by Bryan Camp
“And that’s why you closed up the voodoo shop?” Regal asked, for once reading the room and softening her voice. “Me and Jude always wondered where you went. You know, after.”
Celeste made a noise halfway between a laugh and a grunt of disgust. “Naw,” she said, “that was on account of the got-damn tourists.”
“The what?”
The onetime voodoo Queen of New Orleans let out a little groan as she eased into the empty chair left at the table. “Tourists. You know”—she slipped into an impression of a stereotypical white person, her words clipped and overly enunciated and spoken through her nose. “Gosh, look-ee here, Becky, a, uhhh, a magic voodoo candle!” She raised an eyebrow, her face twisting into exactly the same expression of haughty weariness that Renai’s mother would have worn.
When she spoke again, her voice was her own. “One of them tour guides read about our Renaissance here in the paper, and before you know it, every time I look out my window there’s a crowd of them, swarming like termites. Sweaty, hung-over, wearin’ Mardi Gras beads all year long. And up in front, some no-account takin’ money from these fools saying the police called it a robbery gone wrong. Then he suggests, just suggests, mind, that maybe this young woman lost her life in some ritual. That’s because I can’t sue his pasty ass if it’s”—she paused and her voice shifted to her white-person impression again, her nose lifting into the air with snooty superiority—“merely speculation.”
She chuckled, and it wasn’t a kind sound. “I told him speculatin’ was enough to get a pox conjured up for his pecker, but he kept on leadin’ them tourists to me just the same.” Celeste snorted. “And here I am just got quit of all them fools askin’ where Katrina happened.” She took a swallow of her coffee, grimaced, and glared down at her mug like it was the coffee’s fault. “I wasn’t stickin’ ’round for more of that, no indeed. I locked my doors and ain’t been back.”
Renai let out a long, slow breath and wiped her palms on the hem of her dress, her breakfast making a solid, painful knot in her stomach. She’d been around more than enough death to know that it always had consequences, that her leaving this world would have left a wound. Maybe not as literal as the one left by Ramses, but an absence nonetheless. She’d been able to catch glimpses of her family from the Underworld, knew that her sister was struggling to conceive, that her brother was kind of a fuck-up, but that was all. If Celeste was any indication, Renai’s life wasn’t the only one that the fallen angel had impacted.
Regal scooted forward in her chair. “But what about—” she began, only for Leon to cut her off.
“Regal, no,” he said, shaking his head and grinning in spite of himself.
“She can’t lay that kinda sweet seductive shit out there and not finish me off, Carter,” Regal said, smacking her hand on the table hard enough to make the silverware jingle. “I’m not about to stumble around all brain be-fuck-eld because I got my mind chewing on a case of narrative blue balls.”
Celeste closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “What nonsense is this foul-mouthed sorceress talking?”
“Did you pox that pecker or not?”
Renai burst out laughing, a tension coming out of her that she hadn’t fully acknowledged, her giggling turning frantic, unrestrained. The others chuckled and grinned, but Renai laughed until tears came out of her, until her belly hurt, until she didn’t know whether she was laughing at Regal’s words or the embarrassing sounds she was making or the fact that she couldn’t stop. It took a minute or two for her to calm down, to suck in a few ragged, snickering breaths.
“You okay?” Leon asked, quiet. Renai had no idea how to answer that, so she just nodded.
“The answer is no,” Celeste said her voice entirely serious, “that was just somethin’ I said. I don’t do conjure work, ’less it comes bargin’ in my door in the dead of night wearin’ my niece’s face.” She shot a pointed glance in Renai’s direction. “But even if I did, I never had a hand in no gris-gris like that. That’s callin’ on the loa’s Petwo side. That’s that bokor shit.”
Regal nudged Leon with her elbow. “Why do I feel like I just got insulted?” she asked, without taking her eyes away from Celeste.
“ ’Cause you did,” he said. “Your kind of power is unseemly, Magician.”
“Shiny.” She winked at Celeste, and then turned and pointed a finger at Renai. “That’s as good a fuckin’ segue as I think you’re gonna get, Sparkles. So how about it.”
All the eyes in the room turned toward her. “How about what?”
“How ’bout you tell us what happened to you,” Celeste said. It wasn’t a question.
“Well, first I died,” she said, “but you already knew that part.” Renai felt her way through the story as she told it, relieved to be able to remember the sequence of events in their entirety, but shaky on both the details and how many of them she could share with the living. “I met Jude in the Underworld, and we made a deal with the . . . with Death. I got resurrected and he caught a ride in my head.” Celeste, who already wore an expression of stern disapproval at Jude’s name, frowned in full-on displeasure at this comment. Renai plowed on ahead. “We tracked down his, well, his corpse, I guess. And he pulled himself back together. Body and soul and magic.”
“Thrilled as I am to hear that Jude motherfucking Dubuisson came out smellin’ like magnolias, we asked about you, child.” Celeste did not, in fact, sound thrilled.
“The thing that killed me was a fallen angel. Jude pulled a trick, told the angel that he had this revolver that was able to kill a god. But it actually was cursed, so the angel tried to use it and got trapped instead. That was the trick: only an innocent hand could use the gun, but once you turn to violence, you’re no longer innocent. The revolver pulls the evil out of you, but the fallen angel was pretty much all evil by that point so—” She made a sucking noise and closed her hand into a fist. “Like I said, trapped. And then, you know, the bad guy gets caught and the good guys win, right? But I was stuck. Dead too long to just creep back into my old life, and I didn’t want to face—” She bit her lip, couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. “Look, there’s shit about the other side I can’t say, y’know? I just can’t.”
Leon reached across the table and covered her hand with his own. “Say as much as you can,” he said. “Ain’t nobody at this table don’t understand at least some of what you been through.”
“I couldn’t come back,” Renai said, squeezing Leon’s hand in thanks and then pulling away, “and I couldn’t move on. They found a place for me in the Underworld as a psychopomp.” She looked at Celeste. “That’s a—”
“I had plenty of schoolin’, me,” Celeste said. “When you got somethin’ to teach me, I promise I’ll let you know.”
Regal widened her eyes and mouthed “oh snap,” but Renai pretended she didn’t see it, that she hadn’t heard the clapback in Celeste’s voice. She cleared her throat. “Right. So things were fine for the first few months. I collected souls on this side of things, guided them on the other. But the longer it went on, the worse I felt. Part of me struggled with the Underworld side of things. Having to help people leave the worst of what they’d done in this life behind them? That was hard. And part of me struggled with what I have to do here. Sure, it’s their time and all, but when you get right down to it, I’m the one that does it. For all the souls I’ve carried, I’m Death.” She shrugged. “I tried my best, at least I think I did, but I just couldn’t do it. Being a psychopomp was too hard. I was falling apart.”
“Fault ain’t entirely your’n, child,” Celeste said. “The loa gave you an impossible task. Spirits are simple. Don’t matter if they loa or gods, spirits or angels or demons, they only ever really one thing. Healing. Motherhood. Hunger. Death. Why you think Papa Legba got him a whole other person just to close the doors that he opens?”
Renai nodded, and it felt like some flower was blooming inside of her. None of the other psychopomps had tried to do both parts of the job like she had. There were the Gatekee
pers, like Nibo and Bridgette, who helped the dead cast off the aspects of life that they’d clung to. And then there were the ones like Sal, who seemed only concerned with ending a life and carrying the coin of Fortune down to where it would end up in Grace’s hands. Maybe the Thrones had expected her to choose one or the other. Or maybe they hadn’t considered that she’d even try to do both. She hadn’t thought of her struggle as a psychopomp in just that way before, and it made what she was about to say next make a whole lot of sense.
“Then came my first Hallows as a psychopomp. Those three days are always hell for ’pomps. It’s like all the shades wandering in the Underworld get a hard reboot. Instead of one dead to guide through the Gates, you get dozens at a time. Every one of them wants to see their families, most of them plotting to stay on this side of things when the Gates go back up.” Celeste opened her mouth to say something but thought better of it. Renai had a feeling anything she’d have asked would have come from her aunt, not from the mamba, so she was relieved that Celeste left it unsaid. The last thing she wanted to talk about was why she hadn’t contacted her own family in the five years since her resurrection.
“So I’m running myself ragged, still having to collect the dead, but also trying to keep all the shades on the other side of things when All Souls’ Day comes. Then at midnight, the world of the living and the world of the dead splits in two. And so did I.” Regal made the sign of the cross, and Leon pulled a face like he’d just bitten his tongue. Only Celeste seemed unsurprised. “I’m not sure how to explain it. Honestly? I get to feelin’ some kinda way just thinking about it.” That woozy, light-headed sensation made her vision swim every time she tried to hold two separate thoughts or memories in one brain, but she thought she might be getting the hang of it. “But for the past five years, except for the three days of the Hallows, I’ve been living two lives. One on this side, and one on the other. My memories were cut in half, my emotions, everything.” And a storm spirit moved into the empty spaces inside me, she thought, stretched across the seam between the living world and the Underworld like some shadowy rubber band. She realized that she was picking at a stitch in the tablecloth and clasped her hands together.
“But you yourself again come the Hallows, yeah?” Leon asked.
“No,” Renai said, a little sharper than she meant to be, “during the Hallows it’s worse. I’m two people crammed in one body, one mind trying to think in two directions at the same time. It’s agony. Three days of crippling torture.” That’s why Sal always gets jumpy around the Hallows, she thought. Always got jumpy. He knew what he was about to have to watch me endure. She waved both hands at herself, in a gesture meant to indicate her whole state of being. “This is the first time I’ve been myself in years. I don’t know how—”
“Things is different for you this time on account of this,” Celeste said, dropping a small bundle of rough cloth onto the table. When no one else made a move for it, she turned her eyes toward the ceiling in exasperation and unwrapped it herself. Inside, a human figure made of sticks and twine—an effigy bound together with a single strand of thick red yarn, a twisted lock of hair pinned to the place where the figure’s head should be—and a gris-gris pouch of supple brown leather, its mouth wound closed with a coil of barbed wire. The sight of the effigy made Renai’s head swim for a moment, and then her vision locked together with eerie clarity, like a pair of binoculars going from blurred inconsistency to sudden, perfect alignment. Yarn, she thought, that’s what those lines all over me are. Not tattoos or brands. They’re stitches.
“Fuck me with a lightsaber,” Renai muttered, “I thought voodoo dolls were just in movies.”
“This ain’t got nothin’ to do with the loa,” Celeste snapped, “this here is hoodoo. Conjure work. My people learned it from your’n, not the other way ’round.”
“Bokor shit,” Leon said, nearly a whisper, his voice distant and sad.
Celeste fixed her eyes on Renai and seemed not to have heard Leon at all. “You understand what I done for you, child?”
Renai nodded, forcing herself to meet the voodoo woman’s eyes. “I do,” she said. “And I’ll make it count, I swear.” What people didn’t understand about voodoo as a religion was that it was nothing like the movies. Deep down, it was a faith based on respect: for one’s ancestors, for one’s community, for this world and the next and one’s place in it. You asked the spirits for help, but you abided by their answer. If you made a charm to ward off a curse or mixed a salve to heal some hurt, it was because the loa had directed you to, were using your hands to help them shape this world. Hoodoo, like all magic, was the opposite. It was a refusal to accept the will of higher powers. It was arrogance made manifest in the world.
For someone who had devoted her life to the religion of voodoo, working some hoodoo without the blessing of the loa—even for healing—was a grave sin.
Something about the leather pouch tugged at Renai’s attention. If it was anything like the talismans that Celeste had made back when Renai was alive, it could contain dried herbs and sticks gathered from ceremonial fires, stones with a loa’s veve scratched on them, pictures of loved ones or saints, maybe even bones or teeth. Though some could be turned to evil purposes, in Celeste’s hands they were always protective charms, imbued with a tiny fraction of a loa’s power. Unlike the effigy, Renai wouldn’t have found it strange that Celeste would have made one, except that she claimed to have given up her faith entirely. “I get what the doll is for,” she said, “but why did you gather me up a gris-gris?”
“You had that on you when we found you,” Regal said.
Which meant that it could be anything, a ward against harm or a curse that would bring it, a charm to bring luck or a fake with no power at all. Renai reached out for the gris-gris, unable to stop herself, even though she knew it might be a trap left by Cordelia. When she picked it up, its contents clicked and clacked as the small hard objects within fell against each other. The psychopomp inside of her felt the faint whispers of an Essence: a gruff, often vulgar, sense of humor, a love of old movies, an affinity for art, a cynical outlook and a bitter temper and a tendency toward screwing up words with more than two syllables. She knew that if she unwound the wire and opened the gris-gris, she’d find a handful of sharp teeth and small bones, a couple of broken raven’s feathers, and a piece of spray-painted concrete. Knew that the inside of the leather that made up the bag was covered with soft brown fur.
Neither Cordelia nor Celeste had made this gris-gris. She had. And it held the fragile remnants of Salvatore’s Essence.
Hope leapt within her. She held the leather bag out to Celeste. “Can we—”
But the former Voodoo Queen was already shaking her head. “You listen close, child,” she said. She tapped her finger on the table next to the effigy, as if reluctant to touch it. “Won’t nothing in this world make me stain my hands with this filth more than once. I might not shake the asson no more, but that don’t mean I’m about to stoop so low as some backdoor hoodoo woman. I did this on account of you bein’ family, to ease your pain these last days. I’ll make sure your people are at the cemetery come All Souls’ Day. You say your goodbyes. You let them know that you rest easy in your grave. And then you let go of this world.” She tried to say more, but her voice broke, and she had to swallow hard before she could continue. “Renaissance, I love you like you was my own, but I best never see your face again, you hear? I do, and I swear by Damballah on high and all the Ghede in Guinee, I’ll cut you down my ownself.”
She stood, leaning heavily on the table, her movements slow and cautious as a much older woman’s. She breathed in deep through her nose and straightened to her full height, posture impeccable as she walked away, though it obviously cost her to do so.
Celeste paused halfway out the room, spoke without looking back. “I’m gonna lie down for a spell. Y’all lock the door behind you when you go.”
The three of them endured an awkward silence for only a handful of breaths, and t
hen Leon stood, collected their breakfast plates, and moved into the kitchen. Renai watched as he rolled his sleeves up at the sink and got to work, his hands busy, not having to speak to anyone, actually accomplishing something productive. She wished she’d have thought of that. Anything to avoid what she knew was coming next. At least she managed to ask the question first, so that she passed the responsibility of answering it on to Regal.
“So,” she said, “where do we go from here?”
Chapter Twenty-five
Centralia, where a coal seam has been burning underground for over fifty years. Kolmanskop, where the diamond boom went bust. Shi Cheng, where a hydroelectric station dammed up Qiandao Lake. Plagues and landslides, economic collapses and rising tides. Cahokia and Chernobyl and Roanoke and Thonis-Heracleion and—perhaps one day—New Orleans. Humans build and the world changes and humans leave, their homes and their schools and their temples all standing empty, like the husk of a cicada left clinging to a tree.
We call these places ghost towns. The dwelling places of the djinn. Haunted. Because we know that whether it is a house or a body or an entire town, we always leave a part of ourselves behind.
Regal leaned back in her chair, the old wood creaking ominously. She propped one sneaker up on the edge of the table, stretched her other leg out on top of the tablecloth. “I seem to remember somebody talking a big game about taking care of the ghouls dropping all their corpse-bits up in my streets. How’s about we start there?”
“But Cordelia is still trying to find Ramses,” Renai said, more to herself than making an argument.
“Who?”
“Ramses is that dead boy she tryin’ to find,” Leon said, raising his voice so he could be heard from in the kitchen. Renai had no idea how he’d heard them talking over the sounds of the running water and the dishes clanking in the sink, but somehow he had.
“Not him,” Regal said, waving a hand at Leon without looking at him. She narrowed her eyes at Renai. “The other one. Cordelia. What haven’t you told us?”
