One side of a duplex ahead had its lights on, and Max started to cross the street, trying not to draw attention. Something on the front walk caught his eye and he paused, then cut back toward the two-family. He glanced at the house to confirm he was unobserved, and crouched down, reaching out to pick up a piece of pale chalk. Half a dozen pieces in various pastels had been left scattered about. On the walk were crude renderings he recognized as Sponge-Bob SquarePants and some of the other characters from that show.
With the piece of chalk in hand, he moved on down the street to a spot as distant from any of the lighted windows as he could get without actually moving to another block. Dropping to his knees, feet sliding inside the big work boots, he began to draw, outlining the street he was on and several blocks in each direction.
When the box appeared, and the words describing the Seventh Moment, they were in pale yellow chalk, and there could be no mistaking which house the arrow pointed at.
The little one, with the downed tree lying half across its yard.
Max steeled himself but did not hesitate. The time for hesitation had passed. Retracing his steps, he returned to the little house with its bay window and the single gable above the front door. Some of the roof had been stripped away and the bay window shattered. Unlike some of the other darkened houses, no one had bothered to board this one up.
An icy prickle went down the back of his spine. The magic crackling that had suffused him all afternoon and night had receded but not departed. He looked around once more, waiting for menacing figures to emerge from the shadows or for headlights to snap on, engines to rev, enemies to appear. And when none of these things happened, he walked quickly and quietly to the front door.
Sometimes when he slept wrong, maybe with his arm trapped underneath him, he'd wake up with a sensation like a million tiny needles gently tapping his skin. As a boy, his father had referred to this as his arm having fallen asleep. But Max remembered his mother's phrase best. She'd always called that feeling “pins and needles.”
He had it now, over every inch of his body.
As he reached for the door, the temperature changed. The night turned sweltering, the heat beating down on him, the air so thick with dampness that he could barely breathe. He remembered many nights such as this, though he'd trained himself to forget.
Summer in New Orleans.
The bay window was no longer shattered. He didn't need to glance over his shoulder to see that the tree was still standing. But other than that, the place looked much the same. Whatever year this was, it had to be recently.
Max paused with his hand on the door, troubled. What year was it? Every Moment had been clearly dated, except for this one. The place mat upon which he'd drawn a map sat folded in his back pocket and now, knowing he had to enter the house but also curious and unsettled, he took it out and unfolded it.
There were the words again, just as they'd been before.
The Seventh Moment:
The Hollow Man Tempts
The Oracle's Faithless Heir
She Succumbs
Only something had changed. There had been no date when he looked before, but it was there now, at the bottom of the message. And as he looked at the date, and it took root in his mind, he understood that the magic he had been accumulating was not his own, and never had been. The Map of Moments had led him where he needed to be, but it did not serve Max Corbett. The map served the man who had given it to him, along with that little stone bottle to drink from. The date in which he now stood, when the Seventh Moment took place, had been withheld from him until now.
This was the worst night of his life.
The night he'd walked in on Gabrielle and Joe Noone, in the attic of the house over in Lakeview.
Jaw clenched, Max let the place mat flutter from his hand, gripped the doorknob, and turned it. To others it might have been locked, but not to him. The door swung open. Even as he stepped inside he heard the chanting, its cadence now familiar to him, its intent making him recoil.
He forced himself on, down a short corridor, through the kitchen, and into a kind of den at the rear of the house, where the lights were off and the shades were drawn, and where a circle of candles provided all the light he would ever need.
Max had seen Gabrielle in candlelight before, and when he glimpsed her now, in silhouette, he could not breathe for the tears that began to choke him. For Gabrielle was crying as well, shaking her head as Coco pressed the knife into her hand and the others continued to chant.
“You have to, girl,” Coco said. “You know you do.” The sincerity in his eyes was hideous and painful to watch. He cared for her. He meant her well. “You don't have his strength, and Mireault won't hesitate to kill you. You're with us, or you're alone.”
“I can't!” Gabrielle wailed, her anguish stabbing at Max.
Coco's eyes flashed with anger and his lips tightened in a grim line. “You swore to me, girl! You made a promise. I let the teacher go and you don't fight anymore. I even let you pick the one to substitute for him. You go back on your word now, and when Mireault comes for you, I'll be the one to hold you down.”
Gabrielle stared at the gagged figure on the floor, in the midst of that circle. He squirmed, but the other Tordu gathered for the ritual held him tightly. She turned to Coco, eyes imploring, but his gaze had gone flat and merciless. Gabrielle squeezed her eyes tightly shut, tears streaming down her cheeks, and then she whipped her head around to look again at the man on the floor.
He shook his head wildly from side to side, eyes huge, staring up at her, pleas muffled by the gag in his mouth.
And Max knew.
“Gaby, no!” he screamed.
Coco spun as though he'd heard, stared at Max, eyes narrowed as though he couldn't focus.
But Gabrielle had not heard. With a cry of sorrow, utterly devoid of hope, she knelt, raised the knife in both hands and brought it down, driving it into the struggling man's heart. Blood sprayed into her face, but she brought the blade down again, and then a third time, and she might have done it again if Coco had not stilled her hands.
“Good girl,” he said, kissing the blood on her cheek.
She had stopped crying, arms and expression slackening at the same time.
“I'll take it from here,” Coco said.
And he started to carve into the corpse of Joe Noone.
chapter
16
Max staggered down a nameless street—no sign, no identity, just one more empty place left hollow by Katrina's passing. The sidewalks were strewn with debris, but unlike some of the other areas he'd passed through in New Orleans, the flotsam and jetsam left behind by the storm and the lives that had been lost or abandoned here had been gathered into heaps. Every twenty or thirty feet there were piles of refuse—children's toys, broken furniture, roofing and siding, ruined appliances—but no one had come by to pick it up. Some order had been brought to the chaos in this one neighborhood. Compared to other places, it was moving on.
For a while, Max had stopped noticing the debris. He'd become numb to it.
Now it drove him on, and he forced himself to keep putting one foot in front of the other. His thoughts were a swirl of bitterness and regret. He seesawed between despair and the laughter that came with disbelief. Had he really thought he could save Gabrielle, reach back in time and pluck her from the path of the storm? For a smart man, you're one stupid motherfucker. In his mind he'd pictured himself the knight in shining armor, selfless in his return to New Orleans for the funeral of a girl who'd betrayed him, then risking his life and perhaps more for the chance to save a woman who didn't love him.
But it wouldn't be enough to save her life. He had to save her from herself, or none of it would matter. No, you have to save her from you, because she did love you, and she gave up her soul to protect you.
He tripped on something, staggered again, and turned to stare uncomprehending at a metal prosthetic leg. It still had a sneaker on the foot. What had happened in the storm
to the man who owned that leg—a soldier, maybe, home from Iraq? Had he drowned?
Max sat down hard on the sidewalk and buried his face in his hands. There were no tears. He was too empty for tears. Coco's words, back in the woods by the river, echoed in his head. Gabrielle told you nothing, that was part of the deal, part of the price. And now he'd seen, firsthand, the rest of it.
In that Moment he wished he had never seen, Coco had made it plain. The Tordu had forced her to become one of them, and to do so, she had to give up her past and some part of herself. She had to commit murder. Coco had wanted Max, “the teacher,” to be her victim. But Gabrielle had bartered for his life, and she had chosen Joe Noone to die in his place.
Max cried out, there on the sidewalk amidst the wreckage the storm had left behind, grabbing his hair in tight fists and letting loose a tortured howl.
His walking in on her and Joe that night had been no accident. It was so obvious now. Gabrielle had set it up so that Max would catch them, so that his heart would be broken, so that he would go away and stay away. Stay safe.
But there was more to the equation. She had been involved with Coco before she ever met Max. The Tordu had been trying to seduce her for a long time, and what he'd seen was the culmination of that. But the murder of Joe Noone had not only been to save Max. Coco's words had made it clear that if she didn't go through with it, Mireault would kill her.
She'd saved and damned herself at the same time.
Had she partaken in the hideous sacrament afterward? Once Coco had cut out Joe Noone's organs, had Gabrielle eaten? Max shook his head, sagging further into himself.
“Gaby, no,” he whispered, an unconscious echo of the words he'd shouted minutes and months ago.
Lost and broken amongst a city of the lost and broken, he felt something sifting itself up out of the wreckage inside him. A question. Of all the things Coco had said, there had been one Max did not understand. You don't have his strength. Whose strength? What he had seen in that little house had been the Seventh Moment, and there could be no denying the words that had appeared on the street in chalk had been about Coco and Gabrielle. The Hollow Man Tempts the Oracle's Faithless Heir. She Succumbs.
But if Coco was the Hollow Man, and Gabrielle the Faithless Heir, then who was the Oracle?
Tumblers, clicking into place once more…
Max had learned a great many things tonight, and intuited others. Really, there were only two men the Oracle could be, and he knew one of them. Had seen him shot in a little house in 1965, with Hurricane Betsy howling outside. And he'd drunk with him after Gabrielle's funeral.
Ray had the answers, and always had. Either Ray was the Oracle, or it was the conjure-man, Matrisse, who was supposed to help Max go back and stop Gabrielle from dying. But he had no way of finding Ray. And the crazy old man had said that in the end, when Max had followed the map to his final destination, Matrisse would find him.
“Bastard,” he whispered. “Fucking son of a bitch.” What had Ray said, exactly, that day he'd given Max the map? Something about Gabrielle having the potential to be someone special. Or something special. How much of this journey had Ray manipulated from the beginning? Enough so that the map had not shown him the date of the Seventh Moment at first, withholding a vital piece of information. And why? Because Max might not have continued if he'd known what he was in for? Might not have been able to force himself to witness that scene?
He stood, still trembling. But now his shaking had less to do with shock and grief than it did with the magic that hummed through his body. He'd dragged his feet across the carpet of the Seventh Moment, picking up even more static, and as he walked it crackled on his skin, sparks cascading invisibly to the ground.
“Hey!” someone called.
Max spun, a scowl on his face, and saw the two young black guys watching him from the stoop of a house on the opposite side of the street. They had bottles of beer, and one—larger and more formidable than the other—had a lit cigarette dangling from his hand.
Fucking Tordu.
Max tensed, ready to run, ready to fight.
“You all right, man?” the big guy asked, pointing at him with the burning tip of his cigarette. Concerned.
The thinner, younger guy tapped the other's shoulder and murmured something in a low voice. He looked anxious, almost afraid, and Max realized that they weren't Tordu after all, just a couple of guys having a beer, wondering if the crazy-looking white man stalking down their street needed help.
Max remembered the night he'd taken the bike out to Lakeview, and the threat of violence he'd witnessed on the street. Every shadow had seemed filled with the promise of pain, of attack, of sudden death. Desperate, dangerous people prowled the city without anyone to rein them in. And now he'd come full circle. To the guys on the stoop, he was one of those people.
What could he have said to them?
Max hurried to the corner, glancing in both directions. To the right there seemed to be only dark buildings and a few distant streetlights. Several blocks to the left he saw the lights of a convenience store and a street where a few cars were passing, busy traffic by post-Katrina standards.
He also saw ghosts. People walking, laughing, dying. Carriages and cars. A phantasmagorical circus displaying the history of New Orleans in spectral figures. Max turned left and walked through them as though they were nothing more than mist. With every one he touched, he felt their Moments—the shifts in reality, air, weather, and time—but the dirty, too-big boots trod only on the pavement of 2005. He kept his eyes focused on the lights of the convenience store.
Lost and broken, no doubt.
And when you were lost, what you needed more than anything was a map.
He bought a map in the store. The skinny white clerk had black-rimmed glasses, a stubbly shaved head, and a one-inch strip of beard on his chin that hadn't earned the right to be considered a goatee. His arms were covered with demon tattoos that snaked around his biceps and striped his forearms. He didn't look like he had much of a sense of humor, but he took one look at Max in his Mattie's All-Night Crab Shack sweatshirt and then down at the map and he grinned. “Yeah, you look like you took a wrong turn somewhere.” Max nudged a ten-spot toward him. “More than one.” The guy gave a small shrug, rang up the purchase, and handed him his change. Max took the map, but only as far as a metal rack loaded with chips and pretzels, where he unfolded it and stared as three words took form—“The Last
Moment.” The arrow came next, but it took him a moment to realize that it pointed to a place he had been before.
Folding the map, Max turned to the clerk.
“Hey. Any chance you could call me a cab?”
In the couple of days since Max had first pulled up to the curb near Cooper's, with Ray behind the wheel of that little sports car, the place showed some signs of improvement. Two sections of cracked and taped window had been revealed, plywood taken down and added to the heaps of debris in the alley beside the building. Some enterprising soul had hand-painted a new sign, and the Coopers had hung it from the bent metal hanger out front.
The convenience-store clerk hadn't been able to get him anything resembling a real cab, but he knew a guy who'd started running a taxi service in the aftermath of the storm. The silver Cadillac gleamed in dawn's early light, a glimpse of sheer perfection right off the assembly line, except for the painted TAXI sign strapped to the roof. Max figured it for stolen, but didn't much care at this point. A ride was a ride. He and the driver, an amiable white guy with a bit of a Cajun accent, had agreed on twenty bucks. Max had been able to get money out of an ATM machine in the store, and when the Cadillac pulled up in front of Cooper's, Max gave the driver thirty instead.
Now he stood in front of the bar, staring at the duct tape that had been used to seal cracks in the windows. Dawn was breaking over the city, and the lights were on in Cooper's. Edgy funk music spilled out through the open door, along with the strong smell of coffee, and something frying in a breakfast pan. Ma
x stepped inside…
…and into the Final Moment.
He'd been here before. Not just this place, but this Moment. The brothers who owned the place now that their parents were dead were off toward the back by the bar they'd thrown together. Tires and plywood had been rigged for some of the tables. Fans whirred. Outside the window, the sun blazed again.
And at one table, he saw himself sitting across from crazy old Ray.
This was an earlier version of Max. Calmer, more innocent, less afraid. And though the dislocation of seeing himself struck Max hard initially, he realized that in reality, he was looking at a very different person.
He noticed something he had not seen before; Ray claimed to have been drinking in Cooper's for thirty years, but nobody even really looked at that table. The attention of the people around it wandered away. Gazes slid past as though they knew to look anywhere but at Ray and his guest. It might have been magic, but another possible explanation occurred to Max: fear.
“End of the journey,” he said.
The Cadillac cab ride to Cooper's had not taken long, but he had seen dozens of magical Moments on the way, bits of history unfolding, and hundreds of the ghosts of New Orleans. Max had watched them go by with no more interest than if he'd been gazing out at the passing landscape from the window of a train.
This Moment had much more substance. The stale stink of mold remained in the air. He heard the clink of glasses. Max thought that if he went up to the bar he would be able to pick up a bottle of beer, that he'd be able to drink it and have it quench his thirst. He was in this Moment more than he'd been in any other before.
He weaved a path amongst the tables until he stood only a few feet away from Ray. From himself. He watched as Ray produced the small clay bottle as if from nowhere, and saw his own surprised reaction, the disbelief in those past-Max features and the spark of hope in the younger Max's eyes.
The Map of Moments Page 25
