty, DD," the boss said,
leaning back in his swivel chair.

"O Contrary, Chair. I have a lot of duties,"
the Debauchery Devil said, shrugging. "Couldn't pass through Vegas
without making a few converts, now, could I?"

"DD, you have the right attitude, but you're
such a flake," the Expediency Devil said. He was a new improved
model over the slightly old-maidish-looking previous one. This one
had crisp dark curly hair and a lean, mean form that if he had been
mortal would have been the result of meticulous, but efficient,
exercise.

"I just think there are more pressing
problems these days than a lot of broke-down warblers nobody
listened to even before we wiped out their particular kind
of—er—act," she said (in deference to the sensibilities of the
others). "We have the people pretty well reconditioned now.
Nobody's going to listen to a few jerks who haven't been heard from
in years and can't even reenter the country legally." She blew a
disdainful smoke ring from her Brimstone Light cigarette.

"She does have a point, Chair," the
Expediency Devil agreed. "And we have other agendas. Mustn't let
this little prejudice of yours stand in the way of—"

"Don't you be telling me my job, XP," the
Chairdevil snarled. "Fortunately, I have learned never to rely on
DD and have arranged a reception committee at the border."

"Who's handling it?" XP asked.

"Minions who cannot be deterred by the
spells in the cursed instrument carried by Mr. Willie MacKai."

"Minions have failed before."

"Ah, but these minions are cottonmouth water
moccasins and a flash flood as well as some very nasty wetback
muggers. I don't think a banjo, even a magic one, is going to be
much protection."

* * *

The water moccasin nest lay in wait, just
under the surface of the water. These cottonmouths were no smarter
than average, but they had supernatural instructions to lay in wait
and kill the humans who would enter their domain. To the west, red
lightning, heat lightning usually, flashed in the night, making
Julianne Martin nervous as she remembered the night in Maryland at
the folk festival when lightning had burned away her hearing. Now
she heard better than any of them, since the Wizard Michael Scott
had magically mended her ears. During her deafness she had learned
to listen with her inner ears as well as her external ones. Right
now she heard trouble, and sure enough, as Willie rose and headed
to the banks of the river, starting to wade across, the red
lightning, usually the sign of continued drought and even a
harbinger of prairie fires, turned white, to sheet lightning, and
storm clouds clumped like a pack of mad dogs, clashing in the skies
of the west, blotting out the moon and stars. Thunder crashed and
the lightning strobed again and the banjo broke into a
Mexican-sounding tune.

"What's that one, Willie?" Julianne asked,
her voice coming out thin and nervous. The rocks, the water, the
molecules of sand, all seemed alive with warning. The world beyond
the physical one was fairly howling with agitation, and Juli's
inner ears, the ones that heard that kind of thing, were ringing
with alarm bells and sirens. So when Lazarus started the tune, the
first one in a while, she paid close attention.

Willie paused in the act of starting
to wade, whistled to himself for a moment, and said, " 'La
Llorona.' I used to sing it. There's different stories about it.
Some say she was one of Pancho Villa's wives, some say she was
widowed in the revolution, others say she was a grandee's daughter,
but most agree that for some reason or other she drowned her own
child, and for that reason she haunts the riverbanks—although
naturally there's a lot of disagreement about
which
riverbanks—sobbing and moaning
and—"

The banjo thumped itself with a dramatic
chord and quieted to a soft trickle. Above its notes Juli clearly
heard the sound, a wailing and moaning. The others heard it too.
They were all staring over her shoulder. She turned to see a
black-clad woman wringing her hands and wafting straight at her.
Juli jumped aside or the ghost would have gone straight through
her.

"Is that her?" Ellie whispered.

"I'd say so, yeah," Brose whispered back.
"Ain't shy, is she?" He rolled his eyes and shook his head. "I got
a feelin' about this."

The ghost glided up to a fascinated Willie,
who mumbled, "Excuse me, ma'am," as if he was about to tip his
Stetson, which he wasn't wearing. He took a step back toward the
river, but she stopped him when she suddenly raised her arms, the
sleeves of her mourning weeds fanning out like raven's wings. A
tattered black lace mantilla covered her face, which shone through
white as the moon through cloud cover, except for where the eyes
belonged, where two black holes glistened as if with tears. Juli
leaned forward to see into her face, but the other musicians shrank
back slightly. They'd all had lots of dealings with ghosts in the
last few years, but none quite so—ghostly—as this one. The banjo
grew louder, and the woman's specter grew more agitated.

Juli was pleased at the way Willie handled
it. He began to sing softly in Spanish.

"Ay de mi, llorona, llorona,

Llorona de ayer y hoy;

Ayer maravilla fui, llorona,

Y ahora ni la sombra soy."

The winged arms swooped back down to the
apparition's sides and clasped at her chest before one hand made
the sign of the cross. Juli felt a sense of satisfaction from the
ghost, a melancholy pleasure at being acknowledged. Whatever La
Llorona's reasons for drowning her child, Juli couldn't help but
feel that if she had known the circumstances back in those days
when life could so easily be pure hell for a lone woman, much less
one with an unsanctioned infant, she would have found the ghost
more pitiable than fearsome.

The two glistening black eyeholes turned
toward her for a split second as if in response; then in a tornado
of black tattered dress and lace, the specter whirled and melted
into the river.

"Oh, yeah," Brose said. "I seen 'em do that
before. That time after Anna Mae's festival when we was chasin'
Willie and y'all in Gussie's station wagon cross-country? The rest
of us was in Faron's van, and I was drivin' while everybody slept?
The highway flooded out, and damned if one of those ghosts we saw
on that trip didn't warn us all by goin' into the water and
drownin' hisself again just so I'd know it was deep out there."

"All of those ghosts were warning spirits,"
Anna Mae said. "But everything I've read about ghosts says they're
not supposed to be able to cross running water."

But the ghost was halfway across, and from
about mid-knee up she was still deeper blackness against the
shining black water.

"Around here in the summer the Rio Grande
don't usually run so deep you'd drown, less you laid down in it,"
Willie said.

The ghost glided farther out and was covered
to the hips when she let out a long banshee wail. Willie shone his
flashlight into the water.

The light bounced off wriggling, snapping
forms clinging to the black robes and dripping from the sleeves and
mantilla.

Willie whistled low, the flashlight
jiggling. Juli saw that his hands were shaking.

"Shee-ee-ee-it," Brose said. "Lookit them
cottonmouths. We ain't crossin' here tonight or no time soon."

The specter, still squirming with snakes,
turned, stared at them as if dripping snakes was the most natural
thing in the world, and ponderously began wading back.

Juli and the others stumbled away from
the riverbanks as the ghost emerged from the water.
La llorona
began crying again,
moaning and twisting her hands, coils of snake twining around her
bone white fingers like grave worms. Thunder cracked in the west.
Llorona strained toward them, the snakes slithering away from the
bottom of her gown in all directions. She was still trying to warn
them, but Juli wondered if the ghost knew that coming any closer
with all those snakes was apt to do more harm than good. She
supposed ghosts got out of touch with such mortal considerations,
having been dead themselves for so long. As the ghost advanced a
step, Juli and the others retreated farther from the banks, trying
to stay ahead of not only the ghost but the hissing
snakes.

The hissing was suddenly augmented by
another hiss—that of rain washing down on the desert. The hiss grew
rapidly louder and harder until it turned into a roar. The ghost
and her snakes had chased the musicians perhaps twenty yards back
from the riverbank when all of a sudden the roar got very personal,
very close, and the air grew suddenly wet.

Like an attacking army, an enormous wall of
gleaming water swept down the riverbed from the west, driving a
mist of dust before it while lightning lit the way.

"Flash flood!" Willie cried, as if she
hadn't noticed.

Juli turned and ran, as did the rest,
scrambling across the sand and up the nearest high spot while the
water rolled like a locomotive past their backs and instantly
dispatched waves to nip at their heels.

When at last she stopped, panting, at the
top of a bluff that was now pretty much an island, she saw that
everyone else had made it to safety as well. In fact, they were all
but standing on top of each other as they watched the water eat up
the dry land. The former bank was obliterated, water surging for
what seemed like miles of flat land.

The ghost, the snakes, and every vestige of
the landscape they'd just been looking at had utterly vanished.

* * *

By morning the sky to the west was so clear
it looked as if rain had never even crossed its mind. While the
musicians slept, the flood waters raced out to the Gulf of Mexico.
Just before dawn the river—while still full of water—was no deeper
or wider than it had been before the flood. The sun even baked the
ground dry again before everybody was fully awake.

"That's amazing," Terry said. "It's like it
never happened—one moment the river's a torrent—"

"And the next minute it's going like, 'What,
me? Flood?' " Dan said. "Weird."

"That's why they call 'em flash floods,"
Willie said. "At least it washed the snakes away."

"If it hadn't been for the ghost, we'd have
been snakebit and drowned," Brose said, shuddering. "I guess if
folk music is dead, ghosts must figure dead stuff gotta stick
together. Spooks sure have saved our bacon more than once."

"Maybe the other side is overcrowded," Juli
said, smiling wanly.

"It'd be crowded with
our
asses if that redheaded devil's
buddies had anything to say about it," Brose growled.