Catacomb

by Madeleine Roux

  He pressed one forefinger to his nose and winked at them. “Any vegetarians in our midst?”

  “No, but vegetables kind of sound heavenly after four days of fast food,” Abby said, her eyes going a little glossy.

  “Right on, right on.” Dan couldn’t place Steve’s accent. East coast, maybe, but slowly descending into a smoother, Creole twang. Steve shuffled over to the refrigerator and bent low to inspect what was inside. “Cauliflower, some bell peppers, and an onion or two. We’ll have to do some grocery shopping soon, anyway, so I’ll put more vegetables on the list.”

  Abby thanked him, and then Jordan grabbed a few sodas and made their excuses. They followed Jordan up the narrow staircase to a dark, cool second floor. There were plenty of bags and boxes to unpack from the trunk, but Jordan wanted to relax a little first.

  Uncle Steve had hung framed pictures on the wall along the stairwell. Dan paused in front of one of them. It showed three men on a street, or at least outside. The men wore simple masks, with exaggerated eyeholes and long, curved beaks. Dan shuddered, hating the way the black, gaping eyes made the wearers look lifeless, almost as if there was nothing there behind the painted plaster faces. Hopefully there wouldn’t be any of those damn pictures in their bedroom or he’d never get to sleep.

  “We’ve got the room at the end of the hall, Dan. Abby’s in the office. I know you’re probably internet starved so I’ll get my laptop set up and grab the Wi-Fi password from Steve.” Jordan stopped in the hall and flicked on a light switch, bringing one of the old chandeliers to life. “You can have first dibs on the bathroom, Abby. Hot water’s a little sluggish, so give it a minute.”

  He led Dan to their room, which was small but reasonably tidy, with two ancient futons in opposite corners, both of them made up with mismatched flannel and cotton sheets.

  “This place gives new meaning to the term ‘bachelor pad,’ but I bet you two will get on famously,” Dan said, dropping his backpack onto one of the futons and sitting down. A spring from the frame bounced up to jab him in the rear.

  “Hey!” Abby glided in through the open doorway, bringing her camera with her. Her dark eyes slid to where Jordan was booting up his laptop on the table under the window. “Mind if I leave these to upload while I take a shower? I’m running out of space after the cemetery.”

  “Uh-huh, now it’s obvious you two only want me for my computer,” Jordan said. He submitted to a playful ruffling of his hair from Abby, then abdicated his chair to her. “All yours. And then yours,” he said, glancing at Dan. “You’re doing a good job of not saying anything, but I know you’re dying to email that Maisie chick.”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Yup.” Jordan tossed Dan one of the sodas and then cracked his own open. “Jesus, Abby, how many damn pictures did you take?”

  “A few?” she answered sheepishly, giving him a goofy smile before zooming out the door. “Thanks!”

  “That girl . . .”

  Jordan took a few sips from his soda and then placed it on the desk next to his computer. He flung himself back on the futon, sighing as he nestled down into the pile of blankets and pillows. “Oh, mattress, how I have missed you.”

  Rather than watch his friend flop back and forth listlessly on the futon, Dan stood and went to the desk, taking a few gulps of the fizzy root beer Jordan had given him. He sat at the folding chair in front of the laptop, watching Abby’s files transfer into a new folder, the preview thumbnails popping up every few seconds.

  “Wow, yeah, she really did take a lot, didn’t she?” Dan moused over a few of the thumbnails. He noticed the pictures from the cemetery, shuddering at the image of the child’s jawbone. So she hadn’t deleted that photo after all. “Oh, nice. That woman at the library let her take pictures of the gangster’s stuff in the archive.”

  “What was in there? Cigars? A bowler hat?”

  Dan leaned closer to the laptop, squinting. The photographs showed an aging cardboard box that was beginning to collapse in on itself, which was placed inside a sturdier wooden box.

  “A few postcards, a tin for something, cigarettes maybe . . . an old lighter, a copy of Julius Caesar. Weird. Wait, ugh—are those bones?”

  “What? Awesome!” Jordan popped up from the futon, leaning on the back of Dan’s chair to get a look. “Oh, dude, I think those are bones. Fingers maybe? Probably fake.”

  “Fake? Jordan, he was a gangster. Back in his day, even the medical models of skeletons were real.”

  Down the hall, he heard the squeak of the shower being turned off.

  “Damn,” Jordan whispered

  “Yeah, damn,” Dan said. “I wonder why Abby didn’t mention this?”

  Dan wanted to stay forever in the warm, cozy bubble of feeling brought on by the warm café au lait in his hand and the improbable number of beignets in his stomach. Licking the powdered sugar left on his fingertips, he watched Uncle Steve talk Abby into yet another of the dusty white doughnuts. She didn’t put up much of a fight. None of them had.

  Cafe Du Monde was nothing like Dan had pictured. For some reason, the name conjured images of writers and poets, silver-haired old men chain-smoking and reading tattered books or scribbling their masterpieces by hand. Instead the café existed in a constant state of bustle, the white and green interior blurred by the constant coming and going of tourists, who stayed for five minutes to get the token experience before trundling away, three or four beignets heavier.

  “So what next?” Jordan asked. His loose black tee was dusted with sugar, but in his infinitely cool way it looked intentional, or at least artsy.

  Dan felt sticky and slovenly, and glanced around for a place to wash up.

  “The market, definitely. It’s just there,” Steve said, pointing to a wall of the café and what presumably lay beyond. “Anything you want, you can find there. Food, clothes, souvenirs.”

  They vacated their table, and a server in a paper hat and apron swooped in immediately to tidy it for the next customers. A line stretched out from the back of the café as eager caffeine addicts waited in line for the takeaway window. Jordan and his uncle began to discuss plans for the fall. Jordan was attending Tulane, a private college right here in New Orleans, and Steve was paying, a fact that clearly made Jordan sheepish. His uncle was giving up a lot to help Jordan out with tuition and a place to stay, and Dan couldn’t help but admire the man for it.

  Dan pulled at his shirt, trying to break the sweaty seal it had formed against his chest. Pennsylvania got hot, but it had nothing like this relentless humidity that sat over the city in a soupy funk. Everyone moved slowly here, as if wading through an actual liquid atmosphere. At least everyone was sweaty and gross, which made Dan feel less conspicuous when his hairline dampened.

  The sun hung low behind a hazy stream of clouds. Following Steve, Dan let himself be buoyed along by the crowds surging toward the outdoor market. He spotted a long stretch of tents set up in the street, which was wide enough to be a square. Cop cars and wooden blockades kept traffic from turning directly onto the strip where the market buzzed.

  The four of them dodged into the shade of the tents, vendors hemming them in on both sides. Counters to buy fresh or cooked seafood sprang up, and stands to buy sandwiches, oysters, lobster. . . . Dan didn’t know how it was possible to be hungry again after wolfing down so many pastries, but the smells were intoxicating.

  Abby snapped pictures of some of the stranger stands. One selling taxidermied alligator parts interested her in particular. The shop next door sold a vast array of Mardi Gras masks, from the two-buck plastic junk to handmade masterpieces embellished with beads, crystals, and ostrich plumes.

  “Hey, Steve,” Dan said, nodding toward the masks. “There’s a picture hanging on your stairs of some people in weird masks. And I saw masks like them before, at a library in Shreveport. Is that a thing down here?”

  “Oh, those creepy old things.” Uncle Steve laughed and smoothed back the gray hair from his forehead. “Back in
the day that was the tradition for Mardi Gras. They didn’t much use the more ornate Venetian style you see around now. Myself, I found those pictures at a flea market a few years back, thought they fit the house.”

  That certainly made the masks less creepy, Dan thought, flicking the chin of one of the sparkly, grinning faces that hung from the booth.

  Abby lowered her camera, letting it swing by its strap. She shouldered up next to him, her bare, brown arms glistening from the heat.

  “What is it with us and masks?” she asked.

  “I know. Masks and hoods and motorcycle helmets. Maybe we should buy some of these and see what we’re missing,” he said. “I saw some of your photos uploading. They look good.”

  “Thanks.” Abby beamed up at him, a tiny spot of powdered sugar stuck to her chin. Dan was about to reach up and wipe it away for her when he felt his phone vibrating in his pocket.

  Please be Sandy texting, he silently begged.

  He drew out his cell phone. He could already feel his stomach tightening.

  Not this again.

  Abby read his expression. “It’s him, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Dan said. “But it’s basically blank. Just a few ellipses.”

  “Can you block the profile? This is getting ridiculous.”

  Dan agreed, but hadn’t this Micah impersonator warned him the other night of the visitors to their tent? He looked up, wondering if maybe this was another warning. Scanning the fringes of the square, he looked for motorcycles, someone photographing them—anything at all suspicious or out of place. But that was just about everything in New Orleans, he decided, seeing two half-dressed women drunkenly grinding against each other outside of a sports bar.

  But wait . . .

  His eyes focused behind them, and there, sitting on the hood of a red vintage muscle car, were a young man and woman.

  It was them—it had to be. Without a second thought, Dan took off running. And this time, he wasn’t going to stop until he got some answers.

  “Why are you following us?” Dan shouted as he ran, startling the drunk, dancing girls and a cluster of pigeons out of his way. He hopped the wooden barricade protecting the square from traffic, barreling toward the red car.

  “Why?” he yelled again.

  Already the guy and girl were scrambling to get inside the car. Dan reached the car, sweating hard and out of breath, just as the boy slammed the driver-side door shut. But his window was open and Dan latched on to the edge. A dark-haired guy who looked to be in his twenties stared back, his eyes blazing.

  “Who are you?” Dan clung to the window even as the guy turned the key in the ignition. “Why were you photographing me and my friends? What the hell do you want?”

  “You want to know who I am? Here.” The guy shoved a business card at him. “Meet us later. Eight o’clock sharp. I don’t want to talk here, for more reasons than one.”

  When Dan didn’t take his hands off the window, the guy flicked the card at him. It hit him in the neck and then fluttered to the ground, distracting Dan just long enough that the guy had a chance to back down the street into an alley, rolling up his window with a grim look on his face. Still full of adrenaline, Dan stooped to sweep up the card and then took off after the car. Immediately, he collided with a man trying to unpack his trumpet for busking. Dan apologized and tried to keep going, but the car had found a break in the foot traffic, speeding too far ahead for Dan to catch up.

  He swore under his breath.

  Close. So close.

  Dan stared down at the card, finding scrolling black print on an off-white background.

  Berkley & Daughters:

  Purveyors of the antique, aged, and absurd—since 1898.

  New Orleans

  No address. No phone number. Just a name and a time.

  They would have to be enough.

  The sounds of slurping and gulping were almost as loud as the music, and getting more nauseating by the second. Dan stared down at his tray of oysters and then pushed it away, unable to dredge up any enthusiasm for cold, raw shellfish.

  Jordan took what Dan refused to eat, spooning red sauce into the craggy shells before bolting it all down.

  “I think we should go,” Dan said for the third time.

  His friends seemed hell-bent on ignoring him.

  “What have we learned about this kind of thing?” Jordan asked, lowering his voice so Uncle Steve wouldn’t hear. There was little danger of that, though, since Steve was doing just about everything he could to flirt with their waitress. At the moment, he was at the bar “ordering a drink,” even though there was table service. “It’s usually a trap. Someone winds up hurt or dead. Hardly the way you want to spend your first night in N’Awlins.”

  Dan sighed, looking down at the Berkley & Daughters card sitting on the red-and-white checked tablecloth. It was barely visible in the low light. He had to wonder why it was so dark in the oyster shack, if not to keep people from actually seeing what they were swallowing.

  “Look, whoever is sending messages from Micah’s account keeps contacting me whenever these people show up,” Dan said, meeting Jordan’s eye. “Either they’re the ones behind the messages, or there’s another connection there, and I want to know what it is. Don’t you?”

  “Do you think there’s going to be a reasonable explanation?” Abby asked, chiming in from across the table. She sipped her sweet tea, then wiped at her chin, only now catching the powdered sugar stain that he’d noticed before. “Do you think it’s going to set your mind at ease? Or will it just make things worse?”

  Dan stalled, stumped. Put like that . . . “Well, I don’t know. But I really don’t think this would be that big of a risk. These two didn’t seem all that scary up close. Maybe there is a logical explanation.”

  Wouldn’t that be a change of pace?

  Jordan chewed at the inside of his cheek, sharing a look with Abby before adjusting his glasses and saying, “Felix didn’t seem all that scary at first, either. Neither did any of those students mixed up in the Scarlets. Just because someone seems okay up close doesn’t mean they’re innocent.”

  “Well, that’s a terrible philosophy to take through life,” Dan said.

  “You’re not going to drop this, are you?” Sighing, Jordan finished another oyster and then pushed his empty basket away. “Will you at least let me ask Uncle Steve about this place? It would make me feel better if he knew about it.”

  That was a bargain Dan could easily make. “By all means.”

  They waited until Steve returned to the table on his own—to his credit, he’d actually managed to obtain a new drink—and then Jordan showed him the card.

  “Sure, I know it,” Uncle Steve said immediately. “Little antique place just a few blocks from the house. They do a mean poetry slam there once a month. Nice family owns it, I think. One of the sons is usually behind the counter.”

  Dan cleared his throat softly, trying not to look too smug.

  “You win,” Jordan said, putting up his hands. “Uncle Steve seal of approval granted. Let’s just hope this nice boy behind the counter is willing to talk.”

  “I feel like the adults should have chaperones here,” Jordan whispered, pulling Abby and Dan in closer to him as they navigated the New Orleans streets that evening.

  “What about us?” Abby asked.

  “At least we’re sober.”

  Dan laughed, but it died quickly in his throat. His upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood back home felt totally safe, even quaint, at night. Here, shadows moved between shallow pools of lamplight, and sometimes a laugh or a shout burst out of an open doorway or a window. He could smell the lake, but the humidity dampened the fresh air, and any time they passed by a restaurant, the harsh bite of spices cooking and sizzling overpowered everything else. Groups brushed by them, most too stumbling and rowdy to notice who or what they were knocking into.

  “I feel like we’re back on a college campus,” Abby said. “I’m just glad this is
n’t too much of a walk from your uncle’s.”

  “So what do you think, Abs? Wanna stay here with me for your big year off?” Jordan asked, grinning. “I bet Steve would let you stay in that office as long as you want.”

  “It certainly feels . . . artistic . . . here.” Her tone didn’t ring with interest. “But if I don’t stay in New York, I was thinking maybe L.A., just for a real change of pace.”

  That was about as far from Chicago as it got. Dan wondered if maybe he could convince her to tag along with him, but he decided that was a conversation for another time.

  Leaving behind the French Quarter, they passed tattoo parlors open late and a handful of noisy bars, ever more patrons spilling out onto the sidewalk. Then, following the directions on Jordan’s phone, they turned onto a quieter side street that ran toward the river, and the noisiness gave way to a calmer nighttime hush. Dan breathed a little easier.

  Beyond a bookstore just beginning to close up shop and a candle emporium, they finally found themselves outside a wide storefront window with the name printed across the grimy glass. It was hardly a store that invited you in. Dan could barely make out the BERKLEY & DAUGHTERS in faded gold lettering, and dusty red curtains were drawn behind the panes.

  “Charming,” Jordan muttered, motioning for Dan to try the door.

  It opened with the sound of a tinkling bell. Inside, it was almost pitch-black. A smattering of candles lined the floor, but Dan had to pause with his hand on the door, trying to get his bearings. The red candles, he realized, were giving off an overpowering scent of clove. Gradually his eyes adjusted, and he noticed a small, round table set up just a few yards into the shop.

  Four people sat holding hands around the table, a small tray heaped with trinkets centered among them.

  “I think it’s a séance,” Jordan stage-whispered. “Looks like when my friends used to try and freak each other out with Ouija boards in middle school.”