“You looking for someone?”
“Yes,” Max said, without thinking. “Is it that obvious?”
“Yeah. Seen a lot like you, over the past few weeks.”
“And you?” Max asked. The woman's smile faltered, and he silently berated himself for being too forward.
“We done okay,” she said. “My family, at least. Lost an old friend from school, though. And my boyfriend …he's just gone.”
“I'm sorry,” Max said, thinking of stinking attics and houses lifted from their footings, and that warehouse by the Superdome where hundreds of unclaimed bodies still lay.
“Hope you find her,” the waitress said. And with a smile, she turned to leave.
“Wait!” Max said. She glanced back, raising an eyebrow. “Can I ask you …a couple of questions?”
The waitress glanced around the café with a professional eye, then smiled. “Shoot.”
“Who's Seddicus?” He did not know what to expect: fear? Disbelief? But the waitress frowned at first, then half smiled, as though trying to figure whether he was taking her for a ride.
“You yankin’ my chain?”
Max shook his head. “It's a name I heard …”
The waitress laughed then, shaking her head and running her fingers down her neck. “Baby, someone's been fooling with you.” She leaned on the table again. “Seddicus is a demon of the swamps.”
What the fuck …? Max thought. “A demon?”
“It's an old folk tale, the kind of stuff you hear on those Haunted New Orleans tours. Well, maybe you wouldn't hear that one, but you talk to Cajuns and the fishermen on Lake Pontchartrain, or any of them fake mojo women run the voodoo shops on Bourbon Street, and they'll tell you the story.”
Max arched an eyebrow, showing her a smile he did not feel. “Which is?”
She glanced around again, making sure none of her customers needed tending to, then looked at him like she was sizing him up, seeing if he might be a little crazy, or just curious. The waitress shrugged.
“They say he arrived here long ago, in New Orleans’ early days. No one knows where he came from. For a while he stalked the city, but he's banished from here now, livin’ out in the bayou. My ol’ gran used to say Seddicus was well fed when New Orleans was young, and here an’ there you can read accounts of bodies that were found. Torn up, shredded, like they'd been eaten an’ spat out again.”
“A bogeyman story?” Max said.
“For the tourists, yeah. But it's said he only fed on bad folk. So maybe he ain't a bogeyman at all.” Her eyes twinkled.
“A demon,” he muttered, shaking his head as though they were on the same page about the foolishness of such superstition. And with that came total recall of what Charlie had said, and how he'd said it: The only thing they're scared of is Seddicus. The only thing. Not the only man.
“That help?” the waitress asked.
“Maybe,” Max said. “So you don't believe the story?”
The waitress’ smile hardened a little. Someone from another table signaled her. She nodded at them, then looked back at Max. “We're not all voodoo people down here, you know.”
“No, I—” Max began, but the woman was already walking away.
He folded the map, ate a few mouthfuls of food, drained his coffee. He left thirty dollars on the table, then stood, and on his way out he looked for the waitress. She'd disappeared. On the phone? he wondered. Calling Coco right now? Paranoia grabbed him again, he looked around at the other diners, locking gazes with one of the other single customers and both of them looking away, embarrassed. Outside he sucked in a heavy breath, and jumped when a voice spoke next to him.
“Sorry,” the waitress said. She was leaning against the café's front window, smoking.
Max shook his head. “I didn't mean—”
“No, I know you didn't. I know. And that's what frightened me, a little.”
“I frightened you?”
“Your eyes, when you asked if I believed. Because you do.”
Max didn't know what to say. She finished her cigarette, threw it into the gutter, and gave him a final smile.
“I hope you find who you're looking for,” she said.
“I hope so, too,” Max said. And turning around to head back into the café, she could have been Gabrielle, walking away from him all over again.
He knew that he should get a taxi, but the paranoia was still there, and he wanted to at least get out of the Quarter be-
fore stopping to call a cab. So he walked, and the streets were nowhere near as alive as they had once been. One night, amongst many he had spent on the streets with Gabrielle, they had come just to see the life and listen to the bustle. They had stopped in the occasional bar for a drink or some food, and it was not until early the next morning that they had hailed a cab and gone back to that house where she had died. They had snuggled in the back of the vehicle, and Gabrielle had smiled sweetly while unzipping him and slipping her hand into his trousers. She had stroked him, and agreed with the driver that there were so many things the tourists could never know.
Didn't mark you for a tourist, the waitress had said, and Max knew that he would never come to visit this place as a sightseer again. He knew too much to face these streets with such innocence. When he'd flown back to Boston after finding Gabrielle and Joe Noone fucking in the attic, he had left that place almost as he had arrived: a visitor who had gathered a mere haze of New Orleans about himself. It had not taken long for that haze to be washed away, eroded by his return to a safe life in the Northeast.
But now he had New Orleans inside him. He breathed its air, and it breathed him. He dreamed of the city when he slept, and though the city itself could never sleep, he knew that he was in its thoughts.
Max kept a watch out for faces he knew, or strangers who appeared to know him. He enjoyed the walk. Something about the warm evening air seemed to slough away the revulsion he felt at the beating he'd dealt Fat Man, and that was part of the city's gift. He thought of Coco and the
Tordu, the Moments he had witnessed and what Charlie had said about them only being afraid of Seddicus. And though little of what had happened could possibly make sense in Max's innocent Bostonian mind, this new Max of New Orleans had a mind that was opening more and more to such possibilities.
He smelled the air, smacked his lips, and once more tasted that bitter liquid that Ray had given him. It's all coming closer, he thought, and though that scared him immensely, he also found comfort in such an idea. He'd come here for a purpose, and every street, breeze, and breath of life left in this damaged city seemed to be driving him toward that end.
At the junction of two streets in Faubourg Marigny, the sound of jazz breathing through the open doors and windows of a bar along the street, Max found an idling taxi. He checked out the driver first and, satisfied that he'd not seen him before, jumped into the back.
“Off duty,” the driver said.
“I'll pay double.”
A sigh. “Where to?”
“Lower Ninth.”
The driver looked in his mirror. “Nothin’ there now for anyone with sense.”
“Not now, no,” Max said, staring back.
The man sighed again and started the car.
Max took the opportunity to rest, wondering just what atrocity, crime, or wonder he was about to witness.
chapter
13
The driver was not keen to drive into the Lower Ninth. Max had to promise him a forty-dollar tip, and even then he drove at a snail's pace. Max heard metal strike metal, saw that the man drove with one hand, and guessed that he was nursing a gun with the other. A week ago, he would have been shocked, but now he saw the sense in caution.
The moon was emerging in the dusky sky. Hesitant, as if uneager to view this devastation once again.
They passed two cars, one on top of the other, the one underneath flattened to half its normal height. A house lay across the road, its roof washed away and its insides laid bare. Max s
aw pictures hanging on inner walls, and he wondered how many people in those portraits were still alive, and where they were, and what they were thinking right now. He felt like an intruder, and he looked away from the ruined home.
But wherever he turned were more ruins. One house had slumped sideways, skewed almost forty-five degrees from the vertical, and its front yard was piled with appliances turning to rust. Another home had a name, KENNETH, spray-painted across its whitewashed front façade, and moonlight glinted from several framed photographs pinned there. Beneath the name, like a ghost, were the pale sprayed words indicating that the house had contained a body.
Cars had been washed along the street, houses carried from their foundations, roofs swept along in the flood and deposited almost whole in neighbors’ front gardens. One vehicle was crushed front to back, maybe half its original length, and Max wondered at the forces that could do that.
It was an apocalyptic landscape, a scene of ruin and destruction that he would never get used to seeing. But something made him look.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
Max took out the map and examined it closer, leaning this way and that so that the moonlight would reveal relevant detail. “Where are we now?”
“This used to be North Claiborne.”
“Left onto Lamanche,” Max said.
“If I can find it, I'll take you there. This far south, water was up to the tops of the front doors. Farther north you go, deeper it was. Up to the eaves, higher. That's where a lot of people died. Then Rita came along, swamped it all again.”
Max did not respond, because he could think of nothing meaningful to say.
After a few minutes, the car braked and came to a stop. “This is as far as we go,” the driver said.
“Is that Lamanche?” Max asked. They were at a junction, of sorts, but the road had almost disappeared beneath a sea of broken wood, shingles, slates, smashed cars, and other detritus. Ahead of them, several cars were tangled with the ruin of a house, splayed across the street and preventing any further progress.
“Two, maybe three streets farther.”
“Thanks.” He handed the driver some money.
“This place isn't safe right now, you know that?” the man asked.
Max nodded. “I know.”
“You got a gun?”
“No.”
“Well …you should've brought one.”
Max nodded his thanks and exited the car, standing there in the rubble and watching the driver perform a five-point turn before going back the way they'd come. As he stood alone, listening to the sound of the car engine diminishing in the distance, the weight of emerging moonlight was almost palpable.
A dog barked somewhere in the distance. The sound of something collapsing came from nearer; wood tumbling, metal clanking. And Max silently agreed with the driver.
He walked past the car wrecks and the ruined house, making his way along two more streets until he reached what he hoped was Lamanche Street. Here he turned left, counting the houses on his right. What if it's been washed away? he thought. What if it's a ruin? He would face that when he came to it.
The third house was collapsed, the roof sloping down to touch the front yard. The fifth house had a car buried in its front façade, just the rear trunk and wheels visible. The sixth house, which the Sixth Moment on the map pointed to, had vanished.
Max stood staring at the square concrete foundation, light gray in the dusk. There was still some grass on the front yard, though much of the lawn had been scored and scarred by objects being dragged across it. There was a set of three concrete steps leading up to a vanished front porch, and Max approached, each tentative footstep marking his route in dust.
More noises from far away …but this time, there was more than just distance between him and their source. He heard voices raised in argument, and then in triumph. A cheer. And behind the talking and the cheering, the unrelenting roar of a storm.
He walked up the concrete steps. Grit ground underfoot. At the top he faced where the house had once been, breathing in the scent of rain, feeling a cool breath on the back of his neck, and hearing raindrops hammering against glass, wood, and stone long gone.
Then he took a step forward, and the Moment erupted around him.
Noise, chaos, the crashing of wooden shutters, the smashing of glass, and the cheering of voices raised again from somewhere above him.
Max stumbled into the hallway of the large house, and something smacked him in the back. He fell, wincing at the pain. Rolling, he looked back, and the front door was in the grip of the storm, thrashing back and forth but never quite allowing the catch to click. He kicked out and sent the door swinging, then he crawled forward and pushed with both hands.
The noise of the storm lessened only slightly when the front door slammed shut.
He pulled a curtain aside and looked out into the face of Hurricane Betsy. Rain slashed down, driven almost horizontal by vicious gusts of wind, and a car was rolling slowly along the street, parking brake off. There was no one inside. He watched until it struck another car, its windows rattling with the potential to move on and do more damage.
This Moment is everywhere. He looked up and the sky was heavy with rain, violent with the forces slamming down upon the New Orleans of 1965.
More voices from behind and above, and it was as if they called him. They were what he was here to see. Not the storm, not this backward echo of the doom that would once again befall New Orleans …but the voices. The people. And whoever they were, they were about to destroy the ward.
He crept up the staircase, his caution natural. Last time he almost saw me, he thought. And the time before that, I was just a glimpse. Maybe this time…
He touched the walls and felt them shaking, breathed in and tasted rain and danger.
Maybe this time, I'm really here.
A woman appeared at the top of the stairs, looking directly down at him. Max froze. She was young, pretty, and she looked petrified.
“I…” Max began.
She started down, and her eyes looked past him. He flattened himself against the wall as she passed by, not wanting to sense her moving through him, or himself through her. She reached the bottom step and stared at the front door. After glancing around the hallway she ran back upstairs, turning left at the top. The sound of voices raised and lowered slightly as she opened and closed a door.
Max let out his held breath. The house creaked around him, timbers stretching and groaning in the wind.
He continued up the stairs, turning left to follow the young woman. He was faced with a closed door. Beyond, the sound of a single voice, low and sonorous, and Max closed his eyes because he had heard that voice before.
“Ray,” he said. He reached for the handle, wondering what he would see when he opened the door. But the woman had looked through him. I'm not really here, he thought. And maybe I'm not really back there, either. He was at the balancing point between two moments in time, and to maintain the balance he had to bear witness.
He opened the door and walked through into a large bedroom. The bed had been pushed into the bay window, and Ray was sitting there, and he looked exactly as Max had seen him in 2005. Before him, a dozen people sat on the floor, some of them hugging, others apparently on their own.
In front of Ray stood a low, narrow wooden table. There was a large bowl there, in which some thick fluid seemed to be boiling. Beside the bowl was a mess of brown paper, open on the table like a large wilting bloom. At the bloom's heart, something wet and bloody.
“I trust you all to be here for good reasons, not bad,” Ray said. “I trust you all to have made the right choice, the purest decision. I trust you all …and that's why Mireault and I have always been so different. I trust, he mistrusts.” He nodded slowly, casting his gaze across all those present. Then he smiled, but there was little humor there. “Besides …I'd know if your being here was a lie.”
A couple of people looked around, and there was an expectan
t air in the room. No one stood, no one spoke.
“You're good people,” Ray said. “At their heart, everyone is. It's the bad that steals you away. Light is heavy, it has weight and mass, and if you bathe in light long enough, it will move you. Darkness …that's just an absence. It can be cured.”
“For everyone?” a young man asked.
“Everyone.”
“Mireault?” a woman's voice whispered, and outside the wind battered the house, rain smacking at the windows like shotgun pellets.
Ray looked at whoever had spoken, and that sad smile came again. “You've all suffered at his hand, and caused suffering in his name,” he said. “You've all lived with the dark for a very long time. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart for shunning that darkness.”
“Will you kill him?” someone said.
“I don't have the power for that. I never have.” Ray looked down at the package before him, grimacing with distaste. “But because our friend Robert here brought that out with him…” He picked up the package and gasps came from around the room.
Max did not like the sound of those sighs. They were not shock, they were hunger. What is that thing? he thought.
“Did anyone know his or her name?”
“Marcus,” a woman cooed. “Marcus, sweet boy.”
“And you should fucking know!” another woman said. The tension in the room heightened.
“Enough!” Ray snapped. “There are no histories here. You all started your lives again the moment you walked through that door.”
“No histories?” the loud woman said. “No justice?”
Ray shook his head. “Justice? If we punished everyone who'd ever helped or followed the Tordu, how many would be left?”
Max sidled across the back of the room, trying to edge closer to Ray. He did not want to see whatever he had in the paper before him—heart, kidney, brain—but there was something he wanted to try.
Mireault had sensed him. And now here was Ray, more involved than he had claimed, more a part of everything than Max had ever guessed. There was something incredibly ancient about this old man, as if he were carved from quartz, not built of flesh and blood. He and Mireault …they had histories.
The Map of Moments Page 20
