by J. D. Horn
Like Alice herself, her uncle had always been a loner. She hoped he wasn’t still alone.
Above her, the cerulean sky slid into hematite, then went full black, the diamond sun blinking out, dying as if poisoned by the sky. A heartrending cry went up around Alice, giving her the sense that all souls, living and dead, and all objects, animate and inanimate, mourned as one.
All except Alice herself, who, alone in her wonder, could find no tears.
The cool silver-blue points of seven stars pierced the blackness above her.
A creaking caught her attention and she turned her face toward its source. The door to her father’s house eased open, and a cold silver light, like that of the seven stars hanging above, spilled out of it. She felt something brush up against her leg, and she startled. A purring patch of gray fur wove around her ankles. Glowing viridescent eyes looked up at her. Sugar padded past her, then slunk back into the blinding whiteness.
A figure, a dark silhouette, appeared in the doorway, then stepped forward.
Alice recognized Daniel in an instant, even though his form was in flux, flashing back and forth between her beloved nanny and her earliest nightmare, Babau Jean. He turned—they turned—and went back into the light.
Alice sensed the answer to every question she’d ever posed lay beyond the threshold, and that realization, tantalizing and terrifying in equal measure, held her in place.
She felt a pressure build around her, as if the air itself was congealing. The horizon tightened, and the seven stars seemed to be descending, falling to the earth in slow motion, though Nicholas’s house—the house of her earliest memories—remained unchanged. Alice realized the world beyond the house was shrinking, leaving her without a choice. This was not a new experience for her. She’d endured a similar constriction of her reality before, on the Dreaming Road. But this was not the Dreaming Road. This was, as far as she could tell, the common world, the world she’d always held to be objective reality. She trod along the walk toward the house, an unseeable force sweeping her along like a gust of wind chasing fallen leaves.
Alice arrived at the doorway. She could feel the force willing her forward, but she hesitated, uncertain. The light spilling through the opening obscured what lay inside. She didn’t know how long she stood there, straddling what felt like two separate worlds, but not because she lost track of time. It felt more like time stood still, waiting for her as she gathered her nerve. She didn’t remember taking the step across the threshold but found herself on the other side as soon as she made the choice to cross. Beyond the threshold, she’d expected to find a world of wonder, or perhaps a world of terrors, but the only thing to shock her was the banality of what she found awaiting her. She stood in the hall of Nicholas’s house. His office sat, as it always had, off to the left, and the staircase lay dead ahead.
“I’m sorry, love.” Daniel’s lilting voice came from the foot of the stairs, accompanied by the shing-shing sound of Babau Jean’s grating razor teeth. “I didn’t know about any of . . . this . . .” He motioned with Jean’s sharp nails from the death-mask face down the gangly frame. “Not until I came to free you from the Dreaming Road and found myself stuck there instead.”
“I think,” Alice said as she approached him, “I did. That’s why the connection Jean and I have felt so familiar.” She took his hand, not fearing the nails, and in that instant the monster shimmered and turned back into Daniel. “You and Babau Jean. You aren’t the same.”
“No. Not the same, but not separate either. Two expressions of the same energy. Much like the relationship between Papa Legba and the Dark Man. There is no dichotomy. Only polarity.”
He touched her cheek, then tapped the tip of her nose. “It’s time, love,” he said with a nervous smile. “Shall we?” She saw hope in his eyes, hope clouded by uncertainty. He was unsure, she realized, of her. Not of her nature, but of her strength.
Alice nodded, and he began to lead her up the steps. Halfway up the staircase, he disappeared, and then he reappeared on the landing. He smiled down at Alice, unaware he’d switched back to the appearance of a monster. It didn’t matter. Alice understood the truth—if one could think in such terms—of the person she loved lay somewhere between the two extremes. She mounted the final stairs, counting the moments until—an incandescence, a deep rumble—there it was, the flash of lightning she’d been expecting.
“What is this place?”
“You know what it is, love. It’s Nicholas’s house. Your first home.”
Yes, it was that. But it was something more. “What is this place?” she insisted.
Daniel breathed out the patient, impatient sigh he’d once reserved for muddy tracks across the kitchen floor. “It’s the resolution.”
“The resolution?”
“The point where dissonance is resolved. In short, it’s the end of the world.”
A shimmer, and Babau Jean was gone. Daniel once again stood before her.
“Lisette, Evangeline, and you. It could have been any one of you. But you’re special. Always have been. Everything that has ever happened to you has been to strengthen you, to temper you, to prepare you for this moment.”
“What are we doing here, Daniel?”
“Lisette is so strong,” he continued, paying no heed to her question. “She would suffer any fate, death or even worse for herself, as long as her children and grandchildren were left untouched. That’s why she couldn’t be the one. The one to decide can’t have children—at least not ones she loves. Lisette failed her test, or passed it, depending on your perspective. Either way, she proved herself not to be the one. Mrs. Perrault, she has all the strength in the world, but not the right kind for this crucible.”
“You wouldn’t have turned against your children either,” Alice said. Daniel loved the mess that was her brother Hugo, there was no denying that. Alice knew he loved her, too. His totality loved her, even his nightmare ego of Babau Jean. And Daniel also loved Luc. Even now. She knew if any possibility of redemption existed for her big brother, Daniel would lead him to it, by the nose if need be. Daniel may have had nothing to do with their conception, but they were his children.
A tear escaped his eye. “Enough of that, young lady.” He wiped the tear away. “Of course, I was never to be the one.”
“The one to what?”
“Evangeline. She, too, was strong, and unlike Lisette, she wasn’t bound by the love of a child. But she wasn’t as strong as you, my love.” Alice remembered the ringing of Evangeline’s laughter. “Such a sweet, generous creature, such a loving woman, she would have been a fine choice, except that she would have crumbled under the weight of the knowing. Still, she isn’t really gone. She never will be, regardless of what we do here. She’s a part of magic now.”
Daniel paused for a moment, letting his words linger, then said, “I think in my heart, I always expected that it would come down to the two of us in the end.” A loud meow from below as Sugar snaked through his legs. He stooped and scooped her up into his arms. “Yes, of course, the three of us. I stand corrected.”
He scratched behind Sugar’s ears and set her on the ground. Sugar circled around and stared up at Alice. Without words, Alice somehow understood the feline, too, felt something akin to pride in her.
Daniel reached out to her.
Behind him was the large landing window. Alice imagined she could see herself, a small girl on tiptoes, peering through it at the maelstrom below. This, she realized, was the image, the inspiration that had given birth to her.
She joined Daniel before the window and took his hand. Together, they turned to face the dim gray light filtering in through the panes. Beyond the glass, the dirty waters of Katrina still swirled. A white plastic lawn chair bobbed up and down, then rushed out of view. A blue tricycle followed, triggering a flash of its owner’s face, a younger boy she’d pushed along on the trike.
A plastic pink flamingo. A red door. Alice took inventory of the expected objects, ticking them off on the men
tal checklist she’d long carried with her, cached away as if in anticipation of this very moment. A bubble of trapped air rose up through the muddy water, surfacing a kaleidoscope of bright colors Alice remembered as belonging to the covers of a collection of DVDs and paperback books. The colors rotated once, twice, then began to sink once again into the deluge.
Beneath the colors—no, through the colors, through the water itself—she could make out symbols. Only then did she discern the pattern buried beneath what she’d perceived as a random collection of flotsam.
These symbols were the sigils from the hospital on Sinclair Isle. Then the sigils melded together to become the image she’d traced on her window on the Dreaming Road. The image shattered, though Alice could see each splinter still contained the image of the whole.
Her mind turned to the vèvès, the living symbols in the windows of Lisette Perrault’s shop. Yes, they, too, contained a hidden depth only hinted at by the visible.
All were two-dimensional expressions of a deeper reality.
Alice clutched Daniel’s hand tighter.
One book remained afloat, its waterlogged spine giving way, its individual pages coming loose from the binding. The pages rippled on the surface of the maelstrom, their words floating up and separating from the sodden paper, unwinding themselves from the page.
“When is a book not a book?” Daniel said, and as he spoke, his words appeared on the surface of the water.
She tried to close her eyes, but Daniel pulled her to him. “You can’t look away, love. You can never again not see this. The gates have opened.” He kissed her cheek. “The angels have fallen. And you’ve been chosen as the sacrifice.”
She opened her mouth to speak, to protest, her own words lining up on the pages before her, disappearing as she changed her mind.
Her memories, for the moment sharp, shocked her by disintegrating. By changing. Words she’d spoken, or intended to speak, came instead from the mouths of others, and their words became hers. Alternate time lines—positing infinite possibilities—collapsed into the experience she had known.
Alice began to see the world through others’ eyes. She remembered crossing through Jackson Square, a brightly colored tourist map in hand, as surely as if she herself were Lisette Perrault. She saw a different symbol, one she knew through Lisette to be Papa Legba’s vèvè. She registered Lisette’s epiphany as if it had been her own. The square. Legba’s vèvè. The one was a model of the other.
“The square,” Alice heard Daniel whisper, “could be understood as a three-dimensional representation of the two-dimensional design, yes?
“Magic has long been preparing us for a truth science is only just beginning to explore. Quantum theory and the theory of gravity are finally beginning to approach the concept of a holographic reality, a truth those who know magic have long sensed.”
In a flash it struck her. Two-dimensional symbols strung together to create a three-dimensional experience. Editorial conflagrations erasing earlier efforts, reworking of plots, characters coming to the page, then disappearing, deleted as if they’d never existed.
The importance of the written word to her own existence.
The Book of the Unwinding wasn’t some musty tome moldering in a locked chest in a convent’s attic. Nor was it only a single spark capable of burrowing into a person’s soul.
Alice now stood in the heart of madness. Only there could the book’s true nature be perceived. The world fell flat into a string of characters against a blank surface. Force and restraint in balance.
“We are The Book of the Unwinding.”
“The story is what matters, love,” Daniel said. “There is no greater power than story. The story is all there is; it is our reality, and beyond it, nothingness.”
In the face of the madness, an epiphany struck her, and Alice began laughing. “Storyville,” she said. “You were trying to tell me all along.”
Daniel nodded. “I think so. At least the part of me—the piece of Babau Jean—who did understand. In retrospect, it seems a fairly heavy-handed clue.”
Daniel waved a hand before the symbols, which shimmered and changed shape, taking on depth and texture, and again Alice was looking at what she understood to be real. “It takes a special type of person to learn she doesn’t exist, then go on living. You’ve been groomed, all your life, to stand firm in the face of madness.
“It’s up to you, love. This can all end now, here. You can stop all suffering, end all joy. You can simply erase us all, everything and everyone you’ve ever known. Plunge us back into the nothingness from which we sprang. No more Nicholas, no more Celestin, no more hospital on Sinclair. But then, there’d also be no more Hugo. No more Nathalie. No more me. No more you.” He paused, raising an eyebrow and looking down his nose at her, the expression she remembered him making when she was small and he was cutting her a deal such as “take your nap now, and you can go to the park this afternoon,” or “finish the spinach and you can have ice cream.” Somehow, in the face of this madness, discussing his own nonexistence, he was still himself. He was still Daniel. “Or . . .”
“Or?”
“You’ll find the beauty, the value of creation. A speck of meaning in an endless sea of absurdity. But you’d have to be strong to let our reality continue, aware that it doesn’t exist, aware that you don’t exist, at least not in the concrete way you once believed. To accept what has come before—what has been written, so to speak—as fixed . . . immutable . . . and that what is to come will spring from the interaction of innumerable variables, of which the will of Alice Marin is but a single factor.”
Daniel paused like he wanted to give this last bit a chance to fully sink in, pulling a serious face, another familiar expression, this the one he used whenever she would refuse to pick up her toys or brush her teeth. It meant it was time to put on her big-girl pants and get on with it. “There have been others,” he continued, “before you who have stood where you now stand. Who’ve had to make the choice you now must make.”
Alice didn’t have to ask. It was self-evident those who came before had chosen to continue the illusion; they had chosen yes.
“Of course, it would be just the two . . . the three,” he corrected himself, “of us who’d share the secret.” She felt Sugar brush up against her leg, twining around it. “Anyone else you share the truth with will think you’ve gone mad, that you’ve lost your grip on reality. And in a way, they’d be right. But you’ll always have us to share the burden.”
Daniel reached out with both hands to take hers, then smiled down at her. “So, my love,” he said, grasping her hands tightly, ready to plunge with her into the abyss if that was what she asked of him. “What will it be?”
She took in his mop of curly red hair, his crooked, perfectly imperfect smile, his sparkling green eyes.
They were Thoth’s emerald tablets; they were the jewels of Indra’s net.
THIRTY-SEVEN
A sudden flash like heat lightning, followed by a low rumbling. Lisette associated it with distant thunder even though it was less a sound than a vibration she felt deep in her bones. When the rumble died, it gave way to an almost reverential silence, or maybe more of a quiet dread. This was the moment of final judgment.
A nauseating vertigo gave way to a sweet resin scent, like the frankincense and myrrh of the incense burned at mass. A blessing then, rather than a curse.
If Lisette mentioned any of this to the nurses passing back and forth before the open door of Manon’s room, she’d find herself being threaded through the hole of a CT scanner in zero time flat. But these weren’t symptoms of a second stroke. These meager manifestations, along with a feeling deep down in Lisette’s gut, counted as the only signs that the world had just been made anew.
She glanced over at her beautiful daughter, sleeping, peaceful, unaware, then turned back to the window. The darkness outside produced a reflection of her own features—and behind her face, that of the old man, Papa Legba.
Lisette�
�s father had sworn that her Legba wasn’t the Legba, but Lisette had just held Papa’s hand as she watched the world be reborn. She knew now that the truth was a tricky beast to pin down. Her manifestation of Legba was different than her mother’s, but he, too, was the Legba—at least for now.
She sharpened her focus and looked beyond herself, through Papa Legba, to take in a sliver of the night sky. The seven stars of the Big Dipper hung low on the horizon but shone bright enough to be seen through the big-city glare. But they, too, had changed. She no longer saw them as the seven gates or as the seven wounds of the gad. They were, at least to her mind, a family—her family.
She selected a star for Remy. A star for Manon. One star for each of her parents. One for her beloved Isadore and one for herself. She saved the brightest of all of them for Joy.
Around their constellation, other stars gained in brightness, and she knew them for the ancestors who came before, and the children who would come after.
Lisette felt a hand touch her own and looked over to find Isadore squatting before her.
“I think maybe you should go home,” he whispered. “Get some rest. Remy’s waiting for you downstairs.” He patted her hand. “Come on now. I got this.”
Lisette looked at her husband, and in that moment her heart felt so full of love for him, so proud of the life they’d built together, she began to cry.
His brow scrunched up with worry. “Is everything okay?”
She lifted his hand to her lips and kissed it. “Yes, you sweet man. Everything is okay.” She touched his hand to her cheek. “For the first time in one hell of a long one.”
DECEMBER 22
THIRTY-EIGHT
Nathalie came to, standing across from Bonnes Nouvelles, her eyes fixed on a mass of flowers and candles that spilled from the sidewalk in front of the club out into the street. She blinked and scanned the faces of the people milling about in the neon-lit night. Some passed by, slowing and bending to add to the collection. Others watched on, acting almost hypnotized by the bright white beam illuminating a familiar-looking stranger in the street, in front of the sea of tributes. A man pointed a video camera at her as she pressed a hand to her ear, seeming to be mid-conversation with someone not there. Nathalie’s eyes drifted to a van that sat a bit farther down the street. She read the words “Five Alive” printed in a large, italic font on its side. Of course. Five Alive. The woman standing before the camera was Katie Cunningham, the same reporter who’d reported on Frank Demagnan’s dollhouse.