Perhaps more importantly, they protect the ground water from becoming corpse consommé, as well.
The real problem is not the abundance of water so much as the illusion of land. The lower portion of what the maps identify as Louisiana is a geological illusion. You don't have to go back more than a few million years—an hour or two on Earth's curriculae vitea—to find ocean here. Ocean going all the back to the very Beginning. Beginning with a capital B. The primary engines responsible for the subsequent landfill were rivers and tributaries that moved dirt in a migratory course to the South, building thousands of miles of new coastline one quarter of an inch at a time.
The trouble is, mankind showed up and moved in too soon on the geologic calendar. Not only moved in too soon but shut down the remaining landfill engines, building dams and locks and levees, choking off the silt and sand migrations that had fed the delta regions for the past hundred million years. The one remaining engine—the "hemi" of the northern half of this hemisphere—is still called the Big Muddy. But the earthen cargo for which it is named no longer spills out into the Gulf of Mexico to continue its millennial task of shoring up the shore, growing the ground, and deepening the dirt. We've managed to dredge and divert and choke the Mississippi River to where it's both dammed and damned. And, as a result, the process has reversed itself: every year more land is lost. The sea is returning to claim its ancient and rightful territory. Louisiana loses the equivalent of two football fields to the ocean every day.
Don't believe me? Look it up.
Still don't believe it? That's because the concept is unthinkable.
And that's why it continues. You can't motivate people to combat something they can't wrap their minds around.
Let's face facts: it takes a certain amount of denial to live in a swamp, below sea level, surrounded by vast amounts of water held back by flimsy walls of earth and ancient cement.
Maybe I just have a better imagination. Or a clarity of perspective since I live in the solid, northern end of the state. Whichever, I couldn't help flinching when the inner door of the airlock opened. By all rights there shouldn't have been anything on the other side but water and/or compressed silt and muck.
Instead, there was a dry and spacious corridor.
Of stone!
For a fleeting moment I felt the first quiverings of a fresh, full-blown panic.
Then I saw that the floor, walls, and ceiling were nothing like the stone-flagged, earthen tunnels in the Faerie Mound. Here the construction was tightly-fitted stone blocks of gigantic dimensions. The passageway itself would have allowed four of us to walk abreast with plenty of room on both sides. Instead, there were only two of us, fleshwise, and Mama Samm and I had to follow our diminutive guide, feeling uncharacteristically tiny amid such cyclopean architecture.
The floor beneath our feet felt pebbly and uneven and the nearest wall seemed to contain some three-dimensional motif or decoration.
>Yo mama, Cséjthe?<
If I'd had my own eyes I would have blinked.
>What kind of manners did yo mama teach you, boy?<
Oh.
>Very well.< She steered over and turned her eyes toward the dressed stone to our right. >Just remember I ain't no taxicab and you ain't no high-tipping fare.<
The surface of each ten-by-fourteen-foot block was adorned like a prehistoric diorama of aquatic life. Trilobites, brachiopods, gastropods, bryozoans, cephalopods, crinoids, tabulate and rugose corals, pelecypods, littered the walls, the floor, and, presumably, the ceiling which was illuminated here and there by another bare bulb on a naked string of wires every twelve feet or so.
Irena turned back and saw us touching the knobby protrusions of petrified flora and fauna. "Oh," she said, "I see you've noticed one of our great mysteries."
"Mmm-hmm," Mama Samm agreed. "Giant blocks of dressed stone dating back to the dinosaurs . . ."
"Oh, much older than the dinosaurs. Most of these," Irena indicated the scattering of ancient forms, "date from the Devonian and Mississippian Ages of the Paleozoic Era—between 380 and 420 million years ago."
"Well, honey, I may not know the exact numbers, but I do know my sequences."
"Sequences?" Irena echoed.
Mama Samm nodded. "I mean you got more than a bunch of pretty rocks stuck in your old stone walls." She ran a large finger along one of the tight seams where a calcified crinoid had lodged around four hundred thousand centuries ago. "Seems these fossils showed up here after this stone was cut, after this place was built. Which means whoever built it was really, really old. Older than the dinosaurs! Certainly older than humans! Our ancestors didn't show up until about six million years ago. And they didn't get around to doing anything like this until like ten seconds ago in geological time. So, who built this place?"
"The Krell," Irena answered.
* * *
Actually, she was pulling our leg. No one in the New Orleans demesne had a clue but neither was anyone inclined to look a 400-million-year-old gift horse in the mouth.
All that Irena knew was that Marie Laveau had led her "people" down into the underspaces of the Orpheum back when it was first being built at the turn of the last century. The Voices told her where to dig, and she enlisted the bodies of dozens—and eventually hundreds—of thralls to excavate the miles of prehistoric stone corridors and chambers choked with mud, ranging from packed sediment all the way to fossilized strata. As the decades passed above, a succession of airlocks were constructed, openings were sealed, collapsed rooms and hallways walled off, and foot by foot, yard by yard, sections were cleared and areas were made habitable.
The ancient underground city was not reclaimed by archeologists but by monsters. Led by a monster who was hearing voices even back then. So the best clues as to the identities of the ancient builders were excavated along with the tons of mud, sand, silt, and petrified sediments, and dumped in ditches, canals, trash heaps, the river—wherever the equally disposable thralls could dispose of hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of earthen debris one bucket at a time—without attracting undue notice. It took decades just to carve out sufficient space for Marie and a staff and guest list approaching seventy. But what was time to creatures that might be immortal. Especially in preparing the perfect shelter to retreat to when threatened? Laveau might be crazy but she wasn't stupid.
>What? This was never a temple. And it wasn't built by or for any Great Old Ones, Mister Chris. Don't you be talking or thinking no nonsense about which you know nothing about!<
>I said "Outer Gods" not "Elder Gods." The Elder Gods oppose the Outer Gods!<
>Excuse me?<
>I never actually said that the architects of this place were the enemies of the Great Old Ones.<
>My tone—look! This is part of an ancient complex built by the Elder Things!<
>Elder Gods are different than Elder Things! Elder Things were an alien race!<
>And I told you we are not going to discuss this. The Elder Things came here a thousand million years ago! The Great Old Ones hated and feared them! The Elder Things waged war against the Mi-go, the Great Race of Yith, and the Star Spawn—<
>They're gone, Mister Chris! Wiped out! Extinct. Between their wars without and the rebellion of their dreaded shoggoths within, the last remnants escaped to the stars eons before the first hominid climbed down from the trees!<
Plus we both needed to focus on the remainder of Irena's account. She was telling us about rooms, still being excavated, where great murals adorned the walls. Scenes of fantastic tableaus featuring an incredible array of creatures unlike anything Irena had come across in her biology or zoology texts. Murals which were defaced and destroyed at Marie Laveau's command. Presumably the Voices told her to do so, and so these Voices—presumably—were no friends to the original architects of this place.
Which continued to beg the question.
Unfortunately someone was being a big ole party poop on that subject.
The one thing Irena could tell us about these Voices is that they had spoken to the Vampire Queen of New Orleans again, early this morning. Laveau had staggered out just an hour or so before sunrise, muttering that she had to obtain "The Russian Key" before it was gone.
"And for all I know, she's just ashes on the morning winds, now," the young woman finished, visibly upset.
While my host and I were both of the opinion that this wouldn't necessarily be such a bad thing, we both realized that Marie had saved the lives of this girl and her father. That she probably cared for them in her own way and that they had come to care for her, too.
So Mama Samm promised to do what she could to find out what had happened to Irena Pantera's oh-so-wicked stepmother once she (we) had looked in on her (my) people.
* * *
The clinic wasn't anything like the medical facilities for the Seattle demesne.
Of course, the medical needs of the undead and their lycanthropic servitors were pretty simple. Whatever didn't outright kill them seemed to have little lasting effect. As for those exceptions—Laveau's management style was more of a hands-off, live-and-let-die approach. I was guessing that the better equipment in the treatment area was on loan from Stefan Pagelovitch. With all the blather about how I posed such a threat to the other enclaves, I found such little signs of détente encouraging.
The chambers were uniformly large, so the patients were clustered together and given the dubious privacy of individual prefab cubicles and curtains. Big surprise: even undead heath care sucks . . .
Dr. Mooncloud was already on duty and came bustling up with a stack of clipboards.
"Any problems? I was starting to worry."
Though I didn't have the same access to Mama Samm's nerve endings as I did when Bloodwalking in other bodies, I got the general sense of her planting her massive fists on her Gibraltar-like hips as she gazed down at Taj. "I used to live in this city, Doctor, and I know my way around better than most. If there is a reason I do not live here now, it is largely because of Marie Laveau. But she has invited me and so what have I to fear?"
Mooncloud shrugged. "You've visited before. Even dropped in back when she was headquartered at the Lalaurie House. But not down here." She crossed her arms across her chest and seemed to repress a small shudder. "This place isn't right. You know the old digs were haunted. But this place is . . . I don't know . . . fundamentally wrong on so many levels that I just don't know where to begin . . ." She shook her head. "And we may have another problem."
"What kind of a problem?" Mama Samm asked.
"You know how the coastal demesnes have been losing vampires of late? Well, it's happening here, too. And now we're starting to miss some weres, as well."
"That's not been a problem elsewhere. The defections were limited to the undead," Mama Samm mused.
"Well, Volpea and Fenris seem to have gone missing. A few of Laveau's other wolves have disappeared, as well. I don't know if it's connected but the good news is I spoke to Pagelovitch a couple of hours ago. I think I've finally convinced him that Cséjthe's not playing Harriet Tubman for the disaffected members of the Seattle enclave."
"I suppose that's something," my host mused, "but I doubt our boy'll be chomping at the bit to visit him any time soon."
"Nor would he be encouraged to do so. That little stunt he pulled in New York has all the demesnes and domans rattled." Mooncloud looked back over her shoulder. "In the meantime, I've got cranky patients right here."
Mama Samm turned our gaze from Taj to the curtained beds, then over to Irena Pantera lounging against the far wall, then back to the doctor. "I will need to speak with them in private, Doctor. If you would be so good as to keep Jorge's daughter occupied?"
Mooncloud nodded enthusiastically. "Oh, my pleasure! Believe me! Anything to get away for a while!" She turned to corral Pantera, muttering something about hormones, and we moved to the first curtained alcove.
A woman lay upon a bed surrounded by a sophisticated array of medical monitoring equipment. Despite the tape holding her eyelids shut and the respirator covering the lower half of her face, it was obvious that she was a stranger. Mama Samm, however, lingered at the entryway.
>It would only be rude if there was someone here,< she admonished. >This bed is empty.<
The vital signs monitors were eloquent in their own way: the mountain range redux of P-wave, QRS complex, T-wave, over and over, measuring the depolarization/repolarization of the human heart. ECG, NIBP, SPO2, all registering the mimicry of life. But the EEG told a completely different story. The alpha, beta, theta, and delta readouts should have rippled like wavelets from four different rivers. Instead the sine waves unspooled like a four-lane highway across the great salt flats of Utah. And, like that level wasteland, what inhabited that hospital bed was potent with mirages but sterile and lifeless, all the same. Once upon a time a person had inhabited that flesh, those bones. Whatever the essence of personhood—personality, memory, thought, reason, emotion—was gone now. All that remained was what we linguistically recognize as such . . .
The remains.
Turn off the respirator, disconnect the machinery and remove the personalized care that kept those remains fed, cleansed, and maintained within certain tolerances and the natural process would take hold. Rot. Decay. Putrescence. Dissolution. A final breakdown to the building block components of Biblical construction: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
But not yet.
For now the remains . . . remained. Science had some purpose yet unfulfilled.
And I had a pretty good idea what that was.
Another curtained alcove. Another bed. Another carefully maintained husk. Another possibility. Another choice.
And another in the third cubicle.
The fourth held more. Much more. A ghost in the shell. Two ghosts, actually: a very pregnant Lupé Garou half-lay, half-crouched in the hospital bed, looking up at us with weary, wary eyes.
"Well," she snarled, "what's his excuse this time? Grateful Dead concert? Monster truck rally? Breaking in a new bodyguard?"
"I heard that!" piped another familiar voice. It came from beyond the next curtained screen.
Mama Samm dragged a pair of chairs over, next to Lupé's bed and settled her ample derriere across their twinned surface. "You don't take his phone calls, you don't answer his letters . . ."
"What phone calls? What letters?"
"If you didn't get them, it's not because he didn't call or write. Did you try to call or write him?"
Lupé shook her head, confusion replacing the fury in her eyes. "I was waiting for him. If he didn't hear from me he should have come in person."
"You think it's easy for him to come to you?" she asked softly. "You keep runnin' away, what's a man supposed to think?"
"I'm
carrying his baby!" Lupe protested.
"Keep your voice down," Mama Samm admonished. "Too many peoples already knows your bidness. You think his stayin' away is all about pride? You been a monster so long, lived with monsters so long, you can't understand how he feels about being a monster, hisself. Other werewolves, other vampires, seek the societies of their own kind. He has no kind. And chasing someone who flees from him just makes him feel more monstrous."
"I didn't think—"
"That's right, you didn't think. You all just pregnant hormones and bent out of shape because your man is the demiurge on the cusp o' time. Well, it bad enough that there be things and groups of things that want to do him harm. How much do it help when the mother of his child goes running off to enemy territories, endangering herself, her child, and the man she claim to love?"
"I—I'm not in danger here," she protested.
"Yeah. You so safe you can't leave even if you wanted to."
"Why would I want to?"
"Have you tried?"
Lupe had no immediate answer to that.
"I know you cannot go back to your family or your pack. They would destroy your child as an abomination. And you along wit' it, just to please their vampire masters."
"So I choose to stay here where it's safe," she reasoned.
"You are kept here," Mama Samm corrected, "because you are a political asset. You are a bargaining chip that keeps the Bloodwalker out of Marie Laveau's territory and impresses the other enclaves that she has something to hold over him. Once the child is born, she will have two bargaining chips. Do you understand how that works? Two chips mean you can play—or dispose of—one without losing the bargaining power of the other."
"Particularly," Lupe puzzled out slowly, "if I am the one she uses and holds our baby back in reserve . . ."
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