The Book of the Unwinding

by J. D. Horn

  He looked down at her with raised eyebrows and a small frown, but like the good soldier that he seemed to be, he carried the bottle to the door. He glanced left and right, then headed out in the direction of Bienville Street. Not two minutes later he came back through the door, dusting his hands as he circled back around the bar. “Package and message both delivered.”

  “Much obliged,” she said, as a sense of familiarity crept upon her. Now that the surprise had faded, she was sure she’d seen this man before. “I know you, don’t I?”

  “Really?” He shook his head, his eyes narrowing. “You run a bar, and that’s your best line?”

  “It wasn’t a line,” she snapped, then regretted doing so.

  He held up his hands, signaling surrender. “Just trying to make you laugh and failing miserably in the effort.”

  It was true. She felt certain they’d met somewhere before, but there was no denying she’d trotted out the oldest pickup line in the world. “I’m sorry. I’m a bit on edge right now. I know it was a joke, but . . .”

  “It’s okay,” he said, waving her apology off. “You’re right. We have met before.” He leaned up against the bar and started whistling a tune she’d listened to maybe a million times when she was a kid. “Evangeline.” She remembered. The day of Vincent’s memorial. The fellows—brothers, she’d guessed—playing on the street corner over by Jackson Square. This Lincoln had flirted with her, and she had flirted right back. Seemed like a thousand years ago now.

  He straightened, seeming to spot the spark of recognition in her eyes, and traced his finger in a slow snaking line along the bar. A gesture either innocent or seductive, all depending on whether she was open to being seduced. “You said I should come find you.” He shrugged. “So I did.” He turned away and began to arrange the bottles on the shelves behind him, turning them so their labels faced straight out and adjusting their spacing to cover for the absent bottle of vodka. “You weren’t here,” he said without looking back. She found herself straining to hear him over the music. “But the job was.”

  He snatched down two bottles of rum, one dark, the other light, and mixed a Hurricane, slipping it to a customer who’d just entered and approached the bar. The customer’s face showed surprise, but he pulled out his wallet and left a ten on the bar. Lincoln’s eyes followed the man as he took a seat near the stage, then fell back on Evangeline.

  She caught a glimmer in them.

  Sure enough. Another witch boy. She should’ve known it from the second she’d laid eyes on him. The first time.

  She was almost as annoyed as she was intrigued. “Bourbon Street. Hurricane. Lucky guess.”

  He shrugged again, but held his tongue.

  Today was not the best day, and now was sure not the time, but she decided the presence of an unfamiliar witch in her own establishment didn’t leave her with much choice. She wasn’t going to try to glean any specifics about him or his life that she didn’t have the right to know, but she needed to be sure she could trust him.

  She lowered her guard a touch and reached out to him with her mind.

  “Oh,” she said, an involuntary expression of surprise. Her magic and his embraced each other, the union creating something she sensed neither of them would be capable of on their own.

  Sparks, literal ones this time, shot from every direction and the club went dark. The music stopped cold, replaced by moans of dismay from the few guys peppered around the stage, and shocked profanity from Tina. Lincoln already had one of those long-tipped butane lighters in hand, and he started lighting up the candles he’d put out on the bar.

  “I can see a bit ahead.” He pushed one of the candles to her. “Sometimes. Not always and not too far. Longest stretch, an hour or two. Most of the time ten, fifteen minutes.” He illuminated another candle, placing it and a few others on a tray.

  She didn’t want it. She wasn’t ready for it. Their timing was three-hundred-and-sixty degrees of wrong. Still, in the moment their magics had touched, she’d known she would fall in love with him. From the confident smile the flickering candlelight revealed, he damned well knew it, too.

  He took the tray and made a circle of the club, putting down a candle on each of the occupied tables, and handing the final one to Tina. The silhouette of her body leaned in toward his. “Thank you, sugar.” She held the candle up to his face, caressing his cheek with her free hand.

  “My pleasure,” he said, and Evangeline cringed at the words, anticipating Tina’s inevitable response.

  “It could be.”

  He lingered near the stage for a moment too long before returning to her. Another message successfully conveyed.

  “We have rules about fraternization,” she said, needing to break the silence and feeling the sudden urge to douse him with a bit of cold water. “Staff are not allowed to see each other.”

  “Well, that’s a damned shame,” he said, whipping off his apron and laying it on the bar between them. “’Cause you strike me as a woman who wants a man with a regular job.”

  Their eyes locked. Evangeline realized they were playing chicken.

  “Tell me. How far ahead did you see? When we touched—”

  “You mean when you touched me,” he said, going back behind the bar and spreading the remaining candles out evenly.

  A movement in her peripheral vision alerted her to Tina’s approach.

  “’Bout time you comin’ back,” she said and tapped the bar. “This place is going straight to hell.” She looked up and smiled at Lincoln. “Usual, sugar?” Evangeline recognized the word “usual” as an expression of more than familiarity. She was marking territory. Lincoln filled a tumbler with diet soda and set it on the counter. Tina reached out and traced her finger down his wrist and hand. She lifted the glass like she was about to make a toast. “Don’t worry, Vangie. I’m a good girl. I still follow the rules.” She lowered the glass and started walking away. She stopped, looking back over her shoulder. “At least some of ’em.”

  “Do not call me Vangie.”

  Tina gave a crisp toss of her metallic wig. “Sure thing, sugar.” She sauntered back toward the stage.

  The lights flared to life, and the pounding music started back up, almost drowning out the cheers as a revitalized Tina started to put a little life into it, though Evangeline suspected the added sauce was for Lincoln’s benefit. Or maybe for hers, so she could witness his appreciation of Tina’s efforts.

  Evangeline cast a surreptitious glance in his direction, but he had his back turned toward the stage. She swiveled around to find a more compact, though—Evangeline sensed—no less potent, version of Lincoln heading her way. The brother, she decided, flashing back once again to the day she’d come across them near the square. “What’s going on out—” he called to his brother, but stopped short as his eyes landed on her. “’Lo there, boss.” He gave her a three-finger Boy Scout–style salute.

  The door to the back part of the club swung open again. “Well, as I live and breathe,” Hugo said, combing his mussed hair with his fingers, then fumbling with his misbuttoned shirt. “If it isn’t the Lady Lazarus come back from the dead to grace us with her presence.” He was putting on a show, trying to sound miffed at her, but she could see the gold flecks of joy pumping through his aura. “I see you’ve met the new members of the Bonnes Nouvelles crew.”

  “Not formally,” the brother said, reaching out and pumping Evangeline’s hand. “Wiley Boudreau. Damned pleased to meet you.”

  “Wiley?” she said, tugging her hand back.

  “Like the cartoon coyote,” Lincoln said. “His real name is Washington, but when he was six he ran clean through a sliding glass door.”

  “Didn’t get a scratch, but you could see my outline where I broke through. And,” he said, offering up a copy of his brother’s shrug, “the name stuck.” He slipped back to Hugo’s side and wrapped his arm around his shoulders. Evangeline realized those gold sparks might have less to do with her than she’d thought.

&nbs
p; “Are you back, then?” Hugo said.

  “Not quite,” she said. “That’s something we need to talk about. Alone. I’ll drop by again tomorrow. At least for a while. Later.”

  Hugo leered at her with a knowing smile on his lips. “I thought you might.” His eyes shot over to Lincoln before pinging back to her. His head tilted a little to the side, his expression smug enough to make her want to smack him. Before she could give in to the temptation, he turned to Wiley. “I guess we should get back to . . . taking inventory.” He smiled. Wiley smiled back.

  Hugo took off, letting Wiley’s arm slide off his shoulders. Wiley flashed her a smile that had no doubt broken many a heart. “That’s right. Inventory. Gettin’ back to it,” he said, then nodded in her direction. “Good to meet you, boss.”

  “Technically,” Evangeline said, watching the two cut through the club toward the door that led to the office and stockroom, “Hugo isn’t an employee—”

  “Far enough,” Lincoln interrupted her.

  She turned toward him and shook her head. “Sorry?”

  “Your question. My answer. I said I saw far enough.”

  TWELVE

  Alice felt herself merge with Babau Jean.

  She wore him like an overcoat, or better yet, inhabited him like a diving bell capable of protecting her in depths she couldn’t withstand on her own. Still, even as he enveloped her, he reached up through her core like an axis mundi, connecting her to every world along the Dreaming Road.

  They’d long shared a rapport, Alice and this entity, one she had been unaware of until this moment. Perhaps it came as a side effect of the quasi-symbiotic relationship Celestin, her biological father, had shared with him. Or perhaps Babau Jean had worked behind Celestin’s back to create a sympathetic vibration between them. A silent glow of pleasure confirmed the latter supposition. Celestin had forced himself upon Babau Jean, trapping him much as he had trapped Alice. Babau Jean, Alice understood without asking, had been trying to throw his rider for decades. Now, without warning or explanation, Celestin was gone.

  The edges of the room grew dim, its center flaring as bright as a nova. The center melted and rolled back toward the edges until there was nothing left of her illusory apartment. Another image reached out to embrace her. Babau Jean’s Mahogany Hall, his recreation of the long-gone Storyville brothel, flickered to life around her.

  An epiphany struck her, and she laughed.

  They laughed.

  It was so clear to her now. The Dreaming Road was a single sphere haunted by innumerable overlapping, sometimes interacting, hallucinations . . . although “hallucination” didn’t seem to be quite the right word. “Hallucination” drew a line between the objective and subjective. It felt too binary. Either a yes or a no. Here, each fabrication held its own kernel of realness. Babau Jean offered her a better vantage point: when all is possible, no world can be entirely real, and none completely unreal.

  The Dreaming Road was inherently neither sanctuary nor prison. Both perceptions of it were perversions of its true nature. The Dreaming Road was a bridge. The bridge over which magic crept into the common world.

  No. That wasn’t quite right either. She felt the sharp certainty of the revelation dissolve and run through her clutching fingers like water.

  Alice grasped at the vision’s unraveling threads before they could slip away.

  The worlds perceived as real and the worlds understood to be fantasy; there would always be an interaction between them. The Dreaming Road wasn’t a place at all. It was the dance between the two. No. Not a noun. A verb. It was interacting, dancing, influencing, interjecting, molding, circling back around, and feeding on itself.

  A crank phonograph came alive, scratching out an all but forgotten tune.

  She sensed Babau Jean was trying to tell her something about himself, but he didn’t just want to convey the information—he wanted her to understand as only one who’d shared his experience could.

  She crossed to the turntable, lifting the needle and touching the record to stop its spin. The record’s red and gold label read “Beautiful Dreamer.” A feeling, his feeling—confused, aching, forlorn—crept up on her. He struggled to find a point of comparison in her own experience, but there was no need. She already understood how he felt. A homesickness that isn’t the result of wanderlust, but is instead a reaction to abandonment, to seeing “home” ripped away.

  A book sat beside the phonograph. She traced a finger over its faded slate-blue cover where the author’s name was presented as “Mrs. Shelley.” Her first thought, Mrs. Shelley, indeed, gave way to the realization that she had never read Frankenstein in the common world. She’d been too young before her time on Sinclair, and due to concerns the novel might “trigger” some patients, it wasn’t one of the books included in Sinclair’s otherwise extensive inventory of classics. She again felt Babau Jean’s proud glow, alerting her that it was he who’d slipped the paperback copy of the book into the bubble where Celestin had imprisoned her. Babau Jean had been attempting to share his story with her all along, to alert her to his desire to free them both from Celestin’s control. Of course, there had never been a literal book. The paperback was how Alice had interpreted the knowledge seeded into her consciousness by Babau Jean. When is a book not a book? An incipient riddle began to write itself.

  A mirror appeared behind the table. A handsome youth with wavy black hair and a deep tan complexion stared back at her. She caught a glimpse of herself lurking in his bottomless black eyes. Those eyes blinked and, upon opening, showed a bachelor-button blue. Another face, a rosy pink beneath corn silk hair. Then another. A prominent forehead and a fighter’s crooked nose. A moment later, a weak chin, hazel eyes, and freckles. The permutations continued until Alice understood he was relating the story of his origin. He’d been created after the Civil War by a mad doctor set on profiting from the grief of widows and broken-hearted mothers. Babau Jean would enter their opiate-laced dreams of loved ones, impersonating the departed. In so doing, he would draw life force from the dreamers and transmute it into magic for his master’s use. Each withering dreamer slowly became a murder victim, a soft sacrifice.

  He’d worn so many faces. Looked through so many different eyes.

  The handsome youth reappeared, and Alice understood this face was the one he’d chosen for himself.

  A pop. A cork escaping a champagne bottle. A woman’s throaty laugh. Alice turned from the mirror toward the hall. The laugh belonged to the beauty she’d witnessed the first time she’d seen this mirage. The woman appeared even more radiant, despite being bereft of her fabulous emerald necklace. She raised a glass to Alice in salute.

  A full band appeared on the dais in mid-tune, their Dixieland swelling up around them. Women circled around her. Their heady scents played a raucous but pleasing composition that pulsed right along with the Dixieland—with contending bass notes of rose and jasmine, beating-heart middle notes of geranium and lilac, and trilling citrus high notes of bergamot and sweet orange.

  Soft hands caressed her. Soft lips pressed against hers, and she was enraptured by it all.

  The thunder of artillery. Lulu White’s bordello was suddenly gone. War was everywhere, and the other world had deserted them. They hadn’t moved, but concrete reality was shriveling and pulling away, growing smaller, dimmer, gone.

  Loss. Panic.

  Alice looked out through Babau Jean’s eyes as the two of them revolved at the center of a dark, icy abyss.

  Cold. Hunger. Fear. Rage.

  The cries of anguish issuing from Babau Jean’s lips were not hers. They sprung from his own sense of desolation.

  Alice realized he’d allowed himself to forget he carried her with him, that for Babau Jean this was more than a simple recounting. He was reliving his terror so that she could taste it, so that she could truly understand him.

  Scintillations, like the phosphenes perceived when an eye is rubbed, floated all around her. They grew sharper, brighter, like the spark of a fli
nt striking steel. Babau Jean snatched at them. He caught one, and it expanded in his grasp. He held it up to examine it, and Alice realized it was a kind of window opening into the common world. But it wasn’t an actual window. Babau Jean grasped a mirror, one connected to a mirror on the other side, and they were peering through it. Each and every mirror served as a window into the ethereal plane. The innocuous looking glass was a natural collector of psychic energy, enchanted by the intent and repeated focus of those it reflected, and their keen feelings—vanity and self-loathing, fear and pride.

  She understood now why the Dreaming Road had first revealed itself to her as Versailles’s Galerie des Glaces—the mirrored hall she’d often imagined visiting, but in actuality never had. In her dream, she’d spied on the Dreaming Road in an inverse manner to how Babau Jean followed events in the common world. Even then, he had been trying to speak to her. He’d brought her dreaming self to his private domain, but for what purpose? What had he wished to show her in his Storyville recreation?

  Babau Jean pounded on the glass, clawed at the silver backing. There was a face on the other side, a young woman pinning back her wavy, platinum hair. Alice caught sight of the pink and black tile wall over the woman’s shoulder. For a moment the woman froze, then she began backing away, shaking her head as she did. Her mouth worked its way open as a scream began to build.

  Babau Jean startled and dropped the pane. But the woman’s terror had strengthened him. He caught another spark and peered through it. A boy in a blue short-sleeved shirt and jeans walked around on his knees, a silver and red tin rocket ship clutched in both hands. He rose, lifting the rocket over his head and zooming around the room. A woman with a helmet of bouffant brown hair came into view, her hands stuffed into oven mitts. She set an aluminum tray on a small yellow table, then tugged off her mitts. She tucked them under her arm as she crossed the room to a wooden cabinet that housed a sheet of glass resembling a circle with a cropped top and bottom. She switched a knob, and a light at the center of the glass sparked on, expanding from the center until it formed a full, albeit grayscale picture. The woman turned back, and the look of surprise on her face as her gaze fixed on the mirror exploded into wide-eyed terror. She dashed to her boy, swept him into her arms, and fled the room.