by Bryan Camp
Legba’s wrinkles spread into a grin, understanding the gamble that Jude was taking. The voodoo god had returned the doubloon he’d demanded, so if Jude lost, Legba would gain nothing. But the game hadn’t ended yet. Even in death, Jude’s destiny had yet to be fully revealed.
He might yet win.
“My gamble is this,” Legba said, reaching into his vest pocket and taking out a silver dollar, “I wager that you will win. When your fate is revealed, it will defeat the current high hand.” He pressed the silver coin to his lips, and then handed it to Jude. “If this occurs, then you will owe me a favor.”
Jude nodded and kissed the coin as well. A tremor ran through him as the contract bound him to the loa. Renai hit him with a hug so intense that he staggered. He handed her the coin, and she flicked it, spinning, toward Barren’s laughter. As all of them—Jude, Legba, and Renai—entered the streetcar, Legba repeated his earlier words, as if speaking to himself. “There is always a cost.”
Renai spent the first few minutes of their journey thanking him, unconcerned that Jude found it impossible to speak. She seemed more than capable of carrying the conversation herself.
“I never really believed in an afterlife, you know?” she said, phrasing it as a question but not even pausing for the answer Jude couldn’t give. “I mean, I hoped, but I always kind of figured when you were done you were done. Mama Celestine told me all about the loa, but she never said anything about all of this.” She waved a hand, vaguely indicating the streetcar and Legba, perhaps the entirety of the afterlife. “So when I got to that party on Elysian Fields, I thought, This is it. This is as good as you can hope for. But it wasn’t. It didn’t change. I could barely spend a day there; can you imagine spending eternity doing the same frivolous thing over and over? But you rescued me from that. And now we’re moving on to— Well, to I don’t know what. I wish Mama Celestine had told me more about what that was going to be like, because she was sure right about Papa Legba and Baron Samedi. Do you know what comes next?”
She looked at him, her eyes so open and earnest that Jude was glad he had no voice to answer with, that he could only shrug. Hē had offered Paradise, and Hermes, Elysium, but if those existed, then so did Hell, so did Tartarus. Jude had no idea where the loa were bringing them, but he knew there was no guarantee that it would be anywhere pleasant.
“Can’t talk yet, huh? Don’t worry, it’ll come. It’s funny, I don’t really sound like myself anymore. Like, you know how people always say they hate hearing their own voice recorded, because it sounds different than in your ears? It’s kind of like that.” She searched his face for something and seemed unable to find it. “Anyway,” she said, “thanks again. I owe you one.”
Jude opened his mouth to tell her that that was a dangerous thing to say, but she’d already turned to stare out the window and, besides, Jude didn’t have the words yet. He followed her gaze outside, saw that they were heading back to Canal Street, but beyond that he couldn’t even guess where they were being taken. He knew far less about these things, it seemed, than he had believed.
Renai twisted her headphones cord around her finger, winding it into a tight coil. Jude wondered if the music player still worked, or if, like everything else, it was simply a shadow, a memory of what once was. Seeing the expression on her face, recognizing in the tight line of her lips a nervousness he couldn’t feel, Jude couldn’t decide whether or not he should be grateful for the lack of feeling the newly dead were granted.
Of course, even if he should, gratitude was another thing he couldn’t feel anymore.
The car swerved, pulling a tight turn onto Canal, facing the Mississippi. Beside him, Renai relaxed. “Oh,” she said. “The ferry, get it? We have to go across the river. Styx, I guess.”
That wasn’t the right river, of course. Nor would a voodoo loa have any reason to lead them to another pantheon’s Underworld. What struck him as significant, though, was where they had come to a stop. The squat glass tower of the Aquarium rose out of the night to one side of them, the Riverwalk on the other. There were no tracks beneath them, not in the world of the living.
So where were they headed?
In the driver’s seat, Barren spun a wheel just at the edge of his reach, the flames overhead growing brighter, crackling in their iron lanterns. A thrumming energy filled the vehicle, growing more and more intense. Renai grasped at Jude, her nails digging into his arm, her breath coming in quick gasps.
Jude looked to Legba and saw that one of the loa’s hands gripped the seat in front of him while the other mashed his hat down onto his head. Without any warning, Barren threw a lever forward, and the car surged at the river, sparks flying as high as the windows as its metal wheels ground against cement. Jude and Renai were slammed back into their seats, her arms squeezing tight around him.
The streetcar slipped through a break in the concrete wall and ripped through a parking lot, bouncing up over grass, not slowing—indeed, seeming to gain momentum—and then they shot up the rise of the natural levee and flew into empty space, falling toward the churning waters of the Mississippi River, pitch-black in the dead of night.
Renai shrieked just before they hit the surface, when the streetcar—ignoring any potential buoyancy it might have had—sank through the muddy water like a stone. Jude patted her hand, pretending concern he didn’t—couldn’t—feel, thinking that his deathly calm might extend to her. It seemed to help; though she still clung to him, she only let out a slight whimper when the sensation of falling was arrested by the sudden thump the car made when it came to rest on the riverbed. And yet, she shrieked once more when Barren pulled a handle and swung open the squealing doors, a roar of river water pouring in.
As the torrent rose around them, past their ankles, the benches, the cushioned backs, all the way to the hanging lanterns, the flames hissing out one by one, Jude decided that the absence of fear was, after all, a gift.
Chapter Eighteen
In Siberia, you must face Erlik, a dark and evil old god, who will swallow your soul into his porcine maw if you are judged unworthy. In Varanasi, you stand before Chitragupta, who has recorded your every deed on Earth in meticulous detail. In Naples, your fate is decided by Aeacus, Rhadamanthus, and Minos, who will send you to the Fields of Elysium, the Meadows of Asphodel, or the tortures of Tartarus. Mictecacihuatl and Osiris, Freya and Odin, Ereshkigal and Supay. With mirrors, with feathers and scales, with records in books or on clay tablets or written on the back of your eye, you will be remembered. Your name, your sins, your virtues. None will be forgotten.
Without lungs, of course, neither Jude nor Renai had any true need for oxygen, and so when the car filled with water, they did not drown. The dead girl, though, caught for too long in the seam between the world of the living and the world beyond, believed differently. She held her face and nose to the ceiling, trying to get one last sputtering gasp of air, then thrashed and flailed when she had to release that imagined breath. Jude waited, patient and unsympathetic as the grave, for her to recognize the illogic of her fear, caged by her panicked grip on his arm. At last she relaxed, her mouth gaping open, her earbuds popping out and floating alongside her head.
“Oh,” she said, quiet and flat. “Okay.”
When she released his arm, Jude followed Legba and Barren out of the streetcar, into the watery valley of the Mississippi bed. The silt-thick waters blocked out any light from above, but without eyes, Jude didn’t actually need light to see. Catfish slithered among thin grass, their whiskers trailing from wide mouths like Chinese dragons. The current howled around him, a hurricane wind beneath the waves. Debris littered the soft mud, car tires and planks of wood, battered musical instruments and shoes, pirogues and rowboats with shattered hulls, a child’s rocking horse, its springs so encased with rust, it looked like a species of spiral coral. Though he kept his mouth closed and knew his senses were mere illusions, he could not avoid the cold, stale coffee taste of the brackish water, the stink of rotting things.
&nbs
p; Renai floated beside Jude, her faith in her body strong enough to make her spirit too buoyant to walk along the murky riverbed as he and the two loa did. Jude took her hand and towed her along with him, following their guides to a sunken steamboat half submerged in the river’s bottom. Barren had again changed his appearance, his painted skull now replaced by a canine’s head, something feral in the slant of its ear and its shaggy fur.
“Down you go,” Barren said, once they had reached the wreck, his thick tongue lolling between his open jaws. “Down, down, down.” He held out a gloved hand when Jude stepped forward. “Whoa there, brah. You lost your manners along with your voice? ‘Ladies first’ mean nothing to you?” He beckoned Renai forward with a teasing curl of his fingers. “Come along, child. Let’s get you settled.”
Barren led the way, descending a staircase into the depths of the sunken wreck. Renai turned to look back at Jude—a fragile smile, a pitiful attempt at bravery—and then she swam after him, her red sneakers flashing as she kicked her way down.
“It was a noble thing you did for that girl,” Legba said. “I wonder if you know how much.” He poked the tip of his cane into a knothole. “I think no. I think you do not understand what you risk.” Legba’s eyes rose up to meet Jude’s, a deep, hungry stare. “You think you are dead, what more can you lose, yes?”
Beneath them, muffled but still clear, Renai cried out, first a shrieking burst of fear, then a long, throaty moan of pain. Legba held Jude back as she cried out again. “But there are some things, Jude,” he said, before releasing him, “worse even than death.”
Jude took the stairs two at a time in a headlong plunge, chasing Renai’s screams. At some point, he splashed out of the river water and into a pocket of air. He followed Renai’s wet sneaker prints down a hallway and into the vast room of what had once been the steamboat’s cargo hold. Water flowed across the ceiling before falling in a thick column—a hypnotic roaring, frothing, gushing whirl—that vanished into a ragged hole in the center of the floor.
Even without flesh, Jude could tell that the room was frigid, a cold that wasn’t physical but primal. On the far side of the pillar, their images distorted by the water’s refraction, Barren crouched over Renai, who knelt, slumped back onto her heels. Beyond them were two ornate thrones, far too large for any human, carved of a single massive piece of wood.
Jude ran toward them, skirting around the column of water just as Barren faced the empty thrones, raising something red and wet above his canine head. Gleaming balance scales stood between him and the massive seats, metal plates hanging from thin delicate chains. Renai, still on her knees, had her back to Barren and whatever absent deity he made sacrifice to; she held up a mirror as though trying to find something in its reflection. A dark stain spread across her chest, down among the folds of her white dress. Jude took a step forward, uncertain. Though tears still lined her cheeks, she smiled. Jude looked back at Barren, at his hands.
He held a human heart.
Words came from his muzzle, a harsh, guttural language that Jude didn’t recognize. The heart steamed in his hands, still warm from the heat of Renai’s imagined body. Barren placed the girl’s heart on one side of the scale with a reverent, almost fearful tenderness. Then, licking the blood from the fingers of one hand, he pulled the pin that held the balancing mechanism in place. A single feather lay on the other plate. It shimmered with vibrant, shifting colors, shining as though lit by an inner fire.
The scales dipped and rose, back and forth, finally coming to rest with the feather weighing the same as Renai’s heart. The dead girl began to laugh, her face shining—literally, a beacon of radiant joy. “Thank you,” she said, looking into the mirror. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She stood, almost too bright to look at, handed Barren the mirror, and moved to the side, her trial complete.
Something about the scene tugged at Jude’s memory, the heart and the scale and the feather, but he couldn’t quite place it. And then Barren returned his attention to the thrones, his dog’s head turned in profile to Jude, and the image clicked into place.
Anubis. The Feather of Truth. The funerary rites of ancient Egypt. So Barren was both Anubis and—if Renai was right about him—Baron Samedi, the way Thoth was also Hermes. Was anybody who they said they were?
Legba spoke from beside Jude, his appearance sudden and startling. “This is why it is better that you came with us,” Legba said. “The others, they will try to convince you that Paradise and the Fields of Summer and Ginen are different places, and maybe they are if you believe they are. But you trust Papa Legba. Everything come together, in the end.”
Barren, whoever he was, turned his dog’s—no, his jackal’s—head, unleashing a feral grin in Jude’s direction. He crooked a gore-stained finger, beckoning. “You’re up,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll be very gentle.”
Jude moved to where the god directed, floating as though in a dream. He turned his back to the thrones, facing the rushing waterfall. A sense of vertigo swept over him, the whisper that came at the edge of a cliff, teasing you to jump. He didn’t realize he’d stepped closer to the rushing plunge of water until Barren stopped him with a hand on his chest.
Jude had time to glance down, curious, and then watched as a claw, bent and dagger-sharp, tore through to the center of him. He heard the rending of cloth, the wet suck of ripping flesh, saw the spurt of dark blood, even smelled the coppery scent of it, before he felt the pain. When it came, it was greater than anything he had ever known, second only to the cacophony of lost things that had overwhelmed him after the storm.
Jude sank to his knees—would have collapsed if Barren’s hook of a claw hadn’t held him upright. The jackal-faced god handed him a thick slab of stone—obsidian polished to a mirror’s shine—then swiped with his claw again and again, making a shredded mess of Jude’s chest.
“Hey, boss,” Barren shouted over Jude’s head, “this one’s got no heart!” Jude heard a rumble, like far-off thunder, a reply just at the edge of his hearing. He held up the mirror, as he had seen Renai doing, and aimed it at the empty thrones.
Smoke rolled off the obsidian, black and stinking of a pyre. The reflection showed two seated figures, male and female—or one that shifted back and forth; Jude couldn’t be sure which. The man wore thick robes and sandals, and held a spear in one hand and a short scepter in the other. A frown glowered beneath a bushy, curled beard, and a withered, puckered hole marked where one of his eyes should be, a sickly green pallor clinging to his skin. The woman wore a long, sleeveless red dress that hugged her body. Jude couldn’t be sure whether she had two arms or four, or whether it was shadows or frostbite that stained her legs black. Despite the cold paleness of her cheeks and the animal skull she wore like a helmet, she smiled, genuine and bright.
At his feet, or hers, or theirs, three dogs lounged, or one dog with three heads. Two ravens perched above them, one on each throne, or just one atop a helm of black metal shaped in the likeness of a raven’s head. In the instant it took Jude to take all this in, he also saw that they were speaking, could hear the words once he could see the movement of their lips. They spoke as one, their voices mingled together, the cold scrape of a closing tomb door, a lily petal against a cheek, harmonious opposites.
“Then we have no choice,” they said. “Send him to the Devourer.”
Without ceremony or protest or a word of regret, Barren plucked Jude from the floor and shoved him into the crush of falling water. Jude gasped, forgetting in that instant that he could neither drown nor fall to his death. Far, far below him, through such black depths that nothing should be visible, Jude saw something that inspired fear even in the dead. A fear not born of the body, but a piercing dread of the soul.
In that abyss, Jude saw something formless, something of many forms. Something that hungered, that personified hunger. Something at the bottom of all things. Something with teeth.
Hands pulled Jude back from the brink of destruction, yanked him gasping into that cold
room at the bottom of the Mississippi, with the empty thrones and the scales for weighing a heart he didn’t have. When he looked up, he expected to see Barren grinning down at him, either with Anubis’s jackal muzzle or Samedi’s skull. Instead, he saw Renai, her mouth pulled into a tight line of grim determination. Again he heard that rumble of speech that hovered just at the edge of his comprehension. Renai, though, seemed to understand it, because she turned to the thrones, her feet set, her hip cocked, shoulders wide, every inch of her defiant.
“No,” she said. “It’s not right.” More grumbles of distant thunder. “Because it’s impossible. I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for him. There has to be a mistake.”
What was she doing? Jude searched the floor, found the mirror where he’d dropped it. He shuffled toward it on his hands and knees, unable to summon the strength to stand. He had to know what—Death, he forced himself to admit; who else could it be?—what Death was saying to her. She couldn’t throw away eternity for someone like him. Just as he came within reach of the mirror, a glossy patent-leather shoe and a long, long stretch of tuxedo pants blocked his path. Jude looked up into Barren’s skull-face, saw that the loa held a finger up to his lipless mouth, bidding Jude to be silent.
Behind him, Renai was speaking again. “. . . a chance,” she said, “to find what he lost.” A brief growl of hunger. “Yes,” she said. “I agree.”
Barren moved, and Jude lunged for the mirror, snatching it up and turning it toward the thrones where Death was seated. No, he wanted to say. Don’t let her do this. But his voice would not come, no matter how hard he strained. He glanced at the column of water, the descent into the Devourer’s maw. If he threw himself down there, then she couldn’t sacrifice herself for him.
Too late. Renai stood in front of him, her eyes radiant, the front of her white dress a red and bloody mess, her heart in her hands. Barren leaned down beside her, whispered in her ear. She nodded. The loa turned and reached down to Jude, slid something into his pocket. Somehow, the skull winked.