Page 97 of Night Songs

Lou has become a costume like Belle. When I have to, I put on a Lou who can sit in the living room with her family and not feel the presence of something dangerous in her periphery, waiting.

But with the tour canceled and me on doctor’s orders to relax, things are often still and quiet, and there is nothing to block out the voice. I spend most of my time in bed pretending to rest while I grit my teeth against the songs that continue to fill my head every night:

Someone leaves the stove on, and the house slowly fills with gas as we suffocate in our sleep.

An errant ember jumps from the fireplace and sets the floorboards on fire, spreading from fabric to wood until the entire house is engulfed in flames and we die in our beds, reduced to piles of ash. I imagine them finding my wigs, somehow still intact and blazing platinum in the dark rubble—the only sign that Belle Powers ever walked the earth.

I have died a thousand times. My body feels each one, the damage piling up so that I feel more like a corpse and less like a person each day.

My night songs have always been a bit sideways. That’s what makes them night songs. It’s why I love ’em.

But these are something different. It feels like my mind has been tuned to a different station, like someone new has taken over the broadcast from that golden place.

I’ve never in my life wanted music to stop entering my mind. I’ve gone to great lengths to try to get it back when I’ve lost it.

But now, I wish it would stop. Because I know it’shim.

I always imagined he’d show up for me one day, and that’d be the end. One tragic accident I didn’t see coming, and whoosh, I’d be gone.

But it won’t be that easy.

Papa loved to preach about the devil in church, even more than he liked to talk about God. I remember him leering from the pulpit, warning us that the devil could take many forms. A serpent. A man. A lover.

Sometimes he was only a voice, whispering in your ear.

And other times, he could enter you. Take over your body and mind.

I can feel him now like a swarm of bugs, burrowing into my skin and gradually eating me from the inside out.

I won’t betakenby the curse. I willbecomeit.

But I refuse to just sit here like some idjit standing on the train tracks, waiting for the train to hit them.

I have to do everything I can to stop it, no matter the cost. If not for me then for you, angel.

You and I will go back to the source, and I will lift this curse come hell or high water.

Rhea, that is my promise to you.

34rhea

2010

EIGHT DAYS LEFT

For the next few months, I lost myself in research.

I studied every interview Belle had ever given, every televised performance, every word she’d ever said, for clues. I combed every album line by line, but especially, of course,The Cursed Woman. There was one line in particular from “Mountain Girl” that I kept coming back to:

In the hidden cave where we worship the Lord,

The preacher points and thunders,

Cast out her demon with your sword,

Cast it out, tear her asunder

Could this mean a church in an actual cave? That couldn’t have been common. And yet, all of my searches only returned results from places like Hungary or Bulgaria. Perhaps the cave was only a metaphor.