by Bryan Camp
The sound of a woman humming shook Jude out of his head and back into the moment. Just as he recognized the melody of “Wear Your Black Dress,” the song the pretty young woman in the voodoo shop had been singing, his mom danced around the corner of her triptych and saw him. She had bright blue eyes, a generous smile, and the milky-white skin and ample figure that Renaissance artists worshiped. She also—through magic or genes, Jude was never quite sure—looked to be about half as old as she actually was. In his more cynical moments, Jude thought it was her detachment from responsibility that kept her so youthful.
“My baby’s come home!” she squealed, and leaped across the room to embrace him. For just a moment, it didn’t matter that this was a borrowed room in a monastery, not the house Uptown where he’d grown up, boarded up since the storm. It didn’t matter that he was a grown man and had come here because she’d sounded like she was on the brink of one of her episodes, nor that he was waist deep in a rising tide of shit. It didn’t matter that, according to the vampire named Scarpelli, he’d traded away his heart on a hand of cards and thus couldn’t have one. For just a moment Jude was a child again, caught up in the tenacious grip of his mother’s arms, enveloped by the scent of her and the depth of her love for him. He was home.
Then he pulled back and saw the manic, glassy sheen to her blue eyes, and the feeling was gone.
His mother’s episodes weren’t dangerous, aside from the fact that she might neglect herself. She’d never been irritable or violent as mania sometimes manifested, nor did she suffer from any subsequent crash into depression that could indicate a bipolar disorder. Jude had done some reading after his mother had charmed the third shrink in a row—one of whom had offered to leave her husband for Lydia—into a clean bill of mental health, and had been grateful for the relative simplicity of his mother’s mania. If anything, when she went off the rails, it was merely an amplification of her normal behavior: odd obsessions, frenetic activity, euphoria, and a disassociation from the necessities and responsibilities of mundane life. Deciding French was the perfect language, for instance, was the sort of eccentric thing his mother might declare in her normal state. If the same thought occurred to her when she was in the grip of one of her episodes, though, she’d spend a month acting as though it was the only language she could understand, translating every book she owned, and refusing to eat anything but French cuisine. He’d even caught her on the darknet trying to buy a stolen passport just so she could fly into Paris as a French citizen.
A week later, she asked the monks to order pizza for dinner, and the French obsession vanished like it had never happened.
Over the years, he’d learned some of the warning signs that said a storm was on the horizon and came up with a few coping mechanisms to steer her toward calmer waters. The most consistent rudder, he’d found, was to guide her back to the obsession that she’d clung to his entire life: an artistic depiction of the concept of transformation.
He disentangled himself from her embrace and gestured toward the unfinished painting of the skyline. “What’s this, Ma? This why you called me?”
She tilted her head to the side; her brow furrowed. “I didn’t—” she began, and then, abruptly, smiled and changed the subject. “This is the scary city,” she said, curling her fingers into claws and twisting her face into a pantomime snarl. “Rawr. Do you like it?” Jude tried to keep his face from betraying his thoughts, hoping he hadn’t inherited his mother’s terrible poker face. She was losing time and forgetting things. At least she was still lucid enough to try to cover it up.
He looked at the painting, unsure what was supposed to be so scary about it. After a few moments, he realized that if he focused on the negative space of the image, the gaps between the low clouds and the high-rise hotels and office buildings of downtown became sharp, jagged teeth, a fanged mouth opened wide. Nope, he thought. Don’t like this at all.
He started to ask her why she’d decided the city she’d always loved should be frightening, but she grabbed his hand with one of hers, pressed a finger to his lips with the other. “Shhh,” she said. “The one you really have to see is a secret. Can’t let the brothers know.” Dreading what she had to show him, Jude let his mother lead him to the bathroom door. “In here,” she said, “is the very best work I’ve ever done. It’s not finished yet, so try not to see what it is, but what it will be.” With that cryptic request, she put his hand on the bathroom doorknob and stepped back, a coy, unreadable expression on her face.
Inside her closet of a bathroom, a single bare bulb glared on the bright spray of colors on the walls. She’d coated them, floor to ceiling, with a mural of the past few days of Jude’s life. She’d perfectly re-created his conversation with Mourning, every detail accurate down to his steaming cup of coffee. She’d left the bright god’s face a blank oval of thick reddish brown, broken only by two globs of bright blue to represent his eyes. Above the toilet, Legba clutched Jude’s arm while they crossed Rampart Street to join the crowd at Dodge’s funeral. Here he was talking to Leon Carter in the alley behind the Maple Leaf; there he and Regal were outlining the summoning circle. In every depiction, Jude’s shadow stretched out behind him, emaciated, clawed, somehow sinister. On the ceiling, in dark purple, were the sharp, abrupt lines of a stylized star, or a compass on an old map. At its center, the doubloon with the heart shape that Jude had lost.
Larger than any of the finished scenes, she’d sketched out an outline of the card game in charcoal, recognizable by the round swoop of the table and the twin arches of the angel’s wings, by the curved scythe of Thoth’s beak and the fat, bald dome of Dodge’s head.
Perhaps most distressing of all: she’d painted her bathroom door the exact shade of red as the one he and Regal had summoned.
Jude sat on the toilet seat’s lid with a hollow thump. On the opposite wall, a cartoonish streetcar curved with the twists and hills of a track that wove, like a roller coaster, through lightning-streaked storm clouds. A figure he didn’t recognize stood behind the driver’s controls, winged and robed and beast-faced, while in the passenger windows Jude could see Dodge’s gleaming head and Tommy’s clown-make-upped face. What could those two possibly have in common? he thought.
Everything else, weird as it was, at least kind of made sense. It wasn’t the why of the rest of the mural that troubled him so much as the how: Had someone told his mother what was happening in his life? Or had she seen it herself? But the two figures in the streetcar didn’t belong together, unless—
He remembered the body he’d seen from Scarpelli’s car, the suspicion that it might be Tommy, and knew with sudden, awful conviction that the young street performer was dead. He still had no idea what might have tied them together, though. Why anyone would kill both a god and a twenty-year-old who spent his days in clown makeup was beyond him.
Whatever the reason, it made him really fucking angry.
After a few more minutes of studying her mural and trying to wrap his head around his mother’s sudden ability to spy on his every waking moment—at least, he hoped it was sudden, considering his misspent youth—Jude turned to leave the bathroom, already putting together a list of questions for her in his head. He froze with his hand on the knob, an ornate twist of metal instead of the smooth, round bulb he’d expected. He backed away until his ass hit the ceramic of the sink, hoping to spot some detail that would tell him he was wrong, but knowing he was right. His mother hadn’t mimicked the door to Dodge’s card game.
The Red Door had followed him.
It took him about twenty minutes to admit it, but after he’d exhausted all his other options, which included banging on the wall and yelling for help, Jude was forced to accept the truth: the fucking door had him cornered.
The bathroom had no windows or any other exits save the door, unless he managed to magically shrink himself and go down the sink’s drain. Aside from the fact that every piece of shrinking fiction he’d ever read or watched told him what a terrible idea that was, he coul
dn’t even explore the possibility, because he’d left his satchel sitting on the passenger seat of the borrowed Porsche. All he had on him was a wallet—empty aside from a couple of fake IDs—a handkerchief, and the tourist’s little pink cell phone, which had finally died at some point on the drive across the lake, since he didn’t have a way to charge its battery. He couldn’t wait for his mother to open the bathroom door; during her manic episodes, she sometimes got so focused, she was nearly catatonic. He’d once seen her make a single brushstroke and then stare at it for over an hour, literally watching paint dry.
Plus, there were the metaphysical implications of whether she’d actually be able to open a door that wasn’t technically the same door on the other side.
Once he came to the decision to go back through the Red Door, Jude found that his old fuck-you grin was stretched across his face. The old Jude didn’t care that it was obviously some kind of trap. He’d always found that the best thing about traps was their tendency to backfire.
Inside, Dodge’s card room was just the way he’d left it: stuffy and musty and dark, stopped cat clock on the wall, bloodstain on the table. He found his way back to the stranded seconds he’d come to think of as slivers of time with no difficulty, slipping into each one as though they were steps in a well-practiced dance. He paused within them, testing them against his memory, trying to puzzle out what made these moments significant. The first few were frustrating, oblique, like trying to build a narrative out of random photographs that had no connection. It wasn’t until he stood within the sliver where he’d turned over blank cards that he noticed a change. Now only three of his five cards were blank. The first was THE MAGICIAN that Barren had given him. The second showed Jude as a gaunt, bearded old man, leaning heavily on a staff: THE HERMIT. The card was flipped upside down relative to THE MAGICIAN. Jude didn’t know much about the tarot deck, but he knew that a card reversed could be bad news.
Really bad.
“I gotta figure out all this tarot shit,” Jude said out loud, more to break the eerie silence of the room than anything else. “Is that what you want? If I promise to talk to a friend about these cards, will you let me go?” He knew he sounded like an idiot talking to the room like it could hear him, but he was honestly a little surprised he didn’t get an answer.
Even though he was pretty sure he’d gotten the message he was supposed to receive, Jude moved to the last sliver of time, bracing himself for the stink of blood and the sight of Dodge’s corpse. He settled into the moment, found it just as he left it, and turned to go, but—there. Was Dodge’s arm flung across the table like that last time? Was there something in his fist?
Jude reached for it before he could stop himself, though he knew that these slivers of time were mere images that he couldn’t touch, though every instinct in him screamed that this—this right here—was the cheese in the trap. He touched Dodge’s meaty, cold hand, and he touched the doubloon clutched in his dead fist, and his gift roared back through him like a long-denied orgasm, every muscle clenching, breath seized in his lungs, pleasure so intense it was just short of painful.
Images devoid of sound or context flashed in front of his eyes, stolen from another life. He stood before a pair of thrones, a king and queen of unspeakable, inhuman beauty. He ran through a forest of eternal summer, sleek and low to the ground and four-legged. He rested his elbows on the rail of a boat, leaned out over the river, and watched the French Quarter being built, docks and ramshackle buildings and streets of dirt. He sat at a card table and made the powerful and the immortal lose and lose and lose. All that loss was his gain.
There was more, so much more, but a sound intruded. The rhythmic clicking of a metronome. No, the ticking of a second hand. Tick, tick, tick.
The clock.
Jude wrenched himself free of his gift’s trance, surprised that there wasn’t a tearing sound when his hand came free of the doubloon. The visions fell away, and he felt his magic draining out of him, that emptiness within him even colder for having just been filled. His breath came in quick, desperate gulps and his heart raced. On the wall, the cat’s tail and eyes were flicking back and forth once more. Dodge was solid and present and stinking no matter how Jude shifted around. This wasn’t a frozen sliver of time, this was now, and something unpleasant was about to happen. Jude glanced at the door he’d come through, relieved to see that it was still open, still gave him a way out.
The lightbulb above him came on with a harsh pop. As the shadows fell away, he saw that the walls were stained in places, oddly rectangular in shape.
Red stains. Darker and more distinct by the second.
Shit, he thought. More doors.
He turned to run for it but hesitated. His gift was right there, clutched in a dead god’s hand. Could he really just leave it behind? But if he touched it, he’d be overtaken by the visions again and would likely get caught by whoever or whatever had set this trap for him. Not to mention the fact that the fortune god had a literal death grip on it. Another few ticks of the clock went by while he considered, the stains obviously doors now, each one bright red with an ornate handle, each one somehow unique, a scratch on one, a brass doorknob on another.
Now or never, he thought, and spoke the word that meant open. Dodge’s hand spasmed unclenched, the doubloon rolling free. The Red Doors all flew open as well. Jude yanked the handkerchief out of his pocket and grabbed the doubloon, bracing himself for the magic to grab him anyway, and letting out a laugh that sounded half-feral when it didn’t. Not looking at any of the other doors that had recently appeared, certain that if he did he was lost, Jude hurled himself through the door he’d come through—
—and banged into the sink of his mother’s bathroom, bruising, at least, some of his ribs and knocking the wind out of him. His mother stood with her back to him, adding something to the streetcar mural. She was humming again, Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” this time. She didn’t seem to notice him. Jude whirled and slammed the Red Door shut, straining for air that wouldn’t come, unsure if he could really still hear the ticking of the clock or if it was just in his head. Finally, he gasped out, sucked in a breath, and spoke the word closed to the door.
The Red Door to Dodge’s card room faded away, became another scene his mother had painted on the door, him and Regal standing outside the voodoo shop looking down at the veve drawn on the sidewalk. Jude lay on the linoleum floor, the doubloon wrapped in a handkerchief clutched to his chest, trying to slow his breathing, his ribs aching with every inhale, watching his mother paint.
A new passenger had been added to the strange streetcar, a young woman with white wires trailing from her ears. The girl from the voodoo shop.
“No,” he groaned. “Goddamn it, no.”
Suddenly it all made sense. The malevolent shadows his mother had given him in all the murals. The only connection a fortune god, a street musician, and a teenage girl could possibly have in common.
Him.
Dodge first, of course. The next night, Jude had gone to Tommy’s show once he’d realized how gloriously normal watching a live band in a crowded bar would be without his gift torturing him with the weight of the audience’s lost things. The following morning, he’d seen the girl in Celeste’s voodoo shop. He’d gone from one to the next, and his shadow had followed. It was all his fault.
They were dead because someone, something was stalking him.
In south Louisiana, summer afternoons are often overtaken by brief, intense thunderstorms that sweep in, darken the sky, unleash crashing thunder and gale-driven rain for about an hour, and then vanish. On the drive back into New Orleans, the skies opened up over Jude halfway across the Causeway, the long, long bridge that spanned Lake Pontchartrain. Though the Porsche could navigate itself through the falling sheets of water without aid, he turned on the headlights and the windshield wipers, just for appearance’s sake. He was already a not-quite-passing-for-white guy in a technically stolen Porsche. No sense giving the cops a reason to pull him over.
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Having grown up with the howling winds and the booms that pounded the earth every time lightning cracked the sky, Jude usually found these storms soothing, loved falling asleep to the sounds of their fury. The idea that some shadowy horror had been following him and randomly murdering anyone he met really killed the mood for him, though.
Jude’s first thought—once the implications of his mother’s artwork had fully set in—had been that he hadn’t heard from Regal in an alarmingly long time. So once he was safely cruising down the Causeway, he tested a theory that had been tickling at the back of his mind the past few days among all the other, more pressing, unanswered questions. He took the doubloon holding his gift out of his pocket, unwrapped it from the handkerchief, and rested it on his thigh, keeping his bare hand just above it. He reached with his other hand into the satchel, thinking about what he wanted, what he needed. A touch of his thumb against the doubloon and his magic surged back into him, intense, but not as overwhelming as before. The fingers searching through the satchel tingled in their old, familiar way, and he pulled out a car charger for the make and model of the tourist’s dead cell phone, the last lingering sensation of loss on it telling him that it had once belonged to the top regional saleswoman of an electronics supply company, who had forgotten it in her rental car when she was in the city for a conference last fall. He grinned and plugged the phone in.