Gathering Deep

by Lisa Maxwell

  “I don’t think Chloe’s ready to go anywhere yet.”

  “She’ll be fine,” Ikenna said, his eyes darting nervously toward the open door. “But I’m not going to be around here if someone comes looking.”

  “Comes looking for what?” I asked.

  “You think what happened here was a small thing?” he said, shaking his head. “Whatever that was, whatever connection you have with this Thisbe person, it’s going to leave a trace. Energy as bright as that don’t disappear, and I don’t want to be anywhere near here if this Thisbe you all keep talking about comes around to find out what went down.” He pinned me with his eerie, uneven eye. “If she don’t already know, that is.”

  Odane looked like he was about to punch something. Or someone. “So that’s it? You’re going to up and leave her here? Helpless?”

  “I did what I said I would—”

  “I don’t know why I’m surprised you’re running off. Seems like I should be used to it by now.”

  Ikenna frowned. “Our bargain was to help her access her dreams, not to get me tied up with something as big and bad as this Thisbe seems to be. I’ve upheld my end of the bargain. I’ll expect you to do the same.”

  “Don’t worry,” Odane ground out. “I will.”

  “You coming?” Ikenna asked, taking a couple steps toward the door.

  “Naw. I’m going to get Chloe home safe,” Odane told his father, and the disdain in his voice made me realize that as easy as Odane seemed to be, he wasn’t someone to cross.

  “Suit yourself,” Ikenna said with a shrug. “I’ll be looking for that paperwork soon, son. Good luck with this mess you got yourself into.”

  Then he was gone—out the door and across the field and back to the relative safety of the life he had before I came along.

  “You feeling any better yet?” Odane said softly.

  I nodded, though I didn’t really. “I think I can get up now, if you’d help me?”

  He threaded an arm around my middle, the heat from his skin brushing against me like a flame. I flinched away and slid back to the ground with a thump.

  “Maybe just grab my clothes?” I asked. I was feeling way too unsettled to be that undressed, especially around him. What I’d just gone through had left me feeling exposed in more ways than one.

  Odane helped me turn my shirt right-side-out so I could slide it over my head. Once I was more covered, he tried to help me up again, and this time I managed to stay upright on my wobbly legs.

  “You think you can walk?” he asked, his warm breath near my ear.

  “I don’t know,” I told him honestly. I brushed off the gentle concern in his voice. “I maybe need to go lay down, I think.”

  “Which way’s home?” Odane asked, so I pointed the way back as he helped me—across the field, back around the pond, and up to the warm little cottage with its lights all aglow.

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling more like myself by the time we mounted the steps to the porch. “I couldn’t have made it back without you.”

  Odane grinned. “Yeah?” He turned me in his arms so we were chest to chest. His eyes were intent on me. They were dark as night, but that close I could see they were ringed in the same gold as his father’s.

  My skin felt warm all at once, but then guilt rocketed through me so strong and absolute that I jerked back.

  “So that’s how it is?” he asked, his voice gentle as the hands that still rested on my waist.

  “I’m sorry—” I started.

  “Don’t be,” he said, cutting me off. “Nothing at all to be sorry for.” He gave me a soft, sad smile.

  I couldn’t help but smile back, but then I thought about Piers and the smile slid from my face. “We’d better tell Lucy what I found out—and that I’m still alive.”

  Odane raised an eyebrow in my direction. He was pretending that my rejection hadn’t bothered him, but it was awkward between us now in a way it hadn’t been before.

  “She didn’t exactly approve of me making any deals with your dad. No offense.”

  “None taken,” he said easily, and I knew he meant it. He meant most of what he said, I realized then. Maybe everything he said. It was a singular quality—a rare quality—to be that sure and true to yourself, I thought.

  “You want to come in for a minute? I can give you a lift back to your car after I talk with Lucy, if you want.”

  Inside, we found Dr. Aimes sitting in the front parlor, deep in concentration over a pile of papers. He looked up when we stepped in.

  “Oh, hey, Chloe,” Dr. Aimes said absently, his focus turning back to the stack of paper in front of him.

  “Hey,” I said. “This is Odane, a friend of mine.”

  The two men did that thing men do when they meet—shake hands, eye each other as they size the other up. Didn’t matter that there was nothing to compete over.

  “Have you heard anything more about Piers?” I asked him.

  Dr. Aimes frowned and shook his head. “The police assured me they’re doing all they can … ” But from the way his voice trailed off, I wondered if he believed that any more than I did.

  Or maybe there was something else Dr. Aimes was thinking about. He was studying those papers in front of him again, a deep frown drawn across his face.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “What?” he said, looking up like he’d already forgotten I was standing there. “Oh, sorry.” He took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. “I was reading over this, and … well, it’s not what I expected.”

  “What is it?” I asked, stepping closer to look over the papers laid out before him on the low coffee table.

  “You remember that book we found? The one that’s gone missing.”

  “The one you sent with Piers, you mean,” I said, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice.

  Dr. Aimes nodded.

  “What book?” Odane asked.

  “It was a journal that belonged to the mansion’s original owner,” Dr. Aimes explained.

  “Roman,” I whispered, a shudder running through me at the memory of the younger Roman’s cold eyes and stale breath. And of his promise.

  Dr. Aimes gestured to the papers on the table. “I kept a copy, and one of my graduate students was working on translating the French and the symbols in it when we heard the news about Piers and the car.” He let out a ragged sigh.

  “Couldn’t they translate it?” I asked, sensing his frustration.

  “Oh, they could,” he said, shuffling through the pages with a frown.

  “You don’t seem overly excited … ” Which was weird, because Dr. Aimes was always excited when it came to old things.

  Dr. Aimes looked up at me then, his gentle eyes—eyes that were so much like Lucy’s—uncertain. Gone was the professor whose eyes lit up at the mention of anything historical. This man was a different person, a more somber and serious one.

  “It’s skin,” he said finally.

  “What?” I didn’t follow right away.

  “The covering on the book wasn’t leather. It was skin. Human skin.”

  My body registered the shock of those words—my stomach flipped, my skin went cold, my mouth went all dry and rancid at once as I remembered the vision of human heads piked along the River Road. “But how do you know that? I thought the book was gone.”

  “It is, unless the police find it,” Dr. Aimes said as he sorted through a couple of the loose papers. “But it’s all in the translation—the way the journal was made, the reasons for it … ” His voice trailed off and we sat in an uneasy silence, with nothing but the sound of the whirring air conditioner to fill the space between us. “Roman Dutilette had secrets no one discovered. He made the book made from the skin of one of his slaves because he thought it would give the book power.”

  You have no idea what I could do to you.

  Roman’s voice echoed in my memory, as clear and stark as it had been while I was in Thisbe’s skin. I knew it could have been any of the Dutile
ttes’ many slaves, but something told me it wasn’t. Roman might not have been able to hurt Thisbe, but he could hurt Augustine, and that amounted to the same thing.

  I stepped back from the photocopied pages, my stomach turning at the thought of what might have happened to Augustine. Maybe he’d woken in the middle of the night and realized what Thisbe’d done. Maybe he’d woken and hadn’t known he couldn’t leave her. He would have tried to go back to his own plantation, but he wouldn’t have been able to go far—not with that binding charm she’d put on him. He would have been an easy target, and Roman had already been looking for a way to hurt Thisbe, to get back at her.

  That journal hadn’t been the book of a rich man, I thought. It had been the book of a monster.

  Odane shifted uneasily next to me. I glanced at him, and the unspoken look we shared told me he was probably thinking something along the same lines.

  Dr. Aimes let out a hollow sigh. “There’s more, but I don’t know that I have the stomach for it tonight,” he said, shaking his head.

  Another uneasy moment of silence passed between the three of us, and then Dr. Aimes scooped up the papers and put them into an envelope. “I guess I should take this back to the office. I don’t even want the copies sitting around here anymore.”

  “Is Lucy around?” I asked, realizing suddenly that it seemed like the house was empty.

  “She went into town—wanted to tell Ms. Legba about Piers in person, she said.” Dr. Aimes frowned. “I thought you’d gone with her.”

  “No,” I told him, but when he looked confused I explained that I’d gone for a walk to clear my head. “I was supposed to meet her in town later,” I lied.

  No doubt Lucy had run off to tell Mama Legba what I was up to. I needed to catch up with them both and tell them what I’d learned.

  “I could take those back to the office for you, if you want. It’s on my way out,” I offered.

  Dr. Aimes didn’t look all that certain at first, but his disgust for what the copies contained must have won out, because he handed them over without much fuss.

  “Just put them on my desk. I’ll figure out what to do with them tomorrow.” He glanced up at me. “And if you hear anything from Piers … ”

  My throat went tight. “I’ll let you know.”

  Twenty-Nine

  “You drive,” I said, tossing Odane the keys.

  “Me?” He seemed confused. “I thought you were taking me back to get my car.”

  “Change in plans. We need to get these to Mama Legba’s before anyone realizes I didn’t drop them off like I was supposed to, so you drive and I’ll read.”

  He frowned but didn’t argue.

  As he tore down back roads to get to the highway, I tried to make some sense of the journal. The copy was hard to read in some places, but that didn’t much matter since it was written in French, which I couldn’t make out, and a series of strange symbols, which I really couldn’t make out. But whoever had done the translating had written the English words in a strong, clear hand right below the originals.

  I started reading.

  By the time we reached the highway into town, I was starting to get a picture of Roman Dutilette that was different than anything I thought I knew. None of the materials from my training to give tours of Le Ciel had prepared me for the man I met in the pages of his journal.

  It turned out that the journal wasn’t just a record of his life. There were all sorts of things mixed in—spells from different lands, charms and superstitions from different traditions. Most were darker than anything I’d ever heard of. The spells in those pages required all sorts of death and darkness—black cats buried alive, frizzled cocks burnt as an offering, and blood. So many of the spells required blood and sacrifice.

  The more I read, the more I saw a strange sort of logic weaving itself together.

  “He was afraid,” I told Odane as the lights of New Orleans came into view down the road ahead of us.

  Odane glanced over at me, his expression grim. “What did he have to be afraid of?”

  “The Dutilettes came from Haiti,” I explained. “Jean-Pierre bought the property the mansion is on and moved his family here to make his own fortune right before the slaves staged a massive uprising on that island. Roman’s father happened to get himself and his wife out in time, but most of Roman’s extended family died at the hands of their slaves. You can see his anxiety all through here that it might happen again.” I picked up another sheet. “He picked slaves specifically from countries that had a tradition of Voodoo. He was afraid of it, because he’d heard that the Haitian uprising started with a Voodoo ceremony. It looks like he thought he could fight fire with fire. Everything he did seems to be to keep another massacre like the one in Haiti from happening again.”

  On one of the pages, Roman had drawn the alley of trees and the pillars of the house in a rough sketch. I remembered what the young Thisbe had told a young Roman about the trees.

  “It’s why he built the house where he did—he thought the trees had some power to protect his family,” I said. I pulled out another page and studied it. “I think Roman was collecting all sorts of magic—especially dark magic. He wrote the spells and charms in code, so no one would have been able to tell what he was doing.” I looked up at Odane. “How did no one ever find out? There had to have been rumors.”

  “It’s secluded out there now,” Odane said. “It would have been more so back then. Besides, it’s not exactly the sort of thing he’d want to get around, so he would have been careful.”

  “Which explains the code,” I agreed.

  “People were scared of what they didn’t understand back then, same as they are now. Plus, his standing in the area would have shielded him from suspicion as well.”

  I sank back in the seat. “So he wanted to protect his family and he collected these spells … They go over most of his adult lifetime,” I said, flipping back through the book. “It’s going to take a while to sort through all this.”

  Odane’s phone vibrated in the front pocket of his shirt. With a frown he looked at the number on the screen and then answered.

  “What’s up?” he asked. “Right now? I’m kind of in the middle of … Got it … Of course I’ll be careful. Love you, too.”

  He clicked off the phone. “Change of plans,” he said. “I have to make a stop.”

  “Can’t you drop me at Mama Legba’s before you do?”

  Shaking his head, he shifted and shot off across three lanes to catch an exit we’d almost passed. “That was my mom,” he said. “She saw something, and I think you’ll want to be there.”

  “Me?”

  He glanced over at me. “She said it was someone connected to you.”

  “Wait … You mean she saw something,” I said, understanding. Then a sort of leaden dread settled in the pit of my stomach. “Do you think it could be Piers?”

  “She didn’t say, but if we don’t hurry, someone’s gonna die.”

  Thirty

  Odane turned off the main highway and took a dark access road that led back into the brush. A little ways down that road, we came upon a broken-down sign that used to welcome visitors to Adventureland, an abandoned theme park just outside the city.

  “Your mom saw something here?” I asked, peering through the darkness of the night in front of us and trying to see the park out in front of us.

  Most people at school had taken the drive down the lonely stretch of highway that winds around the banks of Lake Pontchartrain, out to the abandoned ruin of the park. It had become almost a rite of passage for the privileged and bored to go out to the sticks and play with some danger.

  Back before Katrina, the whole city had been excited about the park opening. People talked about jobs and tourists and money flowing into the area. Then the hurricane came and washed everything out, and the company decided it wasn’t worth the money to fix it. They left the park exactly as Katrina left a lot of things, rotted and empty and covered in a layer of whatever the
floodwaters left behind.

  Even I went out there once with a handful of other girls. We weren’t brave enough—or stupid enough—to go at night like a lot of people did, but we spent the better part of one winter afternoon looking around, scaring each other silly, all while the empty ribs of a forgotten coaster lurked above. It had been bad enough in the daylight, and I wasn’t in any hurry to see what it was like at night.

  Odane cut the headlights so only the running lights of the Nova lit up the way in front of us. A few yards in, we came to an unguarded police barricade.

  “Give me a second,” he said, getting out of the car. In the dim yellow glow of the car’s light, he moved the wooden barricade out of the way and then got back behind the wheel.

  The abandoned parking lot was filled with crater-sized potholes and broken glass that glinted in the dim beams of the running lights, but Odane navigated it all with the same easy confidence he always used until we were at the gates of the park. “We’ll have to walk from here,” he said. “Do you have a flashlight in here or anything?”

  I opened the glove box and pulled out a flashlight and handed it to him.

  “Ready?” he said, looking at me.

  I nodded and eased open my door, careful not to make a sound.

  Before us, the abandoned park loomed like a broken city. Here and there, a few floodlights—probably for security—spotlighted areas in a murky yellow. A few shot upward, illuminating the skeletal remains of rides that had never been opened and casting long shadows that fell across them like bars.

  We made our way carefully through the broken-down turnstiles that should have welcomed visitors and found a moldering map of the grounds hanging listlessly from its busted-up frame. Odane shone the flashlight’s beam on it.

  “What are we looking for?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he told me, studying the map. “My mom’s visions aren’t always specific.”

  “The path to the right is shorter. Maybe we should start there?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Odane said, his voice still as hushed as mine, like someone might be listening nearby.