The Tangled Bridge

by Rhodi Hawk

  Gil softened his tone. “You say we can’t use pigeonry because it’s the devil’s work, but that’s exactly what we resort to every time we’re in a fix.”

  “I know.”

  She took his hand and folded it beneath her fingers. “I’m doing the best I can.”

  “We are, too.”

  “Please don’t steal again.”

  “Honey.”

  “Even when Trigger pigeoned that man for sausages, that was stealing.”

  Gil shook his head. “I’ll tell you a secret. After we got rid of Mother, Trigger made a deal with me. He said if there has to be sin, he and I were gonna be the sinners. He said you should stay clean of it. And I agreed.”

  “Gil, that’s ridiculous!”

  “You’re the only one who has a chance—”

  “Stop it!”

  “Well, we got Rosie covered, too, for now. But I think in the end she’s gonna be more like us.”

  “Stop!” Patrice cried.

  Gil stopped. His gaze went to the Bible folded across Patrice’s chest, then over to his twin. Trigger was staring at a green-painted wall. Patrice could tell by the way he was looking that he had found Rosie.

  Bring her here! Patrice thought.

  And she knew she could do more than that. She could see what Trigger saw if she would allow the briar to unfold in that way. Tracking was a special skill, like pigeon games. It was the kind of skill Maman was always trying to acquire, but could only get at by proxy through her children or by using crude spells that were never reliable. Skills like tracking, pigeonry, and breathlessness came only through focused exploration. One thing to be lost in the briar; another to explore it. A sin to explore it. To explore was to condone.

  But she had to get Rosie and she couldn’t just let her brothers continue to carry out her sins by proxy.

  She left Gil and moved toward Trig. The muscles in his thin back were tense. All his talk, all his posturing, and yet Trigger was just a little boy. Never was that so obvious than times like now, when he was straining to be something bigger than himself. He alone was supposed to bring back Marie-Rose.

  Patrice fixed her gaze on the painted green wall and let it open up the way Trig might look at it. Let it show reflections of their sister—not like some magic mirror, but in an all-encompassing kind of inner knowledge. The thorns moved. They stretched and turned, growing, writhing. They formed the outline of Marie-Rose. But the shape of her was only a small piece of it. The thorns brought the truth of what was happening. Not the sights, smells, sounds. They brought the feeling.

  Marie-Rose was far away. A mile or two already, even though she’d been right here by Patrice’s side minutes ago when they’d seen Francois on the raft. Patrice’s stomach knotted at this realization. That this time Marie-Rose hadn’t just wandered. That this time—

  Rosie was in an automobile.

  She was with Maman.

  That horrible creature made of tar was there, too. Maman was speaking to it. She addressed it with words from her mouth and words from her mind. It had left smudges on Rosie’s dress.

  Patrice could see beyond her mother and straight into her mother’s intentions. Maman had a whole life that she’d built up in New Orleans. She had people who worked for her, bad men. These men would do anything Maman asked of them.

  Patrice saw a flash into Rosie’s fear. A sudden pain down the back of the neck. A sense of outrage.

  Rosie was lashing out. But she was fading from view. The sense of her disappearing behind a cobweb. Patrice focused with everything she could muster. A window splintered into a thousand crystals beneath Rosie’s foot. Blood. Pain. Rage. Another cobweb. And another.

  And Rosie was gone.

  thirty-six

  LOUISIANA, NOW

  MADELEINE OPENED HER EYES. Her vision was still obscured, trying to see through the silken web. She was nowhere that she recognized. She could make out a cot beneath her, walls of decaying wood, sunlight piercing through knotholes and gaps between boards. No windows. A door, though; she thought she could see a door.

  She could barely move. Parts of her body hurt.

  No one else was there. Not a soul. That was the first day.

  thirty-seven

  LOUISIANA, NOW

  SOMETIME DURING THE NIGHT Madeleine roused. Her bladder, that’s what woke her.

  She managed to sit up all the way. Her hands were bound behind her back. Not bound by the webs—though they still seemed intact—her hands were bound by actual twine.

  But her feet and legs were free, which meant she could stand up and walk about the room. This room, though, wasn’t just a room; it seemed to be the entire structure. Some kind of one-room shanty. Black as pitch but for two distinct shards of moonlight. She crept from the cot and kneel-crawled to those shards and they illuminated her jeans, if only a few inches at a time.

  “I can’t see anything,” she said aloud, and her voice sounded froggy.

  The effort of crawling that small distance wore her out and she wanted to lie down right there, curl around her moonlight, and go back to sleep. Except she did need to pee.

  “Severin,” she said.

  And she waited. But Severin didn’t come.

  Wouldn’t you know.

  The air was fetid and thick and her mouth had a horrible taste. She needed water, too. Water in and water out. Night creatures were making up for the poor visibility by replacing it with sound. Crickets and frogs and birds. Their calls were so rhythmic that in her blindness she could almost see their sound patterns.

  What had happened to Ethan and Bo, she wondered. Had Zenon discovered Bo was still alive?

  She had to get the hell out of this place.

  She remembered there had been a door. Had seen it when she’d opened her eyes during the daylight hours. She mustered her strength and veered toward the wall where the moonlight was coming through, and then backed along it with her fingers feeling her way. She turned a corner filled with cobwebs and kept moving. There.

  Her bound hands searched in light hops along the outline of a crossbar until she found a latch. She pulled it and the door squeaked open. Something splashed.

  She pushed through. The doorway wasn’t full height so she had to lean over, which was fine because she had no energy to stand up straight. The fresh air tasted like heaven.

  She ventured the thought: I’m free.

  But it didn’t feel the least bit true.

  The shanty was floating. Beneath her feet, the boards formed a raft. It seemed to be anchored because she could see no tether line. A bucket stood just by the door. Her latrine, apparently.

  She called, “HELP!” and then listened to her voice disappear into a vast nothing.

  Water all around. A very broad expanse, and it reflected stars. They crawled across the surface in a wake sent by some unseen thing that had just jumped in and was now swimming away. Along a distant shoreline, fragrant trees stood bathed in moonlight.

  thirty-eight

  LOUISIANA, NOW

  CHLOE HAD PUT HER out here, of course, though Madeleine couldn’t say why. Her mind was so foggy she was having difficulty thinking through any reasoning in it or, for that matter, how to escape. And she couldn’t make herself stay awake for long. Pain was usually what roused her. Pain where she was bound or injured or bitten by insects. They swarmed her like she was an abandoned picnic spread—ants, mosquitoes, spiders, flies, beetles—all creeping and buzzing and sampling her. Incessantly.

  When she awoke outside the floating shanty at sunrise she found jugs of clean water. They were suspended beneath the surface on trap lines tied to the raft. She needed only to hoist one up and drink from it, though having her hands tied behind her back made it a distinct pain. She used her feet and knees and teeth and bound hands. The sunrise drink of water seemed immediately followed by a sunset, and nothing but sleep and unbearable heat in between. And then the sunrise-heat-sunset pattern started over again, and again, and Madeleine realized she ought to have ke
pt count. There couldn’t have been more than three or four days, or … five.

  Her body was hurting. The scratch on the back of her neck seemed to reopen itself again and again. Sometimes she awoke to fresh pain there. The inability to move her arms had gone from discomfort to soreness to excruciating pain that went back down to dull again.

  The first jug of water was already empty and it now floated above the surface like a fishing bob.

  No food.

  But after that came the day when it rained, and that’s when things started to change.

  * * *

  A THUNDER CLAP DESPITE burning sunlight. The shanty was suffocatingly hot and she’d left the door open to allow in the breeze. Still no thorns, no silver mist. There had been no sign of Severin or any bramble since she’d been wrapped by the spiders.

  White sunlight from the doorway threw a coffin shape on the flooring, the glare so bright that everything else had turned black except for the ceiling. There, dancing hoops of sunlight reflected up from the water. She stared at the patterns, and then realized that there was a person up there. Up above.

  She sat up with a start.

  He was high in the corner where the walls met the ceiling, his arms and legs spread like a tree frog. He began to move when she sat up, creeping along the ceiling toward the center of the roof. His features were obscured in the dark. All she could see were his wide, light eyes and an unruly beard.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  That’s when she saw the blade in his hand.

  She threw herself off the cot and back-scooted to the wall but he dropped down in front of her, blocking the door. He raised the blade.

  She screamed. She braced herself against the wall and kicked at his hand. The blade sliced into her ankle and she screamed again.

  She tried to get a fix on his mind. Tried to pigeon him. Nothing—slippery as a lumen though she saw no light.

  But he was pausing. The glaring sun behind him, he was only a silhouette. Shirtless and barefoot with hair that looked like he’d cut it with that same knife, wearing just a pair of trousers that had been torn to the knees.

  He raised the blade again. But as Madeleine braced herself to try another kick, the metal caught the sunlight and reflected back into her eyes. They teared over. She blinked and turned her head away. He moved the blade ever so slightly, keeping the glare trained on her eyes. On her face.

  She moved along the wall until she had jammed herself into the corner, heedless of the cobwebs that stuck to her hair and the wounds on the back of her neck. Of which, she was certain now, there were more than one.

  His posture had settled. He no longer seemed about to spring at her. Instead he sank to a crouch, and he’d let the hand with the blade rest across his knees. He turned his head and looked out over the water. Ripples of light reflected on his face and she saw that he was very young. Perhaps a teenage boy. Skinny as a whip.

  And then he was gone. She was barely aware of him moving, she just felt the raft tilt and heard the splash.

  thirty-nine

  LOUISIANA, NOW

  SHE SLEPT. OR PERHAPS, lost consciousness. Rain was pouring down outside the shanty and through various points in the roof. The slice in her ankle felt hot.

  She needed rather urgently to use the latrine. She hoisted herself up from the corner and made her way out of her jeans, then stumbled out into the rain. A sudden cramp hit her before she could manage to position herself over the bucket. She went down, falling sideways on the raft, and her bladder released involuntarily, a fierce pain in its wake. She shuddered as it squeezed and then subsided. A urinary tract infection.

  She closed her eyes and let the downpour wash her. Tears welled up and flushed away. Her body was a series of fevers—on her ankle, in her bladder, in the cuts at the back of her neck—and she was also beginning to feel a sinister kind of tickle in her ear.

  If Chloe wanted her dead she wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to stash her away on this raft. Yet that strange boy had clearly intended to kill her, and then for whatever reason, had changed his mind. It made no sense.

  And why, at the one time when she actually wanted it, was she unable to evoke the briar?

  Even if she were to brave an escape off this raft, knowing that she could now hold her breath for extended periods of time, she could never muster enough strength to make it to shore with her hands bound. Nor would she know where to turn once she got there.

  Madeleine realized she was sobbing now as the rain washed over her. But what terrified her the most were the thoughts of Ethan and Bo. Without her help—her bird’s eye view from the briar and her skills in the pigeon exercises—Ethan and Bo had no defense against Zenon.

  Having vowed to look after Bo, Ethan would protect him to the death. This was the thought she could not bear.

  forty

  NEW ORLEANS, 1927

  BACK IN 1925, WORKERS had driven pilings into the Mississippi River floor to begin construction for a great bridge. The local authority had had no budget and no real belief that they could actually build it. This had simply been a way to convert a dream to some kind of material stage.

  But, in driving those pilings, they established the right through the current congressional authority to initiate real construction.

  Each time the ferry crossed the river, its passengers would comment on the pilings that waited to support a “someday bridge”—even after the workers faded away and the job site had gone quiet for months, a skeleton of something that had never been born.

  No wonder that, two years later, the project had halted. There was no money for this bridge. But now the people and the politicians shared a common idea—even though some doubted it could ever be a sound one—the point was that the idea existed for all to share.

  Patrice shared it. She and her siblings had heard the commentators through the radio back at Terrefleurs. Some had been inspired, speaking of an innovative modern age. Others had criticized the effort as a frivolity that had no real hope of manifestation. Especially now, after the floods of this past spring of 1927, when the Mississippi River had roused and shaken like a dog, tossing away man-made adornments. It had taken their father’s life, among so many others.

  The bridge site had attracted men who came looking for work, even though it was common knowledge that construction had stalled. There was of course no work available now. But those who needed laborers knew they could come to the bridge site to hire hands, and so a kind of work camp had emerged of its own.

  * * *

  ROSIE’S TRAIL HAD GONE cold. Even Trigger couldn’t find her anymore.

  Patrice didn’t ask the thing that she feared most: Did Mother kill her?

  There was no one to ask.

  But Rosie wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be. There remained a well of stillness inside Patrice’s heart, one that kept reason despite the panic. If Marie-Rose were dead, then they’d be able to find her body. Their mother had concealed her somehow. It had to do with that scratch down the nape.

  In many ways, Maman was no match for them. The children inherited the ability to walk the briar from Papa. This had always frustrated Maman. Maybe the jealousy she felt for her own children was what embittered her toward them. But though Maman might not be able to direct the briar the way her children could, she did have tricks.

  “We gotta go after her,” Gil said.

  Trigger said, “Where? All I know is where I saw her when she disappeared.”

  “So that’s where we go!”

  “She was in an automobile, driving, and I don’t know where she’s goin.”

  “So find her! You’re the tracker!”

  Trigger hesitated.

  Patrice raised her hands to her cheeks and shook her head. “Even if we could find her, we wouldn’t be able to get her back. Maman was there with a mess of crooks at her beck and call. If we go after Rosie now it’ll be like last night, only it’ll end badly. We can’t face off against all of them. We’re not even in their worl
d right now. Our bodies are, but we’re … here. In the briar.”

  Trigger nodded. “I think Maman’s laid a trap to try to get us all one by one.”

  Gil’s face had gone completely ashen, and he stared first at Trigger and then Patrice as though waiting for one of them to say something that would resolve it all. The cunning plan.

  Patrice returned her brother’s stare and then had to drop her gaze. Her throat had gone stiff. She didn’t dare think of Rosie’s face.

  “Find Ferrar,” was all she could get out.

  Trigger needed no further prompt. He turned to the wall and began the same method he’d used when he went looking for Rosie.

  Gil said, “Criminy, Treese, what’s Ferrar gonna do for us?”

  “He’ll help us. We need it. Especially now that we’re stuck in the briar. He’s the only one who’ll understand what’s happened to us. He can be our ears and eyes.”

  “Treese! He’s a lumen and we’re surrounded by river devils! Don’t you think there might be trouble?”

  “We have to take that chance! Ferrar can help us get Rosie back and go hide. He knows all the little islands and coves along the entire Gulf from when he was running liquor for Maman.”

  “Meanwhile we’re just leaving Rosie behind! With Maman!”

  “It isn’t as though I want to! I’m all ears, Gil! Let’s hear your better idea!”

  His cheeks went dark and he turned away.

  Trigger turned back to them and said, “I found Ferrar. A few miles away.”

  Gil snorted. Patrice dearly wished they were not in the briar now that they knew where Ferrar was. She should have let Trigger do this right from the start instead of trying to walk some ridiculous line of morality.

  Trig said, “He’s at the bridge. Just like that man told Gil. Only, there’s no bridge there.”

  Patrice shook her head. “It’s under construction. That’s what they said on the radio.”

  “Alright then. We just head in the direction of the Mississippi and then follow her curve for a few miles.”