by Bryan Camp
Though the influence of the ghost word illuminated the darkness in shades of purple, Renai still had trouble picking out the details of the room she’d entered because of the destruction within. It looked like fire and transients and time had all taken their turn giving this place their undivided attention.
She stood in a large open foyer whose walls stretched up all the way to the second floor, an ancient rusty chain dangling—pathetic in its uselessness, whatever chandelier or fixture long since looted—from the ceiling. A staircase ran along one wall and led up to a second-floor balcony along the back wall of the foyer, its banister splintered and fallen. Opposite the stairs stood a long half-wall that could have been a speakeasy’s bar or a hotel’s front desk or just a dividing wall that had partially collapsed. She couldn’t be sure if the dust and mildew savaging her sinuses was purely from the house itself, or if it was merely adding to the spoiled-milk stink she’d come to associate with a death avoided.
That sense of wrongness was the only thing that told her that the fugitive dead Cordelia had told her about might actually be here, because her eyes told her that she was alone. She pulled off the hood, hoping that might ease the stood-too-close-to-the-speakers-at-a-concert whine in her ears, but her return to solidity only robbed her of sight.
In the darkness, though, she noticed something: the whine she heard felt off. Not just its fundamental wrongness, but also distorted somehow, out of tune. She imagined a dial, like the old-fashioned radio she used to listen to the Deadline, and with the ringing in her ears as a guide, slowly adjusted it, as if seeking the right station. The noise warped and trebled and then, with a soft pop that felt like plucking cotton out of her ears, the whine was replaced by conversation and laughter and ice tinkling in glasses and the lights came on, blinding her.
When her eyes adjusted, Renai’s first thought was that she’d wandered into a saloon from one of the Westerns her grandfather had loved.
Tinkling, twangy music came from a piano on the far side of the room, in a style that Renai had no name for other than “old timey,” played by a balding black man whose back was to her. A short middle-aged white man with slicked-back hair and an impressive mustache stood behind the bar—restored to solidity and fully stocked and polished to a gleaming shine—wearing a stiff white dress shirt, a bolo tie, and cords tied around his elbows. The ornate and intricate wheel of the chandelier hanging overhead illuminated the room with dozens of burning candles. She couldn’t decide if she’d stepped out of time or if she was merely seeing something that had happened long ago, when a pink-haired young white woman in acid-washed jeans and a Cyndi Lauper T-shirt walked in front of her and headed toward the bar.
Once she stopped thinking of her surroundings as belonging somewhere in the 1800s, she was able to recognize that the handful of figures in the room—sprawled out on velvet couches or huddled around a poker table or leaning on a barstool—came from all over the span of New Orleans’s three hundred years. Fedoras and flapper dresses, plaid suit jackets and mom jeans, grunge flannel and petticoats and crushed velvet leisure suits.
In just a few moments of watching the dead, Renai noticed a few things. First, that the crowd had more men than women, and far more white people than any other race, which, after a little thought, made sense. You had to have had a pretty privileged life to assume that no afterlife could be a step up from what you’d had on Earth, and you had to be pretty arrogant to tell Death that you were better off considering your options instead of crossing over. Second, these dead weren’t impacted by her aura of disinterest like the living. She kept locking eyes with someone whose gaze would dart away, kept seeing heads turn away from her with feigned nonchalance. The third thing she’d noticed was that although she’d been expecting the ghostly forms of the dead she’d led to the First Gate, these spirits weren’t just ethereal, they were also strangely flat, like a series of two-dimensional images superimposed onto the real world. They were just wisps of Essence. Remnants. A deck of playing cards killing time until the end of days.
Is this the part where I’m supposed to say “curiouser and curiouser”? she thought.
Though her heart pounded in her chest and her skin crawled with the weight of scrutiny falling on her for the first time in years, Renai reminded herself of what Cordelia had told her. Respect. She cleared her throat and breathed in deep and—nearly shouting to ensure she could be heard over the piano—said, “I’m looking for a lost boy named Ramses St. Cyr.”
A couple of discordant notes, a few furtive glances, and a brief lull in the conversation was the only response she got. All the tension spilled out of her, replaced by a sudden flush of heat across her face and chest. Suddenly she was invisible again, but unlike the aura of disinterest that had surrounded her since her resurrection, this felt familiar. This was the involuntary vanishing act that black women were made to perform whenever it came time for promotions. Or opinions.
Or respect.
She felt the cold, furious wind of hate rise within her demanding release, and—since it had given her the flood in the morgue, since she’d promised, since she was so very tired of fighting—she let it come. Let it come for every white doctor at the hospital where her mother worked as a nurse who treated her like she worked for them. Let it come for every man who asked her aunt why, with a body like hers, she was wasting her time in college. Let it come for every person who assumed she was her older sister’s daughter, when they were only ten years apart. For the country that once made her grandmother drink from separate fountains from white people, use different bathrooms, attend different schools. For every slap, every suspicious look, every “Where are you supposed to be?” and every “Do you work here?” and every “I bet you’d be real pretty if you smiled more.” For every use of the word that turned a person into a thing. Let it come for every time this world turned a black woman’s skin into glass: fragile, brittle, transparent.
Let it come.
When she finally let the destructive, impulsive presence living inside of her slip free of her restraint, it seeped out from every pore of her skin. The sensation was one of expansion, as though she grew to fill the room with her influence. It began as a breeze, hardly more than if she’d simply puffed up her cheeks and blew, but definitely noticeable in the stagnant air in this place. She pushed, and the wind grew stronger. And stronger. Every eye turned toward her now, but she’d lost interest in merely being seen. The woman in her had taken all she could take, and the psychopomp in her couldn’t stand the presence of these spirits in the living world.
Time for these death-defying fucks to reap the whirlwind they’d sown.
Her awareness spun around the room along with the storm winds she’d freed, so she saw the moment each pair of eyes shifted from scorn or amusement or interest into fear.
Good, she thought, these dead have remembered what being afraid feels like. That will make this easier.
The chandelier creaked and spun overhead. The dead didn’t allow the wind to ruffle their clothes or tousle their hair, but it bent them, forced them to lean in order to stay upright. Another push and her presence became a gale, more than these weak shades could withstand. They flopped to the ground and went whisking through the air and smacked against walls, pinned and unharmed, but entirely at her mercy.
Even though the tempest inside of her had stretched to fill the room, it remained tethered to her body, so when she spoke, it was not with her own voice, but with the storm’s eerie tornado howl. “I’m here for a lost boy named Ramses St. Cyr,” she said, and the walls groaned under the onslaught of her will.
He ain’t here, the bartender said in that whispery non-voice of the dead, flickering in and out of visibility from where he’d caught edgewise between two bottles of liquor. We know every soul ever entered this place, and we ain’t never heard no one of that name. A chorus of agreement came murmuring from every corner of the room.
“Then help me find him,” she said. “He’s hiding from Death, just like you.”
We can’t. Another whisper barely audible over the roaring wind, this one from the pink-haired girl from the ’80s, pressed against the staircase banister and half-hidden by a thin man who’d covered his face with his bowler hat. We can’t leave. We’re too weak.
“This is what happens when you avoid your fate,” she said. “Some of you should have crossed over centuries ago.”
We were waiting, someone said, and Renai scanned the room twice for the speaker before she realized that it was all of them speaking in unison, that they’d always been speaking with one voice.
“Waiting for what?”
For someone to help us leave. Every eye turned her way had a hungry, manic gleam to it. Every mouth twisted into a rictus grimace of a smile. For someone to carry us. And then each of the flattened remnants of Essence let go of whatever they’d been holding, slapping against the walls or the floors or the ceiling. Lying flush, where her winds, no matter how powerful they were, roared right over them. They stretched toward her like shadows, arms extended. Supplicating. Eager. Demanding.
If one of them touched her, slicing her flesh with an impossibly thin blade of a finger, slipping inside to mingle with the Essence of her own soul, to press their memories and thoughts and desires alongside her own, she could handle the intrusion. They were only slivers of a whole soul, after all. A fraction of an identity. She’d feel a strange impulse from time to time. A memory that didn’t belong, a snatch of song she couldn’t forget. Just another touch of haunting to go along with the spirit already living inside of her.
But there were dozens and dozens of shadows reaching for her.
No, Renai thought. You can’t have me.
The presence within her shifted in response, became a kind of disturbance she’d never experienced before. Renai knew the rumble of a lazy summer thunderstorm and the abrupt violence of a tornado and the hurricanes that blew in from the Gulf: fierce, powerful behemoths that stomped and roared and flattened everything in their path. But the presence within her knew of other places, other kinds of destruction. There were storms of the deep desert that carried within their tempests grains of fine sand: immense, relentless things that hissed and scoured and destroyed by wearing away.
It was that kind of wind that tore through the room, abrading the shadows wherever they lay, peeling them from the floors and the walls, casting them once more into the air. Once they were caught up in this whirlwind, however, the spirits weren’t merely shaken up and thrown around.
They were unmade.
Renai let it happen. She couldn’t be sure where her will ended and the storm’s began, but she knew that it was responding to her wishes. Knew that she could restrain this power if she chose to. Knew that even though the tempest had a mind of its own, she was responsible for whatever it did, whatever it destroyed. In moments, the crowd of renegade dead had been reduced to Shadows, wisps of magic and substance. Hers, like the storm, to command.
She thought of the image she’d had of them when she first entered this place, and sent her wind forth again, to unmake these Shadows, shaping them with her will into a form she could carry, could conceal. One by one the Shadows collapsed and squared off and wrote designs on themselves, hearts and clubs, diamonds and spades. She held out her hand and unmade a haunted house into a deck of cards: solid black when held one way, but flickering into a specific card when tilted toward the light. When the lost scraps of spirit and memory had all been reduced to a handful of cards, she tucked them into an empty card box she found on the table, which she slipped into her pocket, her wind still whirling around her.
She felt no pity for the Shadows she’d destroyed, no guilt for what she’d done. They weren’t alive, she reminded herself, weren’t even aware the way a person’s full Essence was. They’d been little more than the shapes of the people they’d once been, only able to function as a collective, and even then nothing more than a Venus flytrap that remembered human language. Just like Cordelia said, more than just gods and men moved in this world, and in the hierarchy of reality, those barely coherent shades were as far away from a recently collected dead soul as she was from her own shadow. Besides, they hadn’t gotten trapped here by accident.
They’d run.
And collecting souls, in whatever ragged form they took, was a psychopomp’s job.
Now came the hard part. Now that the spirit was free—more unrestrained than it had ever been—it wanted to spread. It had a list, this power that lived within her, statues to tear down, institutions to sweep away, people who deserved to feel the floodwaters rising over their heads. And why not? Weren’t hurricanes natural? Wasn’t the city brightest right after the wind and rain had washed the streets clean? That was the scariest thing about this power within her. Not that it had desires and a voice not her own, though that was terrifying enough. No, the most terrible thing was that its argument was almost convincing.
It might have even worked, if she hadn’t seen for herself what all storms really desired. Their destruction was indeterminate, punishing sinner and saint alike. It preyed on the hatred that felt like righteousness to her, but it had the capacity to despise the whole world.
Renai reached out and—with the same unnamed part of her that had pushed the winds into greater fervor—she pulled. The winds fought back, lashing against her body and soul, but Renai held on. It hurt, bone deep and ruthless, but nevertheless she persisted. She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists and, inch by agonizing inch, pulled the winds back inside.
It took time, though she couldn’t say how long, to still the desire that raged within her, to calm the tempest, to coax it back inside of her. When she was done, her breath came in ragged gasps, and she knelt amid the ruins of years of abandonment that she’d seen when she first used the ghost word to enter the building. She ached all over, but the storm was restrained. For now.
She rose to her feet, unsteady but feeling more in control than she had in days and—using the ghost word—walked back into the afternoon light. She was no closer to finding Ramses, but she had, at least, another source of magic. A whole box of aces she could hide up her sleeve. Cordelia stared at her from her perch on the railing, her tiny beak gaped open in some form of amusement. Renai didn’t know exactly what Cordelia’s game was, but she wasn’t going to let the little bird know how tense things had gotten in there.
Never let ’em see you sweat, she heard her mother say, and Renai let herself grin at the realization that, storm or no storm, Shadows or no Shadows, she was already plenty haunted by voices from the past. “So,” she said to the ’pomp, “you got any other bright ideas?”
Chapter Eleven
In pursuit of it, emperors have poisoned themselves with potions of quicksilver and of cinnabar and of arsenic. Herodotus thought it came from a naturally occurring fountain, whose waters moved like oil and smelled of violets. Others sought this same fountain in Persia, calling it the Aab-i-Hayat, or in a mythical land called Bimini in Spanish Florida. In the deserts of the southwestern U.S., it was the red sap of a particular kind of frankincense tree, believed to heal all wounds. It can be found in a variety of cups: the chalice that caught the water that spilled from Christ’s side on the cross, or a cup of seven rings whose contents could reflect a vision of anywhere in the cosmos along with conveying longevity with a single sip. Some seek it still, in treatments and in surgeries and in vials of enzymes meant to lengthen their telomeres. Others believe that, while it could be persuaded to become liquid, its natural form was solid and everlasting as the earth itself. Water or oil or stone, generation after generation sought the substance that could transmute lead into gold, which could melt flawed diamonds and re-form them into a perfect gem, which could purge the impurities of age and return one’s lost vitality. A potion, a fountain, an amulet, a powder, an al-iksir, an elixir. We hunt anything that might grant youth and health and freedom from disease or infirmity or age. We all crave a little piece of eternity.
Demourelles Island—a three-and-a-half-a
cre stretch of land hugging the edge of the Bayou St. John that held a single upper-class neighborhood—was formed when the natural curve of the bayou proved too narrow and too prone to blockage and the current straight channel was dredged. Renai knew it, as most locals did, as Park Island, made famous by the presence of “the ashtray house,” a former mayor’s notoriously ugly and expensive home, so named because of the line of brown glass ashtrays adorning the lintel of the house. So when Renai had forced Cordelia to tell her, and not Kyrie, their next destination, it only took a few minutes of discussion before she knew where to go. It shouldn’t be hard to find, she’d thought, since Park Island only had a single loop of a street, a short bridge the only entrance and exit that didn’t require a swim.
“The farthest house on the island from the bridge,” Cordelia had told her back at the formerly haunted house before winging away, “the tip of the island.”
So it surprised Renai when—despite forcing Kyrie to drive slow enough that she could check house numbers—she found herself back at the bridge that led off the island without having seen anywhere to turn off of Park Island Drive, and it frustrated her when she passed in front of the ashtray house a second time, looping back around to the bridge once more. Kyrie seemed confused too, bucking beneath Renai as if she was slipping out of gear. Renai patted Kyrie’s side. “I’ll figure this out,” she said. “You wait here.” Kyrie’s engine revved once and then stilled. Renai couldn’t tell if that meant annoyance or gratitude, or if she had started to read personality in the bike’s behavior where there was only reaction. Strange, she thought, leaving Kyrie behind and continuing down the sidewalk, all this time and I really don’t know anything about her. I used to question everything.
