The Ghosts of Bourbon Street

by Seanan McGuire

  The roof was tiered to keep rain from building up. I swung myself over the lowest tier, only scratching my hands a little on the tarpaper shingles, and found myself looking into the dead black eye of an upstairs window. I smiled. “Ninja master,” I repeated, pulled the brick out of my pocket, and bashed the crap out of the glass.

  No one ever said that I was subtle. When you spend your life figuring out what shade of sequins best sets off your eyes, “subtle” is one of the first things dumped out of your toolbox. But when it comes to making an entrance, I’m your girl.

  The brick cleared out most of the glass. A few quick hits with the heel of my right foot while I dangled from the top of the window frame took care of the rest. It was all very fainting Gothic heroine of me, and I was feeling pretty smug as I slithered through the now glass-free opening and into the waiting house. Glass crunched underfoot as I settled my feet gingerly on the floor…

  …which promptly gaped wide beneath me, sending me plummeting down into the darkness. I shrieked despite myself. No amount of training or preparation can completely quiet the primitive human hindbrain, which knows full well that falling into the dark is never a good thing.

  The shriek lasted longer than my fall did. I hit the floor butt-first, landing hard enough that I was going to have a bruise, but not hard enough to break anything, thank God. With as many buildings as I’ve jumped off of, I did not want to wind up with a broken ass because I got swallowed by a haunted house. Dust and splinters rained down on me as the ceiling closed up again.

  “Ow,” I complained. There was no point in trying to be quiet. Mr. Georges clearly knew that I was here, if he was ordering his house to eat me.

  “Took you long enough.”

  “Aunt Rose?” I straightened and turned toward the sound of her voice. Rose—still in her green silk prom dress, with her hair snarled around her face and falling out of its careful ringlets—was sitting in a straight-backed old kitchen chair behind me. Not voluntarily, either: she was tied in place, which was no small trick, considering that she was dead. “Aunt Rose!”

  “In the not-so-solid flesh,” she said sourly. “Asshole yanked me right out of my coat.”

  “We noticed,” I said, picking myself up and half-walking, half-limping over to her chair. I reached for the rope. My hand went straight through it, and wound up somewhere in the vicinity of Rose’s kidneys. I stopped, blinking.

  “Get your sticky fingers out of my internal organs,” Rose snapped. “Did you forget the whole ‘dead’ part? You can’t touch me.”

  “Can’t you, you know, turn solid?” I asked. My interactions with Rose had always involved her becoming incarnate. I knew she was dead. I’d seen her walk through walls and disappear into thin air. But I’d never really considered how inconvenient that could be.

  “Not without a coat,” Rose said. She sighed. “I can’t even put your coat back on. It’s a one-use per night situation.”

  “That’s good, because I left my coat outside with Dominic; the pockets were too small,” I said, starting to shrug out of my borrowed duster.

  Rose gave me a dubious look. “Too small for what?”

  “Bricks. Have you noticed how girls never get good pockets? It’s like the people who design women’s clothing think that purses fulfill all our carrying-heavy-shit needs, and I, for one, feel like that’s just not true.” I slung the duster over Rose’s shoulders. “Ta da.”

  She didn’t flicker, but she became suddenly more present, the weight of her making the chair she’d been tied to groan and settle more determinedly to the floor. “Why the hell were you carrying bricks in your pockets?” she asked. “Hang on, I don’t want to know.” The rope that had been used to tie her down had been intended to hold a girl with neither skin nor substance. Rose stood easily, ignoring the phantom knots etched against her skin.

  The rope held its position for a moment before falling to hang limply all around the chair. Then it disappeared, going back to wherever it was ghost ropes went when they weren’t in use.

  “Nice trick,” said Rose approvingly. She slipped her arms into the duster’s sleeves. It hung around her like a leather tent. “Think your Covenant boy is losing his shit by now?”

  “Let’s see. The house took you, and then the stairs looked unsafe, so I climbed up the side and smashed in one of the windows with a brick. Yeah, he’s probably pretty upset.”

  Rose gave me a flat look. “You thought the stairs looked unsafe, so you climbed the house?”

  “What makes that so surprising? You’ve met me.” I looked around the room, shivering a bit. “Is it cold in here?”

  “Yeah. It is.” Rose’s eyes narrowed as she focused on the corner of the room. “You can show yourself now, Mr. Georges. You’ve milked the ‘I am a scary ghost ooo’ routine about as far as you can, and I am out of patience with your theatrics.”

  “Let an old man have his fun, huh?” asked a voice out of nowhere. A figure began assembling itself in the corner, fading into view so slowly that every time I blinked, he looked just a little bit more solid, a little bit more like a person, and not a trick of the light. It wasn’t at all like the way Rose and Mary would appear, going from nothing to something in less than a second. This was slow, and I got the feeling it was painful. Anything that looked so impossibly hard had to be painful.

  Footsteps alerted me to another presence in the house. I turned to see Dominic standing in the doorway, a cross between exasperation and relief on his face. “You are not dead,” he said.

  “I could be,” I said. “All the other dead people we’ve met tonight have looked perfectly alive, unless they were part carriage.”

  “But you’re not,” he said, walking over to me.

  “I’m not,” I agreed. I pointed to the corner, where Benjamin Georges had almost finished the long, slow process of materializing. “We found our host.”

  “Mm.” Dominic narrowed his eyes. “Does your host want to explain why you were screaming? Or how you got down to the first floor without using the stairs?”

  “I don’t think we’re allowed to punch the dead,” I said.

  “No, but I am,” said Rose. She had apparently decided that Georges was solid enough to start answering questions: she strode across the room, her green silk gown rustling around her feet, and stabbed a finger at his translucent chest. “Hey, asshole, what do you think you’re doing? This is not good neighbor behavior.”

  “You came to my home without an invitation,” he replied, his mouth moving only slightly out of synch with his words. “I’m allowed to defend my home.”

  “There’s a line between self-defense and assault, and you crossed it pretty fast,” Rose said. “What is your deal? We were coming to ask you to stop trashing other people’s stuff, which is basic manners for the living and the dead, and then you go yanking me into your little haunted house and tying me to a chair? Like, on what planet is that how you say ‘hello’?”

  “You were an unfamiliar ghost, I had to defend myself,” Georges answered, taking a step backward. The movement put his shoulders into the wall, which was bizarre looking. “I’m allowed to defend my home,” he repeated, mulishly.

  “You’re a ghost too, sir,” I said. “Maybe it’s time for you to start making friends with the other dead people.”

  He glanced in my direction and frowned. “No. They say I am dead because they want me to leave my home. They want me to let them tear her down. She doesn’t suit their beautiful new city, their modern New Orleans. So they tell people I have died, and they send ghosts to disrupt my peace, and it changes nothing. I will close my doors against the dead, I will smash their infernal machines, and I will endure. That is what I do.”

  I blinked and looked first to Dominic, then to Rose. A picture of what was going on here was slowly beginning to form, and it wasn’t pretty. “The man who asked us to come here said that you were destroying the floats because you didn’t like Carnival, and you wanted some peace and quiet. Is that true, sir?”
r />   “I hate Carnival,” he groused, and leaned forward, out of the wall. His edges seemed to become clearer as he moved. Like Jermaine, he looked younger than he was: he’d supposedly lived in this house for seventy years before he died, but I wouldn’t have placed him at more than twenty-five. “Just an excuse for tourists and vagabonds to drink and tear up the streets. They moved in right next door to start building their damn floats, what did they expect me to do? A man’s got the right to—”

  “Defend his home, I got that part,” I said. “Aunt Rose?”

  Rose sighed. “Yeah, I follow. You’re going to need to find me another coat. I am going to need so much beer after this. Beer, and bourbon, and then we’ll start drinking.” She shrugged off Dominic’s coat, letting it fall to the floor, and her body took on the faint translucency that meant she was no longer pretending to be among the living. Benjamin Georges gave her a wary look. This was his worst fear, after all: a ghost inside his home.

  The poor man had no idea.

  Rose stepped closer to him, speaking softly and making short, sharp gestures with her hands. I darted in long enough to grab Dominic’s coat before walking back to his side, taking his hand in mine, and starting to lead him out of the room.

  “What about your aunt?” he asked.

  I glanced back over my shoulder. Benjamin Georges was staring at her in disbelief. Rose was still talking. I couldn’t understand a word she said. That was good. There are some things the living just aren’t meant to know.

  “She’ll be fine,” I said, and pulled Dominic with me into the hall.

  Dominic and I sat on the half-rotten porch, waiting. Jermaine stood on the path nearby. He had finally agreed to approach the house after I swore that Rose had things well in hand, and he still looked uneasy about being that close. I eyed him.

  “You’re the dead one,” I said. “What can he do to you? Wave his hands around and make spooky noises?”

  “The dead are perfectly capable of harming one another, I assure you,” he said, frowning at me. Apparently, I wasn’t taking things seriously enough for him.

  That was his problem. “Yeah, well. My money’s on Rose.”

  “I sincerely hope your luck will hold.”

  “Me, too.” I leaned over to rest my head against Dominic’s shoulder. “My butt hurts. We should have stayed at the bar.”

  “Truer words were never spoken,” Dominic said.

  Footsteps behind us. I lifted my head and turned. Rose was standing on the porch, once more dressed in her preferred tank top and jeans, her long blonde curls replaced by a short, shaggy brown bob. In short, business as usual…except for the nervous-looking man who stood beside her. Benjamin Georges still looked twenty-five, but he was dressed like an old man, in suspenders, loose tan trousers, and a plain white T-shirt. His fashion sense hadn’t caught up with his self-image.

  It would, if Jermaine was anything to go by. “Jermaine Favre, I’d like you to meet Benjamin Georges. Benjamin has something he wants to say to you.”

  Benjamin frowned at her. Rose elbowed him in the side. The blow clearly hit its target, because he winced: I guess ghost-on-ghost violence really was a thing.

  “I’m sorry I damaged your things,” Benjamin said reluctantly. “I was confused. I didn’t understand my situation.”

  “And?” prompted Rose.

  “And it won’t happen again,” said Benjamin.

  “Then all is forgiven,” said Jermaine. “Providing, of course, that you are willing to help us redo the work you have undone. There’s only so much time between here and Carnival, after all.”

  “I used to be pretty handy with a hammer,” Benjamin said slowly.

  Jermaine smiled.

  An hour and another rousing discussion of romance novels with Amelia later we were back at the bar, Rose now wearing a coat Jermaine had purchased from a drug dealer in a nearby alley, Dominic clearly trying not to think too hard about the fact that all of the people we were drinking with were, technically, dead. Or not so technically, really: the only living people left in the place were me, him, the staff, and the city coroner, who had come straight over from work after Jermaine called her. Benjamin Georges was sitting with a table full of new friends, regaling them with tales of how he’d haunted his own house. Jermaine was flitting from group to group, smiling, shaking hands, and demonstrating clearly how he had glad-handed his way into being one of the city’s most influential dead people.

  “So this is what it’s going to be like,” I said to Dominic, watching Rose demonstrate the trick to tying a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue. “Tonight was pretty extreme, but in general? This is what it’s going to be like.”

  “What what’s going to be like?” he asked.

  “My family. Being with my family.” I waved a hand to indicate the room. “We’re not weirdness magnets, but we’ve spent a lot of time collecting weird stuff, and sometimes it follows us home.”

  “Ah.” He smiled around the bottle as he took a swig of his beer. “I think, all things considered, that I can live with this.”

  I smiled back, clinking my bottle against his in a half-toast, and sat back to watch the living—and the dead—party the night away in New Orleans.