‘That’s an incredible story,’ I replied. ‘Did the state ever follow it up and find out what really happened?’
‘They had their hands full, son. Katrina hit the shore five days later.’
I thought about Missy’s story all the way back to the hotel, and how it fitted with Stormy’s death. It seemed I was missing something, and that something was probably connected with Sam Threefinger, so that night I sat down at my laptop and did a little digging. Sam’s real name was Laurent DuChamp. He’d been in a soft-touch annex of the Louisiana State Penitentiary a couple of times for fencing stolen goods, and it seemed he hadn’t learned his lesson. He’d set up his antique shop in 2002, after his last stretch. I wondered if he had approached Stormy about buying the piano before, so I called LaVinna, who told me it had been in storage for years. And that meant the first time Sam saw it after Warena’s death was when it appeared on the new stage.
The thing that struck me most was how Stormy had managed to cheat his old rival by destroying Warena’s most coveted possession at the moment of his demise. It was a kind of justice, but I wondered if there was more to it than that. I admit I wanted an ending; I had the material for a good article, but needed to give it a more satisfying punchline.
The next morning it seemed the storm had blown itself out, but Ren called me to say his plane had been grounded because Louis Armstrong Airport was in the eye of the storm, and the worst was yet to come, so rather than sitting around cooling my heels waiting for Sam Threefinger to call me, I decided to take a cab over to his store.
The sign on the door said CLOSED and the place was locked up tight. I cupped my hands and peered through the rain-streaked window. The interior was so murky it could have been filled with pond water. It was mainly cluttered with 1960s furniture and musical instruments, but looked as if no-one had been there for days. I talked the cabdriver into taking me out to Sam’s house. He didn’t want to go there, complained it was beyond his working area, the weather was too bad and he wouldn’t wait around for me to come back, but by this time I was getting desperate. Ren was delayed, I’d already spent my fee for the piece just holing up at the hotel, and there was no other work on the horizon. I needed to sell the story, period.
The rain was thundering loud enough to drown out the cab’s radio. We came off the I-10 at Loyola, left the main strip and turned into a chain of tree-filled avenues. The house had an antebellum grandeur that seemed out of place. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the old Rosedown Plantation outside St Francisville, with Greek Revival-style wings and a long verandah, only scaled down to fit a modern neighbourhood—because this house was freshly painted and no more than ten years old. I rang, then knocked on the screen doors, but there was no answer. By that time the damned cabdriver had slammed into reverse and beaten a retreat from the property.
I could do nothing but circle the house and see if Threefinger was out back somewhere. Although the lawns were neatly trimmed, water was pooling fast on the grass and I was quickly covered in mud. The rear screen door was bashed in, the nets torn, the door hanging off its hinges. I tried to see inside but it was too dark to make anything out. I should have called the cops right then, but just didn’t think of it. There was no-one around, and I couldn’t see across the street, so I went in.
The house lights weren’t working but I had a lighter in my pocket. It looked like there had been a fight of some kind in the downstairs rooms; a chair lay on its side, and what I thought at first was torn-up paper proved to be broken white crockery. The rugs were squashy with blown-in rainfall. Not wanting to risk getting shot as an intruder, I called out Sam’s name a couple of times, but there was no answer. I was about to leave when I heard the ceiling floorboards creak.
I figured maybe Threefinger had been attacked by someone from Stormy’s who blamed him for the old man’s death and wanted to make a point about it. You get that feeling about New Orleans; there are plenty of nice people, and plenty of crazies looking to get back at the world. Wherever you get old-school religion, it follows you find old-school vengeance. I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of looking upstairs with no lights and no weapon, but I had no other choice. Besides, I had no personal beef with Threefinger, and for all I knew the guy could have had a heart attack. I fantasized a heroic race to the hospital, where the recovering old man would pour out his heart to give me a nice dramatic wraparound to the story.
I could smell something acrid, like burning paper that had been put out. As I climbed the stairs, the rain pounding on the roof grew louder. It was hard to see, but I could make out a long brown corridor leading to several big rooms, most with their doors open. I figured the one at the front was the master bedroom. I could see something moving beneath its windows, wrapped in a grey blanket. As I came closer, the pile shook a little and shifted backwards.
‘Stay away,’ it suddenly warned, ‘don’t get any nearer.’ The room stank of whisky. A red, puffy face emerged from the blanket cocoon and stared blearily back. Sam looked like shit. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked, pushing to his feet.
I explained I’d been leaving messages for him, and wanted to talk about what happened at Stormy’s. I figured he could at least give me some background to their feud, and I’d be able to give the article some shape. I had the end, I just needed the beginning, or so I thought until Sam said, ‘He’s back,’ and I knew he meant Stormy, that somehow his guilt over the old man’s death had manifested itself in the kind of magic the old women professed to believe in. I didn’t buy the voodoo end of the deal, but it gave me a great angle.
‘He’s dead,’ I said. ‘I saw them take Stormy off to the morgue. What happened here?’
‘Nothing.’ Sam had suddenly sensed he was talking to a stranger and shut his mouth. ‘This is private property. You should go now.’
‘You’ve had some storm damage downstairs. Back door’s blown in.’
‘That weren’t no storm, fool, it was him.’
‘Stormy.’
‘Who else?’
‘Tamasha Woodfall told me that Warena could bring people’s souls back from the dead, but only for a short time. If Stormy’s spirit returned and you think you saw him, he’s gone now. It’s over.’ Disabusing people of their notions is no way to win friendship, so I was trying to go along with him.
He gave no reply. Shuffling over to the liquor cabinet, he filled a tumbler, keeping the blanket hitched around his shoulders. ‘See, that’s the problem, right there,’ he said. ‘Outsiders never see the full picture. You think he’d just turn up and go away again? Revenants come back for a reason, and they stay until they’ve done the job. Most appear so they can give the living some comfort. You get a hug like a warm breeze, they dry away a tear, then they’re gone. Stormy’s back to do some damage.’
‘Why would he want to do that?’
‘Don’t fuck around with me, sonny. You been speaking to people, you know damn well why he’s come back.’
‘Well, there’s no-one here now.’
‘You can’t be sure, with this rain keeping up.’
I didn’t understand what the rain had to do with it. ‘Look, I’ll go and I’ll close the back door on my way out.’
‘No.’ Suddenly I knew he was terrified of being left alone. ‘LaVinna told me who you are. You want an interview, I’ll be happy to give it to you, but downstairs where I can keep an eye on the place.’
We moved to the front parlour, but couldn’t get the power up. It really looked like there had been a fight in the room. Sam was twitchy as hell, shifting back and forth, checking both sides of the house. ‘He wants to give me the piano,’ he said, and now I knew I was dealing with a crazy man.
‘The piano’s gone,’ I reminded him.
‘No, you don’t understand.’ He held up his hand and cocked his ear. ‘Listen, damn it. You hear that?’
And there, behind the drumming rain, I swear I heard something like a piano being played. No, not played, jangled, like a cat was trapped inside it and
was rolling around on the wires. ‘What is that?’ I asked.
‘So you do hear it.’
But now the rain renewed its strength and the sound was lost once more. We both stood in the middle of the room listening like a pair of crazies. I knew I was being a fool, half expecting a snaggle-toothed corpse to come walking through the porch door with its arms outstretched like a character from an old EC comic, but the dark house, the storm, the crazy old man all got to me.
Then I heard it again, closer this time, a sound like a harpsichord being dropped on its side, discordant high notes and bass echoes that underscored the movement of something shifting hesitantly outside the walls. With each step there was a glissando, as if someone was dragging a piano, bumping and crashing it.
‘You do hear that.’ Sam was triumphant but terrified. ‘Give me your car keys, I’ll get you out of here,’ I told him.
‘They’re upstairs on my dresser.’ He couldn’t take his eyes from the front door, which was strobing with the shadows of the storm-beaten trees.
‘I’ll go get them.’
‘No, don’t leave me alone!’
‘Then you get them.’ He was spooking me now. This, I knew, was how voodoo worked, spreading its fear like a contagion, turning sceptics into believers. I followed his eyes as he turned his gaze towards each of the windows, listening. He was tracking its path around the house. The blinds were all down, but I could see a shadow passing from one bay to the next. I ran for the stairs. I found a set of Oldsmobile keys and grabbed them, then headed back, but halted on the landing. The terrible jangling was inside now. I looked down and saw that the doors I had propped shut had been kicked apart. Something had dragged itself inside. I tried to find Sam, but figured he had retreated into a corner behind the stairs.
As I came down, I looked between the banisters. I had only met Stormy alive once, and I suppose the thing below represented him. It was tall and bony, and still wore a baseball cap, but it walked as if moving on broken stilts. The piano’s wires were threaded through its wasted body, and where its stomach should have been keys and cables were strung with bits of dried-out gut. Wires stuck out everywhere, through staring red eyes, elbows, leg-bones and vertebrae. The fingers looked like piano keys, but it was hard to tell where meat and wood met. Warena’s revival power lived on, but Stormy’s spirit had been mashed with the piano in such a way that both had come back as one tortured creature. It stumped and staggered towards Sam, who was scrabbling away in a corner of the parlour, whimpering and pleading.
The strung-up keyboard fingers tore at his face and throat, wires slashing and stinging across his flesh, ripped at his soft stomach until I couldn’t tell where Sam ended and the piano-man began. The whole thing was a bloody mess of flesh and wood and steel, and although it tried to pull away at the end of the attack, I could already see it unravelling and falling apart. The keys bounced to the floor, the wires lost their tautness, and the spirit of Stormy Beauregard evaporated, leaving behind a few sticks of varnished wood and the splintered remains of a man who looked like he’d been pistol-whipped with piano wire and eviscerated. And as the last of Stormy faded, I swear I heard a few chords play out in perfect harmony, before they were swamped by the drumming of the rain.
I took stock of my situation. My fingerprints were all over the house, and just in case the cops were too dumb to find me that way, I threw up all over the floor, leaving them plenty of DNA. I knew the bitches had set me up, pushing me towards Sam Threefinger, knowing that Stormy would reappear and take him down. They needed somebody stupid to carry the can, so that they would be left alone and unsuspected, free to continue practicing their damned rituals.
I’m driving out of the state on the I-10 now, trying to outrun the rolling storm, but I had to use my credit card to hire a car, and it’s only a matter of time before I get hauled in for the murder of Sam Threefinger. They’ll probably already have spoken to LaVinna, who’ll place me in the bar near the corpse of her boss. None of it will make any fucking sense at all, but from what I heard the Louisiana police aren’t going to be too bothered about that. Besides, what am I going to say in my defence, that I stood by and watched as the man whose house I had broken into tried to fight off the spirit of a half-man, half-piano? That’s one piece of music that’s never gonna play.
Man, I knew I was right to hate jazz.
The Girl on Mount Olympus
Anna had been sitting in Starbucks for nearly half an hour when she became aware of two things; one, that the dead heated air was starting to make her feel sick, and two, that someone was reading over her shoulder. Vaguely annoyed, she turned the page but felt the eyes lingering on her book. She turned around, ready for an argument.
‘I love that novel,’ he said before she could give him one of her hard looks. ‘I didn’t think anyone read it anymore.’ He was dark and cute, about twenty-one, with olive skin, brown eyes and heavy black eyebrows. His hair was thick enough to hold pencils in. She closed the paperback and examined the cover as if considering it for the first time. ‘I found it in a charity shop,’ she admitted.
‘Which version is that?’
‘I didn’t know there was more than one.’
‘John Fowles revised it years later. He added new stuff but didn’t really improve on the original.’
She searched the cover of The Magus for clues. ‘I guess it’s the first version. It’s pretty old. I like the setting. You know, the Greek island.’
‘I’m from an island.’ He smiled. He had very white teeth.
She looked at him more carefully. ‘Cyprus.’
‘Of course Cyprus. You’re in a Cypriot neighbourhood. Everybody around here is from Cyprus. Our parents and grandparents came here after losing their homes during the Turkish occupation in 1974.’
‘So you were born here.’ She could see him more clearly now. His beautiful black hair was a little too crafted, his silver jewellery a little too heavy. He was a little too sure of himself. She could see him memorising a few book titles to impress girls, when he actually preferred to be popping wheelies on his scooter in a pub forecourt, leaning too close to a girl in a bar, knuckle-knocking his mates behind her back, not being mean, just being male. Having locked her assessment in place, she grew subtly cooler. ‘And you’ve never been there.’
‘Yes, of course. I go every summer at the start of the season.’
‘To Aya Napia.’
‘No. That’s just for English and German kids looking to get laid. I visit my brother Tony in Nicosia. He owns a bookstore. In my family, we all read.’ He smiled again. ‘That’s Fowles’s best book, I think.’
This time she smiled back. She indicated the novel. ‘It’s very strange. Unsettling. Don’t tell me how it turns out.’
‘I think I’ve seen you in here before,’ he said, leaning forward and proffering a tanned hand. ‘Always with a book. I’m Nick.’
‘Anna.’ They shook rather formally. She self-consciously pushed back her hair, aware of how thin it looked when it needed washing. She hated the thought that someone else might be listening in and noting how easily she could be picked up by a stranger, so she pushed her stool back slightly to create some distance between them.
‘Anna,’ he said, trying the name out. ‘Tell me, Anna, do you like Greek food?’
She didn’t want to insult him by pointing out that she found it rather overcooked, but again he continued before she could reply. ‘I don’t mean kebab takeaways, I mean real Greek food, octopus and cuttlefish, shrimps and feta in coriander and pine nut salads.’
She must have been staring at him in surprise, because he felt the need to explain. ‘I’m a chef. That is, I’m training as a chef at The Real Greek, you know those places? It’s a chain, but a good one.’
‘That’s different,’ she admitted, warming more. ‘I’ve been to the one by the river. I really liked it.’
‘Then you must come to the one near here. I’ll cook for you. It would be my pleasure.’
The though
t crossed her mind that he was simply touting for business, but it seemed an unnecessarily elaborate approach to winning customers. She decided not to answer until he presented her with further clues to his intentions.
‘Ah, now you’re thinking he needs customers for his restaurant.’ His smile became a laugh. ‘Yes?’
‘No, certainly not.’
‘You want to know the truth? I work unsociable hours. It’s difficult to meet anyone, so I figured if I offered to cook for you, I could work and you could eat, so we both get pleasure and it would be like a date.’
‘You’re asking me on a date?’ asked Anna, genuinely amazed now.
He thought about it for a moment, then nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing.’ And he laughed again.
Before she replied, Anna made up her mind to accept his offer.
—
It took them ages to find the place. Lily had a tourist map the car rental company had provided, but it mostly consisted of adverts for as-yet unbuilt luxury apartments and terrible-looking nightclubs, all of which were clearly marked with photographs, while half of the island’s major roads were missing.
‘Well, it has to be around here somewhere,’ Paul said for the third time. ‘It must be enormous.’ He pointed to the passenger window. ‘Keep a look out on the other side.’
‘There.’ Lily pointed at a gap in the hibiscus bushes. ‘I can see the top of a water slide.’
‘Great. Watch for the car park,’ Paul instructed. ‘Are you sure you still want to go?’
‘No, of course not. But I’m being a good girl and facing my fears. I didn’t even learn to swim until last year. Anyway, it’s not fear of the water, it’s—’
Red Gloves, Volumes I & II Page 24