The Map of Moments

by Christopher Golden

  The short cop knelt on Max's back, knocking the wind from him. Max felt fingers delving into his pockets, hands tapping his hips and thighs, and then the map was tugged from his back pocket, crinkling as if upset at being removed.

  “What's this?” the short cop asked.

  “A map.”

  “I can see that, sick fuck. I asked, what is it?”

  Max frowned and shook his head, confused. I can't really tell him, can I? What would he think? “It's just a map of the city. I was looking around and…”

  “Looking around for what?” Paul asked.

  “Just …looking. I used to see Corinne's cousin, and—

  “Who's Corinne?” the short cop asked.

  Max twisted his head so he could look up at the man kneeling on his back. “The dead girl.”

  “Right. And let me guess: her cousin's dead, too?”

  “In the storm.”

  “Right.” The cop nodded slowly, unfolding the map as he did so. “In the storm.”

  The opened map hid Max's view of Paul and the cop on his back, plunging him into shadow. The weak light shone through the paper, silhouetting the short guy and stretching the profile of his face so that he looked like something unnatural and deformed. As he turned, his elongated nose and chin pointed across the map, and for the first time Max saw the small box containing the Fourth Moment. He frowned, concentrating on the reversed words, but the sheet was moving too much for him to make them out.

  The cop stood from his back quickly, paused, then knelt by Max's side and slammed the map down beside him. “What's this?” He was pointing directly at the handwritten Fourth Moment.

  The Fourth Moment:

  Evil Defeats Badness for Its Own Ends

  Tordu Banishes the Yellow Fever

  September 18, 1853

  “The Fourth Moment,” Max muttered.

  “You wrote this?” Something about the short cop's voice had changed. There was a sense of unease there, and he tapped the map several times beside the boxed words, never actually touching them. “This? The yellow fever?” Another slight, loaded pause. “Tordu?”

  “No, I didn't write it,” Max said.

  The cop stood and showed the map to his companion. They exchanged a few muttered words, but Max's blood was pulsing so hard in his ears that he could not make them out. He turned on his side and looked, and they were both staring down at him. The tall one, Paul, glanced at his watch.

  The short cop darted across and kicked Max hard in the side.

  Max gasped, from shock as well as pain. He tried to bring his knees up against his chest, roll into a defensive ball, but the cop kicked him again, this time in the back.

  “Steady,” Paul said, concern in his voice. But Max was not sure who the concern was aimed at.

  “Where'd you get this?” the short cop asked. He kicked again, softer this time, more of a nudge. “Where?”

  It's the Tordu that's got him riled up, Max thought. That name was appearing more and more. It reeked of trouble and dark deeds, and he still felt the dregs of its corrupted magic prickling his skin and haunting the byways of his memory.

  “Where?” the cop asked again, and stepped over Max, turning and pulling his right leg back to kick him in the face.

  “Coco gave it to me,” Max said. It was a stab in the dark, but those five words changed everything.

  The short cop froze, and Max heard Paul's sharp intake of breath. Max considered elaborating, taking advantage of the fear that man's name seemed to conjure, but then he would risk getting some small detail wrong.

  The short cop folded the map and slipped it into his pocket.

  “You need to leave,” Paul said.

  “What?” Max managed to sit up, and the short guy circled behind him. Max winced. What would it be, pistol-whipped? A kick in the throat? But then he heard the jangle of keys, and the cuffs fell away from his hands. He hugged his arms, cringing as the circulation returned.

  “Get out of here,” Paul said.

  Max glanced past him into the hallway, and Corinne now seemed like an afterthought to these men. Her murderer was still out there. Maybe it was even Coco himself, whose mere name had shifted this situation from weird to surreal.

  “The Tordu…” Max said, wanting to ask questions, plead for information, and maybe protect himself from who- or whatever they were.

  The short cop raised his gun and pointed it at Max's face. He was sweating, his jaw clenched and unclenched, and Max realized that he was utterly terrified. “Out,” he said, and it emerged as a croak.

  Max stood and looked at the cop's pocket into which the map had disappeared.

  “No,” the cop said. “Consider this …bail payment.” He lowered the gun, and the nervous glance he exchanged with his partner spoke volumes. “Don't leave the city.”

  “Would I be safer in custody?” Max asked. Neither man answered, but they both stared at him grimly, perhaps as they would at a dead man.

  There were so many questions that Max wanted to ask, but any one of them could change things again. So he looked down at his feet as he exited the room, hurried along the hallway, and left the house, expecting at any moment to feel the impact of a bullet.

  Corinne's old neighbor was looking from his front window as Max walked past. He dropped the curtain and retreated into the room, but Max could still see his shadow, alone and adrift with little to protect him against the dark.

  Before long, Max started to run.

  He paid little heed to direction.

  They think I killed Corinne.

  He ran along one street, turned a corner, and jogged along the next. The darkness swallowed his footfalls without echo.

  They think I cut her open, pulled out her insides while she was still alive.

  A dog barked, small shadows darted across the road before him, but the only signs of other people were the occasional dull glow of lights behind drawn curtains.

  And they let me go.

  He was convinced they were cops. He'd never been arrested, never even been involved with the police, but they had looked and spoken as he expected cops to look and speak. Their actions, however…

  Max eventually stopped running because he could run no more, so he walked across a small square and into the shadows of another row of buildings. The night air was cool, and the sweat beaded across his back and sides made it feel cooler still. But when he sat down on a bench outside a boarded-up café, shivering, hugging himself, it was shock more than the cold that pulled him down. He bent over and stared at his feet, then looked at his hands. They were still speckled with dried flakes of Corinne's blood, dark in the weak street light. I touched what was inside her, he thought. The last time we spoke, this blood was where it was meant to be. And now …now it's out, she's open, and everything she knew is gone.

  Something banged, wood against wood. Max drew in a sharp breath and sat up. The shakes receded as rapidly as they had arrived. The sound came again, and it seemed to originate inside one of the buildings opposite. There were several shops on the block, all but one of them boarded up, and that was a café closed for the night.

  There must be ghosts, he thought, because I've seen them. The thought chilled him, but it did not feel quite right. What he had seen were not the spirits of people, but the ghosts of moments in time, echoing down through the decades and centuries and revealing themselves to those able or chosen to view them.

  Whatever had been in crazy Ray's bottle had shown Max the correct way to see.

  The banging came again, more frantic than before, and Max ran.

  A few minutes later he stopped again, out of breath and realizing once more how unfit he had become. He looked around, trying to locate himself—but mapless, the street signs were all strange to him. He stood at a crossroads, and on the corner of the street opposite sat a burnt-out car.

  There were a couple of weak lights behind the windows of houses, but not nearly enough to warm the scene. They looked like islands in the dark, and Max d
id not imagine that their owners would welcome a knock at the door at this early hour.

  “Lost in New Orleans,” he whispered to the dark, hoping for some response. But he was alone here, in this ruined city, and he reflected that perhaps he had been lost since the moment Gabrielle had left him.

  Corinne was dead, and he could not go to the police.

  He could sense the echoes of time gone by, the magic upon whose foundations the city was built, and the dark deeds buried in those foundations like bodies in a bridge's supports.

  But he had no control over what he knew, nor the magical Moments he had witnessed.

  And Coco might be looking for him even now.

  Max was not streetwise. He was a history professor, a normal man who had found and lost love in a far from normal place. This was all too much for him, and his thoughts were a stew of ideas and fears, images and memories, and all those memories were bad.

  He had to go to ground. Find somewhere safe and quiet, where he could think things through and decide what to do next.

  And as the shadows around him suddenly grew thicker and deeper, as if becoming something solid rather than the absence of light, he knew that he had to get off the streets.

  The place looked as if it'd had its last coat of paint sometime around the Civil War. Its façade was rotten and crumbled in places, several windows were cracked, the roof was missing tiles, and Max was sure that none of this was because of Ka-trina. This dilapidation was something only time could bestow, and the light emanating from inside barely found its way through the grubby glass.

  He knew it was now well into the early hours, and he wondered how the owner would welcome a guest at this time of night.

  The hand-painted wooden sign nailed up beside the door looked much newer than the rest of the building. BED AND BORED,it read, and somehow Max managed a smile. He tried the bell, but it depressed without him hearing a sound. It reminded him of the doorbell on the house where Corinne had been murdered, and a sudden, complete image leapt into his mind, shocking him with its intensity: Corinne, glancing up from her book as the bell rang, hearing glass break, placing her book facedown on the arm of the chair, and stalking into the kitchen, seeing the shadow sliding through the broken window …faceless, nameless …and then the knife, and the scream that had caused Max to force the door, rather than ring the bell again.

  So quick! he thought. It was maybe fifteen seconds between when he'd heard the scream to when he skidded into the blood-spattered kitchen, and in that time the killer had…

  Glancing around at the shadowy street behind him, Max rapped on the door; three quick, loud bangs. He waited a while then knocked again. After a third knock he heard someone approaching from the inside, grumbling and coughing, their feet dragging across a bare wooden floor.

  “Got a gun!” they shouted through the door.

  Max stood to one side, in case they decided to make a hole in their front door. “I only want a room,” he said, his voice shockingly loud in the deserted street.

  “It's late!”

  “That's why I want a room.”

  “Thirty bucks through the flap.”

  “What?”

  The metal cover over the letter slot in the door snapped shut three times, a rapid crack crack crack that echoed across the street like gunshots.

  Max pulled three crumpled tens from his pocket, glad that the police hadn't searched him too thoroughly. He flattened them and pushed them through, and heard a grunt from the other side.

  “You runnin’?” the voice asked.

  “No,” Max replied.

  “Yeah, right.” There was silence for a few beats, and Max wondered whether he had just given away thirty bucks for nothing. Then he heard locks being twisted, bolts withdrawn, and the door opened a crack, security chain in place. A sawed-off shotgun poked out at him, and above it he could make out a dark face haloed with a shock of white hair.

  “Don't look like trouble,” the old man said.

  Max smiled and held out his hands. See?

  “Sure smell of it, though.” He closed the door, flipped the chain, and opened it fully. “Thirty bucks's for the bed. I can do you breakfast, but that's another ten. An’ you pay in advance, day by day.”

  Max nodded and smiled again, hoping it did not look too much like a grimace. “Fair enough.”

  The old man ushered him inside and resecured the door behind him. Then he led Max up a narrow staircase to the second floor, and along a series of damp-smelling corridors to a door adorned with a hand-painted 7. The key was already in the door, and the landlord pulled it out and handed it to Max.

  “When's breakfast?” Max asked, shocked to discover how hungry he was even after everything he had been through, everything he had seen.

  “ ’Bout four hours.” The man nodded at him and squeezed by, retreating along the corridor with the same coughing and scraping Max had heard downstairs.

  Max glanced at the three other doors on this corridor. All of them had keys hanging from their locks.

  He opened the door, stepped into his room, and turned on the light. There was a single bed, a small chest of drawers with one whole drawer missing, and an open-fronted wardrobe that seemed to be filled with old coats. The curtain across the window had been pinned into place and would be impossible to take down without a knife. The ceiling and walls were yellow from years of cigarette smoke, and though there was a carpet, it was so worn that in places it was possible to see the joints between floorboards. He looked around for a bathroom door, but there was none.

  Shared bathroom, then. The old guy hadn't told him where it was, but Max would find it when he had to. It was the least of his worries.

  If Max had gone back to his hotel, he'd have been visible, easy to find if Coco or the police came looking. Here, he was invisible. It was just what he needed.

  He flopped on the bed, exhausted, traumatized, but when he closed his eyes he could not sleep. Too much had happened in too short a time to allow escape that easily, and his mind was abuzz with events, and everything that might yet come.

  The next day—or rather, later that same day—Max was booked on a flight back to Boston. It took him only a minute or two to decide not to go.

  He could flee, he knew that. Run from Coco and whatever the Tordu were, or had been. Run from Corinne's murder, because he couldn't remember those two cops even taking down his name. And he could run from Gabrielle's memory, and the crazy notion that Ray had planted in his mind that he could actually save her from the past.

  Yes, he could run. But he could not hide from his memories and guilt, or from the mysteries that were growing around him. He was not the Max he had been just a few days earlier, looking down on Louisiana from above and witnessing nothing he could understand. Now he knew something about this city, and though ingrained doubt still niggled at him about those visions, he could feel the effect they'd had upon him. The city had entered his blood and bones, and the bones and blood of the past had rooted in his memory. What would grow from them, he did not know.

  But he could not leave.

  He stared up at the ceiling, resigned to sleeplessness, and tried to decide what to do next. The cops’ attitude had changed the moment they saw the word “Tordu” on the map, and they'd let him go as soon as he mentioned Coco. They were obviously afraid of the man and the organization, but Max thought there was something more than fear in what they had done. Respect? Complicity? Not that close, perhaps, but maybe they had simply known that, were Coco searching for him, it would be against their better interests to become involved.

  Easier to find me if I'm in custody, Max thought. But maybe not so easy to get to me.

  The more he dwelled on Coco, the more he felt hunted. He could not be certain that Corinne had been killed by Gabrielle's old lover, but if he had been the murderer, Max realized with a jolt why it had happened: he had called Corinne, and asked about the Tordu.

  He groaned and rested one hand across his eyes, shaking his head slowly. Me?
he thought. Is it all because of me? He'd found out about the Tordu accidentally after all. Coco himself had mentioned it first.

  “Fuck,” Max whispered. “Fuck fuck fuck.” He wished there were an easy way he could discover more about Coco and his gang, but he didn't think the Tordu was the sort of thing he could just Google. Strange to think that in this modern world there could be anything still secret, still off the map. But if he'd learned anything these past few days, it was that there were whole worlds you couldn't find a whisper of on the Internet. Whether through magic or fear,

  some shadows remained shadows, no matter how much light the world might shine upon them.

  Besides, he was out of circulation now. With the windows of his room covered, he might as well be underground. He could stay here for a day or two, lie low, and maybe when the time was right he'd find his way to a police station, speak to someone senior, tell them about Coco and Corinne, and what he'd seen and heard…

  He wondered what the two cops had filed in their report. Suspect sighted but lost after a chase?

  He needed help. He needed someone to talk to about Gabrielle, and perhaps through them he could find out more about the Tordu. If he was to remain in New Orleans and protect himself, that must be his main aim.

  But who? Crazy Ray? Max laughed bitterly. Even if the old man allowed himself to be found, Max was sure he and the Tordu must be entangled somehow.

  His friend Charlie, back at the university? Sitting there with his empty classrooms, emptied bottles, mourning whatever future he saw in the bottom of a glass? Charlie had been in New Orleans all his life, and he might well know about the Tordu, past or present. But the last thing Max wanted to do was to put his friend in danger.

  Not after what had happened to Corinne.

  Who, then? He stood and paced the room. His feet ground in grit on the carpet, and in one corner the floor gave a little where the floorboards were rotting. This was the second floor, and Max knew that this area hadn't been flooded that deeply, so it wasn't Katrina that had done this.

  Not like in that attic where he and Gabrielle had loved, and she had died. Max had dreamed about that, he was sure, though only the vague shadows of images came back at him, not the scorched pain of memories. At least, not of the flood.