Copyright © 2017 David Griffith
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, brand names, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Prologue
Wednesday February 5th
11:00 a.m.
Even when you get past the public nudity and general bawdiness of Mardi Gras, things that would be shocking in other cities go unnoticed in New Orleans. Nobody bats an eye when some people talk to the dead – after all, they listen at least as well as most of the living. It shouldn’t be surprising that, just like in life, some corpses get more attention than others. Simply being long dead has not stopped Marie Laveau from receiving a steady stream of visitors: mostly tourists, others faithful in Voodoo.
So there wasn’t anything particularly unusual about a late-middle-aged man talking to her tomb, except perhaps his clothing: his ruffled shirt, double breasted vest, flowing cloak and top hat would not have been out of place more than a hundred years before his rather one-sided conversation. On the other hand, it is not exactly uncommon to see people dressed in a Victorian fashion in the city of New Orleans, especially around the French Quarter.
“Marie, I know I’m a little out of order, but I’m scared and I want to make sure I get your attention. I’ve brought you a bottle of rum, and I am not asking for a single favor from you for it. I’m bringing it just to be friendly. You’ve helped me before, and I’ve never forgotten it. I am going to ask a favor, and I will happily come back with more if you help, but this bottle has nothing to do with that. This one is just to be friendly.” He carefully placed the rum amongst the hodgepodge of other offerings at the base of the tomb.
“I am afraid, for myself and for my family. All I ask is that you keep us safe.”
With that, he turned and walked away.
Wednesday February 5th
Noon
Jeremy was twenty-seven years old, a fact that surprised him greatly. He had never expected to have a long life; dying young, specifically at the age of twenty-six, was something of a tradition for the men in his family.
So the day after his twenty-seventh birthday, Jeremy found himself without direction. He also found himself eating lunch at Yo Mama’s Bar with Kelly, his best friend. Whenever they went out, strangers assumed they were a couple and they generally didn’t mind. Jeremy was not immune to the feeling of power that came with escorting a tall, beautiful blonde, and Kelly liked the fact that it cut down on (but did not eliminate) the random pick-up attempts to which she was constantly subjected.
Jeremy sighed and said, “I just don’t know what to do.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
He leaned forward and cradled his face in his hands. “I am at a loss for what I should do with the rest of my life.”
Jeremy looked around the room and, as they usually did when he was on this side of the booth, his eyes fixed on the rather hideous framed thing behind the bar. It had arms, legs, a tail and wings. It had a face that was frozen in what seemed to be a malevolent grin. Julie, the bartender, had once told him it was a fluke – some sort of real creature, looking like a monster out of a horror film, maybe a dried evil fairy. Jeremy knew better, it was a devil fish; a bizarre piece of folk art taxidermy that transformed a skate ray skin into a demon. Julie claimed it moved a little every day. Jeremy doubted that too, unless it was due to humidity.
“Why not keep doing what you have been doing? You’re young, you play guitar pretty well, you are reasonably good looking, you have a lot of money ...”
“Had a lot of money,” Jeremy interjected.
“Huh?”
Julie arrived with a couple of beers and their food. Jeremy had a burger smothered in peanut butter and bacon, Kelly’s had avocado and salsa.
Jeremy swallowed the first three inches of beer from his bottle and said, “I never expected to live this long, so I spent my money accordingly.”
“Why? Do you have some sort of disease I don’t know about?” Kelly sounded worried.
He said, “I told you once. A long time ago.” Kelly’s face showed no sign of comprehension, so he added, “about the curse.”
Recognition dawned. “It was at a party. You were very drunk …”
“I was drunk, and it was crazy, so you just filed it away under, ‘crazy things drunks say.’”
“You never mentioned it again.”
“I stopped talking about it years before I met you.”
“Because nobody believed you. Because it made you sound a little crazy. You only told me because you were drunk enough to hope I’d believe … and I made fun of you. Oh, Jeremy. I’m sorry.”
“Sober, I wouldn’t have expected anything different. I know it sounds crazy, and people treat you differently when a big, crazy idea is at the core of your existence. I never saw any point in pushing the issue when the only way to prove I was right would be by dying at the appointed time. When that happened, I wouldn’t be around to have the satisfaction of gloating, plus everyone would just feel bad for not believing.”
“I’d like to think if you’d told me about it sober I would have taken you seriously, even if I didn’t entirely believe it. We’re sober now; let’s start over. You’ve always believed there is a curse on your family?”
“It was kind of hard for me not to believe. Do you know why I had money?”
“You inherited it from your dad, right?”
“Close, but no banana. It was an insurance policy.”
“Okay …”
“Kelly, how many twenty-six-year-old men take out a couple of million dollars in life insurance on themselves?”
“Suicidal ones?”
“Ones who know they are going to die.”
“But if he was sick, they wouldn’t have sold him the policy, and if he killed himself they wouldn’t have honored it, and how else could he know he was going to die? Was he in trouble with the Mafia?”
Julie was standing next to the table. She asked if the food was okay. Jeremy said, “The food is great, but somehow my beer got empty.” To demonstrate, he picked up the bottle and poured the last half down his throat.
Julie laughed and said she’d take care of it. When she was gone, Jeremy picked up the conversation where they had dropped it. “My father died in an accident. It was a weird accident, something that nobody could have predicted. He didn’t know exactly what was going to kill him, he just knew something would.”
“How can you know something like that?”
“Because all the men in my father’s line die at the age of twenty-six.”
“You didn’t.”
“I am starting to worry that my birthday might not be the right day.” He looked in her eyes. He wanted her to believe, or at least not to think he was crazy for believing. He said, “Look, whether it makes sense to you or not, I believed it. And now I’m broke.”
She took a bite from her burger.
Jeremy noticed that at some point Julie had b
rought him a new beer. He took a good swallow and said, “Maybe I’m just the luckiest SOB my family has ever produced, or the curse ran out, or I did something right karma-wise, or my birthday is really tomorrow, because a leap year factors into it somehow, or something. But I still don’t know what to do with myself.”
“So you’re broke?”
“Broker than I have ever been… I have maybe two months before I am totally out of cash.”
“That puts you at least six weeks ahead of most of the people I go to school with. I guess you’ll have to do something old-fashioned, like get a job.”
“Doing what? I’ve got no marketable skills, and no employment history.”
“There’s always fast food.”
“I couldn’t pay my bills on that.”
“So go to school and get a degree, like the rest of us.” Her tone had a slight edge to it. She had never resented the fact that Jeremy had money and didn’t have to work, but it was beginning to seem like he felt work was beneath him. That bothered her. If it were true, then he felt that people who work were his inferiors, and since she worked, that would mean he felt like she was less than him.
He interrupted her thoughts by saying, “I don’t know. This may sound stupid, but I have lived my whole life expecting to be dead by now. Don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled to be alive, but I don’t trust it. It wouldn’t surprise me to die tomorrow, and I don’t want to spend any more time than I have to doing anything I don’t want to do. In other words, how would you live today, if you knew you were going to die tomorrow? I doubt you’d go to class.”
“Well, at some point you just have to realize that while you might die tomorrow, you probably won’t. So we go to class and we go to work, and we don’t spend all day every day having sex.” Or killing everyone who annoys us because there would be no consequences, she added to herself, and then wondered why she had thought such a violent thought.
Trying to be helpful, she suggested, “You play a pretty mean guitar.”
“Yeah well, when Scenic Decay has a hit record, we’ll all be set for life, but if you want to talk about tough odds, that’s somewhere between getting hit by lightning and winning the lottery. Especially since you and Stevie are graduating in the spring and heading off to grad school. That just gives us a couple of months. I’d be amazed if anybody has even listened to our demo.”
“You could always pick up some money playing gigs in a cover band.”
“I can’t think of any way to start hating something I love faster than that. Have you listened to the schlock they play on Bourbon Street? A lot of good songs, but they run the life out of them. I think there must be a law that says that they have to play “Sweet Home Alabama” at least once per set. The drunks love it, but I’d go crazy. I’d start hating music.”
“I hope you realize that most people would kill for a chance to make money doing something they like doing. Or even something vaguely like something they like doing. The rest of us go to school so we can get jobs so we can do something we don’t want to do, so we can afford to do the things we like to do in the time we aren’t at work.”
Jeremy was silent for a moment. He hoped he hadn’t hurt Kelly’s feelings. She looked a tad peeved. He desperately tried to think of the right thing to say to ease the tension. He thought about pointing out that her major, English, wasn’t exactly the most practical field in the world either. She was a dreamer too; that was part of why they got along so well.
While Jeremy was pondering, a middle-aged gentleman in Victorian attire walked up to the bar, sat down across from the framed fluke, and asked for a glass of water. Jeremy and Kelly knew him; his name was Dexter, and he was a tour guide for the Madness and Mystery Tour Company.
The cloud lifted from Kelly’s face and she said, “You could do that ... you’d make a good tour guide.” She was right. Jeremy had what he referred to as a ‘sticky brain.’ Facts that interested him stuck to it like flypaper, and facts and factoids about the French Quarter interested him. Even though he only had a high school diploma, Kelly felt Jeremy was better educated than most people she knew who had college degrees.
Jeremy smiled and said, “Never mind, I think I know what I am going to do.”
“What is that?”
“Get drunk. Maybe that’ll change my perspective.” With that, Jeremy sucked down the last half of his beer, and waved the bottle at Julie. She smiled to acknowledge his request.
“Jeremy, it’s noon, don’t you think it is a tad early to get drunk?”
“Kelly, this is New Orleans.”
Another man in Victorian garb walked into the room. He was about six inches taller than tall. His head was shaved and his skull was covered with a bold, pointy tattoo of a crown of thorns. Both ears were amply pierced with a variety of silver shapes. What made him look most alien, though, was the fact he’d also shaved his eyebrows. With everything else on his head it was hard to notice that his eyebrows were gone, and yet it was their absence that seemed to remove him entirely from the world of human.
His name was Aldous, and he was another tour guide for Madness and Mystery. Aldous sat down next to Dexter and said, “I hate it when they schedule me for daytime tours,” and everyone heard him, not because he spoke loudly, which he didn’t, or because his voice was deep and penetrating, which it was, but because whenever he walked into a room people tended to stop what they were doing and stare for a few moments.
The bar remained silent for a few moments, then the patrons seemed to collectively realize they were being rude and simultaneously resumed their own business.
Before he was seated Julie had a bloody virgin waiting for Aldous at the bar. She hopped around the bar and put a fresh beer in front of Jeremy. Jeremy thanked her and as soon as she was gone Kelly said, “Man, I wish they would turn that TV off.”
“Why?”
“Because when there is a moving picture I can’t help but watch it, even if it’s something I don’t like.”
“Uh, Kelly, I know I’m the one drinking here, but all that is on that TV is static.”
“Static moves, and besides, it’s worse.”
“Worse?”
“I’m seeing things in the static.”
“Like a snowstorm?” Jeremy wasn’t trying to be sarcastic, but he was at a loss for what she might be seeing in the static.
“No ... okay, I stayed up a little too late last night web surfing, and I found myself on a page talking about,” she dropped her voice, added a little vibrato for a properly eerie effect and continued, “the electro voice phenomenon.”
Jeremy looked blank and vaguely puzzled.
Kelly continued, “I know it sounds flaky, but it has been creeping me out ever since I heard about it. There are people who believe that dead people can talk to us through the static on TV. After reading the web page, I turned on the TV. It works.”
Jeremy fell over onto his side on the bench laughing. He wheezed, “I see dead people,” and took a long swallow from his beer.
Kelly was still irritated from the work discussion. Her tone icy, she said, “It’s not nice to laugh at things that people believe in.”
Pulling himself together slightly, and remembering their discussion about his beliefs, Jeremy replied, “What else is there to laugh at?”
“Good point, so let’s be more specific, I don’t like it when you laugh at me.”
“I’m sorry, that was rude. If I was sober I would have only laughed on the inside, at least until you had finished. But you do have me curious. If I promise not to laugh, will you tell me more?”
“Nobody knows how it works, but pretty much any source of static has voices in it if you listen close enough. The creepy thing about TV static is that sometimes there are pictures. You can even record them on tape, if you point your camcorder at a TV screen full of static.”
“Have you heard these voices?�
�
“Yes.”
“Well, what did they say?”
“Stuff. Personal stuff.”
“Maybe I should ask my dad what I should do for money.” He chuckled.
“You shouldn’t joke like that.”
“I’m not joking… I trust you, and if you say you’ve heard voices, I believe you.” Jeremy silently added, “I think you heard your imagination, but, hey, I’m about drunk enough to try anything.”
“The pictures are really creepy.”
“Have you done that yourself too?”
“No, but I’ve seen tapes of what other people have done.”
“What do they look like?”
“Faces mostly.”
“Anybody you recognize?”
“They usually aren’t that clear.”
“Has it occurred to anyone that they might just be faint TV signals, not faces from beyond death?”
“I don’t know about the pictures, but the voices ... like I said, they say stuff, personal stuff, and they answer questions.”
“Do they give the right answers?”
“If I ask you a question do you give the right answer?”
“When I can.”
“It’s about the same with them.”
Jeremy sat, looking at his beer for a moment. “Have you ever seen anything that wasn’t what you thought it was? Like a stick that looked like a snake when you first saw it?”
“Of course. You aren’t going to try to tell me this is the same thing, are you?”
Jeremy tried to look studious. “Our brains are all about finding order, and patterns to things. Maybe there is something there, or maybe there is just the brain trying to find something. But I’ll tell you what. If the TV is bothering you, I’ll switch sides with you, I’ll look at the static, and you can stare down the fluke for a little while.”
Kelly glanced at Aldous, then the framed fluke. “No, I need to be getting back to work. Are you going to be okay to walk home?”
“Kelly, I’ve only had three beers and I only live a couple of blocks away, I’ll be fine. I didn’t survive twenty-six years to die in a horrible drunk walking accident. Probably. Besides, how much trouble could I get into?”
The Whisper Garden Page 1