The RAV4 sat at the curb just down the street. Max careened toward it. He heard the library door slam open behind him, glass shattering with the force of his pursuer's exit.
“Fuck,” Max muttered. He repeated the word in his head as a mantra. Images of Corinne flashed in his mind and he could practically feel the cold, sharp metal of a Tordu knife splitting the skin of his belly. Desperation opened before him, an abyss into which he felt he might plummet forever.
He kept running, fishing the car keys from his pocket. He could not let terror seize him. If he surrendered to desperation, the knife would not be far behind.
He'd locked the car, of course. For a moment he panicked, but his thumb found the button on the key chain, and he heard the beep that signaled the locks disengaging.
An engine gunned to life nearby. From the corner of his eye he saw an old black Mercedes pull away from the curb maybe fifty yards farther up Loyola.
Max ran around to the driver's side and opened the door. He heard heavy footfalls and grunting breaths, and glanced up just as the guy hit the sidewalk and jumped. Those huge hands outthrust, he came flying over the RAV4's hood. Max dropped into the driver's seat and tried to slam the door behind him, but the man managed to get one hand on the door as he scrambled off the hood, half hanging from it.
“Nowhere to run, teacher.”
Max used both hands and his left foot to ram the door open. The guy was still off balance and the door mashed his face, glass striking skull, blood blooming from one nostril. Then Max tried again to haul the door closed, but the bastard hung on with three fingers. Max dragged it closed anyway, even with the guy's weight on it, and slammed his fingers in the door.
With a shout of pain his attacker let go, falling backward into the road. Max hit the locks and started up the car, engine purring.
The impact from behind took him by surprise. With a crash of metal the RAV4 squealed forward, and Max whipped back in his seat. He swore and looked in the rear view, and there was the old black Mercedes.
He blinked, forcing himself to focus.
The cornrowed guy got to his feet, and Max saw him in the rearview mirror, signaling to the Mercedes with those huge hands.
“You not goin’ anywhere, teacher!” the man called.
And he was right. If Max drove off, they would follow. And they knew the city better than he did. Heart pummeling so hard that it blurred his vision, Max slammed the RAV4 into reverse.
Just a nudge. Just to put him down, block the road in front of the Merc, give me time to—
His foot slipped from the clutch and the vehicle jarred back. Still looking in the mirror, he saw the cornrowed man's eyes widen.
The RAV4 struck him with a whump and pushed him back against the Mercedes’ bonnet. He screamed as his legs were crushed.
“Oh Jesus, oh shit…” Not wanting to see what he had done, Max shifted into drive and punched it, tearing away from the front of the library. I hit that guy! Crushed him! Shaking, he spared a single glance back, even now expecting to see the Mercedes giving chase. But the Tordu apparently took care of their own; the driver was out of the car, kneeling beside Max's broken and bleeding pursuer and lifting his face to cast a hate-filled gaze at the departing RAV4.
Coco, of course.
Max drove, blinking away tears or sweat. His heart refused to settle, and every squeal of brakes or creak of the car was an echo of the sound it had made hitting that man. It was me or him, Max thought, and he laughed out loud at that clichéd idea.
He took lefts and rights, getting himself lost in New Orleans, with no destination in mind. At last he pulled over and took the map from his back pocket, unfolding it and looking again at the marking on Perdido Street, and the words describing the Fourth Moment.
Leaving the map open on the seat, he started driving.
chapter
10
Max didn't need Google or the library to tell him about the yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans. Even before the possibility of teaching at Tulane had arisen, he'd covered it several times as both a student and an educator. He'd spent a semester at Boston University teaching a course entitled “Plague in History,” and remembered the most prominent details, just as he did the bubonic plague, and epidemics in London, in Philadelphia, and in ancient societies. By its very nature, an epidemic could be a tilting point in the history of a city or region, changing its cultural fabric forever.
Yellow fever hit New Orleans nearly every summer from the early 1800s until 1905, killing at least forty thousand people, though with the flow of immigrants arriving in that era, the death toll could have been much higher than official numbers reflected. Some years, only a handful of people were taken by the fever, and in others the angel of death might dim the lights in hundreds of homes, even thousands.
The darkest point came in 1853, when the yellow fever had raged out of control, striking down more than eight thousand New Orleaneans in a scant few months, the majority in the sweltering heat of a brutally tropical August. The streets had been deserted, the music halls silent, with most people dead, dying, or tending to the sick. Mass graves were dug and filled, and each morning in August an impromptu parade of hearses and dark carriages headed out to the cemeteries. That image, the burial parade, had remained fresh in Max's mind all the years since he had first read about it.
What he didn't understand was the phrasing of the Fourth Moment. Its meaning seemed clear—the Tordu had done something to rid the city of the yellow fever. But that seemed entirely opposite from what little he knew about them thus far. Had Mireault still been alive then? Why would he have cared how many people the fever took? Max had no idea what the population of New Orleans had been in 1853, or what percentage eight thousand dead would comprise, but it had to be enormous.
Max sighed. He clicked on the car radio and tuned through hip-hop and rap stations until he found a comforting bit of bluesy jazz. The only way for him to find answers was to follow the map, all the way to the end.
He'd managed to get himself tucked away on North Derbigny Street, just off Iberville. According to the map, he wasn't any farther from his destination than he'd been at the library. The only difference was that west of Canal, nearly every street was a one-way, and the map didn't account for that. More than once he had to turn around, but within minutes he found himself turning off Perdido Street onto a road that had no sign.
Both sides of Bertrand Street were vacant lots now. What they had been before Katrina, Max could not decipher. Whatever had been here before had been erased.
He parked the RAV4 on the hard earth of the shoulder and got out. The engine ticked, cooling, and he glanced around to make sure nobody would appear to question or challenge his presence. The neighborhood felt dangerous, even the slant of afternoon sunlight ominous.
Max slammed the car door and locked it. The RAV4 chirped and he surveyed the lot in front of him. When he encountered the Moments, they had a startling reality, and he knew enough about the yellow fever to make him hesitate. This was something he didn't really want to see.
But then he thought of the man he'd left broken and bleeding in front of the library, the hatred on Coco's face, and the dead, glassy eyes of Corinne's corpse. He'd made his choice and chosen his path back in the bar with Ray, when he'd taken the map and later drunk from that little stone bottle.
Max walked onto the vacant lot, stepping carefully over concrete fragments and hard, furrowed ground. He felt the frisson of shifting air around him and the small hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
The stench hit him first.
He staggered, queasy. His equilibrium shifted and he nearly fell, but the sense of dislocation seemed to decrease with every stop along the Map of Moments, and Max was prepared for a shift in the weather, the season, the angle of light.
Instead, he gasped in shock to find himself in a narrow corridor with rough wooden flooring and peeling fleur-de-lis wallpaper. Turning, he saw an entryway behind him and a heavy oak door hanging open.
The air that swept past him in the hallway reeked of rot and filth and something much worse—a sickness more revolting than anything he had ever smelled.
He walked back along the hall, reached out, and felt the turned-up edge of peeling wallpaper. His footfalls echoed on the wooden floor. Christ, I can feel it. It isn't like a dream at all. It's like I'm here.
The thought terrified him. Of all places, this was somewhere he did not want to be, with the yellow fever infecting the air of the city itself. It's 1835. Jesus, this is 1835. He looked out through the open door. The stone-and-dirt street was empty, save for an open carriage that rolled slowly down Perdido Street at the corner. The driver had a scarf across his face. The back of the carriage was laden with the dead, their clothes stained with blood and black bile, faces and other exposed flesh dominoed with purple lesions.
On the street corner, and just across from the building where Max stood, barrels belched flames and spewed black smoke. The wind carried the scent of burning tar, and he recalled the old belief that the scorched stench of the tar could cleanse infection from the air.
Panic touched his heart. Max remembered the map's description of the Fourth Moment, but he hadn't really been prepared for this.
He stepped back out into the street, away from the Moment, out of the past…
But nothing changed. Black smoke drifted across the sky. Grief-stricken wailing came from farther along the block. And an awful certainty formed within him: he'd entered the Moment, but he would not be able to leave until he had experienced what the map intended for him to see.
Max glanced around. What if he walked away? How far would he be able to wander through 1835 New Orleans, or the rest of the world in that year? Would he be little more than a ghost, as he'd been during past Moments? Where was he, physically, right now? In an empty New Orleans lot, or somehow slipped in between realities, as though time were sheaves of paper?
He could smell the stink of this world, hear its agonies, feel its texture.
Could he be infected by its ills?
Max hung his head, thinking, breathing evenly.
He had no choice. Only forward. But in this case, forward meant backward. He turned to face the building again and saw the sign above the door—GRANGE HALL.Taking a breath, Max crossed the threshold, leaving the door open.
The corridor rustled with shifting September breezes, carrying the acrid smell of burning tar in one direction, and the bilious stench of rot and death in the other.
Cries of despair and suffering came from deeper within the building, and the breeze grew stronger. Max pulled his shirt up over his mouth. Though he always thought such attempts to prevent disease illogical and feeble, instinct demanded it.
At the end of the hall, he entered a small kitchen. Two doors exited from the rear of the kitchen, one leading into some other living area, the other opening into a narrow corridor from which issued the moans and wails of anguish. He tried to make mental sense of the building. If this was a grange hall, it seemed an odd construction.
He turned a corner and went through another propped-open door, finding himself in the hall itself. The side he'd entered from must be the residence of the grange president or some other caretaker. On this side there were two large doors—one to the right, at the back of the hall, and a side entrance directly across from him—and the hall had the feeling of a vast church whose pews had been removed.
People lay on cots, blankets, and the rough beams of the wood floor. Every door was open, but somehow instead of taking away the smells, the moving air made them worse, disturbing the stink that rose from the bodies of both the living and the dead. The dead in the cart that had passed him on Perdido Street had not been as hideous as some of those who lay here.
There must have been more than two hundred people here, including several dozen who were tending to the sick or mourning the dead. The place seemed to have been broken up into three staging areas, with the ill at the back of the hall, the dying at the front, and the dead in the center, most of them wrapped in blankets that would have to be burned. Men with kerchiefs over their faces were carrying a corpse out through the side door as Max entered.
He'd studied plague, taught lessons about it, but seeing it brought home how little he'd really understood. Half of those infected would die. The fever started like a typical flu, but those patients wouldn't have been brought here yet. The grange hall was filled with end-stage victims, many of them close to death.
Max walked amongst the caregivers and the grief-stricken. Men huddled in tears over wives, mothers over children, people of all ages over parents. Doctors and nurses and patients alike spoke in a Babel of languages that made understanding impossible. Max heard Spanish, French, English, and German, as well as languages that must be Caribbean or African. All of those tongues, all of those words, flowed into a single prayer for the dying.
Some had boils on their skin; others were spotted with purplish blotches. A pale little girl of no more than twelve began to convulse just as Max passed her, and he flinched away. Then, ashamed, he forced himself to stay and watch as a nurse rushed to her side. The girl vomited black bile, which dribbled down her chin and stuck like tar in her long, lank blond hair.
Max fought back tears as he finally turned away.
When shouts rose from the back of the hall and he turned to see a group of healthy men storm in, he knew that the Fourth Moment had arrived. This was what he had come for, and he hated the relief that swept through him. He would willingly bear witness to whatever the map's magic demanded, as long as it meant he could be gone from this hall, from this Hell.
There were nine of them, all with their faces masked against the disease. It took a moment for Max to realize his mistake. Two of the nine were women, one white and one with the caramel hue shared by some Creoles. Three of the men appeared to be Creole as well; three were black and one white. Whatever the Tordu's origins, their work blurred the lines of race.
One of them carried a burlap sack, heavy with things that squirmed and chattered, struggling to be free.
Nurses shouted at them. They made their way into the building, passing the sick who lay near the rear door, intent upon those deeper in the hall: the dead or the dying.
“Le Tordu,” a whisper went up from two nurses standing amidst the patients closest to death.
“Non!”a doctor said.
He started forward and confronted the leader of the group at the middle of the hall, amongst the blanket-shrouded dead.
“Monsieur, you have no business here!” the doctor said firmly, pressing one hand against the man's chest.
Dark eyes stared over the top of the cloth mask covering the Tordu man's face. “Ah, but we do,” he said. “We are here to help.”
The doctor gave him a hesitant shove.
The man took one step back, and his hand came round in a silent arc. Max thought he would merely slap the doctor away. He didn't realize the Tordu held a knife until it slashed the doctor's throat; blood sprayed onto the white cloth the man wore as a mask.
Nurses screamed; men shouted.
But the Tordu marched forward, and no one else dared to stand in their way. Some of those who grieved for the dying lay themselves on top of their failing loved ones, as if to protect them. Coughs and moans and sobbing continued, but the doctors and nurses had moved to the sides of the hall now, and they did not interfere.
The nine Tordu weaved through the cots and blankets and bodies. One of the women muttered a name, and the leader, whose knife had already been bloodied, hurried to her. The others followed suit, until all nine of them surrounded the little girl whose black vomit stained her hair and chin.
“This one's perfect,” the leader said.
“No,” Max whispered.
They moved quickly. From their pockets the Tordu brought out half-melted black candles and placed them in a circle around her, lighting the wicks. They dragged and shoved other patients away from the girl without a care for their lives or comfort. Their only foc
us was the girl.
“You cannot—” one of the nurses began.
A doctor clapped his hand over her mouth and held her back.
The Creole woman took out bags of powder and began to sprinkle them first over the girl herself, and then in a careful circle around where she lay on the floor. Two men dropped and began to use half-burnt sticks of charcoal to etch symbols on the wooden floorboards around her.
“Wait,” Max said. “What are you going to do?”
Stupid. They can't hear you.
The white woman produced a knife and stepped toward the girl. She began to chant in something that sounded vaguely like French, but was not. Max took a step closer, but the woman lifted her own hand and sliced her palm, wincing, then made a fist and let her blood spatter down onto the dying girl's face.
Where the blood dripped, it burned like acid. The girl opened her mouth in the beginning of a scream, and then convulsed again, more of that black vomit issuing from between her lips.
Two men tore away the blanket covering the girl and ripped open her clothing, showing her withered body and its pattern of awful lesions. Her lower back had turned entirely bruise-purple, like a corpse whose blood had settled into mortification.
The Tordu took up the chant. One by one, they cut their palms and bled onto her belly, legs, and face, and everywhere their blood showered her, the girl burned.
Max shook his head, hands clenched into fists at his side, damning the map and damning crazy Ray, and even damning Gabrielle. “Stop!” he screamed, stepping up to the one who was their leader.
The Tordu man raised a hand to hush the others and looked around in alarm, his eyes alert, but not as though he was searching for something. As though he was listening. He closed his eyes tightly, cocked his head.
“Did you hear me?” Max said aloud. Impossible. But …“Stop, you fucking bastards! Leave her alone!”
The Map of Moments Page 15