by Bryan Camp
Home.
Renai slipped down through the fog and the tree canopy, swooping past the campus of Tulane University and the row of Greek housing and into the residential neighborhood that lay beyond. This area hadn’t changed much in all the time she’d known it; even after the storm it had just gotten taller, with most folks rebuilding their homes and raising them up five feet in case another once-in-a-lifetime flood happened the following year. The houses in this part of Uptown were a more diverse bunch than you’d find in an older neighborhood. There, street after street was filled with identical shotgun doubles. Most of these were bigger single-family, two-story homes, the first floor converted from what had been just a dusty crawl space before the storm.
Even amid the mist and the trees and the strangeness of the Underworld, Renai could walk down these cracked and broken sidewalks with her eyes closed. She didn’t need a map to know that Plum Street Sno-Balls was that way, that the Nix branch of the library was over there, and that Palmer Park, where she had stolen her first kiss from a neighborhood boy named Trent, was off in that direction. It was all so familiar that when she reached the house, she had to stop herself from checking the mailbox. There were no cars in the driveway, of course, but there was her father’s herb garden lining the front where there used to be a porch, and there was her mother’s lemon tree peeking up over the back fence.
Turns out you can go home again, she thought. So long as you don’t mind haunting it.
A long set of stairs climbed from the sidewalk to the old front porch, now a screened-in balcony on the second floor. The front door, she knew, would be unlocked, as all doors were in the Underworld. Her childhood home would be full of everything she remembered: an antique curio cabinet that both her folks hated but couldn’t get rid of because it had belonged to Renai’s great-grandmother, a dining room table full of opened bills and grocery store receipts and clean laundry that had been folded but not put away, a mantel crowded with family pictures and junior high trophies and a souvenir coffee mug full of pens, above all of which hung a picture of Jesus, his heart visible in the center of his chest, glowing and crowned and encircled with thorns like barbed wire.
They hadn’t kept her room “just the way she’d left it” as some kind of shrine to her like they did in the movies—her grandmother now slept in her old bed, even—but they hadn’t tried to erase her from their daily lives, either. Pictures of Renai were everywhere, and bits and pieces of her life had survived her, a throw pillow once on her bed now on the family sofa, a school art project taped to her wall was now framed and hung in the kitchen. Every day without fail, her mother wore a cheap bracelet that she’d found in Renai’s nightstand.
Renai knew all this because she could still catch glimpses of her family in the obsidian mirror that she could pull out of the same nowhere place where her wings lived, so long as her family was in the house on the living side of the veil and she managed to get the angle on the mirror just right. She’d watched them in the five years since her death—spied on them, honestly—her younger brother overcoming a learning disability in school, her parents moving her grandmother in when it became obvious she couldn’t stay on her own anymore, her sister and her partner struggling to conceive. She’d read their lips and laughed when they did, even though she couldn’t hear the joke. Wept sometimes, too, though they kept laughing.
Much as she could use the small measure of comfort that looking in on their lives granted her, Renai didn’t make her way up the stairs. Partly because she didn’t have the energy to struggle with the mirror, and partly because—even though they were literal worlds away—she knew better than to track the mud from her filthy feet onto her momma’s fresh cleaned floors. Instead, she went around the side of the house, to the small apartment that her father had built in the former crawl space when they’d raised the house, hoping to rent it out to college kids to help pay off the ongoing Katrina repairs that the insurance company had screwed them out of. Since the ceiling down here barely cleared six feet, he’d had trouble attracting tenants for long enough to be worth the hassle. So now the family used it as storage space, and Renai took advantage of the old furniture and working bathroom to make herself a place to live in the land of the dead.
After a long, hot shower, Renai felt like a human being again, or as close as a dead-and-resurrected girl like her could get, anyway. She put on a pair of pajama pants and a moth-eaten Tulane T-shirt that had once belonged to her older sister. Her whole wardrobe had come out of a box of stuff that was supposed to go to Goodwill and ended up down here. After a quick meal of a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich—she made a mental note to scavenge some more non-perishables from the hurricane supplies in the pantry—she lay down on the inflatable mattress that served as her bed and scrolled through her phone, hoping she could distract herself from the events of the day long enough to quiet her mind and fall asleep.
When memes and celebrity gossip brought her no satisfaction, she propped her phone up on a pillow and started the next episode of Treme. In life, she’d been more into horror movies and dark fantasies, having been in the grip of a minor goth phase in the part of her teens when she developed those sorts of tastes, but since her resurrection, she’d found herself desperate for any depictions of modern-day life, especially of New Orleans.
Hellraiser lost a lot of its menace when you had actually seen a doorway into Hell.
After only a few minutes, Renai gave up on the show, too, and shut her phone off, rolling onto her back and staring up at the ceiling. Her mind kept chewing on the events of the day. Some souls were easier than others, and Miguel had been a hard one, but she’d gotten him down to the Thrones and the Final Gate. After that, she no longer felt the weight of responsibility, neither her self-imposed obligation to her dead nor the Thrones-induced burden of the coin of Fortune. She hoped that Miguel was satisfied with the Far Land the Thrones had sent him to, but those decisions weren’t hers to make. She was a guide, not a judge.
So he wasn’t what kept her thoughts churning. It was all her extracurriculars: Mason and Ramses and her memories and Sal.
In the five years she’d been a psychopomp, she’d had little contact with the gods—aside from the Gatekeepers, of course—so Mason coming to see her felt portentous in a way that twisted everything else that had happened to her since.
She hadn’t said anything to Sal about meeting a god, nor was she entirely sure why she’d kept it a secret. She’d checked for the name Ramses St. Cyr in the giant eerie book where Plumaj kept the names of the dead, but she’d only managed to steal a quick peek without Sal noticing. Her mentor had seemed anxious and cagey, too, especially when she’d brought up the Hallows. I know how it weighs on you when the Hallows are comin’ up, he’d said, and he hadn’t given her a chance to ask him what that meant. He knew that her memories were as full of holes as a pair of cheap stockings, but did he know that she remembered nothing at all about the Hallows? That those three days were blank spaces in every year since her resurrection? Did he know why?
Could it be a coincidence that Mason, whoever he really was, had chosen a time when the Underworld’s order was thrown into chaos to ask a psychopomp for help?
Above her, the passage of someone—some family member she’d only see in her mirror’s reflection ever again—made the ceiling groan and creak. She wondered if they ever heard her moving around, if they knew they were haunted, or just thought they had another family of possums living down here. She didn’t even know for sure who the footsteps belonged to, and she missed them so much that it ached. She’d given up on ever seeing the living world again and, in the same way, had given up on remembering what happened to her during the Hallows. She’d tried notebooks and Polaroids and digital recorders, none of which had survived until November 3rd, when she’d wake in the grip of what felt like an epic hangover and no memory of the previous three days.
Renai groaned and sat up, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes like she could squeeze the thoughts o
ut. Her chances for sleep were diminishing rapidly. She reached out and turned on the small flat-screen she’d . . . acquired . . . her first year in the Underworld, when she’d found her brother’s old Nintendo buried at the bottom of the Goodwill box. She didn’t know if the television on the living side of things had disappeared from the house on Greek row that she’d taken it from, or if only echoes of things were carried over from one side to another. Frankly, she didn’t care. She was dead and bored, and they were frat boys. Fuck ’em. After a couple of weeks, she’d gone back and taken their PlayStation, too.
In the flickering light of the TV, Renai saw a couple of shades watching her from the corner of the room. They didn’t bother her too much here for some reason, but she never managed to escape their presence for good. She wouldn’t mind them following her everywhere if they could hold a conversation. Just listening would be nice, if they would respond to her in any way that was more than repulsion or attraction. She’d tried, but talking to a shade was like talking to a rock. Worse, because rocks didn’t bring their friends to help them creepy-stare-at-you for hours. She was so starved for human contact that she’d be cool with the shades hanging around if all they did was pick up a controller and play video games with her once in a while.
Her game finished loading, and she swirled the camera around her character, reminding herself where she was and what she’d been doing. She’d last saved out in the Capital Wasteland, about to descend into a cave that she’d finally gotten to a high-enough level to take on. Her character, who she’d named Bey, looked as close to her own appearance as she’d been able to get in the hours she’d spent tweaking it, except this version of her wore bulky power armor and carried a laser rifle. The hair was wrong, though; they always had such shitty options for a black woman’s hair.
She had a flash, almost like a memory, of herself in the living world, wearing a badass leather jacket and her hair in a short natural puff. It occurred to her that she’d designed Bey to look just like this other Renai. She shook that thought away like all the others, though, and in just a few moments, she’d lost herself in this other world, Mason and Ramses and Sal and even the Hallows all forgotten. She couldn’t solve any of that, not tonight anyway. Not by worrying about it.
But she could damn sure kill a few ghouls.
Almost a week went by, and every day was practically indistinguishable from the rest. Renai woke and wasted time scrolling through social media or playing video games or attending to her body’s physical needs until she was scheduled to meet Sal at the First Gate, where he would hand over a coin of Fortune. She’d guide that day’s dead through the Gates, always checking Plumaj’s book for the name Mason had given her and not finding it, nor getting a moment alone with the angel to ask if they’d remembered where they’d heard the name before.
She’d sign up for another random soul and then continue on, more and more convinced each day that Mason had tricked her somehow. She’d lead her soul through the rest of the Gates, showing them their true self with her mirror, cleansing them of their Shadow with the magic inside her, and leaving them at Barren’s streetcar. She lost one soul to the fog, another to Babaco’s never-ending party, and carried a third—a crib death who had spent only a few weeks in the living world—the whole way down to the Thrones and the Final Gate. Renai found it hard to hand the small bundle of Essence to one of the other dead there, even though she’d known all along that she wouldn’t be able to cross the Gate herself, had known that she couldn’t carry the soul on to Paradise, the Far Land that the infant had earned in her short joy-filled life.
Each day Renai intended to ask Sal what he knew about the Hallows and Mason and her place in everything going on, and each day she found herself too exhausted or emotionally frayed or just plain scared to actually ask. Each night she’d find herself back here, either so worn out that sleep dragged her under without giving her a chance to reflect or so tightly wound with anxiety that she couldn’t trust any of the conclusions that came to her. Each day blended so seamlessly with the one before it that she’d practically forgotten about Mason and his deal and the thief he’d asked her to find until four days before the Hallows began when, leading an elderly dead man through the Third Gate, she saw in the giant book of the dead that the next soul she’d been assigned to lead through the Underworld was none other than Ramses St. Cyr.
Even though Renai spent most of that night building Ramses up in her mind as some culture hero who laughed in the face of the gods, Death, and anyone else he damn well pleased, when Sal didn’t show up at the First Gate like he was supposed to, it still took her by surprise.
She just stood there, stunned, struck by that disconnected feeling that came from closing your eyes for a few minutes in the afternoon and waking up in the dark of night hours later. She fidgeted with the dangling shirttails of one of her father’s old blue dress shirts—coffee-stained and sleeves rolled up and still smelling of his aftershave—that she’d tied in a knot at her waist.
Renai dug the toe of her low-top canvas sneakers in the dirt. She checked her watch to be sure she had the time right. She called Sal’s name, first like he was just in the other room, then shouting like he was lost.
A quiver of what-felt-like-memory from that other version of Renai told her that on the living side of things, she was used to waiting on Sal. But the Sal she knew was always on time. She gave him five minutes, then ten. After that she gave the Gate—on this side of things: a huge pair of brass and ivory doors that were, impossibly, too big for the frame that held them—a halfhearted shove, not surprised to find that they didn’t budge.
“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do now?” she muttered to herself.
Sal’s voice came from one of the trees above her. “How about you start by explaining yourself?” he asked.
She looked up but couldn’t spot him among the foliage. Her heart began to flutter, a nervous, guilty feeling. The psychopomp sounded pissed, suspicious even. Something had gone wrong with Ramses’ collection, that much was obvious. The question was, how bad? Had Sal known about her deal with Mason and guided the dead boy himself, just to keep Renai away from Ramses? Or was it something worse?
It occurred to her, then, that she really had no idea what Salvatore was capable of doing, what he might know. She’d always thought of him as a friend, but she couldn’t trust that he had her back on this one. The stakes were just too high; bigger than life or death. Salvation or damnation. This is what I get for fucking around with gods, she thought, and then, in her grandmother’s voice: You ever got to choose between a truth and a lie, tell the truth and shame the devil.
So that’s just what she did. She told Sal all about meeting a god in a coffee shop, and the deal she’d made. Tried to explain how desperately she wanted out of the monotony and the loneliness of the Underworld, even if it meant crossing through the Final Gate and into the Far Lands. Admitted that she’d been waiting for Ramses’ death to show up in Plumaj’s book, that she’d been deceiving Sal for days, even if her lie was one of omission.
As she spoke, she found a vine climbing the exposed brick of a crumbling, unmaintained tomb, and stared at one of its leaves as it trembled in the soft breeze of the Underworld, fixing her gaze on it in order to keep herself from searching the trees for Sal.
The words spilled out of her in a kind of meditative trance. She didn’t know for sure that Sal was alone, or even if he was still there. For all she knew, the only ones hearing her story might be the small group of shades that had gathered among the tombs as she spoke. Once she began, though, it was less about Sal hearing and more about getting the whole thing out. It felt strangely familiar, unburdening herself of something unpleasant and secret to an unseen listener, like a trip to the confessional from her youth.
When she finished, Sal said nothing for a few seconds that felt like hours. When he spoke, he no longer sounded angry—only tired. “There just ain’t no side of this ain’t fucked from hell to breakfast, is there?” he asked, tho
ugh it seemed rhetorical. Then she heard wing beats and claws scrambling on granite, and she turned to find him perched on a nearby tomb.
“How long have you been—”
Sal squawked out an angry caw, whipping his head around to glare at her with one black eye. “Nope. We are not at the Renai-gets-to-ask-questions part of this yet. The fuck were you thinking, making a bargain with a god like Seth?”
Renai’s own anger, rising in her own defense, slipped away in sudden confusion. “Hold up. Who said anything about a Seth? The god who came to see me called himself Mason.”
“Ugly sumbitch? Goofy ears and red hands?”
“Yeah, no. My dude was too pretty and he knew it. And his hands were as brown as the rest of him.”
“And I bet you dollars to dick-punches he wasn’t no bricklayer, no matter what he called himself. He give you anything? This nose a’mine might know him. These fuckin’ deities leave their stink all over anything they touch.”
“No,” she said, “he texted me Ramses’ name.”
“Figures,” Sal muttered. “Why would they make it easy for us?”
“But whoever he is, I think he’s a Trickster like Jude.” She started to tell Sal how Mason had worn the face of Jude Dubuisson at first, but didn’t get far before Sal spit out a sentence that was just the word “fuck” in all its grammatical flexibility. “Yeah,” Renai said. “That’s what I thought, too.”
