The next decade was a veritable explosion of trade and commerce. And multiculturalism as slaves, goods, and colonists poured in from Saint Domingue. And that introduced Voudon, better known as voodoo after Saint Domingue became better known as Haiti.
Which meant whatever the Baron was alluding to had happened earlier.
But how much earlier? That question remained unanswered as I parked and walked into the courtyard of the Place d'Arms Hotel.
* * *
There might have been some irony in Mama Samm taking a room in a hotel with several well-documented hauntings. Except for the fact that it's getting harder to find a hotel in New Orleans that doesn't have a ghost or two. And if you doubt me, just sign up for some of the "Haunted Tours" that service the tourists on a nightly basis.
I can't speak for the authenticity of the ghosts but don't buy into any of the vampire sites in the Garden District. The real bloodsuckers relocated to Faubourg-Marigny back in the eighties. Only the poseurs show up for the tourists.
The Place d'Arms is actually eighty-three rooms distributed throughout eight renovated, historic townhouses framing the courtyard. So finding the right room was a little trickier than knowing the floor and number. Mama Samm found me before I found her.
She shushed my attempts to update her on my most recent encounters on the way to her room. "Plenty of time to talk once I Spock you up," she said, unlocking her door and hanging out the Do Not Disturb sign before closing it behind us.
She had already arranged her room for the ceremony. There were candles everywhere. Which she set about lighting. The bed had been moved away from the walls and a pattern of white powder circled it on the carpeted floor.
I eyed a stack of emptied Sweet'N'Low packets overflowing the top of the dresser. "I thought you had to use salt."
She looked at me like I was an idiot. "That's for zombies."
Oh. Well. Of course. No point in mentioning the recent studies suggesting links between artificial sweeteners and brain seizures.
"Now lie down with me," she ordered, arranging herself on the king-sized bed so as to allow a narrow strip of leftover space.
"What? No candy or flowers, first? Aren't you even going to try to chat me up?"
"Lie down," she insisted, "we haven't got a lot of time!"
"Seriously," I said, sitting on the edge of the mattress. "We do need to talk. Something just happened—"
"We'll talk once the spell is complete."
It was dimly registering somewhere that she wasn't affecting her "street" voice which meant she was deadly serious and focused. But I was still unsettled by recent events. And one other thing.
"I still don't understand," I continued, refusing to lie down. "I proposed this once before . . ."
Mama Samm sat back up and shook her head. "I wasn't ready back then. Too dangerous to let you go rattling around in here," she tapped her temple with a sausage-sized finger, "all loose and wild."
I shrugged. "Volpea didn't have any complaints."
She gave me one of her looks that explained the "Mama" part of her surname. "There's a great deal of difference between what's going on in that vixen's head and what you'd have access to in mine."
I felt my face grow a little warm. "It's not like that. It's . . . it's . . . been very platonic."
The fortune-teller's eye widened. "Platonic, huh?" She started to chuckle. "Oh. I should think so." She turned and started lighting the candles and incense on her side of the bed.
"You don't believe me?"
"Oh, I believe you, baby."
"Then what's so funny?"
She shook her head. "Nothing, child, nothing. You inside her head, sharing her body. All those nerve endings. Only be funny if you still didn't know Volpea be particular to the company of others of her kind."
"What? Werewolves? Of course I know all about the whole furry/yiffy predilection; Lupé and I are an anomaly."
She shook her head again, the chuckles escalating into giggles and moisture starting to twinkle at the corners of her eyes. "Oh, Chris honey! She's not a werewolf. And, anyways, it's not a species thing I'm talking about—it's a gender thing."
"Gender thing?" I echoed.
"As in preference."
Preference?
Oh.
"Oh!" I said. Then: "So it was an act . . ."
Mama Samm pushed me back down on the mattress. "I thought Fenris and Gordon had pretty much enlightened you as to a plot?"
"Well . . . yeah . . ."
"But maybe you were hoping it wasn't a total act?" She nodded sympathetically. "Oh, baby, maybe you right. We get you over to see Miss Lupé right away. It been too long." She lay back down next to me. "Now close your eyes and count backwards from one hundred and seventeen."
I closed my eyes. More in embarrassment than obedience. Well, this was awkward. Not that I actually had been seduced, you understand . . . I never would have allowed an actual seduction to transpire if such had been the case. But I had been taken in by her apparent sincerity. Which meant that I was slipping. Or that she was very, very good!
And that I couldn't trust her!
I opened my eyes to ask Mama Samm what we were going to do with Volpea after I was out—but someone had pulled the shades, turned off the lights, and blown out the candles.
>It is done, child. Relax a moment and allow the realignment to settle.<
>It is. I have created a zone where you may exist and observe without actually interacting—<
I felt her nod, though the sensation was different. Distant.
>Something between a safety deposit box and hanging a privacy curtain. Just relax and enjoy the ride . . . <
She opened her eyes and sat up. There was a little disorientation as the room swung around and I tried to focus through a different set of foci. Sharing Volpea's body, I saw everything pretty much the way she saw. Peering out of Mama Samm's specially prepared "zone" was more like trying to function while looking through a weak pair of binoculars.
I was still adjusting to my sudden farsightedness when Volpea sat straight up and grinned at us.
"Od'glf hajf vfa'nafh," she said through blackening lips. The voice was very familiar but it wasn't hers any more than it had been Samedi's scarcely an hour before. "Fhtagn Azathoth ph'ghaan Cth'tu—"
Mama Samm's fist was the size of a small ham and it smacked into Volpea's darkening face like an ancient battering ram taking out the gates of a small castle. V's head snapped back, her eyes rolled up and she dropped back on the bed like a collapsing Jenga stack.
"That was jus' bad manners!" she muttered aloud as she stomped around the hotel room, blowing out candles and stuffing a small arsenal of religious artifacts and apothecarial vials and tins into her shopping-bag-sized purse. "He may fancy hisself an elder god but there's no excuse for bad manners! The Crawling Chaos has sumptim important enough to say to me, he can damn well come in person to say it!" And with that, she shouldered her handbag-of-many-items and we were on our way out the door.
Chapter Seven
I waited until Mama Samm had situated her bulk in the back of a cab and directed the driver to an address on University Place before starting up.
>Are you finished, yet?<
>Stop babbling!<
I stopped.
>There was only one.<
>Lesbian. Singular. Not plural. The only harm there is to your pride. Given her preferences, you could choose to see her deception as a compliment.<
I scowled at her. Being on the inside of her head, the expression was probably lost on her.
>Yes. Yes, there is. I wasn't sure until now that we were dealing with his kind—<
>You're getting hysterical, again. I won't be discussing this with you if you get all excited. It opens ancient pathways in the mind that should stay closed and forgotten. And it draws their attention.<
>What? The Deep Ones?< I caught a mental image of my fishy foes reflected from her thoughts. >They are mere flesh and blood, the mortal detritus of those who opened their minds and their flesh to the madness generations before.<
>Mister Chris, do you know your Bible? Do you know the story of Sodom and Gomorrah? Of Lot's wife?<
>Sodom and Gomorrah were bad places. Evil places. Abraham tried to bargain with God. Made the Lord promise to spare the cities if he could find fifty good people living there.<
She nodded. It was an interesting sensation. >Then he negotiated down to forty-five. Then thirty. Then twenty. Ten. Couldn't do it. In the end only Abe's nephew Lot and his family could be evacuated. God told 'em: 'Don't none of you look back! This place is too evil to stand!'
>The Bible says evil can enter in through the eyes when it beholds that which is sinful. When Lot's wife disobeyed God and looked back while He was a-destroying all that evil, she was destroyed, too. Turned into a pillar of salt. A lot of them man preachers like to say she was punished for disobeying her husband and disobeying God. Like God going to take time outta scrubbing the toilet to hose a crumb off the back porch. No, I think Lot's wife looked back while the power was pouring down on all that evil and some of that evil entered by way of her eyes—just like the Bible says. And the power that was chasing right on its nasty-ass tail followed right on in and destroyed that woman just as it turned two whole cities into dust and ashes.<
>That, just as you're supposed to avert your eyes from evil lest it enter in, you must turn your mind away from madness, or it will enter you and have its way within, as well. What I am trying to do here, Mister Chris, is stop you from turning your attention to things that don't bear thinking about. Because if you turn your attention to Them, They will eventually turn Their attention to you!
>There are things that you have seen that would give most people nightmares for the rest of their lives. But they are still the things of this earth, this Creation. But there are things that dwell in the darkness between this Creation and others—awful, empty, evil places—Places of Madness! Things that don't belong here. Shouldn't be able find Their way here. But They want to come! They hunger! And sometimes They find ways! Terrible ways! Unthinkable ways! And They don't even have to actually be here! Just by whispering through the keyholes of the universe, just by casting Their shadows over the line between our reality and Theirs, They infect places. And the people who get caught there for very long get infected, too!<
>You have only met the shadow of Nyarlathotep, though he alone walks the earth at this time. One other sleeps on this side of the gate. The rest—Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, Yog-Sothoth, the rest of the Great Old Ones, the Outer Gods—are exiled outside of this universe and cannot, must not, ever return or Creation will unravel and the stars will gutter into eternal darkness!<
>It don't work like that, child. What you saw and heard was just a shadow, not the real thing. If the real Nyarlathotep had showed up in person you'd be dead or forever insane. Besides, he been walkin' this earth for a long time, makin' trouble here and there. As for the rest? As long as Their great priest sleeps, They ain't comin' nowhere. Now, I don't talk about these things because the best way to let sleeping gods lie is to not wake them up. Think about Them too much and They begin to dream. You don't want Them dreamin' about you. Their dreams . . . leak . . . <
>But nothin'. I told you, this is something that is way out of your league. You may be all badass and bluff when it comes to bad peoples and vampires and shapeshifters. But you ain't no astral physicist: the Great Old Ones should be left alone. To sleep. You can't do nothin' but quicken Their dreams. And I will kill you myself if I ever get the idea that you might disturb the eternal slumber of the Master of R'yleh!<
There was that weird title again. I would have asked for an explanation but after a long explanation about not explaining certain things, the last was thought with such vehemence that I was shocked into mental silence.
>But enough of this,< she continued. >I have said too much already and we will speak of it no more. All things have an ending, even this world and this Creation. But when it comes—whether next week or a thousand years hence—it will be as Yahweh, God of this Creation ordains it. Not mad abominations from Outside in the Great Dark. Our work is to deal with the evils of this world, of this Creation. We do not—we cannot—concern ourselves with the Endless Oblivion Outside and Beyond! Right now you are about to see the mother of your unborn son. And your . . . (ahem) . . . colleagues. You need to focus. I'm risking enough carrying you around this city without you going all Busby Berserkly inside my head now that we're on our way to Marie Laveau's inner sanctum!<
< >
>What's that? I didn't hear you!<
At which point we had arrived at the Orpheum Theater.
* * *
Located in the central business district, the Orpheum has had its share of past lives. The Beaux Arts terra-cotta theater opened in 1918 as a part of the vaudeville circuit. It saw its heyday, however, as a movie theater—one of the crown jewels of the RKO chains. Even after they reclaimed a section of the first balcony for a projection booth, the "O" could still seat an audience of 1660 people, spreading them around a main floor, two separate balconies, and a number of private boxes. Back in the Jim Crow days of the previous century, the audience was segregated. "Colored" seating was restricted to the second balcony and that could only be accessed by stairways from the outside alleys on either side.
That was then, this is now. We walked up to the front doors of the building that was now home to the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and knocked.
A crash bar boomed two doors over and we were admitted by a young Latina girl wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The T had a picture of a crawfish and some message about "sucking heads and pinching tails." She did not look happy.
"Sammathea D'Arbonne?" she asked, looking us up and down.
Mama Samm nodded. "I thought you were off at school, doing summer studies."
"I am. Oceanography. I'm assigned to crew the Spindrift, which is in port for a few days so I wrangled leave for the weekend."
The big fortune-teller leaned toward the girl to peer at her more closely. "Oceanography, huh? How you likin' all dat water?"
The girl smiled like Alice's Cheshire Cat. "It's full of all kinds of fascinating fish. Follow me, please." She turned and led us through the small lobby and into the orchestra foyer.
Or would that more accurately be referred to as an "inburst"?
Mama Samm harrumphed inside our head. >This is Jorge Pantera's daughter, Irena, so behave yourself.<
I protested.
>And probably a lesbian,< Mama Samm added wryly.
"When we are done here, I must ask you a favor," Irena Pantera said as she led us down and then back up and onto the stage. "It's about my stepmother . . ."
It took me an extra moment to realize that she was talking about Marie Laveau.
"We'll talk after my visit," Mama Samm told her. "I'll require some privacy, you understand. But we'll meet afterwards and you can tell me all about it, then."
Irena nodded, her chocolate eyes narrowing as if to squeeze her agitation down to a more manageable compactness.
She led us off into the wings and down a corkscrew spiral of metal stairs to a chamber under the stage. Across this room was another door that required a key. Past that door was a narrow bricked alcove with stairs leading down into darkness. She flipped a switch, illuminating a string of bare bulbs tracing the descent, and we eventually found ourselves in a metal-sheathed room that resembled a modern elevator façade. A ten-key number pad replaced the binary up/down configuration.
Irena punched in a code, shielding the keypad with her body so we couldn't learn the access number. The door slid open to the left and we entered another metal-walled room that was, unmistakably, an airlock.
"We're below the water table now," Irena explained. "This egress doubles as security and protection against flooding."
That made sense. New Orleans was notoriously short on any kind of subterranean construction. You don't put buildings with basements in a swamp. And, between vast bodies of water that make periodic attempts to overrun the levees and an aggressive groundwater table that seeks to rise to the level of the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, and Lake Pontchartrain, even the dead get aboveground housing. The limestone and marble crypts that fill Cypress Grove, Greenwood, Metairie, Lafayette, and all three St. Louis cemeteries like so much tract housing protect the corpses from the decompositional effects of ground water.
Dead Easy Page 14