The Tangled Bridge

by Rhodi Hawk

  She nodded more with her heart than her head. The girl had lifted the jar to Madeleine’s lips and she found she could drink. Probably, the stuff tasted awful. Everything looked to be moving in waves. Even the gingham pattern of the girl’s dress seemed to move like charmed serpents.

  Madeleine was going to fall back asleep if she didn’t hurry.

  “Severin,” she called in her mind.

  And Severin appeared, crawling up from somewhere beneath the bed, maybe even beneath the floorboards, and she kept low. For once she wasn’t wearing a grin.

  Severin put her tiny, filthy finger to her lips in a shushing gesture.

  “Just us, yes?” she whispered.

  Madeleine nodded in her mind. And then, mercifully, she felt herself being dislodged from that wretched thing that had become her body. Briar mist cool and quiet, all around.

  * * *

  THEY DESCENDED AT ONCE from the forest into the fractured tunnels below, Severin whispering, “A secret in your heart, a thing to find, yes.”

  Madeleine nodded in reply. Severin was dragging her along, Madeleine’s weakened mind unable to do anything but focus on the fissure she’d seen in the symbols, and she saw it in her mind now. Saw it clearly though she’d never been there before. The compulsion came not from her mind but from somewhere else deep within her, a part of her she’d felt when she was talking to Marc and Daddy.

  And she knew Severin was taking her to that fissure. Uncharacteristically obedient. Probably because Severin held her own stake in Madeleine’s survival.

  “Are Zenon or Gaston anywhere nearby? Or their river devils?” Madeleine asked.

  Severin halted and gave Madeleine a fierce look. “Hush that! Why invoke them?”

  “Invoke? I was just asking.”

  “To say a name is to pray it. And the feeling in your heart wraps around the name, too, fury or love or death, so surely.”

  Madeleine, listened, bewildered. They were in an underground grotto, roots dangling above and water washing along beneath them. A smell of mildew and rot.

  She felt so drowsy. Losing consciousness now would be deadly.

  Madeleine said, “Alright, fine. Is anyone nearby we should know about?”

  “Not as of this moment. And luck, that. What you seek is a secret.”

  “OK, so let’s go.”

  Severin said, “You know the way, not I. You’ve stopped looking at it so now I cannot find it.”

  “Me?”

  Madeleine thought backward, trying to figure out where the fissure was, her mind flitting over the places she’d been inside the briar. But she’d never before been to this particular place.

  Severin glared at her. “What are you doing? You wish to take us on some lengthy voyage?”

  “I … don’t know how to find it.”

  “Just do as before!”

  Madeleine swallowed, erasing all thoughts, then pictured the carving she’d seen in the root system of Gaston’s tree. The plus sign with a circle and dots. The long-tailed triangle.

  The sense returned. The coarse groove that she’d seen in that wood became a new, living dimension, a cleft in stone.

  They were moving again, this time with the seven-league steps Severin took when covering long distances, and suddenly they were there.

  * * *

  FOUR TREES, JUST AS in the carving. And there was the crevasse.

  Madeleine and Severin were standing at a bend in the river that had gone black with shadows—unnatural shadows, those that had never been framed by light. An immediate sense of danger swept over Madeleine.

  Where the water turned, an eddy had formed. Only, the water did not look like water. It swirled black and thick. A vestigial body like an appendix that once served to filter sludge but now only acquired the worst toxins of its environment, storing them in a pool that could never empty itself.

  Madeleine narrowed her eyes at the odors emitting from the eddy, and watched as the water moved … strangely, as if a creature made of tar were stretching along the surface. An unsettling sight. There were many traps in the briar. Most caused you to lose your way so that you might wander for weeks, even years. Some caused physical pain or loathing. As Madeleine gave a nervous glance toward that shape that seemed made of tar, she noticed thornflies crawling along the roots dangling above.

  The fissure was shaped much like the triangle in the carving, with the longest end being on top, and the point of the triangle falling below and to the right. The mouth was covered in moss, mottled with green and rust colors like the duckweed at the briar’s surface. A breeze came from within. It smelled sweet like a meadow just before a rainstorm is about to break.

  “Inside, now,” Severin was saying, and her eyes were bright.

  But this fissure was tiny. About the size of the glove box in Madeleine’s truck. They couldn’t exactly crawl inside. Madeleine looked at Severin, puzzled.

  “In!” Severin said.

  Madeleine peered inside but saw only darkness. And movement. She steeled herself and reached inside. Felt something covering her arm. She pulled her arm out again and saw it covered with thornflies. They poured out of the opening.

  Madeleine kept her breathing steady, refusing to give in to alarm. The thornflies had their stingers curled and waiting, crawling up her arm and following to her neck and body. She felt a wave course through her, one that ought to be panic but she let it pass through her like a shadow and it did not catch.

  Everything was slipping away from her. Like a giant fan slowly turning its blades over her vision, she knew she was about slip into unconsciousness. Death.

  “Go on! Stupid thing!” Severin cried.

  Madeleine went tense, and felt the first few stings of the thornflies.

  Severin said, “You are going to die here, right here. In this moment. A breath away.”

  The stings throbbed, but Madeleine released a slow sigh and let the pain happen. The thornflies stopped.

  Madeleine looked again into the crevasse, and suddenly realized what she needed to do.

  A clear mind. An open heart. Her spirit lifted.

  And she was inside. She alone, not Severin.

  * * *

  SHE LAY PRONE ON something soft. Without Severin’s will to pull her along she found she could not move. Not an inch. Much like being back in her body.

  The fan blades turned. Madeleine counted each turn. Such comfort in counting. It took the last reserves of her consciousness. And then consciousness slipped, too.

  * * *

  SHE FELT HER BODY churning. Her awareness was bogged down in something like sleep, only heavier. More resistant. But after a span of time her mind broke through the blackness into something she couldn’t attach to briar or material world. If anything, it felt like a dream: In her ear, she felt a cocoon had formed, then hatched. Both agony and relief to feel it seize and move. She wanted it to eject itself from her. She felt bending delirium to the point of vertigo. Her body wanted to writhe, too, like that anxious, fervent thing in her ear.

  All the little cuts on and throughout her body formed over clean, and they ejected the heat and puss and scab into tiny itchy balls that fell away from her like dry rice, leaving behind only smooth pink sensation. Her ankle where Gaston had cut her, her knees and hands. Her kidneys, even, and her bladder—she felt them knitting over with coolness where there had been heat and pain. Her lungs planed themselves clean and filled with a substance that, it seemed, had she not found the skill of subsistence without breath, might have drowned her.

  She was aware of rolling over onto her belly to cough it out, and this time her consciousness rose even higher from the dream state. She retched.

  The creature in her ear was working, working. She felt a strange sort of wrenching. It pulled the pain away with it. The heaviness. She placed her hand to her ear. Inside the ear canal, the creature went flap flap flap flap. Then it was vibrating, soft and furtive. It emerged, spread its wings, and flew away. She watched it go. A moth, but with briar
enchantments. Had she created that? A thing that she learned from the soft, cool, mossy retreat. In its absence her ear was clean and her hearing sharp.

  No real awareness of where she was, as all her sight had gone inward. She collapsed back down onto the feel of soft, spongy moss and let her body plunge back into real sleep.

  This time it was restful.

  * * *

  SHE AWOKE IN THIS same fissure. And when she opened her eyes her mind was immediately brighter though she could see only in fractals.

  This was a good place. An anomaly of the briar. She could feel a kind of ambient tension, a delicious sense, sort of like the way her muscles felt when she was treading water very slowly. Drawing warmth into her body. Exploring her own strength. The scent of impending rain was strong though she knew it would not rain.

  She rested there, keeping her mind easy. A strange kind of euphoria filled her, light and beautiful.

  Slowly, her surroundings came into focus. Spongy moss above and below her, lining the walls of the cave. Somewhere far away Severin was speaking. Madeleine could not discern the words and didn’t try, because this was not a river devil’s place.

  She heard, “Oh.”

  Madeleine looked.

  Cooper.

  Sitting in a corner of the fissure, his toy blocks spread out before him. He was smiling. A gorgeous thing. Eyes bright and round and set wide above his cheeks. He cooed at her.

  Madeleine felt a rush of delight. “Oh, little baby. I’ve been wanting to meet you.”

  He reached his hands toward her.

  She scooted over to him and pulled him up into her arms, and he nestled into her lap. He slapped at his knees and inspected first her face, then her hands, and then reached toward his blocks. She picked one up and handed it to him. They sat like that for a very long time.

  But even as she held him, she felt dismay. Somewhere, on the brink of death, Chloe was watching.

  fifty-seven

  LOUISIANA, NOW

  HE WAS SUCH A little thing. Ghastly to imagine an infant in the briar. Madeleine hadn’t known this place existed before last year, and she was in her late twenties.

  Little Cooper was falling asleep. She held him close, drinking in that baby smell.

  She whispered, “Marc, I don’t know how to protect him.”

  She felt a lump forming in her throat. Had she just somehow given baby Cooper over to Chloe? This was what Chloe had wanted. That Madeleine come find him in the briar.

  The return to sharp-mindedness fueled a new determination. She wasn’t going to try to hide anymore, it wasn’t working anyway—not for Cooper and Emily, or for herself, or even for Bo.

  Cooper was fast asleep now. And then suddenly he was gone. Madeleine’s arms fell empty to her sides.

  She closed her eyes and drew in her breath. No anxiety, no sadness or fury, just a solid plan. Take the necessary actions. Commit to the death.

  * * *

  SEVERIN WAS WAITING OUTSIDE the crevasse, ranting, frustrated that she couldn’t get inside. Madeleine heard it now, though the river devil had likely been railing the entire time. And as she heard it and resisted the anger, she felt herself slipping from one form of awareness to the next, as though trying to hold onto a dream. And then suddenly she was out of the crevasse and facing Severin again.

  Severin regarded her with gleaming eyes. “Such the better. Whole again.”

  “Take me back,” Madeleine said.

  “Now is not when. You owe a long debt of time in my play. Here you must while. Here with me.”

  “Not now. Take us back to my body!”

  Severin narrowed her eyes. “A fine thing to believe that you can demand service of me.”

  Madeleine felt strange. Almost euphoric. And she was deeper into the briar than she’d ever dared venture. Had she died? The thought was chilling, that she might be damned to this briar world instead of in that cool, quiet place where she’d seen Daddy and Marc.

  But in her heart she knew better. She was very much alive. More so than she’d been before she’d rested inside the mossy cave.

  She looked to her left and recognized the broad, oily pool within a grotto of thorns. Greenish-gray light. Movement at the far side—a whirlpool. No sign of the thing she’d seen stirring at the surface before.

  Severin was looking at her with a gloating smile. Madeleine’s instinct was to reprimand her for not bringing them back. To unleash some fury.

  But no, she wouldn’t be unleashing fury. She’d be cultivating it.

  She knew better than to try to manhandle Severin.

  And suddenly she sensed the creature. Its nearness was apparent before she even saw it. She turned to look.

  The same creature she’d seen before on the eddy’s surface, but now it stood just behind her. A devil who had the body of a man but whose four limbs were long like those of a spider. A devil with tar in its body and soul. She knew that it wanted to claim her and that if she allowed that to happen her life would never be the same.

  It folded its cagelike arms around her. It happened so fast.

  She turned her attention away from it. Inward. And she was gone.

  Gone. Slipped away from the creature’s grasp.

  Daddy and Marc were standing opposite her. The same sensation she’d used to get inside the fissure.

  Without a word, Marc, Daddy, and Madeleine looked down. Madeleine’s body lay on a pallet in the room below.

  The sense of falling, and then Madeleine was back inside, hacking desperately against fluid inside her lungs.

  fifty-eight

  BAYOU BOUILLON, NOW

  PATRICE SAT IN FERRAR’S pirogue as he navigated by electric lantern through the snaking waterways. It had an outboard motor, but the going was still slow. Even if it were light out it would have probably been slow because of the endless twisting passages. The motor hummed beneath her, vibrating her bones, making her body numb. Her mind felt numb, too. She faced away from Ferrar’s beam of light and looked out over blackness. The Bible sat on her knees.

  They’d left Francois behind in the floating village at Bayou Bouillon. He was badly hurt, having been attacked probably just prior to when Trigger was killed. Patrice and Ferrar found Francois lying on his side with a wound to his right lung where he’d been stabbed in the back.

  “Leave me to the ghost. Take the Bible. Leave me to the ghosts.” It’s all he got out.

  And they did. Patrice and Ferrar obeyed and left him bleeding there in the boardwalk while village dwellers hovered around him. Patrice wondered about him now. He could be cold and dead, like the seven she’d drowned. Like her brother. She ought to grieve at the thought of Francois lying there that way, but Trigger had consumed all her anguish and left nothing but a cauterized numbness in her soul.

  She was going to kill her mother. She would offer herself up in exchange for Marie-Rose and Gilbert, wait until the younger ones were safe, and then she would kill her.

  The motor throttled back and the boat slowed. Patrice looked over her shoulder. They were close to a stretch of land and Ferrar was shining his light along the shoreline. Gray shapes showed in the beam. Green grass or redbud, it all looked gray in the thin artificial light—all color and life squeezed out, leaving only a combination of black and white, absence and presence.

  Ferrar gunned the motor and then cut it dead, tilting it up. The pirogue shot forward like a silent arrow across the water and slid up onto soft sand. Though the motor had stopped, it seemed she could still feel the echoes of its vibrations.

  “Are we here already? The mainland?” she asked.

  “No. This is a portage point. One of two. We have to cross overland and then set in again.”

  “Oh.”

  “Wait inside the pirogue, I’ll push it up all the way.”

  But she was already out and in the water. She felt her dress balloon up around her like a jellyfish. The silt felt soft beneath her toes.

  No shoes. Where were her shoes?

  Some
where in Bayou Bouillon.

  They hauled the pirogue up onto shore, and then Ferrar lifted it onto a dolly that was waiting in the weeds. The dolly’s spoked metal wheels were enormous and it reminded her of an old Civil War cannon she’d once seen. The wheels seemed reluctant to turn but Ferrar knew how to coax them.

  They walked in relative darkness. The moon was out but dawdling, and Patrice found her way more by feel of bare feet than anything else. She must not have been wearing shoes much those past six years because her soles were good and rough. Ferrar was barefoot, too. She saw the occasional flash of his soles catching moonlight as he hauled the pirogue ahead of her.

  After about twenty minutes they were setting in again. This time Ferrar had to use a pole that was waiting at the set-in side to navigate through the windings.

  “Too shallow for a motor,” he explained.

  He used no electric light to guide them this time, just the thin moonlight and his own familiarity with these waters. Patrice looked out over a calico expanse of cut grass and water. No bird or cricket or frog sounds. Just the splash of the pole stirring the marsh and Ferrar slapping mosquitoes. Bayou Bouillon was behind them to the south and west, with Terrefleurs somewhere far to the north and New Orleans with its bridge waiting to the east.

  Patrice and Ferrar traveled without conversation. She was glad he wasn’t trying to fill the silence, that he wasn’t trying to console her over Trigger.

  * * *

  ABOUT AN HOUR HAD gone by in the winding flats with Ferrar guiding the pirogue with pole or paddle, depending on which was necessary, and then they were pulling onto another rise of land.

  “This is…”

  “The second crossing,” Patrice said, remembering that they had to make two overland crossings before the final waterway to the mainland.

  “Yes.”

  They pulled together and hauled the pirogue up onto the soft, grass-matted banks. The grass helped give the vessel a little slide.