by Bryan Camp
She’d lived and died once already in these scraps of memory, and whatever had happened to her inside that mansion had still scared her worse than dying again. So she was more relieved than she could say when Babaco unlocked the Fifth Gate and let them through.
Before they reached the location of the Sixth Gate—the streetcar stop at the foot of Canal Street—Renai managed to climb up out of her feelings.
Here, three cemeteries spread out in a fan. Cypress Grove was to her left, a largely Protestant graveyard where they’d built the Katrina Memorial. Its entrance of tall white pillars and a pair of pyramid-sloped roofs looked to her like the gate into an ancient city. Odd Fellow’s Rest was to her right, a small cemetery hidden by high brick-and-plaster walls, its name carved, in bas-relief, into its granite entryway. Greenwood Cemetery was right in front of her, huge and lavish, a true city of the dead complete with its own landmarks, like the massive, grassy mound topped with an imposing bronze elk of the Lodge’s tomb or the Firemen’s Monument, rising like the spire of a Gothic church, the statue of a man wearing a fireman’s helmet taking the place of a church bell.
In the living world, according to Sal, this intersection had been closed off for months due to construction extending the tracks across City Park Avenue. Soon, he said, the streetcar stop would be a well-lit brick structure on the neutral ground that ran beside Greenwood. Here in the Underworld, though, the streetcar stop at the foot of Canal remained as Renai remembered it: an uncomfortable bench that only seated about half as many people as the streetcar could, sagging beneath a rickety Plexiglas overhang, its single wall covered in scratch-etched graffiti, its roof offering as little protection from the rain as from the sun.
Sometimes there were other dead here with their guides, two or a handful or even a crowd. Sometimes, like now, Renai and Sal were alone. Sometimes her dead used this time to question her, if they’d managed to figure out the dead’s version of talking, anyway. They’d ask about members of their family, or what would happen to them next, or whether they’d lived a good life. Sometimes they’d even ask questions she was able to answer.
She and Sal sat there in silence. Sal yawned, his tongue lolling out the side of his muzzle, and seeing it provoked a similar yawn from Renai. In that sliver of time between when her gaping jaws squeezed her eyes shut and when she opened them, the streetcar appeared.
It didn’t come rumbling and squealing to a stop, didn’t announce itself with the signature jangling bell, didn’t move down the tracks at all. It was just there all at once, an Underworld streetcar that only partly resembled its counterparts in the living world: a glossy black carriage with a row of small square windows running along each side, a set of thin folding doors at all four corners, and a single headlight at the front and back that somehow managed to pierce the gloom of the deep Underworld.
The general shape and function of it matched the streetcars in the living world, but here dark silk hung in drapes along the side instead of advertisements, and the interior was lit by lanterns filled with eerie blue flames instead of simple electric bulbs. The streetcars on the other side were either green or red, depending on the line they serviced, but here the black surface of the streetcar had a shimmery iridescence, like an oil slick, like the sheen on a raven’s wings. The carriage’s abrupt appearance was startling, but in an almost childish way, like jumping out from behind a corner and shouting, “Boo!” The eerie streetcar was the Sixth Gate, and unlike any of the others, could carry them pretty much anywhere in the Underworld that they wanted to go.
Assuming they could convince the driver to take them there, anyway.
“Why’s my dude always gotta be so extra?” Renai said, more to herself than expecting Sal would hear her.
Sal chuckled. “You’re one to talk.”
The folding doors creaked open, and Baron Samedi, the Gatekeeper of the Sixth Gate, leaned out. His entire head was a fleshless skull painted with vibrant, stylized images of flowers and stars, like a Día de Muertos sugar skull.
Without lips, his teeth—clamped tight around a thick, hand-rolled cigar—stretched into a constant leer. He came correct though, in a three-piece suit, charcoal gray and pinstriped, with an eggshell dress shirt and gloves to match, a tie the dark purple of a glass of merlot, and a pair of fresh polished black-and-white oxfords.
Just the sight of him made Renai feel dirtier and more busted than she already felt. The loa in the streetcar’s doorway went by many names: Baron Cimetière, Bawon Lakwa, Saint Saturday, Mr. Same Day, Baron Criminel. Renai had hazy memories of him from her time spent with a fortune god named Jude, so she called him what Jude had called him: Barren.
Even though he had nothing but deep wells of emptiness inside his eye sockets, Renai could feel Barren’s gaze look her up and down. “When I asked the good god Bondye to send me a woman who liked to get filthy,” he said, his voice raspy and dry, “this ain’t really what I had in mind.”
Renai had no response. Her ears filled with a persistent whine, like she’d been standing too close to the speakers at a concert, and it drove anything resembling coherent thought away. She couldn’t swallow and her chest felt tight, and she only realized her hands were clenched into fists when her forearms started to ache.
Barren affected her like this, sometimes, though the reason why eluded her, lost in that haze of memories from her death and resurrection. It was worse than Plumaj, worse than Babaco, maybe because she at least had an idea of why those two Gatekeepers unsettled her. Barren, charming and flirtatious as the rest of the Ghede though he might be, just plain scared the hell out of her.
Sal knew what Barren did to her, and—bless him—stepped forward so she wouldn’t have to answer. “Yeah,” he said, “and when I asked the Thrones for a shape that would let me chase tail for all eternity, they made me a damn dog. You gonna let us on, or what?”
“Salvatore, you old so-and-so,” Barren said, cigar smoke rising up from the slits in his face where a nose ought to be, “you know I’ll take you anywhere’s you like. Just so long as you pay the fare.” It was a familiar exchange, not rehearsed exactly, but—like many of a psychopomp’s interactions with any of the Gatekeepers—as much ritual as it was conversation. An act performed for the benefit of the dead, even when the audience wasn’t present. With the others Renai could play her part, but far too often Barren’s presence robbed her of any speech at all, much less playful banter.
For the dead, paying Barren’s “fare” meant giving up their coin of Fortune. Once he had it, he’d drive his streetcar all the way down Canal to the Mississippi and onto a ferry that would carry them halfway across the river, only to sink down, down, down to the silty, dark riverbed. There, at the very bottom of the Underworld, they’d find the Thrones themselves: the pair of huge empty chairs from which Death reigned. Barren—sometimes the skull-faced voodoo loa, sometimes an Egyptian death god with a jackal’s head, sometimes a winged, haloed man in white robes and bronze armor—would weigh the dead’s heart, their Fortune, on his scales. If they passed that final test, the dead would walk between the Thrones, through the Final Gate, and into whatever afterlife they’d earned. Where the coins of Fortune went after that, Sal had often told her, was above her pay grade.
In the Underworld, commerce between psychopomps and gods and spirits and anything else that found its way down here wasn’t nearly as regulated and relied more on a constantly shifting economy of barter and favors and oaths. Sal and Barren bickered back and forth for a moment about the cost of Sal’s ride, and then the skull-faced god stepped aside, beckoning them in with a wide, sweeping bow.
For some reason that Renai had never had the stones to ask about, Barren had never once asked her to pay.
Renai followed Sal up the stairs into the streetcar, the floor trembling from the engine’s rumble. Just as she dropped into one of the lacquered wooden seats, the whole thing lurched forward once, shuddering, and then leapt into motion.
“Almost there,” Sal said, his ears twitchin
g back as he glanced up at her. “You doin’ okay?”
“Yeah,” Renai lied. “It’s just been a long couple of days.”
“Yeah. Must be hard on you with the Hallows on the way.” His ears flattened against his skull, what would have been a guilty shit-did-I-just-say-that-out-loud frown on a human face. He kept talking, though, didn’t give her a chance to call him on it. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll buy you a drink. First round’s on me.”
And that’s when Renai realized just where Sal was leading her.
There were places in the Underworld where the dead couldn’t go, markets and hotels and theaters and libraries that were nothing like their counterparts in the world of the living. The Sylvain, an opera house that had been on this side of things since the French Opera House burned down in the living world in 1919. The Docks, a restaurant stitched together from the West End places that got washed into Lake Pontchartrain by Katrina’s storm surge. The Oubliette, a prison that held the demons and the wild spirits and the corrupt souls that the Far Lands wouldn’t take.
The Last Stop, where psychopomps drank away their sorrows.
On the living side of things, it was called Carrollton Station, an Uptown neighborhood bar across the street from an electric grid transformer yard and the once-abandoned streetcar repair station that gave the bar its name. In the Underworld, the only sign of the streetcars were the straight lines cutting across the field outside the bar, the only places where the tall grass didn’t grow. In place of the constantly humming power lines and transformer towers in the living world, here a giant bonfire roared and crackled, always consuming but never dying down. Renai only needed one look at it to decide that she didn’t want to know what was burning there.
As they walked up to the pale green building of The Last Stop and beneath its sheet metal awning, its security gate and corner door both left hanging wide open, Renai tried to shake whatever panic the sight of Barren inspired in her. They’d left the skull-faced loa behind when they’d exited his streetcar, but Renai swore she could still feel his eyes on her. Waiting. Weighing. She gave her body a full shake, like a bug had gone skittering across her skin, and turned her attention to what was in front of her.
She’d only been inside Carrollton Station a handful of times when she was alive, but she found the same green and white tile on the floor, the same combination of wood paneling and dark green paint on the walls, the same row of lights outlining the steps that led to the stage in back that she remembered.
The main difference between the two bars was that The Last Stop was full of death.
Psychopomps were everywhere, of course: a solid white dog drinking beer out of a pint glass at the walnut brown bar; a calico-feathered owl flipping through the channels by pecking at the television remote; a crow at one of the small tables, its wings waving back and forth as it told a story to a pair of hooded, shadowy figures with corpse-pale hands.
They weren’t the only occupants of The Last Stop. A camazotz—a Mayan Underworld demon that looked like a horn-nosed bat stretched out to human proportions—hustled back and forth behind the bar serving drinks, his wide veiny ears twitching, the skull-and-crossbones tattooed on one of his leathery wings showing every time he stretched up for a bottle of liquor on the shelves above him. On the stage in the back, a thick white woman in a long, slinky green dress, her eyes red-rimmed like she’d been weeping, helped a trio of skeletal, black-cloaked musicians set up their instruments—a banshee accompanied by specters.
At a small table in the corner, half-hidden by the darkness of a burnt-out lightbulb, a white woman with high, pointed ears, a vulture’s curved beak taking up the lower half of her face, and hair made of snakes played a game using both chess and checkers pieces against a brown-skinned, shirtless man with protruding eyes, a smear of paint on his forehead in the same shade of dark blue as the crown of feathers he wore, and a beast’s cruel fangs curling down over his lower lip. He wore a belted loincloth that only covered his privates, while his opponent wore a tunic-style dress clasped at the shoulder with an ornate gold pin, which draped across her body in such a way that it revealed one of her small, flat breasts.
Sal saw Renai watching the gamers and grabbed her hand in his teeth, not hard enough to break the skin, just nipping at her to get her attention. She yanked her hand away, startled, scratching her palm in the process.
“Jesus,” she said, “what?”
“Eyes front,” he said. “We’re here for a couple of ’pomps, remember? Not them.” And then, lowering his voice so that she could barely hear him over the murmuring crowd, muttered, “You done fucked around with enough gods for one Hallows, you ask me.”
“At least tell me who those two are.”
Sal sighed, scanning the occupants of the bar as he answered. “The one with the feathers is Tlaloc. He’s an ancient water deity. Brings the rains that bring the crops that bring the life, y’know? And the one with the snakes is Too-Chew-a? Too-too-chew? I don’t fuckin’ know. Somethin’ like that. She’s an old-school death god. Real fond of games.”
“What’s a life-bringing rain god doing in the Underworld?”
“Same thing a god does anywhere else,” Sal said. “Whatever the fuck he wants.” He grinned up at her, his tongue dangling over his lower jaw.
Renai raised an eyebrow at him. “Seriously, though.”
“The serious answer is that the gods got two sides to ’em just like people,” he said. “He might be all rain and life and happy times right now, but flip that coin? Hurricanes. Rage. Death. Trust me. He belongs down here as much as the rest of us.”
Motherfucker got some kinda nerve showing up here, Renai thought, god or no. She knew all too well how easily a storm god could be a death god, like everyone else in this city, but she’d never really seen the other side of that coin. The bitter twist to her inner monologue made the spirit within her swirl and surge, wanting, as it always did, to help wash away her pain. Sal didn’t seem to notice the discomfort that she was sure was showing on her face, so she pushed that all away. Instead, she considered the gods she knew best, the Gatekeepers. Considered what they represented. What they were gods of, Barren in particular. Which side of their coins did she know?
Sal made a happy, triumphant sound in the back of his throat, interrupting her thoughts. “Jackpot,” he said. “Howl’s right over there. Let me do the talking. She’s a sharp one, and I ain’t talkin’ ’bout her claws.”
The psychopomp named Howl wore the shape of a chubby gray cat with sleek, thick fur and short, stubby ears. She sat on the bar, her tail wrapped daintily around her paws, lapping wine out of a nearly empty glass. Howl glanced up as Renai and Sal approached, and some combination of the posture of her ears and the curl of her mouth gave off the impression of a sly, knowing smirk. Renai couldn’t tell if the brief gesture had revealed some quality of Howl’s personality, or if it was just the way cats looked at everyone.
“Salvatore,” Howl said in a voice made of velvet, drawing out the syllables as if she were stretching out a kink in her spine as she spoke. “To what do I owe this dubious pleasure?”
Just those few words told Renai that Howl possessed more charm and personality than all the other ’pomps Renai had ever met combined. Usually, the spirits who guided the dead through the Underworld moved through the Gates like automatons, answering questions in distracted, one-word responses, like they were half-asleep or all-the-way-stoned. Like the souls of the dead didn’t matter to them one way or the other. When she’d asked Sal about it, he’d told her that most psychopomps were deeper in the Underworld than the two of them, that the act of collecting a soul and guiding it through the Gates was more of a recurring dream for them than a conscious, deliberate act. Howl was the first ’pomp Renai had met who, like Sal, seemed to have a mind of her own.
“We got a couple of questions for you,” Sal said, “if you can spare a minute.”
Howl inspected and then licked at the space between two of her toes, revealing he
r claws in the process. “Mmmm, I don’t know. Might be difficult to say much, seeing as I’m so parched.” With her other paw pressed against her throat, she made a delicate little cough. Sal laughed and raised a paw of his own in the direction of the bat-thing behind the bar, who swept over and refilled the cat’s wineglass without slowing. Howl returned to her bath, without so much as glancing at the demon fulfilling her request. After a moment, she paused, flicked a pair of golden eyes at Renai, and then started to clean her tail. “Ask your questions,” she said. “But please, darling, don’t be boring.”
“Who did you lead through the Gates today?” Sal asked.
Howl froze mid-swipe. She stood and stretched, a long, exaggerated movement full of disrespect. Renai half expected her to knock the wineglass over next. Instead, she turned her back to them both and started to slink away, her tail high and twitching.
“Thought you said she was sharp,” Renai said to Sal, loud enough for the cat to hear them. “You must have been thinking of some other—”
“I asked for one thing,” Howl said, her head and shoulders turned back around toward Renai. “Just one. And yet this lout asks me a question that is a matter of public record. The definition of banal. Perhaps you think you’re up to the challenge?”
“How about a soul who managed to evade his own death?” Renai asked. “Does that tickle your fancy?”
Again that sly feline smile crept across Howl’s posture. “Oh, yes,” she said, “that’s much more like it.” Her tail dropped down and started swishing back and forth, like she’d seen a particularly fat and delicious bird within pouncing distance. “I presume the boy in question is the one you were meant to collect?”
Renai exchanged a glance with Sal, not exactly asking for permission, but close to it. She read agreement in the shift of his eyebrows. “His name is Ramses—”
