Still, he turned to Max.
Max forgot everything—the Tordu pursuing him, Gabrielle, poor Corinne's corpse. This remnant from the past glared through him as it drifted into a wall. The ghost seemed to wash against the wall, like a wave striking a beach, and then it continued on and through. The last Max saw was the rifle's ruined stock, scraping along the floor without touching or marking the worn wood.
He let out his held breath. When he breathed in again he tasted candle smoke, and something less distinct that he could not quite place. This is 1935, he thought, and he turned to look back at the door he had entered through. It had drifted shut behind him—or maybe this door, in this here and now, was locked. Only starlight showed through the windows, and there was no sound of pursuit.
Am I there? he thought. Standing inside the house's front doors, still and vacant, waiting for Coco to draw the knife across my throat? But he could not believe that. He stamped on the floor and dust rose around him. He breathed in again, deeply, smelling the smoke and that other scent, vaguely familiar and yet not quite connecting with anything in his memory. He looked at the wall through which the ghost of the Civil War soldier had vanished, then walked the other way, aiming for a door set deep in a wall and surrounded by a carved hardwood frame. He touched the carving, felt the wood grain beneath his fingertips. He was here. He could taste the air and hear the creaks and groans of this house, settling in June of 1935.
And somewhere here, according to the Map of Moments, the Tordu were beats away from being confronted by the Civil War dead.
It won't happen until I see it, he thought. I'm here to witness this. He glanced back at the door again and wondered how far he could go if he stepped out into the street. If he had to witness the Moment before returning to his own time, could he spend more time here? Perhaps he could walk the nighttime streets of the New Orleans of 1935, visit the city as it had once been. And beyond …a United States recovering from the restrictions of Prohibition, and starting to deal with the organized crime that had arisen during those dry years.
How far could he walk? How long could he stay?
Max heard a voice, and for a few seconds he felt a terrifying sense of dislocation. He grabbed his own stomach and throat, feeling himself to make sure he was still there, and his current reality flooded back in.
The voice came again, muttering words so quickly that Max could not even tell what language was being spoken. It originated beyond the inset door, and as he listened it was joined by more voices, all of them chanting something low and unintelligible.
He pressed his hand flat against the door and pushed it open.
The room beyond was large, maybe thirty feet square. Its timber-paneled walls were dark, the ceiling an ornate spread of plasterwork, and the floor was of polished, aged oak. Its corners were illuminated by hundreds of candles, shadows flickering this way and that as air movement sent the myriad flames dancing.
There were a dozen people in the room. Most of them stood in a rough circle, and at its center were three people. Max recognized Coco instantly.
No! He backed away, ready to turn and run. But then he realized that this Coco was wearing different clothes from the Coco he had known up to now. His suit was dark, his shirt gleamed a creamy yellow, and the open collar displayed a necklace of what looked like teeth. His face was also different; not younger, but fresher, as though yet to gather decades of wear.
That can't be Coco. But he knew that he was wrong. This was Coco, and beside him stood a small, twisted man, with short hair and hands clawed inward, toward his chest. This could only be the Mireault that Max had read about …though he would have been over a hundred years old in 1935.
Before them, naked and shivering on the floor, lay a boy no older than fifteen. He moaned, and rolled his head, but his arms and legs were free, slumped on the floor in a vague crucifix shape. His voice slurred, and Max knew that he was drugged.
Coco held a long, thin, curved knife. He continued muttering those words, and beside him Mireault joined in, his voice old and as gnarled as his body. The others echoed them, following a beat behind and lending the impression that Max was hearing this all in a large, echoing cave.
The smell of candles was strong in here, and beneath it he could still sense that other scent that so confused him. He looked around, trying to place its source, and then he saw the several metal tins arrayed around the prone boy. The light was poor, but he could see they were filled with liquid, and at last recognized the scent: vinegar.
He remembered the plague-ravaged girl and what they had done to her, and he stepped forward into the room. “Leave him alone,” he said, and the sound of his own voice startled him. He drew back slightly, expecting all eyes to turn to him. But he could not be heard.
The boy rolled his eyes back in his head, staring directly at Max. His voice changed, from a low groan to a high-pitched plea.
The kid saw him.
Coco paused in his speech and looked across the room at Max. The man frowned, narrowing his eyes, and he looked to the left and right of Max, closing one eye and then the other. Beside him, the twisted shape of Mireault stepped around the boy.
Max tried to back away but could not. Mireault stood beside the boy's head, shoulders hunched, back bent, and yet in his eyes Max saw signs of a startling intelligence, and a cruelty he could barely comprehend.
Coco spoke, his words rising in a question.
Mireault shrugged, a grotesque movement. And then he turned around, bent down with an audible creaking of joints, and drew a knife across the boy's throat.
Several people around the room gasped, and then their voices rose as one, launching into a loud and excited chant that seemed to drive back more shadows than the candlelight could touch.
Max watched the boy bleeding to death. He wanted to close his eyes and turn away, but an intense curiosity held him, because he knew that there was more to come. It was horrible to witness, but this boy's fate had been sealed many decades ago. What Max was about to see was essential to him steering his own fate.
Coco dropped to his knees and went to work. Even while the boy was still twitching, Coco slashed his stomach open, extended the cuts across his chest to his shoulders, and plunged his hands into the wound. He dug deep, sweating, muscles rippling on his arms, and with a dreadful crunching sound he ripped open the boy's chest.
Mireault laughed, a startlingly high sound from such a wizened man.
The other Tordu shifted and chanted, enrapt with what was happening.
Coco dug, cut, and dropped things into the tins of vinegar.
And then the ghosts in tattered uniforms arrived.
From the start, watching the slaughter, Max had the impression that there was more behind the ghosts than uneasy spirits. They emerged from the air itself, forming from shadows around the flickering candle flames, manifesting from the spaces between one circle of light and another, taking shape from the New Orleans air as if the city had sighed at the murder committed here, and in its sadness were these wraiths of murders past.
The dead were not silent. The sound of their arrival slid in along a tunnel of time; a single, indefinable roar to begin with, but soon opening into screams and shouts, shots and explosions, the whinnying of dying horses, and the cries of already-dead men. Chaos and confusion filled that room and made it seem much larger. And death soon followed.
Whatever the purpose of the Tordu's ritual here, it had offended the ghosts of the Civil War dead that had inhabited this home for decades.
The first Tordu to die was impaled on a flag staff. She screamed as two wraiths drove the metal pole through her chest, and the ghosts faded away to be replaced by others. The visions ebbed and flowed around the room, rarely existing for longer than a few seconds each. But each appearance was marked by murder.
Max backed into the doorway. There was something immediate about these ghosts, something out of time, and where and when he was became confused in his mind. Was this the Civil War or 1935, or w
as it still 2005, a place and time when many more spirits were lost to the wind and water? He shouted in confusion and fright, but everyone in the room ignored him.
The Tordu were panicking. All but Mireault and Coco, those two men who could not possibly be here, who were backing toward the rear of the room. They had both dipped their hands into the dead boy's open chest, and now they held them out, bloodied fingers flexing before their mouths as they uttered words lost to the chaos.
Gunfire sounded, different from the ghostly shots. Two of the Tordu—a man and a woman—had retreated to the far end of the room, and were hunkered down beneath paintings of proud-looking people Max did not know. They each held a heavy revolver. He could see panic in their wide eyes as they fired at the wraiths, and close to Max a Tordu man's head flipped back from a bullet's impact.
The woman with the revolver dropped her gun. Her head tipped to the side, bouncing from her shoulder and rolling forward. A ghost emerged from the wall behind her, passing straight through her slumping body even as it and its bloodied sword faded away once more. The Tordu man stared at the dead woman, then placed the barrel of the revolver beneath his chin and pulled the trigger.
Other Tordu tried to run. One man was trampled beneath a horse with terrible, gaping wounds across its stomach and flanks. Another was caught within a drifting cloud of smoke, and he screamed as a ghost manifested within him. Shots sounded, and Max saw two faces screaming as bullets ripped chests and throats apart, one of them melting back into the atmosphere of the room, the other crying lonely, desperate tears as he fell to the floor, dying.
Coco and Mireault had reached a door at the rear of the room and were backing through. Max knew that he was not meant to see them die here, and he wondered if he should follow. But then he looked at the chaos and death before him, unsure of whether he could.
The slaughter was almost over. There was no combating the ghosts, and the remaining two Tordu were quickly cut down by ethereal sword and bullet. The room stank of cordite and spilled blood, and the air still rang with the dying cries of those whom death had chosen. The ghosts wavered in and out of existence, and it was only when the last Tordu was dead that they began to fade away completely.
Max was left alone in a room of corpses. A mist seemed to hang over the scene, and he was not sure whether it was from the dead bodies opened up to the air, or a leftover from the ghostly apparitions.
He breathed deeply, trying to remember the texture and feel of everything he could sense, because he knew this was important.
A shape appeared in the corner of the room. It was the faceless man, still dragging his broken rifle behind him. He surveyed the scene with his blind eye, and only as he was fading again did he look up at Max. Then he was gone.
Max had to leave. He tried shifting his feet and they obeyed his command. But if he went back out the way he had entered, he had no idea what he would find, or who would be waiting for him there.
Maybe I can leave another way, he thought. He looked at the door through which Coco and Mireault had passed. It had drifted half-shut behind them, and beyond was only darkness. Before him lay a room of ruined bodies, which he would have to cross. Many of the candles had been tipped over or extinguished during the violence, but there was enough light left for him to see by.
The air shimmered. Max felt the world shift around him, but the evidence of the ghostly slaughter was still there. He did not have long.
He started across the room, avoiding the bodies where he could. His feet splashed in a puddle of blood. This is real! he thought, and then a door slammed somewhere beyond.
When he reached the open door, he went through, plunging into a dark hallway that led toward the rear of the building. He passed several closed doors to his left, and on the right was a blank wall, broken up here and there with tall windows that looked out onto a shadowed garden. The plants and trees were silver and black, colored only by moonlight.
The end of the hallway was marked by another door standing ajar, and from beyond he heard someone kicking again and again at a locked door.
The world moved around him. The air seemed to take on the consistency of sand, grating against his skin, and when he tried to breathe he found the breath trapped in his lungs. Breathing out of time, he thought, and someone passed beyond the door in front of him.
Max knew him. He gasped and called out, “Ray?”
Dusk resolved itself around him again, and from the front of the building he heard the screech of brakes.
Car doors slammed. Men shouted.
I was only in there a heartbeat! No time had passed while he'd been in the Moment. Yet Max himself had moved from the front to the back of the house, traveling through it.
He hurried from the hallway and found himself in a small vestibule, an external door before him flanked by tall glazed screens. He looked around for Ray but there was no one else there. Still, it had been him. There was no mistaking his slight build and shock of white hair. Max stared at the door. The door where Coco and Mireault smashed their way out, he thought, seventy years ago. And now…
Now Coco was on his trail once again.
Max drew the bolts and tugged the door open. He closed it gently behind him, ran across the small garden, climbed a short fence, hurried along a narrow alleyway, and emerged onto a long street. Confused, shocked, and feeling as though time itself was laughing at him, he ran.
The map poked at him from his back pocket. He was relieved that he'd grabbed it before jumping from the car, but then he remembered that this was the second map, the first having been taken from him by the cops. If he'd left this one behind he could have bought another, and still he'd have been guided toward his destiny Moment by Moment. Maybe he could simply draw an outline of New Orleans in the mud left over by the floods, mark its main streets and parks and squares, and even then he would be shown where to go next.
Ray had gifted him with something. Or perhaps cursed him.
Max ran along the evening streets, changing direction as often as he could. He had no idea where he was going, and he hoped that if he got lost, then they would lose him, too.
Three big army trucks rolled along the street. Max stood in a doorway, leaning against the sunburned painted door and watching the vehicles trundle past. They carried nothing that he could make out, and he caught the eye of one driver. He was young, maybe twenty, and he tried to stare Max down, his eyes screaming, You haven't seen the things I've seen! But Max stared back and won, because the driver was wrong.
As the trucks rolled away, he looked around, startled. He'd been careless; the sound of the trucks’ engines could have masked anyone approaching, and here in the doorway he was exposed. Max moved along the street and ducked through some wrought-iron gates, traversing a small courtyard and passing into a narrow walkway between two tall buildings. He emerged onto another street and turned left.
Back there in the Beauregard-Keyes House, would Coco be remembering the slaughter from so long ago? Ducking through that house, maybe for the first time in seventy years, would he be recalling the blood and pain and death brought down upon them by the ghosts that haunted that old, old place? How Coco could be so old was a mystery that Max was doing his best to ignore right now, because it made the shadows growing across the streets seem even darker, and gave the buildings he passed a sense of dread that he could not shake. He heard Charlie say, You've pissed off Mireault, and shook his head to lose the echo.
He doesn't have a grave. Charlie had said that, too. He'll never need one.
Mireault might not be immortal, but if he'd been alive still in 1935, how much harder was it to believe he could still be drawing breath now, seventy years later? And Coco, seventy years ago, looking just as he did now?
Max ran, and he thought about the other familiar face he'd seen in that house.
Ray. It had been him, passing beyond that door like a ghost himself. But had that still been part of the Moment? Max tried to pinpoint the exact time when the replayed past had turned o
nce again into the rolling present, but he was confused now, and afraid.
At the end of a street, with two-story buildings crouching on either side and the smells of cooking and beer wafting from open doors, Max heard a shout. He ducked sideways and stood among some scattered tables below a balcony, looking back the way he had come. They can't have found me! he thought. He'd run fast, turning this way and that, and however well they knew the city—
Because they think the city is theirs! Charlie had shouted. Its people are theirs!
—they would have no idea which way he'd gone.
“Unless the ghosts told them,” Max muttered.
“You don't wanna mess with old ghosts, honey,” a woman's voice said. Max looked through the doorway behind him and saw an old black woman sitting at a café table, a bowl of fried shrimp before her. She smiled at him, and it lit up her whole face.
“Not much choice,” Max said.
“Oh,” the woman said; her smile vanished, face dropping, as if he'd told her he had two weeks left to live. She glanced down at his bloodied shirt, then back up at his face. “Then I'm sorry.”
“Is there a back way?” Max said, nodding into the café.
“Depends who you're backin’ away from.”
If he said, The Tordu, he was certain that things would change. So he merely smiled his thanks at the woman and ducked inside. It was a sparse, simple place, unadorned by the usual tourist trappings, and the smells of honest food set his stomach rumbling. After all he had seen, all that had happened, Max still felt hungry. He almost laughed, and it felt good. It felt normal.
Past the restrooms, past an open door looking into a shady kitchen, the back door stood propped open with a chair. He stepped out into a narrow alleyway, piled here and there with bags of refuse. A couple of rats darted away from him, fast shadows in the dusky light. A dog worried a bag farther along the alley. It cast him a baleful glance before returning to its foraging.
He listened for voices and footsteps, but the noises that came to him did not seem out of place here: the crashing of pans; a dog barking; someone raising their voice; someone else laughing.
The Map of Moments Page 18
