by Bryan Camp
“Legba?”
“That’s how they call me, true enough.” For a moment, Jude saw the loa himself and not the woman he rode, wrinkles creased at the corners of his eyes, an ancient gap-toothed smile. Legba crushed a knob-knuckled grip around Jude’s arm and pointed toward the crowd of deities with the tip of the cane. “They won’t wait forever, them.”
Jude chuckled and helped Legba across the street, unsure whether Legba held tightly to him for support or to keep him from getting away. As they drew closer, Jude’s nostrils were assaulted by the scent of spices and the odor of hot flesh, the burnt ozone of a thunderstorm, the stink of rot. He picked out the other players at the card game from among the restless group. Thoth, still wearing his Jazz Fest T-shirt and jeans, rested in the grass with his legs folded, his bird’s head buried in a book. Scarpelli leaned against the cemetery wall, attention focused on a smartphone. He wore a dark suit with a tie the brownish-red tint of a fresh scab. The angel swooped in from above just as the crowd began to quiet, wings snapping, toe tips prancing along the ground.
Jude turned along with everyone else when the doors of the funeral home creaked open, the sound loud enough to be heard from across the street. The pallbearers emerged, six shadowy figures holding a coffin aloft. The gods hushed, and it seemed like the city itself silenced around them, the only sound that of the pallbearers’ footsteps, hooves clopping on asphalt instead of the soft tread of human feet. The smell of sulfur grew overpowering. The wind died down.
When the pallbearers turned in a slow, precise circle to face down Basin, they shifted, changing shape with liquid grace. Within moments, six roughly man-shaped shadows with a black casket hoisted on their shoulders became an ebony carriage and two shaggy-maned horses, pawing at the street and snorting gouts of fiery snot. The wind returned, as if on cue, kicking up the dust beneath the huge wooden-spoked wheels, billowing up into a plume of smoke. Where it blew, images flickered—vague figures, indistinct like something glimpsed in an early morning fog. A single moan hung in the air, a note played on a brass instrument. The note doubled, trebled, and then the dust swept away, and the carriage rolled forward, followed by the shades of a brass band, playing a slow, mournful tune. As one, Jude and the assembled deities fell into step with them. Still leaning on Jude’s arm, Legba produced a pint bottle of Old New Orleans Rum, took a long swallow, and held it out with a little shake. Jude hesitated, wanting sobriety when he questioned the loa, but knowing disrespect wouldn’t get him anywhere. He tipped the bottle back and swallowed twice before returning the rum.
Jude expected the procession to move across to the cemetery, but it wound its way down to Canal, step by halting step. Traffic stopped without the usual need for a police escort. As they turned onto the busy street and headed away from the river, Jude wondered what the tourists behind their cameras and the locals frozen behind their steering wheels saw. Did they see a normal funeral procession with a hearse and a convoy of cars, or the somber parade of a traditional jazz funeral, the death of a local musician beloved enough to shutdown Canal Street? Did the convoy of deities pass unseen in the darkness between one blink and the next? Then the music and the rum caught his mind and his steps, and, for a time, he thought nothing at all.
If Canal Street was a river, its head was the bustling life of downtown, and its mouth was a broad delta of cemeteries, a city of the dead that sprawled for over a mile, divided, like any city, into neighborhoods. St. Patrick’s, for instance, was the poorer part of town, with many of its headstones and iron fences falling into disrepair. Lake Lawn, tucked away on the other side of an interstate overpass, was the resting place of the affluent, huge crypts replete with stained-glass windows and finely crafted statues. In between was Greenwood, a typical New Orleans cemetery with aboveground stone tombs laid out with the regularity of a suburb, like the shotgun doubles where many of those buried had lived and died.
It should have taken Jude at least an hour to walk the three-mile stretch between the Quarter and the cemeteries, but carried along with the funeral procession, it seemed to take no time at all. The carriage took a sharp right at the corner of Canal Street and City Park Avenue, entering a small graveyard that Jude had seen before but always somehow ignored. Ten-foot-high stone walls obscured everything in the small patch of land between the streetcar line and St. Patrick’s Cemetery. As Jude followed the deities through the wrought-iron gate, he looked up at the words carved in sunken relief on the arch above: ODD FELLOW’S REST. Odd fellows, Jude thought. That’s an understatement.
The vegetation beyond the graveyard walls had long ago moved past being overgrown. This was the swamp of hundreds of years ago reasserting itself right in the center of the city. The dominant colors in most New Orleans cemeteries were varying shades of gray: marble statues and tombs with crumbling plaster, concrete walls and walkways made of oyster-shell gravel. Here, everything was green. Grass and brambles and vines crept up underfoot while elephant-ear leaves held sway overhead. It seemed larger on the inside than out, which didn’t surprise Jude at all; most things were.
Despite the relative coolness of the day, sweat dampened the skin between Jude’s shoulder blades and itched at the edge of his beard. Gnats rose in hordes from every disturbance of greenery, every shuffled footstep, and every branch brushed out of the way. They fell on him, irritating pinpricks along his flesh, as if sensing that he alone had mortal flesh to bite. He wandered amid the trees and the graves, awed, falling behind the rest of the procession. By the time he caught up to the gods, they had already reached Dodge’s crypt.
The angel perched on one of a row of gravestones facing away from Jude, delicately balanced on the pockmarked granite. Occasionally, the angel’s wings shuddered, flinging a fine mist of dew and the scent of spice into the air. Beyond him, Legba leaned on his cane next to Thoth, who still held a book, one of his thick fingers wedged between the pages to mark his place. Scarpelli stood with one hip cocked above the other, his thumbs typing on the device in his hand. His posture, the smartphone, all of it seemed somehow disrespectful, bored.
The ebony carriage waited in a shaft of pollen-filled sunlight, its doors opened wide, its interior empty. Dodge’s body must already be in the tomb. Unlike the others Jude had seen, Dodge’s burial chamber was not granite or marble, but bronze, centuries of weather coating it with verdigris, a greenish black that spread across its surface like a rash.
A tall, lanky man in a dark, pristine tuxedo unfolded from inside the bronze structure, spinning and closing the doors behind him. Jude’s skin went cold at the sight of him. He had no face, no ears, no flesh anywhere on his head, just the smooth bone and rictus grin of a skull. Whorls and blooming flowers of bright paint adorned the glistening surface of his head, like a tattoo, like a calavera sugar skull. That grim visage swept back and forth across the assembled gods, jaws clacking as he spoke, words that Jude either couldn’t quite hear or were in a language he couldn’t comprehend, and then the skull-faced god stepped up to the carriage and closed the doors. The horses strained in their traces, pulling the carriage forward, and the brass band ripped the solemn air of the cemetery with the first notes of bright, energetic music. Had the funeral really been that brief, or had Jude wandered longer than he thought? The gods began to dance, handkerchiefs waving in the air, second-lining their way out of the graveyard.
Wings snapped and fluttered, the angel taking flight, followed by Thoth in the shape of a small white bird. The vampire was nowhere to be seen. “Shit,” Jude muttered. “Shit, shit.” He stepped forward, needing to catch up to Legba before he left, too, but a white gloved hand fell on his shoulder and stopped him. A voice spoke into his ear, deep and similar to Legba’s, but rasping as though strained by illness. “You looking for someone?” it asked. Jude didn’t need to turn around to know that when he did, he’d be looking into the empty eyes of the skull-faced god.
There was a weak flutter of fear in his gut, but he pushed it down. He’d let the fear win in Mourning’s office,
let fear rule his life for six years—and it had gotten him nowhere.
Maybe it was time to let the old Jude out of the box.
He turned and grinned in the face of death. “Maybe,” he said, hoping those empty eye sockets wouldn’t see too easily through his bravado, “I’m looking for you. Are you ‘angelface666’ on Match.com?”
The skull-headed god’s jaw clicked as it opened and closed, and a frisson rose the hair on the back of Jude’s neck, when he realized what was happening. He’d made a death god smile.
“Who I am is either a real long answer,” the god said, “or a real short one. Which you want?” He eased back onto the edge of a tomb, his long arms and legs bending at right angles like a thing made of sticks.
“Let’s try the short one.”
“Then call me Barren.”
Jude knew that many of the ghede—the voodoo family who handled death—went by the honorific “Baron.” Cimetière, Samedi, La Croix; this god could be any of them or someone else entirely. “You saying I ought to curtsy?” he asked.
The skull-faced god snorted out a laugh. “Naw,” he said. “Barren like a field that don’t bear no fruit.” He slid a gloved hand into his tuxedo jacket and pulled out a silver flask. Barren unscrewed the cap and took a long drink. There was something very unsettling in the way his teeth clinked against the metal, in the way the alcohol seemed to vanish in between the bone of his jaw and the pale gray of the cravat that hid his neck. Jude hoped, desperately, that he wouldn’t offer to share. Barren finished and put the flask away, running his gloved hands along his painted skull, like a man smoothing his hair. “No sense in my askin’ who you are.”
“Because it’s obvious?”
“Naw,” Barren said, shaking his head. “’Cause you don’t know your own self.” Barren turned his head away, as if, despite being earless, he heard something Jude could not. “You better figure it out, though. Quick and in a hurry, too. You about run outta time.”
“Time? For what?”
“For anything.” He turned his empty eye sockets back toward Jude, holes that seemed to fall away to cavernous depths. “You ain’t askin’ the right questions.” He sounded, Jude realized, disappointed.
“What kinds of questions should I be asking?”
Bony shoulders lifted up into a shrug. “I know ’em when I hear ’em.”
“Fine. Let’s go with the obvious one. Who killed Dodge?”
Barren’s gloved hands came together in a soft, patronizing clap. “Better,” he said. “But I got no answer to that one.” He pulled at his cuffs, an oddly vain, fussy gesture.
Something about Barren’s coy, taunting replies burned away the last of Jude’s restraint, let his temper off the leash. “You won’t tell me who you are—don’t know who I’m looking for—why the fuck am I talking to you?”
Again that clicking jaw, mouth gaping open like a serpent’s smile. “’Cause I know somethin’ you don’t,” Barren said. “I know who you are.”
“Yeah? And who is that?”
“That,” he said, “is the right question.” Barren reached out, fingers giving a little sleight-of-hand flourish. A large playing card appeared in his hand, which he angled toward Jude. “Compliments of the dearly departed,” Barren said. It was a tarot card, THE MAGICIAN, a robed figure pointing to the sky and to the ground. The man on the card had Jude’s face. When he looked up, Barren was gone, leaving him alone with only the dead for company.
The tourist’s pretty pink phone buzzed in Jude’s pocket with a text. Instead of a number, the phone displayed a series of X’s. Waiting for you out front. He slid the tarot card into his coat pocket and started typing a reply, but stopped halfway between right and out. He’d presumed it was Regal, but hadn’t she saved her number? It couldn’t be her, he realized; she’d have no idea where he was.
Jude rummaged through his satchel, thoughts racing. He had a couple of magical disguises, but none were good enough to fool someone who was actively looking for him, since there was just one exit, and he was the last one still in the cemetery. There were wards and charms he could work to protect himself, if only he knew who—or what—was waiting for him. He considered a handful of ways to escape, and then the old Jude spoke up. What if that’s one of the card players you’ve been looking for? he asked himself. What’s it gonna take for you to quit running? How many different kinds of timid little shit are you gonna be?
Inside the satchel, his fingers brushed against a slim rod, humming with energy. Just a touch filled his veins with fire and swagger like he’d drunk the whole bottle of rum that Legba had offered. The solution to the worst-case scenario, to every worst-case scenario. He grinned. Not even Mourning knew he’d been walking around with an honest-to-Zeus thunderbolt in his bag all this time. Confidence at least somewhat regained, he finished his message, be right out, and hit send.
Just outside the gate, a Cadillac—long and dark and low, washed and waxed to a polished gleam—idled next to the curb. The chauffeur stood at the rear door, a tall, thin specter, his posture so rigid it was unnerving. Jude’s tongue probed the inside of his mouth to see if he’d bitten his lip. No wound, but he still tasted . . . blood.
The mirror-tinted window rolled down, smooth and whirring, to reveal the vampire Scarpelli. Jude’s arm twitched, eager to reach for the thunderbolt.
“Afternoon, Sunshine,” Scarpelli said in his high-pitched rasp. His blotchy corpse’s skin looked even worse in the daylight. Jude tried to keep his breathing calm, hoping the vampire couldn’t smell his fear like people said dogs could. He felt the vampire’s eyes traveling up and down his body, judging his fashion sense or looking for the best place to bite.
“Isn’t it a little bright out here for you?” Jude asked.
A disappointed click of the tongue. “You watch too many movies. Though I do abhor this heat. Come, get in. I’m here to collect you.”
A flash of memory, the doubloon with the drop of blood that Scarpelli demanded of him. “You didn’t win that hand,” Jude said. The words sounded hollow even as he said them. As though Scarpelli had never broken the rules before.
The dead god smiled wide enough to show his fangs, his gums stained black. “Not to collect you like that, sweetmeats. Not yet.” Again the vampire eyed him, his gaze full of some predatory combination of hunger and lust that turned Jude’s stomach. “Merely a ride and some conversation. A . . . proposal of sorts.”
The chauffeur opened the door, and—though every mammalian instinct he possessed screamed for him to run—Jude eased into the car, the space within frigid and dim, filled with the sterile stink of an industrial freezer. Two rows of benched leather seats faced each other. A young blonde waited inside, wearing a long pencil skirt and a silk blouse buttoned tight against her neck. High as the collar rose, it didn’t entirely hide the ragged scar on the side of her throat. Jude saw, then, the pale, unnatural tautness of her skin, the red stain in the whites of her eyes, recognized her as the woman from St. Joe’s, the chauffeur as the scruffy-haired bartender. Ghouls. Revenants. The leftovers of Scarpelli’s dinner up and walking around, chained to a semblance of life, forced to be his servants.
The woman turned to the small side bar, her movements a detached, near-convincing mimicry of volition, a marionette controlled by a skilled hand. She opened a glass decanter and poured half a glass of some rust-colored liquid, the flow of it smooth and viscous as motor oil.
Scarpelli took it from her as the car rolled into traffic. “Where are my manners,” the vampire asked. “Would you care for one? I mix it myself. The trick is, you add the gin when the blood is still hot, so it doesn’t fully coagulate.” Jude turned his attention to the tinted windows, trying to hide the revulsion he knew must be in his eyes. The vampire giggled anyway. “Yes, well, there’s no accounting for taste.”
“I thought the same thing just the other day,” Jude said, letting some of the vampire’s indifferent tone creep into his own inflection, “when Dodge invited an immortal tick to h
is card game.” As soon as the insult left his lips, a feeling of vertigo washed over him, an instinctive repulsion away from the danger he was in, but Jude was desperate. He’d lost his chance to talk to Legba; he needed to goad the vampire into revealing something.
If Scarpelli noticed the barb, he ignored it. “Ah yes, the game. Just the thing I wanted to talk to you about.” There was something of an eye roll in the way he said “the game,” as though the whole experience was beneath him. “I have to admit, I was impressed by your gambit. Quite clever. Just the sort of thing I can make use of when the prize is mine.”
“The prize?” This was his big gamble. A bluff wrapped in a mask. He had to seem like he was feigning ignorance about a thing he really didn’t know, so the vampire would see through one deception, but not the deeper one.
“Oh, let’s not be coy with one another, precious. You know as well as I that whoever leaves the game with the most tokens—which will be this current hand, given your delightful little gambit—will do so as the luck god of New Orleans.”
Jude kept his face impassive, even as his mind whirled. He couldn’t let Scarpelli know how much he’d just revealed. He thought back to that night, the vampire not bothering to turn his cards over after Dodge showed his own. “Funny,” Jude said, “you didn’t seem that confident in your hand before.”
Scarpelli sipped his drink, rolling it around on his tongue like a fine wine. “That was before your little trick,” he said. “I’ve had time to make some side wagers thanks to you, and with that fool Renaud out of the way—”
“Glad I could help,” Jude said, the words spilling out before he could stop them. A glance out the window showed him that the car was moving unwaveringly in the direction of his apartment, and the thought that the vampire might know where he lived made him too jumpy to be able to stomach Scarpelli’s gloating. “You have an offer for me?”
All pretense of playfulness slipped from the vampire’s face, leaving only cold, calculating hunger in its wake. He drained his glass and held it out to the ghoul without bothering to look in her direction. He reached into his coat pocket with his other hand and pulled out the doubloon from the card game. Jude had to clench his hands into fists to keep from reaching for it.