Gathering Deep

by Lisa Maxwell

We left the map and followed the debris-strewn pathway to the right, passing a limp, horseless carousel as we went. When we came to the entrance of Mardi Gras World, we had to pass under a half-collapsed archway. Huge, clown-like masks watched with empty eyes as we made our way beneath them, and once we were on the other side, everywhere we looked, more gruesome masks, their surfaces darkened with age and mold, leered at us from every surface.

  “This was a mistake,” I said, wishing I had picked the other direction. “It’s like they know we’re here.”

  Odane took my hand. “Come on,” he said, leading me farther into the madhouse world that we’d entered. “We need to hurry.”

  Onward we walked, steadily, carefully. Past the crumpled frame of a whirling ride, past countless trash bins topped with open-mouthed clowns that looked like they might come alive at any moment and jump up to devour us.

  “What’s that?” Odane said, training the beam on something that glinted in the dark.

  We inched closer to it. “Oh, no,” I said, my voice shaking as I stooped down near the camera. Gingerly, I picked up the broken body, but bits of the shattered lens fell to the ground as a feeling of triumph flowed through me.

  Bodies pressed around me, but I didn’t pay them any mind. Through the eyes of the mask I watched, following her from a distance through the crowd of the Quarter.

  I gasped. The vision wasn’t as vivid as the others, but I understood what it meant.

  “What?” Odane crouched down near me, catching me as I wobbled free of the vision. “Did you see something?”

  “It’s Lucy,” I said, sure. “Thisbe has her.”

  Odane took the camera from my shaking hands and slung the strap over his shoulder. “Where?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The vision didn’t go that far.”

  “Maybe you could try again?” When I hesitated, he gave my hand a squeeze. “I’ve got you, Chloe.”

  His eyes were so calm and sure as he urged me to take the camera again. Like he trusted me to do this. Like he knew I could.

  “I’m not getting anything else,” I said when I took the camera. “It happened fast. Thisbe was hiding in the crowd somewhere in the Quarter, and she took Lucy before Lucy could even fight her.” I looked around, the buildings lurking over me, threatening to box me in. To keep me there. “Where would Thisbe have taken her?”

  “Not anywhere out in the open,” Odane said finally. “She’d find a place to hide out. There—” He pointed to a large, square building with the silhouette of a jester lurking over it like a jack-in-the-box gone wrong. “Let’s try in there.”

  I wasn’t sure, but I followed as he led me to the entrance with its broken-down door, and then into the bowels of the building.

  Thirty-One

  Inside, the air was close, and it choked us with the heavy scent of rot and mold. And something else—something dark and sticky smelling. It was a scent that reminded me of that first day I’d visited Thisbe’s cabin.

  “I think this is it,” I said, coughing on the thickness and dust in the air.

  Odane peeled off his top shirt and tore a strip from it, leaving only his white tank covering his chest. “Here,” he said, wrapping the fabric around my face. “Don’t breathe it in.” Handing me the flashlight for a second, he tore another strip from the shirt and tied himself a mask as well. “Come on.”

  Slowly, we crept into the deep darkness of the building. It had been a funhouse once, so we had to watch our step or trip over the tracks sunk into the floor that should have carried riders through the darkened rooms.

  “Do you see that?” Odane said, pointing to a glow ahead of us.

  “I think so,” I whispered.

  “I’m not imagining it?”

  “Not unless I am, too.”

  He looked at me, the whites of his eyes glinting in the light thrown by the flashlight. With a tight nod, he led me forward, carefully stepping along the tracks. When we got to the source of the light—a set of swinging double doors—he put his finger up to where his mouth was under the mask, like he was motioning for me to be quiet. Then he waved us forward, pushing on the door slowly in case it creaked and gave us away, and then suddenly more quickly, and stepped through.

  I followed him and stopped dead in my tracks.

  The room was empty except for a pile of rags someone had been using for a bed and a rickety metal table, probably used by a mechanic or security guard at one time. But on the floor, laid out like an offering, there was a body wrapped in red string.

  “Lucy!” I rushed over to her, but she didn’t stir.

  She was burning up with fever beneath the string and trembled at my touch, but she didn’t wake.

  The red string—it didn’t seem like nearly enough to hold anyone. I touched a place where it had already rubbed Lucy’s skin raw, and as my hands brushed against the thread, I was in Thisbe’s mind again …

  She’d taken the boy from me, so it was only fitting for her to take his place.

  I took out the carved figure, the one I’d made for this occasion. The girl was still unconscious when I sliced into her hand and rolled the little doll in her blood. Carefully, I wrapped the wet figure with the red string until the blood was sealed beneath it, and then, happy with my work, I tucked the binding charm into my pocket.

  Energy fairly crackled around her, like her body was trying to call back the part of her soul I’d removed. Yes, the girl was exactly what I’d need. Once I found Augustine, we’d be able to live out our lifetimes together with the power her body gave us.

  Satisfied, I began wrapping the sleeping girl in the power of the string.

  When her body—and all it had to give—was bound up tight, I went over and crouched in front of the man slouched in the corner, until I was eye-level with him. My knees protested as I balanced on the balls of my feet, but I wanted to be close when I said what needed saying. I wanted to see the understanding when it finally lit in the eyes that had been following my every movement for the last few days.

  But how to begin?

  “When I was a girl,” I started, “the water ran sweet most of the year, as though the roots of the cane had grown deep down into the soil, down to the cool springs under the earth and seasoned them. But come late summer, the water would go rancid and taste of iron and rust, like the land had soaked up all the blood spilled during the harvest. Like the land had judged the sacrifice and found it wanting.

  “Those were the hardest months—when the heat flayed you. But in those months, your parched throat wouldn’t accept the water you tried to give it, because during those months, the water tasted of death. Those were the months we buried our dead in a hurry, without the proper rituals or any time at all to mourn. After, when the cane was boiling away and when the fields lay massacred by our blades, that’s when we waited for the new crop of men to arrive and replace the ones who had fallen.

  “There was always a new crop—of cane, of men, and even of hope. We hoped that this would be the last season, and still we hoped we would see the next. Most of all, we each hoped that something else might happen.”

  I hesitated. Even so many years later, the pain still felt as clear and distilled as the water that used to run from those sweet, sweet springs. But I’d lived with that pain for lifetimes, now. I’d live with it a bit longer.

  Lifting the boy’s chin between the sharp nails of my thumb and forefinger, I forced him to look at me. To see me. “When I learned what my mother was, that was the beginning of my something else, and when I saw his face for the first time, that was the end of it,” I said, waiting for that glimmer of understanding in the prisoner’s tired, bloodshot eyes.

  The man shifted but never once tried to pull away. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you ought to know. Because I’m giving you a gift.”

  “How is any of this a gift?” The words pulsed with anger.

  Good. Anger meant strength. Strength meant life. Life was what I needed from him.

>   I smiled then, not because I felt pleasure at his discomfort, but because I admired the strength I saw before me. “What I’m about to tell you is a gift, because most people don’t have any idea why they have to die.”

  I surfaced from the vision, gasping for air and shaking with the intensity of what I’d just seen.

  “I was right,” I whispered, as my own anger warred with the memory of her satisfaction. “She has him.”

  “Who?” Odane asked.

  I looked up at him and forced myself to say the rest. “She has Piers. He was here, too, a little earlier. But she took him somewhere. We were right—she’s going to trade him to Samedi for Augustine.”

  Thirty-Two

  “We need to get her out of here,” Odane said as he listened to the shallow breaths Lucy was taking. “She’s alive, but barely.”

  “But Piers—” I started.

  “We’ll find him,” he promised, his jaw tight as he spoke. “But Lucy might know something about where Thisbe went, and she won’t be able to tell us anything until we get her some help.” He pulled a knife out of his boot, ready to cut the threads away.

  “Don’t,” I said, grabbing his wrist.

  He gave me a puzzled look.

  “Thisbe did something else before she wrapped up Lucy’s body. I think she might have trapped her soul with a binding spell.” I tried to think back to everything I’d seen in the vision.

  “And a body can’t live without a soul,” Odane said, understanding. “So we’ll leave the thread be for now, and we’ll get her back to Aunt Odette.”

  Getting to Mama Legba’s place was a challenge. That late, the Quarter was packed with people—none of them all that sober. As we drove, I watched the crowd, wondering if Thisbe was out there somewhere, hiding in plain sight, waiting to find another victim. Or if we were already too late.

  Eventually, we made our way to the shop by the cathedral. Odane pulled into the alleyway behind it and parked illegally, so we could get Lucy into Mama Legba’s without anyone seeing us carrying around a tied-up white girl through the streets.

  Before we were even out of the car, the door opened and Mama Legba and Odeana came out.

  Odane brushed past his aunt and ignored his mother’s concerned expression as he carried Lucy in and laid her on the low couch. Mama Legba went over to Lucy and knelt next to her. Carefully, she touched her forehead, her cheeks.

  Mama Legba’ mouth was drawn tight and when her eyes met mine, I saw a fear in them I’d never seen there before.

  “What?” I said. “You can help her, can’t you?”

  “She ain’t in there, Chloe-girl,” Mama Legba murmured, and then glanced up at me. “But you knew that, didn’t you.”

  I nodded silently.

  “What did Thisbe do to her?” Mama Legba asked.

  “I think she bound her soul,” I whispered. My hands were shaking as I looked at Lucy’s quiet body. “Thisbe used another one of those little carved dolls, but she took the charm with her.”

  “Can we get these strings off the girl?” Odeana asked, pressing her hand to feel the heat coming off Lucy’s body.

  “As long as she got that charm, she got Lucy,” Mama Legba told me. “We take off the strings, we take away the only thing holding her to this world.”

  “She has Piers, too,” I said, and I told Mama Legba and Odeana everything I’d seen when I touched Lucy and everything Ikenna had told us about what it took to summon Baron Samedi.

  “But why not just summon him right then and there?” Odeana asked, ignoring her sister’s disapproving murmurs about Ikenna.

  “It hasn’t been five whole days yet,” I told her. “Sunset on day one to sunup on day five. That’s tomorrow.”

  “She could have just as well stayed where she was, though,” Odane admitted. “It would have been easier than moving a grown man somewhere else.”

  “It’s because she finally figured out what happened to Augustine,” I said slowly, thinking of the book covered in human skin.

  “Where you going?” Mama Legba called as I ran out the door and back to the Nova. I returned with the envelope filled with the copied journal.

  “There’s got to be something in here I missed,” I said, pulling out the pages and handing everyone a few. “In the past that Ikenna helped me see, Roman said something to Thisbe right before Augustine disappeared—he basically threatened to get to her through him. When she took Piers, he had this book with him. Not the copy, but the real book—the one with the cover of human skin.”

  “Which might actually be Augustine’s skin,” Odane said.

  “Yeah, and Thisbe’s had this book for days,” I continued. “She has the charm she bound Augustine to her with. There has to be something else that we’re missing—something that would make her risk taking Piers somewhere else instead of just performing the ritual to summon Samedi right there at the park.”

  “This here is nothing but marks and lines,” Odeana said, examining one of the pages. “How would this Thisbe make heads or tails of it?”

  “It’s not random scribbles,” I told her. “It’s a language from Nigeria.” I looked up at Mama Legba.

  “You meaning that Thisbe could have read this?” Mama Legba didn’t sound convinced.

  “I don’t know for sure, but you saw all of those tickets and things in that box we found. Thisbe traveled a lot—and she traveled to Liberia at some point. It’s close enough that it’s possible she traveled other places as well—maybe even Nigeria. It’s possible that she could have understood what this all says without these translations. I know, it’s a leap, but—”

  “Here,” Odeana said, holding out a page to her son. “Take a look at this.”

  Odane took the offered sheet of paper and frowned. “Well, that answers the question of what happened to Augustine.”

  When he handed the paper to me, I found myself looking at a sketch of Le Ciel Doux. Most of it was notated in French. A few of the strange symbols hadn’t been translated yet, but most of them had.

  “It does at that,” I said, unease turning my blood to ice. “She was already a loose cannon, but if she has this information, who knows what she might do. And she still has Piers … ”

  “We have to get to the big house,” Odane said.

  “Right now?” Mama Legba asked, still looking over the papers in her hand.

  “What do you expect them to wait for?” Odeana asked. “They either go now, or they’ll be going to a funeral.”

  “Odeana’s right,” I said. “It’s today.” I repeated Mama Legba’s words back to her: “Sundown to sunup on the fifth day. We don’t have time to wait.”

  “It’s not morning yet,” Odeana told us, but then she pinned her son with the kind of look that only a mother could give. “But don’t you even think of coming back unless you all in one piece.”

  “Wouldn’t come back any other way.” Odane gave his mom a peck on the cheek, and we started out the door.

  “Wait!” Mama Legba yelled from the doorway. When we turned to see what she wanted, her eyes were determined. “Don’t forget about the other charm,” she told us. “We got to burn it before it does any more damage to Lucy.”

  “Got it,” Odane said as he started to slide into the Nova.

  But I stopped him. “I’m driving this time,” I told him, taking the keys.

  His mouth quirked up as he raised his hand in surrender and backed away without argument. I started the engine with a roar, and then we raced back to Le Ciel and the nightmare that waited somewhere in the darkness. The nightmare I’d once called Momma.

  Thirty-Three

  The grounds of the plantation were bathed in shadow as I pulled through the heavy gates and steered the car down

  the fork in the drive that would take us to the big house. The Nova’s headlights cut through the darkness and lit up the white columns of the mansion, causing them to throw dark shadows against the house.

  I cut the engine and the lights, but the mansion still s
eemed to glow in the darkness, rising up in front of us like an enormous tomb.

  Not like a tomb, I corrected. The whole place was a tomb because of what Roman Dutilette had done to build it.

  How many times had I stood in those rooms and told gawking tourists about how the whole plantation system along the River Road was built on the blood and sweat of people who were forced to labor in captivity? I’d never known how much more devastating that truth was in the case of Le Ciel Doux.

  Odane sidled up closer to me. “We don’t know for sure they’re in there,” he said in an attempt to build up my courage and his own. “We might be wrong.”

  “They’re in there,” I told him, pulling the tarot card from the visor and tucking it into my pocket. Then I got out of the car before I could change my mind.

  If my mother—if Thisbe—had any idea that her lover had been captured by Roman Dutilette, if she had read, as we had, how Roman had sacrificed Augustine, she wouldn’t be anywhere else.

  It was all in the journal. How Roman had learned young that there was more power available in this world than money could buy. How he’d searched for ways to make that power his.

  He’d detailed every sacrifice he’d made over the years, every spell or curse he ever tried, but he’d killed Augustine specifically to hurt Thisbe. Because Thisbe had embarrassed him and he couldn’t touch her. Because that scared him, and fear made him angry and desperate. He’d written about how he’d collected Augustine’s blood to ward the grounds of his father’s house and about the intricate process of preserving his skin to bind the book. But he’d never buried Augustine. He’d never done any of the rituals to send the soul on its way back to the beginning.

  Because he wanted more than Augustine’s death. He wanted his life as well.

  By the time Roman inherited the land from his father and was ready to build his mansion, there hadn’t been much left of Augustine but some bone, but he’d ground them up with all the rest of the bodies and souls he’d collected over the years and he used them to create the concrete of those pillars that ringed Le Ciel. Because he believed that the power his sacrifices demonstrated would protect him and his descendants from any sort of attack or magic.