1503901092

by J. D. Horn

  “Celestin disappeared me from the common world. By now I should’ve disappeared from the Dreaming Road, too, burned away to nothing or perhaps transformed into one of your hungry shadows. But Celestin knew what he was doing.” A trumpet blared and Astrid paused, glancing about, but the party failed to resurrect itself. “I believe,” she continued, “it was always his plan to bring me back in some form to the common world. He wanted me to be around to appreciate his final victory, so he imprisoned me here, in this reality fueled by the life force of dreamers Celestin poached from the myriad drug-addled fools wandering around the astral, and whatever scraps of fear energy Bogey John might pick up from terrorizing teenage slumber parties.”

  She gestured around the hall. “It’s a repeating loop,” Astrid said. “It pleased Celestin to trap me in the tale you witnessed when you saw this place in a dream. The last days of Storyville. Over and over and over again.” She lifted her eyes, and Alice followed her gaze to Babau Jean’s white death mask. “Jean’s paradise, and my hell.

  “This image,” Astrid gestured the length of her body with a wide sweep of her free hand, “is that of Jean’s favorite whore.” Astrid’s eyes softened slightly as she stared at Babau Jean. “That’s what Celestin called me, you know. When he brought me here.” Her jaw tightened. “Whore. A catchall insult for any woman who won’t do as she’s told.”

  Her focus returned to Alice. “Funny, isn’t it? He punished me for not following through with something he himself couldn’t do.” She spoke as if it were the first time this thought had struck her, though Alice sensed it had occurred to her many times during her confinement, perhaps as many times as the Mahogany Hall loop had repeated itself. “I mean, he could’ve made light work of the task and drowned you in flood waters. No one would have been the wiser. But no. He built you a paradise to allow you at least the illusion of a long, happy life. A deadly paradise, but a paradise all the same.”

  “A paradise that would have eventually drained me of all humanity and left me a rapacious demon.”

  “Well, there is that. A dark ending for you, but one he’d never have to witness. Or perhaps he thought you would end up there anyway. Like father, like daughter. Like the mother whose spirit he drove to perversion, though how he initiated my descent requires a more detailed recounting.” A balloon-back chair with deep red upholstery slid up beside Alice. Astrid smiled and nodded at the seat. “Please. I know this is all illusion, and that we are no more than two tiny sparks in an abyss, but that”—she motioned to Alice’s feet—“is a bit distracting.” Alice glanced down, surprised to see that she appeared to be floating several inches above the floor. She slipped onto the chair.

  “Thank you.” Astrid saluted Alice with her glass, then handed it to Babau Jean, who had appeared at her side. “Would you mind, dear?” she addressed the creature. Shifting her gaze back to Alice, she said, “We have no secrets from each other, Jean and I, but a bit of privacy will, no doubt, make both the recounting and the hearing of the inelegant cautionary tale of my life that much easier.” She smiled up at him, then he, and the glass he held, dissipated into mist. “Where to start . . .”

  Alice cast a glance at the doorway. The portal to the common world remained sealed by the impressive and seemingly impenetrable door. It appeared they had time. “At the beginning.”

  “At the beginning, it is,” Astrid said with a sigh, as if capitulating to Alice’s demand, though Alice sensed Astrid had rehearsed this telling so many times, it would be impossible for her to start at any other point.

  Astrid’s gaze softened. “It began with Nicholas and me. You may already know a lot about how things went wrong between us. You were too young to remember on your own, but I’m sure Hugo has shared with you. Perhaps even Luc did, too . . . before . . .” She fell silent, as if she recognized that there was no need to finish her thought. “The fierce rows that would come and go,” she continued. “The even more vicious silences that would come and linger. I believe at the end we were happier when shouting at each other than when the house was quiet. To paraphrase the Russian chap, our family was unhappy in its own curiously unhinged way. Hugo remembers, I’m sure, even though he was barely eight . . .” She stopped midsentence, seemingly beset by a new train of thought. “I don’t blame Nicholas for not searching for me. I wouldn’t have looked for him either.”

  “Everyone said that you were unstable. That you chose the Dreaming Road.”

  “That would fit the narrative they’d created for me from the beginning. Odd girl. Not one of us. Not really. Wouldn’t be surprised if Celestin kicked that story off.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Alice said, though no doubt many of the witches of New Orleans had, at some point, made similar statements about Alice herself. Celestin may have invented this theme of the odd and fragile outsider, but Nicholas had adapted it to his own ends. Sobering that if it weren’t for Celestin’s scheming, Alice might have wasted away her entire life in a psychiatric care facility.

  “No, you couldn’t. Still, Nicholas should’ve known better. He knew me better. In life, I was a survivor, not a quitter. But it must’ve been a relief for him once it was finally over. I’m sure he didn’t give a damn what happened to me as long as he was free. He no longer held any affection for me, and I suppose it’s obvious that I returned his cold indifference at the time.” Alice wondered about the ambiguous way she said “at the time.” Had the years of absence softened her toward him? “I’m sorry. It seems when it comes to Nicholas I can’t help but begin at the end. We were such a glorious failure. The rest of our time together pales in comparison.”

  “Why did you marry and have children together if you didn’t love each other?”

  “Oh”—Astrid looked at her with surprise—“but we didn’t begin in ice. We began in fire. Once we were very much in love, Nicholas and I. I can’t speak for Nicholas, but I was stricken by Cupid. What was the term Celestin liked to use? Un vrai coup de foudre. Love at first sight.” One eyebrow rose, as if she were gazing back through time at the woman she’d once been. “We met in the taxi queue at New Orleans International Airport. Romantic, no?” Alice couldn’t tell if she was being sincere or sardonic. Her tone was out of sync with the tender look in her eyes. Maybe a touch of both. “We recognized each other as witches, so we began chatting in the cloaked way one does. He was coming back from a ski vacation somewhere or other. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember he had too much baggage for us to share a cab.” She shook her head. “I should’ve taken that as an omen, but I was new in town. I knew no one, and Nicholas was so charming, so handsome. So charming and handsome, in fact, he never needed to develop any other interpersonal skills.” She wagged a finger at Alice. “You’d better believe that circled back to bite me. Hard.” She paused. “Tell me, is he still beautiful?”

  “I may not be the best judge of that, but yes. Until recently he was dating . . .” Alice stopped herself before mentioning Evangeline’s name. “He was dating a much younger woman.”

  Astrid sighed. “Damn. I’d hoped time would allow me that tiny satisfaction. He’s still due a bit of comeuppance, then, but karma never seems to distribute itself evenly.”

  “You blame Nicholas for your actions?”

  “No, but I blame him for his own. At the root of it all”—she shook her head, the lovely, features hardening—“lay Nicholas’s ambition and sense of entitlement.”

  Astrid seemed unaware of the change occurring to the doorway, but Alice noticed a rattling. She glanced over to see the door shaking in its frame.

  “I needn’t tell you about that,” Astrid said, recapturing Alice’s full attention. “You’ve witnessed it firsthand. Still, I would’ve been better off if I’d never gone to New Orleans. If Nicholas and I had never met. Perhaps we all would’ve. Even you children might’ve been better off had you never been born.” She waited, perhaps to see if Alice might be of the same mind, but Alice held her tongue. “I didn’t go to New Orleans to look for a husband, yo
u know. I was, like I sense you are, very independent. I went to New Orleans to take a position. Hearth and family were the furthest things from my mind.”

  “You were a painter,” Alice said, realizing that Astrid’s artistic skills counted as the sole source of pride she’d ever been able to take in her mother.

  “Yes. Among other things. I’d gone to New Orleans to work as a conservator and restorer of the community’s magical texts. The most valuable had been locked away, some for centuries, in a room behind heavy locks and magical wards. All of that, and it lacked air-conditioning or basic humidity control. In New Orleans. The degree of the collection’s decrepitude was discovered when its previous caretaker died.

  “The books and scrolls weren’t merely coming apart in the physical sense; their potency was dulling from lack of use. Grimoires must be used to maintain their power. An untouched book of spells loses its ability to reveal its true, hidden contents,” she said, her tone waxing pedagogical. “It’s never just about the material itself—true magic comes from the witch’s interaction with it. Even a decade of neglect can leave a perfectly serviceable grimoire not much more than an outdated and poorly illustrated travel guide to a hypothetical land. The New Orleans magical community needed an expert who could stop the decline and reverse it wherever possible. Many complained I was too young and inexperienced to take on the job, but I’d apprenticed in the Atelier Magnusson.” She lifted her chin high and spoke the name with such pride, Alice felt compelled to react as if she were impressed—to pretend she’d heard of the workshop. “Besides, I was the only restorer of any caliber willing to move to and live in the city for as long as was required to care for the texts in the proper fashion, so I was engaged to do the work. I came to understand that ‘too young and inexperienced’ was code for ‘lacking a penis’—the gods help us, even among witches. They were lucky to find me, whether they appreciated that fact or not. I did good work for the witches of New Orleans. Saving those texts took a strong witch and a skilled artist with a deep love of books.”

  Alice recognized this aspect of Astrid in herself—she not only lived for books, but she had, in truth, lived most of her life through them. A thrilling, though fleeting, sense of kinship warmed her.

  “I dove right in, perhaps at the expense of observing certain niceties that might have positioned me better with the locals, but I was young and full of fire. I had years of work waiting for me behind those locks and wards, but I was up to the task. It wasn’t all work, though. Against all odds, Nicholas and I began seeing each other.” She traced a finger down her forearm, as if trying to remember the sensation of his touch. “A bit of a fairy tale, our romance. The drab little field mouse catches the eye of the crown prince and snatches him out from under the belles in their shimmering gowns.” Her nose wrinkled up like she’d smelled soured milk. “Celestin and Laure disapproved of me. Foreign, and not the right kind of foreign. An orphan without title, without fortune—and worst of all—without pedigree, but there was another reason for their displeasure. I was some years older than Nicholas. Eight, if you must know.”

  She shook her head. “Laughable, really. If I’d been the man and he the woman, no one would’ve even blinked at the age difference. It didn’t matter to me, and it certainly didn’t matter to Nicholas. We grew inseparable. It was all so new and exciting. Before I knew it, I was pregnant with Luc—I do hope someone has warned you that no birth control will work if a witch wants to have a child.”

  Not a problem, Alice thought, but Astrid continued before she could speak the words aloud.

  “And I did want his child. I loved Nicholas with every fiber of my being. I wanted to make a child with him, et voilà.

  “Celestin fumed that I’d entrapped his son. Laure mourned the ‘unfortunate, inappropriate match,’ perhaps even more than he did. Mothers always have a special connection to their firstborn son. We place so many hopes in that first basket. But appearances, appearances! Laure insisted Nicholas ‘do the right thing’ by me.” She laughed, tossing back her dark curls. “A creature of a different age, she was. Still, for once, and this was perhaps the only time, her wishes aligned with my own. Nicholas and I were married within six months of our first setting eyes on each other. For a while, a brief while, we were very happy. Nicholas burned bright, but not for long. He found a new passion.”

  “Another woman?” A faint scraping sound on the periphery drew Alice’s attention to the doorway that stood between the common world and the Dreaming Road. It had begun to creak open.

  “No. Not another woman. Power. Nicholas became obsessed with it. It started out as contempt for his father’s practices and ended with him deposing Celestin as the head of the Chanticleers. I wanted nothing to do with his challenge to his father. Even as Nicholas’s wife, I was still viewed as an outsider, and to be honest, I viewed myself as an outsider as well. Nicholas’s desire to dethrone his father consumed him. So I focused on Luc. One of us had to. It seemed that Nicholas had only two uses for Luc—to prove his own virility and to preserve his legacy. I chose to stand outside the controversy and care for my son. And I threw myself into my work. I took pleasure in resurrecting things of magic and beauty.” She paused and gave Alice a quizzical glance. “I assume the collection survived your disaster, that Nicholas would see to that.”

  “I believe so, but I can’t say for sure.”

  Astrid nodded. “No matter. I once would have cared deeply, but no longer.”

  “If they held power Nicholas could use, I’m sure they were kept safe.”

  “And if they no longer mattered to him . . .” She clenched her fist. “I apologize,” she said, relaxing her hand. “Perhaps I do still care. A little.” Alice felt her mother turn inward, once again seeming to relive the moments she recounted. “I started my efforts, as one does, by composing an inventory, then performing a triage of the works. I had, I thought, a complete catalog of every text there. You can imagine my surprise when I later came across a copy of The Lesser Key. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn Celestin had slipped it in. A bit of vengeance against his renegade son. I didn’t learn that detail until later . . . until it was too late.”

  The door now stood open far enough for Alice to catch sight of a slice of night sky, spangled with an abundance of silver-blue stars.

  “Celestin was right,” Astrid continued. “He saw a darkness in me I’d always refused to see in myself, and The Lesser Key found fertile ground there. Oh, sure, I sensed the tome was dangerous. I hid it away in a safe place to protect others, but deep down I knew I was saving it for myself. I tried not to think of it. I resisted it for years. But it spoke to me every day. It played upon my disappointments, promising to give me back everything I’d ever lost. To right every wrong I’d suffered. It was my pain as much as my pride and greed that allowed it to take root in my heart. No,” she said, holding up her hand as if she were cautioning Alice, “that isn’t quite true. I already carried darkness in me. It’s all about the progression: The Lesser Key, the subtle descent from where it found you to where you’re ready to receive ‘the greater key,’ if you will, The Book of the Unwinding—”

  Astrid’s words were cut short.

  For a moment Alice felt the familiar comfort of Daniel surround her. Whereas her immersion with Babau Jean had made her feel like she was inside a pressure suit, this was more like being swaddled in a soft blanket. Then Daniel was gone, and Alice found herself tumbling from the sky, below her a sea of twinkling red lights.

  NINETEEN

  Fleur picked her way along the overgrown lane that had once been Grunch Road. It had never been much of a proper road, more a convenient byway where teenage lovers could explore each other. The spot’s notoriety had lent the lightless stretch an undeserved air of sexiness, and stories of red-eyed man-eaters and murderers with hooks for hands had gilded it with a seductive patina of danger that had only helped increase its notoriety. She’d never believed Grunch Road to be unique. Every city, every town had its own version of the
bucolic lane. At least they used to. There was less sexual repression these days, and with the advent of the internet, teenagers had much easier and more private access to information. Maybe young people these days didn’t need to recast their anxiety in the guise of monsters and murderers.

  Fleur blessed the cooler days, but tonight, in this eerie place, she missed the hot weather song of cicadas. Other than the muffled, arrhythmic cadence of her companions’ footfalls, there was silence.

  Fleur could sense that in its desertion, the path had been reclaimed by spirits. Grunch Road no longer belonged to man. She felt the spiderweb sensation that often announced the presence of elementals or even interstitial beings—incomplete entities that sometimes existed in the common world and sometimes didn’t. Their greatest yearning was to experience life as a human. They tended to be tricksters, though most were harmless. Fleur sensed she wasn’t alone in her awareness of otherworldly presences. Even her voluble Lucy was uncharacteristically silent.

  This wasn’t Fleur’s first visit to Grunch Road. She had come here a dozen times or so, long ago, with Eli Landry, the man whose arm she now held. The intervening years had streaked his chestnut hair with gray, but at the time he hadn’t been much more than a boy, and Fleur herself had been a year younger than her daughter was now. Then they had come to the deserted road together alone. Now an entire entourage—Lucy, Daniel, Hugo, the Twins, and the latest wrinkle in her life, Nathalie—accompanied them, the latter carrying both of the shovels that Daniel had demanded they take along.

  Alice, too, accompanied them in body if not in spirit, floating alongside them, buoyed by magic drawn from the relics Fleur had pilfered from the Demagnan Mortuary. She had employed a low-power variant of Hugo’s stealth mode to gain entrance to both the Doll House and the adjacent mortuary, whispering a soothing chant as she approached the officers stationed outside the crime scene, acknowledging that while she might be unauthorized, she was harmless. Nothing more than a shadow, a trick of the light on their tired eyes. Noticing her would lead to more trouble than not, so they should simply turn away. And they had. The spell hadn’t even taxed the modicum of magic she’d felt safe deflecting from Lucy.