A Twisted Ladder

by Rhodi Hawk

  But the children, in unison, turned instead and faced the bayou again. Patrice could feel her mother’s gaze boring into their backs. The vastness inside kept her calm, preventing her from fighting or resisting, while somehow bolstering her strength. The river devil stepped away from Marie-Rose and pounced at Patrice, her silver eyes flashing. She lashed out with a sharp claw at Patrice’s arm. Patrice flinched.

  Chloe yanked Patrice by the hair and threw her backward onto the bank. Patrice cried out. She felt the skin abrade down her forearm as she tried to break her fall.

  “You do this!” Chloe said.

  Rosie’s river devil railed and babbled. The strange conjuring filled the bayou. Patrice pushed against the packed mud and looked back over her shoulder at her mother.

  Ferrar stepped forward. He leaned over and put his arms around Patrice, and lifted her to her feet. She looked down at the dirt and blood scraped into her hands and forearm. Her skirts were mottled with filth.

  Chloe said, “You disobey me! You fraternize! You poison your brothers and sister!”

  Patrice took a shaking breath. “No Madame, I think it is you who are poisoning us.”

  Chloe slapped Patrice across face. Patrice gasped and felt a momentary resurgence of electricity. But she saw the surge in the river devil’s eyes, and she let the crackling pass through and out of her.

  Chloe turned to Ramsey. Her face was hard. Patrice observed what lay inside her mother’s heart. Chloe implanted the suggestion to Ramsey to shoot Ferrar through the throat. Chloe’s ability was much weaker than that of her children, but Ramsey was an easy vessel to navigate.

  Ramsey turned, the shotgun aiming back toward them. Patrice threw her gaze on him and made him swing the weapon away, but too late. A shot rang out. It caught Ferrar. Patrice turned to look.

  Ferrar sank to his knees. But the scar at his throat was untouched. Blood poured from his shoulder. It had spattered Patrice.

  Ramsey was reloading.

  Patrice trained her focus on Ramsey. He paused, chin down, the blindfold tails at his back. She could sense her mother’s doubled efforts. But Ramsey heard Patrice’s suggestion with much more resonance than anything Chloe could send forth. He turned back to the bayou and threw the shotgun into the water.

  Chloe flew into a rage. She struck Patrice, a hard cut across the mouth, and Patrice tasted blood. Chloe struck again and again, pummeling until Patrice stumbled and fell back to the packed wet earth. A tuft of fur from one of the fallen rabbits drifted on the breeze. Chloe kicked.

  Patrice reached inside to that shimmering ocean that seemed to wash through herself and Ferrar and to a smaller extent, the others; even Chloe. She used her mind to push Chloe back. Chloe stopped.

  Patrice said aloud, “Children, turn and see.”

  Guy, Gilbert, and Marie-Rose turned around to face them.

  Chloe’s face twisted with rage, but Patrice formed a tight net around her, and Chloe seemed unable to move against it.

  “Ferrar,” Patrice said.

  Guy and Gilbert stepped forward and went to Ferrar, who was now lying on the edge of the woodland, leaking blood with the rabbits. The twins put their hands to his shoulder and compressed the wound. The river devil shrieked. Marie-Rose pressed her hands over her ears, weeping and screaming.

  Patrice rose to a sitting position. “Make a doll, Rosie. In the mud.”

  Marie-Rose looked at her older sister. She knelt at the edge of the water, tears streaming, and traced an outline of a figure in the banks. Marie-Rose’s physical form still lay strapped in the nursery at Terrefleurs, but her projected self worked with the water and mud to form a small creation. The shape emerged from lapping water that trickled through channels of dirt. The river devil quieted, watching the little girl, and seemed mesmerized by the activity.

  Patrice turned her attention to her mother.

  “We need clean cloth.” She crystalized the thoughts that showed exactly what she wanted.

  Though Chloe fought, she followed the motions of Patrice’s implanted suggestion. Chloe reached under her skirts and pulled a knife from a belt around her thigh. With shaking hands, she tore shreds from her skirts and then gave them to the twins. The boys pressed them into Ferrar’s wound and held.

  “Now kneel,” Patrice said.

  Chloe’s mouth was pulled into an angry grimace. She sank to her knees in front of Patrice. Patrice rose to her knees to face her. Mother and daughter stared eye-to-eye.

  Patrice said, “You’re going to leave us alone now. You’re going to leave Terrefleurs for good and live in New Orleans. You’re not welcome here anymore.”

  Chloe quaked before her.

  “Do you understand?”

  Chloe was grinding her teeth. It seemed that she fought harder against this than when she had torn her own clothing. Patrice saw the turmoil of intentions inside her mother, and she sensed the determination.

  But Chloe answered, at least for the moment, “Yes.”

  seventy-five

  NEW ORLEANS, 2010

  MADELEINE AND ETHAN SAT in the drawing room at Chloe’s home on Rue Toulouse while Chloe peered through heavy spectacles at Zenon’s letter, dust motes drifting in a shaft of sunlight. Severin crouched on all fours, her spine making dragon ridges down her thin, bare back, and she crawled along the floor. Beyond the wall, reporters milled somewhere on the sidewalk. They’d been following Madeleine around like ducks. Severin settled in under the curtains, layered with a thin white sheer and then a heavy brocade, and a third layer of drapery seemed to form from the dust itself. It looked like you could peel it off like a sheet of plastic wrap. Madeleine remembered that first day when she’d come to call on Chloe. Back then, she’d come looking for answers. But each answer she’d uncovered led to a host of more questions.

  The old woman grunted and laid the letter on the tea tray beside her. “That is bad.”

  Ethan nodded. “He’ll use the trick, the implanted suggestion.”

  Chloe looked at Madeleine. “You taught yourself how to do that.”

  “I suppose I did. Did Zenon learn it from you?”

  “These secrets come from the other world. You have the ability to inhabit that world, and bring secrets back. Zenon can too.”

  “Are you saying that he taught himself as well?”

  “No, I did teach him. I showed him the beginning. He is continuing from there.”

  Madeleine didn’t like the sound of that. If Zenon continued to learn secrets like the implanted suggestion, each discovery could be another weapon to add to his arsenal.

  Ethan said, “What other secrets are there?”

  Chloe regarded Ethan with thinly veiled distaste. “Do you know how old I am?”

  “You’d said you were a hundred and fourteen years old,” Madeleine said.

  “Now one hundred and fifteen. I was born in 1895.”

  Ethan said, “My God. You’ve learned the secret of longevity. That’s amazing.”

  “Why do you speak!” Chloe snapped. “You have nothing to do with this.”

  “Chloe! What’s the matter with you? Ethan has every right to speak.”

  “Then I have nothing more to say!”

  Chloe curled her claw-like hand over the arm of her chair and turned her face to the window, lips curled inward. Severin laughed.

  “I have nothing more to say!” Severin repeated in Chloe’s voice. “He can’t make the kind of babies Zenon can so we don’t like him!”

  Madeleine made a noise of disgust. She’d had enough and rose to leave, but Ethan put his hand to her shoulder, easing her back into her chair.

  “It’s all right. I’ll go wait in the car.”

  “No,” Madeleine said.

  “Really. I’ll see if I can send some of them reporters on a wild goose chase. Don’t forget why we came here.”

  He planted a kiss on the top of her head and walked his uneven steps to the door, then left.

  “That was very rude,” Madeleine said.

 
; “The secrets are only powerful as long as they are kept secret. Once the masses learn them, we are no better than anyone else.”

  “These abilities don’t make us better, Chloe, just different.”

  “Ah, but you are wrong! My children were better. But they left me. They taught their own children to consider me as poison. I watched you grow, you and your brothers, and waited for you to come to me.”

  “I don’t understand why you watched from afar.”

  “You, and Marc, and Zenon, your parents were absent. You learned to fight and survive. The masses, they know no hardship and therefore are weak.”

  Madeleine shook her head.

  Chloe said, “But I would not do that again. We lost Marc Gilbert because he did not understand. The next child of the briar, I will be there. I will teach.”

  Severin said, “Marc had a child, so surely! At the mirror end of the river it lives!”

  “Hush!” Madeleine snapped, realizing after the fact that she’d spoken aloud to Severin.

  Chloe looked surprised by Madeleine’s outburst. The old woman didn’t know about Marc’s baby, and now more than ever, Madeleine wanted to keep it that way.

  Chloe’s gaze went to the curtains and down to where Severin sat crouched beneath the window. “Your devil is here too, yanh?”

  “Severin is under the window.”

  Chloe’s eyes brightened. “Do not fight her, Madeleine. I can help you. I can teach you the ways of the other world. I cannot see it as you, but I have seen my husband and my children and their children. I know the ways. I will teach you.”

  Madeleine looked away. She wanted so badly to learn how to tame this phenomenon. Any knowledge Chloe could share was invaluable. But leaning on Chloe seemed about as sensible as leaning on a guillotine.

  Madeleine asked, “Hasn’t anyone ever escaped the river devils?”

  Severin cried out, “I’ll never leave! I’m your pair, and I stay with you forever, truly.”

  Chloe said, “Once you have opened that passageway, it is always there. I helped my daughters and sons to open it early. But, you children of the briar, you must not see it as a sickness. You are frightened because the river devils bring chaos.”

  Madeleine said, “Zenon doesn’t seem to experience the . . . what are they, fugues? He always seems to be in control of his awareness.”

  Chloe leaned forward. “Ah, you see? It is because Zenon is faithful to the cause of the river devil. It is powerful, yanh?”

  “But what is that cause?”

  “You learn the secrets. Bring them out. Obey the wishes of the river devils.”

  “But . . . murder? He obeyed by committing murder.”

  Chloe gave a cough that might have been a laugh. “You are so pious. What Zenon does, it is culling. He helps to remove those that would oppose us.”

  Madeleine felt the hair rise on her skin. Hard enough to understand Zenon’s taste for murder; even harder to believe that Chloe should support it.

  “And now he wants to cull me.”

  Chloe’s face clouded.

  Madeleine said, “I want you to come with me to see Zenon.”

  “No.”

  “I want to talk to him. See if we can call a truce.”

  “I will not go. Zenon is the strongest warrior of all the children. It would be wrong of me to oppose him.”

  Severin rose and approached, her face softening to a kind of sincerity. Her thin, naked form streaked with gray.

  She touched Madeleine’s hand. “We’re going to be together for eternity.”

  Madeleine flinched.

  Severin said, “You should think toward it, a little some. We’re the ones who can select and cull. That means everything, yes truly.”

  Madeleine’s heart filled with sand. Select and cull. After all, she had wished to cull Carlo Jefferson. A faithful descendant of Chloe; one of her warrior-children of the briar. Madeleine disliked the sense of being just a cocktail of traits handed down through generations. Her life having been preordained in the DNA scriptures inside each of her cells.

  Madeleine said to Chloe, “Zenon intends to kill me. Is that what you want too? Is that part of this?”

  Chloe shook her head, and perhaps the faintest hint of emotion played at her brow. “Of course not. I do not wish for your death, or his. I have watched you all these years.”

  “Then come with me. Let’s talk to Zenon together.”

  Chloe looked away. “I will not go.”

  Madeleine sighed, exhausted. She opened her hands and drew a slow breath.

  “All right. I’ll go alone.”

  Chloe still did not look at her. She kept her eyes fixed on the wall, and Madeleine was surprised to find a faint tremor at her lip.

  “Use your skill,” Chloe said. “When you go to see him, use the same skill he would use.”

  seventy-six

  NEW ORLEANS, 2010

  FLUORESCENT LIGHTS GLARED THROUGH a caged lens. Madeleine’s fingers dug into the arm of the plastic chair as she debated whether or not she should stand up and walk out of this soulless room before it was too late. Severin was not present, at least. There seemed no rhyme or reason to when she appeared or when she was gone, and Madeleine wondered if she’d ever know why.

  She tried to remain calm. At the next booth, a prisoner in an orange jumper was talking to someone through a telephone, but he kept eyeing Madeleine and making lascivious gestures. She did not look at him, and instead kept her eyes on the words someone had carved into the booth. Filthy words. She closed her eyes.

  Zenon appeared. He too was in an orange jumpsuit, looking like any other prisoner. Madeleine reflexively looked away from him, suppressing the urge to bolt. He walked to the booth and sat down, separated from her only by a sheet of glass.

  He smiled, and his mouth seemed to twitch strangely. It occurred to her that he might be as nervous as she. He deflected his gaze and pulled out a cigarette which the guard lit for him, then began to smoke, inhaling deeply. She lifted the handset and he did the same on the other side of the glass.

  “Thanks for coming to see me, Sis,” he said.

  She looked at his wide gray eyes and realized for the first time how much they resembled her father’s, even her own. His skin was much lighter, though. The African blood in him was not so apparent.

  The prisoner who had been eyeing Madeleine said something to Zenon, and Zenon shook his head.

  “Sick bastard. This ole boy got sent up the river for grand theft auto.” Zenon leaned toward her and lowered his voice. “But I happen to know he also raped and killed half a dozen women. Two of’m were mother and daughter. Says to tell you he thinks you’re cute.”

  Her eyes involuntarily darted to the prisoner, and he winked. A scar cleaved his cheek. Madeleine sighed. She had worked in a mental institution long enough that such antics had lost their shock value on her.

  “I received your letter,” she said.

  Zenon smiled as if they were discussing a mail-order box of chocolates. “Oh, you got it. That’s good to know. I wasn’t sure whether it had gotten to you or not.”

  “Oh it got to me. You definitely got to me Zenon. Is that what you wanted?”

  “It’s a start.”

  “Zenon, listen. I came here today because I want to call a truce.”

  “A truce?”

  “I don’t want a war with you.”

  “Getting too hot for you, baby? I understand that. Play with fire, expect to get burned. I guess you thought you were immune.” He shook his head. “Don’t think I’m interested in a truce, baby. That all you come here to say?”

  She shook her head. “Not really. I have some questions. Hoped maybe you’d answer them for me.”

  “All right,” he said. “Shoot.”

  “How long have you known that I was your half sister?”

  He smiled and looked at her for a long moment, weighing whether or not to indulge her. Finally, he shrugged.

  “Found out about Daddy Blank on my
twenty-first birthday. Got a letter from a lawyer along with the deed to the plantation on River Road. I was surprised, but it didn’t really mean nothing but extra property taxes to pay at the time. Always meant to sell it.” He shrugged again. “Other than that, I never heard a damn word from him about it, or you. Thought maybe I’d bring it up sometime, but then brother Marc’d already decided he didn’t like me no more.”

  Zenon crossed his arm under one elbow. “My turn. How long you been having conversations with your secret friend?”

  She was startled. Somehow she never anticipated that he might want information from her, too.

  “It started, I guess, that night on the bayou. When I found Anita Salazar.” She swallowed. “And you? Have you had conversations with . . . unusual people or things?”

  “My lawyer would probably object to the direction this conversation’s taken. He didn’t want me to meet with you alone in the first place.”

  “Tell me the truth, Zenon,” she said aloud, and in her mind she made certain he would.

  Zenon did not speak again immediately, but instead fixed his gaze on her.

  “You fuckin with my head, ain’t you, baby?”

  Her breath caught in her throat, and they stared at each other while prisoners and guards milled nearby.

  “That’s all right,” Zenon said, his voice just above a whisper, and then he continued with an almost casual air: “Tell you what. I’ll answer you because I see fit to do so, and not because you trying to pull some shit on me. That might work with my lawyer, but you think you can use it on me, you wrong.”

  Her face and hands grew hot, but she said nothing.

  “There’s someone that I see,” Zenon began carefully, letting his gaze drift.

  Madeleine waited.

  “He’s a . . .” he shrugged. “I don’t know. Seem like just another good ole boy. But no one can see him but me. I call him Josh.”

  She nodded.

  He paused, checking her face. “Well, maybe he’ll go away. Since I’ve been in here I’ve been seeing a shrink, and he keeps me pretty medicated.”

  Madeleine narrowed her eyes. Zenon was sharp, alert. “You haven’t been taking meds.”