Comeback Tour

She had seen many wonders, obviously. The girl looked at Raimundo Rex, Captain Marcus, Hiroshi Shiba and the others without seeming to see anything unusual.

'Heyyy,' said Raimundo, 'chiquitaaaaah! Whass happenin' bay-beeeee?'

The girl ignored him, still looking for something, for someone…

The Ancient Adversary relinquished control of Krokodil, and disappeared back into the depths of her mind. She felt pain in her torn and bloody hands.

'Which of you…?' the girl began.

Then she saw Elvis, and sank to her knees.

The Op looked behind him, then thumbed his chest with a sullen 'who, me?' expression, and shrugged.

Krokodil remembered the way 'Ti-Mouche had treated Elvis in the swamp. She was the host to a magical being, but he had a touch of the pure-bred, pure-born voodoo in him somewhere.

'Conjure man,' the girl said.

Elvis shifted his collar. The Suitcase People were staring at him.

'Yes,' said the alligator exec, 'yes. Conjure man.' He clapped his forefeet together.

'You must help them.'

There were dark figures among the Suitcase People, shadows becoming human. Krokodil recognized the spirits of the dead.

Elvis passed a hand over his hair, shaping it perfectly.

'Help them?' he asked. 'How?'

'You have magic…'

The girl's words were intently serious. She knew exactly what she was saying.

'…you must use it.'

Shiba had slithered off. Krokodil wondered where he had gone.

Marcus was wrestling with the elevator controls. 'It's no good,' he said. 'They've disconnected them down there. We'll have to blast our way in. If that's possible.'

'No,' the girl said, 'use the magic.'

Krokodil realized how young the girl was, and felt another history of ill-use and exploitation. Perhaps another Daddy like Bruno Bonney, certainly a string of artful torturers…

'Missy,' Elvis said, 'I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you're tryin' to say. I ain't no conjure man…'

Shiba was back. In his jaws he carried a familiar object.

'You see,' the girl said. 'He knows. I know. Inside yourself, you know. You must let the magic come out. You must.'

Elvis looked at Krokodil, an appeal in his eyes.

Krokodil didn't know. This was not what her dreams had led her to. But she had always known that she must bring Elvis Presley and none other to Cape Canaveral. He had always had his part to play in this drama, even if it had never been made known to him or to her.

'Krokodil, what's this about?'

He picked up the guitar, gently disentangling it from Shiba's mouth, and slung the shoulder strap around him.

'Down there, they're using black magic and blacker science to gain control of a powerful weapon. They're trying to take over the sky.'

The Op looked appalled. He was almost unconsciously tuning the instrument, tightening keys and twanging strings. She could feel the power gathering even in such flawed and negligible notes. 'Ti-Mouche had been right. The girl from the bunker was right. This was magic.

'The sky?' Elvis asked. 'That can't be. Why…like the man said…the sky…'

CANTICLE: EPILOG.

The Big Screen was a blazing kaleidoscope of lights.

Sister Addams yelled, and Commander Fonvielle hugged her.

'Total control. Elder,' she screamed, 'we have total control.'

Duroc smiled, and recovered his composure. Despite Simone, despite Krokodil, despite everything…

The Needlepoint System was on line.

'Throw me up a large-scale map of the Cape, and give me manual control. We're going to try a little target practice.'

'…belongs…'

It had first been said, so the story went, on February 3, 1959, in a small airport near Mason City, Iowa. Charles Hardin Holly, top-lining a mid-west rock 'n' roll tour, had chartered a four-seater Beechcraft Bonanza to take him to Moorhead, North Dakota for the next engagement. Besides the pilot, the plane was already weighed down with Jiles Perry Richardson, The Big Bopper, and there was one seat left. It would go to either Tommy Allsup of the Crickets or the Chicano kid who sang 'La-La-La-La-La-La-La Bamba,' Richard Valenzuela. The kid won, but was unnerved, his breath frosting in the cold air as he protested to Buddy his lifelong fear of flying. Sometimes, he dreamed of dying in an air crash. 'Don't worry Ritchie,' said the twenty-two year-old to the seventeen year-old, confident of their immortality, 'the sky belongs…'

'…to the stars!'

Elvis began to play, not as he had played for the Cajuns, to return a hospitality, or for Shiba, to please an admirer. This time, he played for himself alone, although maybe he hoped his Mama Gladys and Jesse Garon could hear, and he played as he had never done before.

Always, Colonel Parker had hammered home, he had been a face and a voice and a set of hips, not a pair of hands and a brain and a heart. Now, he was everything.

He had never been a great guitar player, but now his fingers slammed against the strings as well as Buddy's ever had, and his voice found new heights, new depths…

Without thinking, he started off with a song he had heard many times but had never sung.before. Buddy Holly's 'Everyday…' It must be the association with what he had said.

It was getting closer, and it-was coming faster than a rollercoaster…

It was supposed to be a song about a love that had surely come to stay, but Elvis realized as he sang, watching the stricken looks on the faces of the liule group standing around him on that great expanse of blackened and bloody concrete, that it was really a song about darkness, about death, and about what comes after.

Death had certainly come for Buddy, who had often been compared to Elvis, and to so many others. He sang for Buddy, tapping his foot to add the famous handclap to the song, and he sang for Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper and that nameless pilot. He sang for Robert Johnson, whose ghost must surely be out there in the swamps, for Charlie Parker, for Johnny Ace, for Frankie Lyman, for Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, dead in a car crash in a foreign land, for Chuck Berry, for Jackie Wilson, for Harvey and the Moonglows, for Alan Freed, for the musical dreams of John Lennon, for Jesse Garon, for Reuben, for all those who had served in battle with him, for the Suitcase People still bleeding on the beach, for the murdered indentees of the Delta, for the mind-robbed Josephites he had killed.

Krokodil was crying, a stream trickling from her one good eye. The ghosts stood solemnly in ranks, solidifying as the song took effect.

Liquid electricity coursed dirough his veins, and he segued into Johnson's 'Hellhound on My Trail,' singing of the blues that fell down like hail.

The girl from underground was sobbing now, falling into Krokodil's arms. With a tenderness the Op had never seen before, his employer stroked the black girl's short hair, and kissed her forehead.

There were more songs to come. 'Jambalaya,' he sang, expunging the menace from the melody as he evoked fun on the bayou.

Raimundo Rex was dancing, his feet crunching into the concrete, his tail lashing.

The ghosts were coming up through the elevator platform, emerging slowly like conjurer's phantoms. They were all dressed in spacesuits, all hideously mutilated. Elvis had to sing for them.

Something from an old children's show came to him, and he had to sing it. 'I Wish I Were a Spaceman.'

Then there was a Sinatra song, 'Fly Me to the Moon.'

And Petya Tcherkassoff's 'Soyuz Love.'

There were more ghosts than Suitcase People now. The music fought to get free of him, and he felt like a