by Bryan Camp
A young brown-skinned man wearing a do-rag the light purple of an almost-healed bruise sat slumped against the wall to the side of the entrance, his head nodding on an unsteady neck, a bottle of white rum nestled in his lap. He wore a leather jacket the same color as his do-rag, the sleeves patterned with white crosses. Renai cleared her throat, and when that didn’t work, she kicked him in the side of his thigh, nearly toppling him over.
“The fuck?” His words came out in a sleepy slur, more the tone of a child asking for a few minutes more sleep than any real anger. He squinted up at them, taking in Renai and the raven on her shoulder and the dead man next to her one at a time. “Masaka’s on duty now,” he said. “They’ll let you in.”
Renai kissed her teeth. “Your twin watches the Gate during the day, Oussou.”
The drunk on the sidewalk grinned up at her. “If we’re twins, how you so sure I’m who you say I am?”
Renai smirked and started to answer, but Sal cursed under his breath and spoke over her.
“Because you’re the only one who’s piss-drunk enough to wear that ugly-ass jacket,” he said, way more bitter than he ever was with her. “Quit being a dick and do your job.”
Oussou’s grin didn’t fade like Renai expected but widened. “That you, Salutation?” he asked. He rose to his feet in a series of lurching movements that were always one precarious second away from being a fall, groaning and spilling rum and farting. When he was more or less upright, he swilled from his rum bottle in greedy gulps before glaring at Sal through one bloodshot eye. “Didn’t recognize you wearing a shape that can’t lick his own balls. What happened? The Thrones make you turn in that dog-skin so they could beat the fleas out of it?”
“I wear this skin at night because the dog can’t stand the stink of you,” Sal said, an indignant squawk finding its way into his voice. “Why’s the Gate still locked? You trade your key for a cheap bottle of booze again?”
“Traded it away, he says,” Oussou muttered, digging in his jacket pocket with the hand that wasn’t holding his rum. “I got your key right here, see?” He pulled out his hand, his middle finger thrust up toward the sky.
“Children!” Renai yelled, loud enough that a couple walking halfway up the block turned to look at her. Both the psychopomp on her shoulder and the loa in front of her went quiet. She reached into her own pocket and pulled out the coin of Miguel’s destiny. “We’re kind of in the middle of something here, Oussou. You mind?” She smiled at him, feeling her face take the shape of her mother’s, that smile that said: If this is the game you want to play, let me go ahead and teach you the rules.
Oussou frowned but nodded. He moved his bottle into his other hand and—still giving Sal the finger with the hand that held the bottle—reached into his pocket and took out an antique key made of black iron. It was cast in the shape of the veve for the Marassa twins: three circles laid out in a line, each with four different ornate and symmetrical spokes poking out, like three conjoined compasses. Glaring at Sal the whole time, Oussou reached behind him, pressed his key into the plaster wall of the cemetery, and turned it.
A single vertical crack shot up the wall and into the night sky, a line of brilliant light three stories tall. Oussou pressed a hand to the wall and pushed, and all of it—cemetery wall and the palm tree rising above it and the few stars visible through the light pollution of downtown New Orleans and the night sky itself—swung open on a smooth hinge, revealing a sky obscured by fog and bright green grass and a warm, sweet breeze. Light seemed to come from everywhere. Beside her, Miguel’s mouth was open in naked astonishment.
The first look into the next world never failed to impress.
Chapter Four
The world on the other side of the Gate wasn’t quite New Orleans, and it wasn’t quite the afterlife, either. The cemetery’s tombs were still there in various stages of repair: some the reddish brown of crumbling, exposed brick, others the solid, almost-gleaming white of freshly applied plaster. Thick fog curled overhead, obscuring the source of light and turning the sky into the ceiling of a great cavern. In the world of the living, the cemetery’s ground was almost entirely paved, but in that place a lush green carpet of dew-kissed grass covered the earth.
A still and profound silence hung in the air. New Orleans sang every hour of every day with the cacophony of traffic and trills of birdsong and with shouts both joyous and angry and with the throaty wails of brass instruments and the thunderous pounding of bass speakers. In that place, in the Underworld, no one spoke, no one sang, no one breathed. That silence called to Renai, promising a rest she hadn’t been able to find in the living world.
Once and only once had she summoned the courage to cross over, but found the threshold of the Gate was as diffuse to her living body as dust motes dancing in a sunbeam. She had slipped through into the cemetery in the living world without touching the Gate at all, as though it were merely an image, a hologram. She sometimes wondered if the ghost word would let her cross over to the other side, but—as Sal would say—hadn’t yet found the stones to test that theory. She didn’t fear death, knowing what she did about what came next, but every living cell of her craved life. Staring into what waited on the other side of the Gate was like looking out over the edge of a tall, tall building: toes curling in her sneakers for a better grip, stomach muscles clenched tight in recoil, thoughts dizzy with vertigo, and a quiet voice underneath it all that whispered, Jump.
Sal hopped from her shoulder to Miguel’s, and even though he didn’t actually have a body for the raven to perch on, the psychopomp’s claws gripped his spirit as tightly as they had her leather jacket. Miguel didn’t seem to notice, couldn’t tear his attention away from the Gate. It always took a while for anyone to get over their first sight of the other side. Part of it, Renai imagined, was that this was usually the point in their journey where the dead really seemed to get that they had died. That particular pot needed a little while to simmer, no matter who it was doing the cooking.
It wasn’t fear that the dead experienced in this moment. Awe and confusion? Epiphany or cosmic insignificance? Those were all possible. But they couldn’t really be afraid. True fear was a product of chemical reactions produced by a part of the brain that rotted in the body the dead had left behind. The newly dead were usually as incapable of being afraid as they were unable to speak. Sometimes they carried with them the memory of fear, though, and staring into the proverbial abyss could cause them to recall that sensation just enough to try something stupid. That’s why Renai kept Miguel’s spirit hand clasped firmly in her own.
You never could tell who would try to run.
The other part of it—whatever particular flavor of “it” that was taking up Miguel’s thoughts just then—was that the other side didn’t look the same to the dead as it did to psychopomps like her and Sal. According to the raven, it didn’t even look the same from one dead to the next. What looked to psychopomps like a gray, peaceful limbo of “not-here” but “not-there,” the dead saw as a series of trials, each Gate an obstacle or challenge that they had to overcome in order to complete their journey to their just reward. Whatever they’d believed in life, the gods they’d worshiped—with their hearts and actions, if not with their tongues—their deeds and regrets and sins, all of that determined what kinds of challenges they’d have to face. Lakes of fire, knife-thin bridges over deep chasms, rivers full of blood or scorpions or lost souls. That sort of thing. Oussou and Masaka’s Gate was the first of seven.
Renai couldn’t remember what she’d seen on the other side when she’d died, what she’d faced, one of the few mercies of her own death and resurrection. She did know she’d triumphed over her trials, knew she’d stood in judgment before the Thrones. She remembered a cold, dark place, her dress a bloody ruin where her heart had been torn from her chest, an obsidian mirror in her hands enabling her to look on the dual faces of the god who sat in the Thrones, to hear their voice. She tried not to think about it. She’d see it all again one day
, after all.
Sal cleared his throat, yanking her back to the present. The raven shot her a glance that conveyed both impatience and a distinct lack of confidence in her. Pretty impressive really, considering he only had one solid, dark eye aimed at her. Goddamn, girl, she thought, handle your shit. Without saying a word, she held out the coin of Miguel’s Fortune to him, which he took with his beak and tucked away beneath a glossy black wing.
Miguel’s eyes caught hers, his face full of questions and trust and an earnestness that she had to harden her heart against. “This is as far as I go,” she said. “I only show you the Gate. It’s up to you to walk through.” The dead man’s full lips compressed into a tight, grim line. He looked back toward whatever he saw on the other side, and though he had neither lungs nor a need for air, he took a deep breath.
“Let’s go, chief,” Sal said, tapping his foot twice on the spirit’s shoulder, “no time like the present.” He launched himself into the air and swooped in a graceful arc through the Gate.
Miguel tightened his grip on Renai, but she pulled away, his spiritual hand like smoke against her flesh when she wasn’t holding on to him. “Go on now,” she said. “You’ve been on this path your whole life. This is just the next step.” Renai made herself watch while he crossed over and, in case he looked back, forced herself to keep a calm expression on her face. Serene, like she had all the answers. She didn’t, of course; for all she knew, Miguel wouldn’t even make it as far as the next Gate, much less all seven of them. Or he’d be found unworthy to pass into the next life, and his Essence would be devoured. She never knew if she was leading her dead to eternal bliss or oblivion.
Judging was somebody else’s job. She was just the guide.
A gloom descended when Oussou swung the Gate shut and locked it, like a cloud had passed in front of the sun. He gave Renai a squinty-eyed appraisal, like he’d noticed her for the first time, like this wasn’t part of the routine they’d established. “You wanna stick around and have a drink?” he asked.
“Looks like you’ve had enough for the both of us,” Renai said over her shoulder as she walked back to her bike. She couldn’t quite make out what he said in response, but she let him have the last word. She considered, very briefly, taking him up on his real offer. He was good-looking, in a mistake-she’d-enjoy-regretting kind of way, and she’d eaten enough of Miguel’s Voice that she still thrummed with energy like a plucked guitar string.
If she brought him home, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d gotten laid right after delivering a soul to the Gates. Oussou surely didn’t seem like the type to get possessive once the deed was done like some of the guys she’d slept with before she’d died, nor would he forget her as soon as he left her bed like the mortal men she’d been with since her resurrection. His ability to remember her when most everyone couldn’t was why, appealing as the prospect was, Oussou had no chance with her. Because he wasn’t a psychopomp like Sal or a living human man, even though he looked like one. Oussou and his twin were loa of the Ghede family, voodoo ancestor spirits who presided over the realm of the dead. Gods, more or less. So even if he was sober enough to handle his business, looked like Will Smith—lanky early ’90s Fresh Prince Will, not buff action-movie Will—and was her last option on this Earth, she’d have still turned him down; Renai knew better than to be fucking around with gods.
Besides, what would happen to the dead if Oussou wasn’t there to open the Gate?
That thought followed Renai as she rode Kyrie back to her new place, an all-but-empty one-bedroom apartment on the edge of the Garden District in a building that had once been a school and was now full of condos. It nagged at her as she changed out of her clothes and into track shorts and a long-sleeved Saints T-shirt and a pair of Nikes. It nipped at her heels as she ran down to Audubon Park and back—a four-mile circuit along the wide, grassy stretch of St. Charles’s neutral ground that housed the streetcar tracks—which she did without stopping for rest, lungs seared as she sucked in the cold air. It weighed on her as she did push-ups and crunches and pull-ups in the apartment when the run didn’t burn off enough of her excess energy, muscles straining and aching. It haunted her during her brief but intensely hot shower and joined her on her bare-mattress-on-the-floor version of a bed, where she burrowed under the blankets and lay staring up into the dark.
Renai knew, of course, that not everyone who died made it through all seven of the Gates. During her brief glimpses through the First Gate, she could sometimes see them wandering through the fog of that in-between place, and there had been others that Sal implied weren’t just lost but gone. It also happened that once in a very rare while a person would refuse to enter the First Gate at all, either too attached to this world to move on, or simply unable to believe that they’d actually died. She’d seen her share of those walking the streets of New Orleans since she’d returned, though they usually fled once they realized what she was. Ultimately, though, what happened to a single identity didn’t matter much to the overall system. It was the coin of Fortune that she couldn’t stop thinking about.
Voice, life, magic—whatever you wanted to call it—the part of the soul that psychopomps consumed when a person died was a renewable resource. It grew inside everything that lived, restored itself from the tiniest amount if it was drained, and its absence on the other side was part of what defined the other side. If human souls were only that one thing, nothing would change if the Gates no longer opened. But destiny—that coin of Fortune—was another thing entirely. Your luck could run out. Your fate was sealed. Like the first law of thermodynamics, destiny could neither be created nor destroyed, and that made it precious. No matter what happened to a person’s Voice and Essence, their Fortune had to get to the other side of the Gates so it could be reused. Carrying that coin was the psychopomp’s true purpose. Sal had told her that bad things would happen if they didn’t consume the dead’s leftover Voice, but what if they couldn’t get the Fortune to where it was supposed to go? Would newborns start their lives with no fate? Would the whole cycle of death and life grind to a halt?
She couldn’t decide which was worse.
These thoughts wouldn’t torture her so much if she weren’t a psychopomp now. A normal human could detach herself from these greater concerns, but devotion to the cycle of life and death had been hardwired into her when she’d been resurrected, instinctive as a migratory urge. Which was why, as she spiraled down into sleep, the god who called himself Seth and his strange request were pushed from her mind by an almost-pathological anxiety about the First Gate. By the time she woke the next morning, she’d forgotten all about the red-handed god.
There were times where Renai felt—with the tingling ache of a phantom limb—that she could envision the Underworld as surely and as clearly as if she had spent the past five years there instead of in the world of the living. These moments were always fleeting: a flicker of memory just before the oblivion of sleep or a scrap of dream left over just upon waking, a tickle of scent from a passerby, a misheard line from a song just at the edge of hearing.
She knew, from her glimpses through the First Gate, that the Underworld was a shadowed, muted version of a New Orleans shrouded in fog. What she couldn’t know, but still believed to be true, was that in that place, pine and oak and magnolia grew thick and towering, the spirits of the trees that had been cleared away to make room for the grids and snarls of city streets. The Underworld had no parking lots or sidewalks underfoot, no cell towers or power lines overhead. The homes and the restaurants, bars and shops and high-rises—those remained, their doors unlocked, their rooms empty of all but dust and memories.
She could picture that other Renai, too, hair still twisted into long dreads, still dressed in the lace-laden white graduation dress that she’d been buried in, barefoot and hovering in midair, like a ghost. Or an angel.
Since St. Louis No. 1 had once stood at the outermost edge of the city, in order to get to the Second Gate, that other Renai had to lead Miguel throu
gh the duckweed-coated waterways and the fetid, squelching muck of the swamp that had been drained as New Orleans grew. The path changed with every soul. Some meandered past landmarks personal and historic; some followed a course as straight and precise as if it had been laid out with a ruler and compass. Some paths were solid wooden walkways of fresh-cut pine and taut rope guidelines, while others were all slick, weathered cobblestones spread a full stride apart. It all depended on what the soul believed they deserved.
If Miguel strayed from his appointed path, all his personality and individuality would fade, his Essence dimming into a mere reflection of personality. That other Renai walked through the Underworld burdened by an unshakable paranoia, haunted by the constant attention of these lost souls, these shades.
When the knowledge and sensations of the Underworld overshadowed Renai’s mind, it was always an unsettling feeling, like déjà vu or vertigo. Always a sensation of sadness and loss. For the next day or two, she’d catch herself studying her face in mirrors as if checking that her reflection was still her own, found that she struggled to fall asleep, unsure that she’d still be herself when she woke.
Afraid that when she closed her eyes, it would be for the last time.
