by Bryan Camp
Her aura of indifference allowed her to slip past the ordinary barriers of EMPLOYEES ONLY signs and let her peek over nurses’ shoulders when they logged into their patients’ records—which made searching the database for Ramses St. Cyr and John Doe as simple as it was illegal—and the ghost word gave her access to the more secure areas like the ICU and the cold chambers of the morgue without needing a magnetized ID badge. Just like her earlier search, Renai wandered the hospital’s halls in a growing fog of frustration and doubt. It wasn’t until they’d gotten to the morgue at the depths of Touro’s labyrinth, that Cordelia finally broke her silence.
“What song is that?” she asked.
Renai had grown so used to the psychopomp’s quiet, still presence that she’d almost forgotten the little bird was there. And it wasn’t until Cordelia pointed it out that Renai realized she’d been humming. She knew the song, though, the same one that had been stuck in her head the whole time she’d been wandering up and down the identical taupe-walled, fluorescent-lit hospital hallways and inspecting the variations on the theme of antiseptic-stinking, frigid-aired autopsy rooms. “‘St. James Infirmary,’” she said.
“You say that like I should know it,” Cordelia said.
Renai made a noise in the back of her throat. “Made famous by Louis Armstrong? Then sung by basically every New Orleans musician ever?” She half sung, half muttered the first couple of lines. “I went down to St. James Infirmary. Saw my baby there, she was stretched out on a long white table. So cold, so sweet, so fair. Nothing?”
“Can’t say it’s a path I’ve walked.”
“Girl. Where have you been ’pomping all this time? Baton Rouge?” Renai dug in her pocket for her phone. “We have to remedy this right quick so we can stay friends.” When Renai unlocked her phone, she saw a notification she didn’t recognize. After a minute of swiping through menus, she realized that it indicated a voicemail, the first she’d ever gotten on this phone. She knew without checking that it had to be from Opal, since the prophet was the only person—living or dead—who knew her number. “Hang on,” she said to Cordelia. “Opal called. Must not have heard it because we were on the bike.” Renai set her phone down on a steel instrument tray next to a bone saw, pushed the SPEAKER button, and started the message, the song she’d been about to play already forgotten.
“Spooky Girl and Miss Feathers,” Opal said over the cacophony of shouts and laughter and traffic and PA announcements that Renai recognized as the end of a school day. “So bad news first, social media was a bust. Looks like his moms was real paranoid about cyberbullying and knew his passwords, so most of his feeds are just videos of people falling down. I do have a little something for you, though. Probably nothing, but it doesn’t hurt to check. Last time anybody heard from our boy, he was supposed to meet up with some friends to ride the Ghost Train. They went in a big group, so no one can say for sure if he was there or not. Maybe you can pick up his trail there. I’ll keep asking around, and if I find out anything else I’ll let you know. Give me a call either way. Ramses is a good kid and I want to help find him.”
When the message finished, Renai slipped the phone back into the pocket of her jeans, disappointed but not surprised. After the conversation she’d overheard—okay, spied on—at the St. Cyr house, she’d all but given up any hope that Ramses would be found by conventional means. Still, she was running out of time. The Hallows began at midnight the following night, whether she’d found Ramses or not. She couldn’t decide whether she should even bother with the long shot of picking up his trail at the Ghost Train. He sure as hell wasn’t in this morgue.
She poked her finger at her shoulder to give Cordelia something to perch on and—once she felt the little bird’s claws get a good grip—held her out at arm’s length so they could talk face-to-beak. “So look, tell me straight. If Ramses did ride the Ghost Train, can you track him down? Will you even be able to tell he was there?”
Before Cordelia could answer, the electronic locks behind Renai beeped and clunked, the double-wide door swinging open on smooth hydraulic hinges. A red-haired white woman in hospital scrubs pushed a gurney through the doorway, the shape of a body zipped up within the thick white envelope of a body bag.
The nurse had a phone trapped between her shoulder and her ear, talking into it in a tired, detached voice. “—asphyxiation due to strangulation. His folks gave us the OK for organ donation, so I’m wheeling him into the morgue now. I figure Dr. Carlie will wanna come right down and start with the corneas.”
The woman wheeled the gurney into the room and set it into position next to the instrument table, right in front of Renai. As she locked the wheels with her sneaker’s toe, the nurse nodded and made a couple of affirmative noises to whomever she was talking to. “Call me when she’s on her way, will ya? I ain’t had a smoke all shift. Thanks.” She hung up the phone and dropped it into the apron pocket on the bottom of her shirt. She looked down at the body bag for a long moment, her face expressionless. Then she frowned. “What the fuck, man?” she said, though it wasn’t clear to Renai if she spoke to the body or to herself, or to someone who wasn’t there. “Just. Fuck.” And then she turned and left, already tapping a cigarette out of the packet she pulled from her pocket.
Given the luck Renai had had the past couple of days, she felt no surprise at all when—smooth as a hydraulic hinge and with the crinkling rustle of plastic and fabric—the corpse on the gurney sat up.
Chapter Nine
The silence of the grave is not always peaceful. For some—those who drowned, or who took their own lives, or who died with some crucial task left unfinished, or who were killed by a spirit alone in the wilderness—a single ember of quickness remains with the corpse even after the rest of the soul has departed. What is left is remnant of life given teeth and claws and a familiar face. A puppet of necrotic flesh gyrating to a danse macabre; a hollow automaton clinging to the basest instincts of humanity, driven by the machinery of lust and hunger and rage. When they rise and walk again among us, we call them draugr and Widergänger. When they are still bound within their shrouds and stagger ungainly with one-footed leaps, we know them as pocong, as Jiang Shi. Nachzerer. Revenant. Ghoul. They are relentless and violent and unreasonable and invulnerable, but their true horror lies in their humanity. In the fact that they were once one of us. A reminder that the “requiescat in pace” we put on tombstones is not a promise.
It is a prayer.
It said a lot about the life Renai had been living the past few years that she barely flinched when the dead body on the gurney sat up within its shroud of thick plastic. She reacted, of course—a step back and a clench of the eyes and a frustrated, disgusted shake of her arms that went from her shoulders to her fingertips—but it was an involuntary, instinctive thing. More akin to the little gasp of revulsion wrung from someone confronted by one of New Orleans’s huge roaches skittering across a kitchen floor than the panicked shriek or the terrified paralysis that one expected from horror movies.
Cordelia, shaken from her perch on Renai’s finger, fluttered in the air a moment before coming to rest on a countertop. They waited for a long, tense moment and—when the corpse made no other move—Renai let out a brief, anxious chuckle.
“This amuses you?” Cordelia asked.
“Just didn’t think this would be part of my day when I woke up this morning, I guess. You ever see anything like this?”
“I’ve seen more than one kind of un-death.”
Renai felt what was left of a smile slide off of her face. “The Gates,” she said.
“What about them?”
“If they’re still locked, then psychopomps can’t get over to this side to do their jobs, and souls can’t cross over to the other side either.”
“I assure you, the Gates will reopen once the Hallows begin. Until then . . .”
Renai turned to the little bird, a frown twisting one side of her mouth. “Until then what?”
“Until then, there is at leas
t one psychopomp remaining in this place who can still fulfill their role.”
“Yeah, I figured that’s what you meant,” she said. She took a long breath and blew it out, surprised at her reluctance. She did this literally each day of her life. Somehow, though, there was a difference between taking a life and handling the dead. One felt natural, the other taboo. She gave herself a moment to consider her state of mind—nervousness that this new aspect of being a psychopomp was beyond her, fear of desecration or contamination, frustration that yet another thing had stepped between her and Ramses St. Cyr—accepted all of her frailty and shortcomings, pushed them all to the back of her head, and then did what she’d been taught to do her whole life: she did the work.
Unzipping the body bag was like unwrapping the worst Christmas present ever.
She peeled the crinkly plastic shroud back just enough to reveal the head and torso of a skinny dead white boy. His face was puffy and distended, and skin was already starting to purple and bruise in the places where his blood had pooled when his pulse quieted. She couldn’t really put an age to him with the way death had twisted and distorted his features, but he couldn’t be out of his teens.
Once Renai looked away from his face and saw the marks on his face, she understood why the nurse had been so affected by this boy’s death. The raw, angry gashes of ligature marks made tracks across his neck, telling her not just how he’d died, but that he’d taken his own life. Mingled amid the scents of bodily excretions that came with death and the antiseptic cleaners that the hospital used against them, Renai could smell the shampoo that lingered in the boy’s hair.
She knew she should feel something profound in this moment, remembered how much death had pained her back when she’d been alive, but now the only thing the dead boy awoke in her was a fierce sense of purpose. Renai flipped up the hood of her jacket and spoke the ghost word, braced for the slap of tightness against her skin, for the monochromatic shift of her vision.
She was unprepared for how strange the dead boy would appear.
The flame of life was entirely absent in him, not even the banked-coals glow of someone on the cusp of death, which made sense, since he was already dead, not dying. Instead of merely lacking any sort of life, he seemed to emanate dimness, projecting shadow like the antithesis of a flame. In the same way a cloud occluding the sun could leave part of the world in daylight and part in twilight, this boy’s presence sucked the light from the room.
Worse than that was the way the parts of his soul had come unbraided and dangled obscenely from his flesh. The golden coil of his Fortune spilled out onto the gurney next to him like a loop of intestine, tarnished and weathered, its usual gleam now a brassy fatigue. The shadowy strand of his Essence—difficult to see within the corona of shadow the dead boy emitted—stretched out taut from his back and though the door, tattered as a pair of ruined nylon stockings and leading off to wherever this boy’s spirit wandered, lost and alone. Renai couldn’t see the quicksilver sprawl of his Voice, imagined it must still be somewhere inside his body. Cordelia kept any comments she had about the dead boy’s appearance to herself.
That’s right, Renai heard, in her father’s voice, only people entitled to opinions are the folks getting their hands dirty.
Renai reached for the dead boy’s Fortune first, though she couldn’t say whether she chose it as a woman examining her options, or as a psychopomp whose whole existence depended on getting every scrap of Fortune back into the Underworld unharmed. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw something shift in the dead boy’s face when she tore his Fortune loose—a grimace maybe, or a narrowing of the eyes—but when she stopped to study him, he didn’t move again, if he’d moved at all.
Turning to the Fortune in her hands, she found it harder to manipulate than she was used to, tacky and resistant, like wax that had cooled and hardened. After a few moments of effort, she managed to squeeze and stretch it enough that the Fortune could be molded and flattened into a coin. She slipped it into the same pocket of her jacket that held the scrap of paper she’d gotten from Seth.
Finding her rhythm now, she plunged her hands into the dead boy’s belly, seeking out his Voice. She found nothing. At first, she thought that her hands had merely been numbed by the sting of her ghostly flesh penetrating his physical corpse, but as she sought around within him like some grotesque version of the game of Operation, she realized that something else had already consumed the dead boy’s Voice—had scooped him out like an avocado and left the rind behind. She wasn’t dealing with a creepy side effect of his death not being properly collected by a psychopomp. This was something else.
This was a ghoul.
She was just about to pull her hands free when she brushed up against something inside of the corpse, something that went skittering away from her touch. She had time to let out an involuntary grunt of surprise before the ghoul’s hands latched onto her forearms with an implacable grip so icy-cold that it burned. She threw her weight back, trying to yank free, but the dead boy’s hands had clamped on her like manacles. Even as she fought against the restraint, she struggled to accept the fact that the ghoul could touch her despite the ghost word’s magic. The swollen face and unseeing eyes turned, straining against rigor mortis, to look right into her own. A hoarse whisper came from the corpse’s open, unmoving lips, echoing and far away. “We have a message for you,” someone said.
Despite the shock, despite the pain in her arms, Renai stopped fighting. Could this—creepy as shit though it was—be Sal reaching out to her from the other side of the locked Gates? Or maybe the Thrones? Until the possibility was in front of her, she hadn’t realized how desperately she wanted some authority figure to step in and take control.
Before she could say anything in response, a brown-feathered, shrieking blur swept in between her and the corpse; Cordelia buffeting at the dead boy’s face with her tiny wings and scratching at him with her ineffectual claws.
The ghoul forced her palms together and shifted so that it held both her wrists in one hand. The other dead hand reached up and snatched Cordelia out of the air, squeezing her so tightly that the bird let out a pitiful little squeak. She’d scratched the corpse across the eyes, leaving bloodless furrows gashed into its waxy skin. The ghoul moved with the unconscious, disaffected gestures of a puppet, had seized Cordelia without shifting focus of those unseeing eyes away from Renai. She felt her small measure of hope trickle away.
“We have a message for you,” the whisper deep inside the corpse repeated.
Renai had never wanted to hit someone so badly in her life. Either of her lives, come to that. She allowed herself a brief, glorious vision of driving her forehead into the dead boy’s nose, of finding whatever animated this corpse and destroying it. Yet she knew it was a fantasy, knew she dealt with something that didn’t feel pain, even as tears leaked from her eyes from the icy burn of the ghoul’s fingers on her wrists, the electric crackle against her ephemeral flesh buried within the dead boy’s solid guts. “I’m listening,” she said.
“Cease.”
It took a moment for Renai to realize that the one word was all the ghoul—or, more accurately, whatever drove the ghoul—intended to say. “Cease what?” she asked, though she had a sinking feeling that she already knew.
“Cease your search.”
Shit.
Every curious impulse, every desire to find Ramses St. Cyr, everything but the need to escape washed away.
Renai struggled against the ghoul’s grip, even though she knew it wouldn’t do any good. Her mind raced. She couldn’t overpower the ghoul, and she couldn’t use the ghost word to slip away. She considered throwing her head back—dislodging the hood and breaking the spell and returning to solidity—but her ghostly hands were still inside the dead boy. Two objects suddenly occupying the same space might throw them violently apart and free her, or it might fuse her flesh with the corpse’s and ruin her hands.
Cordelia struggled as well, twisting her tiny body and
stabbing at the ghoul’s fingers with her sharp beak. It was a futile, pitiful gesture that reached past the barrier of Renai’s fear and woke the spirit within her, set its winds howling.
Release me, whispered the presence as it probed against Renai’s restraint. Its voice was halfway between a gasp and a groan. Promise to free me, and I will give you the power to free yourself. In her near-panic, Renai nearly agreed without thinking, but its power frightened her almost as much as the ghoul did. She refused the temptation, straining against the ghoul’s grip with all her might. It was just as futile as the struggle of a tiny bird in a monster’s hand.
Another sound came from the depths of the ghoul’s open mouth. Not another message, not even words, but a hissing noise, sharp and abrupt and harsh. Laughter, she realized. Whatever drove this ghoul was fucking laughing at them.
Power, whispered the storm, if you promise.
She had only the space of a breath to decide. If she let the spirit loose, it would lash out and destroy all that it could. She was certain of that. Storms could only do what was in their nature. Images of flooded streets and people clinging to makeshift rafts and houses flattened by implacable winds and piles of debris left in the aftermath flashed through her mind, but if this corpse killed her here, the spirit would likely slip free anyway, and there would be no one there to stop it. So her choice wasn’t much of a choice at all.
Yes, Renai thought, I promise.
The tempest stretched free of its cage, and Renai swelled suddenly with its presence, an uncomfortable, bloated feeling, her limbs numb and stiff. Her guts twisted, tighter and tighter, first merely hunger pangs, then period cramps, then an excruciating clench that made her vision waver. She’d expected the storm would increase her strength or that it would beat the ghoul away with a fierce wind.
You promised to help! Renai thought.