by Bryan Camp
Shit, Jude thought, SOS. He took the stairs two at a time, propelled forward by the sound of Scarpelli’s grating, tittering laughter. When he burst out of the stairwell and into the pristine living room, his first thought was: Scarpelli’s gonna need all new carpet after this. Ghouls—about a dozen of them—crowded the expansive, sterile living space, dropping chunks of putrefying flesh onto virginal carpeting, smearing what few bodily fluids the vampire hadn’t drained onto walls and furniture. They were so rotted that it was hard to say which had been male or female, white or black, which had died young or old. They shambled and swayed in exactly the aimless, apathetic way that horror movies had trained him to anticipate semi-sentient corpses might move once their bodies started to degrade.
The stench lodged in his sinuses, in his throat, so powerfully that Jude feared it might never leave.
Since they hadn’t seemed to notice him yet, Jude had time to consider and dismiss the idea of using the thunderbolt in such tight quarters, to wonder madly what one should call a group of the undead—a rot? a hunger?—and to scan the room for Regal, before he decided the first and best thing to do would be to lock the door that led down to the vampire’s cage, so one of his puppets couldn’t come and let him out as soon as Scarpelli called.
He touched the knob behind him and spoke the word that meant close, forgetting the pearl’s amplification in his haste, the word sealing the doorway shut with a grumble of shifting rock. The room suddenly went silent, and every corpse’s cataracted gaze angled toward Jude in a synchronized glide.
The movies had prepared him for what that meant, too.
They came at him in a shuffling mass, desiccated hands clutching, mouths gaping wide in soundless cries. Jude had time enough to change his footing, to scan the room one last time for Regal’s flickering presence, and then the ghouls were on him, grasping hands and filthy, bloated flesh.
At first, it was all he could do to avoid being mauled, backing away from their clutches and shoving them away. When they pressed him up against the wall, any further retreat cut off, Jude hit one of them, desperation giving him such strength that he felt skin split and bone crumble beneath his knuckles. Another one lunged at him, grabbing his extended arm and bearing its full weight against it, pinning him against the wall. As if sensing his moment of weakness, a ghoul darted forward, blackened teeth snapping together inches from Jude’s cheek. Jude’s veins ran with ice water.
Demigod, Trickster—none of that would matter if these things ripped his throat out.
A knife blade sprouted from the ghoul’s left eye socket, the decaying corpse yanked back from Jude and hurled away. Regal, panting from the effort, filled the suddenly empty space next to him. “Thanks,” Jude said.
“Don’t mention it.”
Together, they tried what spells they had, shouting words of transformation, words of control. Even supercharged by the pearl, magics slid away from the ghouls and died, finding no form to change, no mind to coerce. Magics designed to cut and to maim had no effect on their nerveless flesh. The first ghoul recovered enough to grab Jude by the neck, its implacable strength drawing him closer to its grinding jaws.
Rage overtook him, that anger he’d always gone to such lengths to subdue, billowing up from his stomach like a physical thing, like heat and acid and thunder in the blood. He’d endured too much these past few days for it to end this way, in the clutches of these things, these castoff bundles of meat and rags that had been full human lives not long ago, the petty insults and grand hopes and the life that had been reduced to a shambling, ravenous machine.
Which was what Scarpelli had in mind for the entire city.
There were no words for the hate he felt for what Scarpelli represented. No way to speak the pure, smoldering desire to see the vampire destroyed that Jude felt. Except, in the midst of these clutching fingers and grinding jaws and his own blinding rage, suddenly there was a word, thrust forward from somewhere deep in the recesses of Jude’s mind, a word that had the same twisting shape and roiling cadence as the words of opening and closure that Dodge had taught him.
Burn.
It spilled off of his tongue like lit gasoline, took shape as flames spewing from his open mouth. When the fire touched the first ghoul, it went up like so much kindling, as though its rotting flesh had been soaked in alcohol. Jude drew in a deep breath, his throat scorched ragged, the taste of cayenne and smoke and burnt sugar, and he spoke again. Through a red haze, he saw the living dead consumed, collapsing under their own weight as his magic ate through torn skin and the putrid, bloodless meat of their flesh.
Burn, he said. Burn. Burn. Burn.
An open-handed slap connected with his jaw, knocking his head back. The pearl rattled against his teeth, went solidly down his throat like a dry-swallowed pill. Something slipped away from his mind, a phrase he and his mother had shared in his youth, a way of saying I love you known to just the two of them. He knew it existed, but not the words, and then it was gone even from memory. The pearl’s price had been paid.
Regal stood over him—when had he fallen to his knees?—visible once again, her face sweat- and soot-streaked. She was yelling that they had to get out of there, so he let her guide him to his feet and out the side door, smoke heavy in the air and fire crackling all around them. They made it halfway across the lawn before they fell to the grass, the dew blissful against Jude’s skin. Beside him, Regal retched and rasped for breath. Eventually she pushed herself up until she knelt over him. “Not that I’m not grateful for the sudden show of force in there, because I am. But Christ, Jude. When in sweet hell-fuck did you learn to breathe fire?”
He didn’t have an answer for her, or at least not one that she’d want to hear. Because he had the feeling that he’d always been able to, that it was a part of who—and what—he really was. He was content to lie there and contemplate his place in the world, but Regal forced him to his feet and into her car before the fire department got there, not that it would matter. Whether they saved the building or let it burn to ash, Jude knew the stone walls and frigid air of Scarpelli’s subterranean tomb would keep the vampire safe.
Still, he thought, watching the glow in the side-view mirror recede as they sped away, it would have been nice to watch that fucker burn.
Chapter Fourteen
The next morning Jude woke to heaven, the scent of fresh chicory coffee and the sizzle of breakfast cooking. He’d slept with the rosary still around his neck and decided to leave it there, a good luck charm if nothing else. He changed into a Tipitina’s T-shirt and a pair of faded jeans, both of which were reasonably clean, and left his bedroom just in time to see Regal click off the stove and pour the contents of two skillets, an omelet from one and hash browns from another, onto a plate. She looked up at him and gave him a sheepish sort of grin, the closest she’d come, he presumed, to an apology for the way she’d invaded his apartment of late. If she hadn’t obviously showered and changed clothes, Jude might have thought she slept on his sofa. “Coffee’s in the pot,” she said, as she squeezed past him on her way out of the kitchen, already scooping a forkful of food off of her plate. Jude surveyed the wreckage of her breakfast preparation, noting that she’d only cooked for one.
“Where’s mine?” he asked, knowing she’d hear the smile in his voice, even though her back was to him.
She mumbled something with a full mouth, something that sounded a lot like “In the fridge, fucknuts.”
“But I saved your life, Queens.”
She swallowed and raised her eyebrows with exaggerated innocence. “Really? Let’s zoom right past the part where you saved me from a life-threatening situation you got me into in the first place, and ask: Did you save my life in nineteen-fucking-fifty? No. It’s twenty-eleven. Women can vote, black man’s in the White House, and you make your own breakfast, hero. And be quick, it’s already the crack o’ noon, and I want to check out this bookstore before the thunderstorm they forecast rolls in.”
A glance at the clock to
ld him she was right, it was just shy of noon. He wasn’t surprised he’d woken up so late, because he hadn’t slept well at all. He made himself a cup of coffee and started on his breakfast—half a carton of takeout shrimp-fried rice dumped into a hot skillet with a couple of eggs fried on top, the breakfast of champions—and while his hands were busy going through the motions, his thoughts turned to the night before.
After Regal had dropped him off at his apartment, he’d crashed into bed and fallen right to sleep, plagued by dreams of fire and shadows, culminating in a strange one where he’d lain on a prison cot eating dozens of hard-boiled eggs, one after another, surrounded by everyone he knew chanting that Trickster was always hungry, while the vampire Scarpelli loomed over all of them wearing mirrored sunglasses and shouting in a Texas drawl not his own that what they had here was a failure to coagulate, and Dodge told him that sometimes nothing was a pretty cool hand.
After waking from that bit of madness, Jude had given up on sleep and gone to the pile of research Regal had left on his floor, scooping up anything that talked about Tricksters. Reading about those myths in the context of his own life was, simply put, weird, like studying a mental disorder and seeing a list of your own personality traits and idiosyncrasies. Tricksters were liminal creatures, always living in the edges of one world and the next, never quite one thing or another. They were also agents of change, able to take on the role of creator or destroyer with ease, whichever was more useful for upsetting the status quo. Tricksters shared a complete disregard for any societal rules about sex or gender. Tricksters were often pansexual, cross-dressed out of necessity or whim or inclination, and were sometimes capable of physically shifting from one sex to another. When they were victims, it was usually through the fault of their own appetite or lust—which they had in spades. When they were angered, it was usually with disastrous consequences.
So much of Jude’s life made sense when viewed in this light: the way he’d bounced enthusiastically from one passion project to the next, his compulsion to stick it to the rich and powerful, especially if he was able to show how foolish and petty and human they were, his long list of love affairs, men and women both, which he always ended disastrously when things got too routine, and his capacity for “Hulk smash!” levels of rage.
As it turned out, he’d belonged at that card game all along.
Regal finished eating and carried her coffee mug over to the whiteboard, staring at it and bobbing her head as she debated with herself. Jude devoured his rice and eggs, watching her, wondering what was going through her mind, grateful that they’d gotten her problems with him out in the open, wishing he could shake those last lingering scraps of suspicion that kept him from being entirely honest with her. After practically licking the plate clean and pouring another cup of coffee, Jude asked where this bookshop was.
“Not far, actually. On Perdido Street, over by the Superdome.”
“And what, exactly, are you hoping to find there?”
She gave him a wry frown. “I’m hoping we’re greeted by a dude wearing a name tag that says, ‘Hi, I’m an ancient Egyptian god of scribes and also a Greek Trickster, ask me anything,’ and he sells us a copy of How to Solve Creepy-Ass God Problems for Dummies.” She took a sip of her coffee. “On sale.”
“Seems a little on-the-nose, don’t you think?”
Regal snorted. “After last night? I’ll be thrilled if you don’t burn the damned place down with me inside it.”
Regal drove Jude downtown to an abandoned building on the corner of Perdido and South Rampart. It rose three stories from the pavement, isolated all around by wide streets and parking lots. One of the exterior walls was left bare where another building had been torn down, the brick and mortar showing like a scab, a scar. Around one corner, a fire escape clung with all the tenacity of the moss and kudzu Jude found in the back, where a chunk of the third-floor wall had fallen away, covered by wood as though the gap were just another window. It had the look of “historic preservation” or, in common language: a building that the Historic District Landmarks Commission wouldn’t let anybody tear down, but one that nobody would pay to revitalize, either. It had stood empty for so long that even the plywood used to seal the windows looked aged, the padlocks on the doors more rust than metal. Jude’s first impression was of the single tower of a sand castle that managed, through luck or providence, to survive the tide.
Amid the thick, reaching weeds and the knee-high mounds of rubble at his feet were the remnants of a red-and-black checkerboard floor, its individual tiles splintered and swept or stolen away. A tentative drizzle of rain plucked at his hair, more a suggestion than any actual threat of a downpour, as though the heat of midday sapped the will of even the clouds overhead.
After a few moments of fumbling around with locks too aged for even his magic to open, a whispered spell of Regal’s revealed a third door where before there had only been a blank wall, and a glowing neon sign above it that read: LIBROS PERDIDOS.
“Sounds like the place,” Regal said from behind him. “You gonna wait for an invitation?”
He knocked twice before he reached for the knob. It shook in his grip, like many in New Orleans, unseated by years of the wood shrinking and swelling around it. A quick shove showed that the door was unlocked. Jude led Regal inside into a dark and stifling room where the lack of air conditioning trapped the heat, entombed it. The long, mournful creak of the door announced their presence to anyone within. Jude felt the irrational urge to call out, to shout into the dust and emptiness that they were here.
Jude crept past abandoned counters, his sneakers silent on the bare concrete floors. Interior walls had been gutted, Sheetrock ripped away, leaving only the skeletal wood framing. He couldn’t tell if this had once been a restaurant or a storefront, or if it had some other purpose. He now smelled the decay he had expected outside, rot and the dank scent of black mold, all too familiar since the flood.
“You sure Thoth is still here?” he asked. “Maybe he moved after the storm.”
“Lost books sounds right to me.” When she saw Jude’s puzzled expression, she rolled her eyes. “The sign on the door, genius. Means ‘lost books.’ I guess you never studied with a bruja, then.” She kicked at a chunk of wood and sent it skittering. “Does seem pretty hopeless in here.”
Jude pointed to the staircase on the other side of the room, a perilous contraption of sagging wood and questionable construction. “There’s always that,” he said.
She bit her thumbnail. “Empty building; creepy, dangerous stairs? This is feeling too damned familiar.”
“Who you telling? Do I get to be the one to go stealth mode this time?”
Regal looked at him strangely, then shook her head. “Nope. Lost that dagger escaping the burning building you tried to drop on my head, fuck you very much.” Something in the tone, in the look, didn’t sit right with Jude. He tried to push it away, reminding himself that she’d risked her life the night before guarding his back, that she could have left him to the tender mercies of a vampire and his horde of rotting minions if she’d so chosen, but that squirming of suspicion remained nonetheless. Especially when she gestured, with both emphasis and derision, for him to go first.
As Jude started up the stairs, they bowed and trembled beneath his weight, groaning as if they were about to collapse. He tried to swallow past a lump in his throat, a clench of fear that grew with each lurching step, with each vision of himself stepping into empty air, arms pinwheeling, before a short abrupt plummet. He might be half man and half something else, but he was pretty sure the man half could still die all the way. With slow movements and his breath held the entire time, Jude made it to the top of the stairs.
This door opened with a blast of cooler air and a soft, inviting light that illuminated a long hallway cramped along its length and height with books. A dozen feet in, this hallway branched off in another direction, and a few feet down that one, two more split off, all of them filled to the brim with old, faded spines i
n a variety of languages. Jude signaled to Regal that they should split up and check the different paths. She nodded, pressing an upright finger across her lips.
Despite this caution, his footsteps creaked on the polished cypress floorboards as he threaded his way through the maze of bookshelves. Looking closer, Jude saw that the shelves themselves were made of books, that the archways overhead were formed by volumes stacked so tightly together that they held each other in place, that the entire structure of walls and stairs were formed solely from books artfully arranged and piled.
A library fort, Jude thought, I’ll be damned. Leave it to the god of scribes to be the biggest nerd on the planet. He couldn’t decide if he was more impressed at the construction, condescending toward the inefficiency, or just plain jealous.
The light came from a phosphorescent shine that glowed from some of the books’ spines in a synchronized dance, like candle flames all swaying in the same gentle breeze.
Checking over his shoulder to make sure Regal couldn’t see him, Jude slipped his hand into his pocket to touch his coin. As the magic poured into him, he brushed a knuckle against one of the books, and just as when he touched the revolver from the vampire’s room of antiques, he was seized by the knowledge of the book’s loss.
The book’s title was Isle of the Cross. In the summer of 1852, in a tavern in Nantucket, a lawyer met an author with a failing career. The lawyer told the author the story of a woman he knew, Agatha Robertson, whose sailor husband had abandoned her and their daughter, returning years later to reveal that he had married another. This tale so inspired the author that he wrote a novel with Agatha as the protagonist, only to have his publishers Harper and Brothers reject the work, effectively ending his career. That author’s name was Herman Melville, and when he burned the manuscript of Isle of the Cross, Thoth preserved it on these shelves.