Firewalk

by Chris Roberson

  “That’s a lot of somethings. And a lot of maybes,” Izzie said.

  “Like you said earlier: many questions.” He sighed. “It sounds crazy, but if I were crazy I’d think it made perfect sense, right?”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s what crazy people tell themselves.”

  “So? Are you going to tell my captain that he should order a psych eval, or … ?” He let the question hang in the air, waiting expectantly for her to answer.

  Izzie rubbed the inside corners of her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. It had been far too long since she last slept, and she was beginning to feel it.

  “I’m going to …” she began, then broke off, shaking her head. “Let me think about it, okay?”

  She met his gaze, and could see the tension on his face.

  “It’s the best I can do for now,” she said.

  For a moment it seemed like Patrick was going to press the issue, but then nodded slowly. “How about I give you a ride back to your hotel?”

  An awkward silence filled the car as they made their way north through Oceanview, like the drive home after a first date that had gone horribly wrong. The restaurants had all closed down for the night, and the bars had been taken over by the serious drinkers. Izzie was tempted to stop in for a few stiff drinks herself, but an agent getting drunk with their service weapon on them was seriously frowned on at the Bureau. Besides, she was having enough trouble wrapping her head around all of this mess while she was in complete control of her faculties. Cocktails wouldn’t help there.

  When they passed through Ross Village, only a handful of late-night cafés were still open, but Izzie knew that coffee was the last thing she needed. Sleep wouldn’t come easily, if experience was any guide, but at least her body could rest in the bed while her thoughts raced.

  Finally they reached City Center, and Patrick pulled up to the curb on Hauser Avenue in front of the hotel across from the FBI offices.

  “Sleep well,” Patrick said as Izzie reached into the backseat to grab her go-bag, then opened the door to climb out.

  With the door still open, she fished in her pocket until she found her room key. Then she began to close the door, but paused, thinking. She leaned down and looked through the open door at Patrick behind the wheel.

  Izzie sighed. “Okay. I’ll report back to Quantico that we think that there’s a connection between this new street drug and the Fuller case, and that I think it merits further investigation. Which is true, to a point. But we aren’t going to tell anyone what we really suspect is going on until we know what is really going on. Is that clear?”

  Patrick blinked a few times, then nodded eagerly. “Of course. I’m not crazy, remember?”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Izzie answered with a wan smile. “But maybe I’m crazy, too.” She hiked the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder. “Meet me back here in the morning?”

  He grinned. “There’s a great donut place around the corner.”

  “You spend a lot of time thinking about food, don’t you?”

  “What can I tell you?” He shrugged. “I’m a cop.”

  “Tomorrow, then.” She closed the door then pounded on the top of the car.

  Patrick gave her a thumbs-up and then pulled away from the curb.

  As she walked in the hotel’s front door, Izzie noticed that the retaining wall had a red brick façade. It wasn’t her grandmother’s red brick dust, but it would have to do.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The hotel that the Resident Agency had arranged was decent, the bed was comfortable, and with the heavy curtains closed the room was plunged into almost total darkness. The sibilant hiss of the white noise app on her phone completely masked the sounds of people passing by her door out in the hallway, or the faint creak and rumble of the elevators ascending and descending at odd intervals. Only by floating in a sensory deprivation tank would Izzie be more completely undistracted.

  And yet still, as she’d anticipated, she found it nearly impossible to sleep.

  The time change was partly to blame, of course. Shifting three hours in the course of a single day would confuse anyone’s internal rhythms. Izzie hadn’t laid down to sleep until it was already deep into the middle of the night back home. And spending most of the day sitting in a cramped airplane was somehow more physically exhausting than being active and mobile, so her muscles were sore and aching, keeping her from completely relaxing.

  But the real problem was in her head. Even if her body was exhausted and ready to rest, her mind was racing, thinking about her conversation tonight with Patrick, with the things he had shown her, and the things he had said. Those thoughts kept sparking off memories of days and nights from five years earlier, and the things she had seen and heard then. And underneath it all, moving just beneath the surface of conscious thought, were dim memories from childhood.

  And still she tried to sleep. She lay completely immobile on her back, willing her body to relax; first the muscles of her feet, then her calves, and then her thighs, feeling the stillness creep up her body. Her arms were at her sides beneath the thin covers, palms down and fingers spread. Her head was cushioned by the spongy pillow, eyes closed against the darkness.

  As her muscles relaxed, sensation faded. The feeling of her body pressing down into the mattress, the weight of the covers over her, the texture of the sheets against her skin … these all became a kind of tactile white noise, and just like her ears eventually tuned out the hiss from the phone on the bedside table, so her skin tuned out the feeling of the bed.

  So while her thoughts still looped and swerved, her body seemed to fade away into the darkness, until she was just a disembodied consciousness, alone in the darkness with her thoughts.

  And then the voices started.

  She’d entered this type of hypnagogic state before, on other nights when she was too exhausted to stay awake but too keyed up to sleep. She’d slip into a kind of middle ground between wakefulness and sleep, still conscious but in a dreamlike state. At first, she simply imagined what Patrick would have said had their conversation continued, but in time it seemed like they were having that conversation, as if he were sitting in the corner of her room, there in the darkness, saying to her the things she imagined he would say.

  At first, Izzie’s mind just replayed things that Patrick had said earlier in the evening, and Izzie knew that she was simply remembering. But as she slipped deeper and deeper into the hypnagogic state, she began answering in her thoughts, saying things that hadn’t occurred to her before, asking questions she hadn’t thought to ask, and then the conversation went from remembrance into new territory.

  It was very important to Izzie in that moment that Patrick understand that she was not defined by her upbringing. She loved and respected the woman who had raised her, but Izzie had struck out into the world and made a place for herself. It had not always been easy for a black girl from the wrong side of the tracks in New Orleans to put herself through college and build a career in the FBI, but she had done it. She was a respected professional, and no conjure man or haint or petro was going to take that away from her.

  But loa, like the petro, have to be invited to possess a body and walk the Earth. Izzie had no reason to worry about that, right? It wasn’t as if she was going to offer herself up. Of course, it could help with their investigation, to have eyes on the other side. Izzie wasn’t a two-headed woman like Mawmaw, and couldn’t see the spirit world on her own. But she remembered the rites and rituals from when she was a little girl, and maybe Patrick would be willing to help. Perhaps Marinette-Dry-Arms or Ti Jean or …

  “Girl, you best wake up.”

  Izzie sat bolt upright in the bed, wide awake and gasping.

  She’d heard that. Hadn’t she? Not in her thoughts, but out

  loud?

  She lurched to the side of the bed, fumbling for the lamp switch.

  “You got work to do.”

  Izzie turned to look back over her shoulder into the darkness, hands stil
l grasping for the lamp. “Mawmaw?”

  Her fingers finally found the switch, and warm light filled the room.

  There was nobody there.

  Asweeper truck groaned through the intersection while Izzie jogged in place at the corner, waiting for the Walk sign to light up. The temperature had dropped hard and fast in the last few hours, and the clouds of steam that billowed out with Izzie’s every exhalation rose up to the bright streetlamps overhead, dissipating as they rose.

  The running shoes that the hotel had lent her were a little tight, and didn’t offer the same support as the ones that she normally wore back home, and the hoodie and sweatpants smelled of bleach and other people’s perspiration, but Izzie couldn’t complain. She’d left home so quickly that she hadn’t packed a proper suitcase, just her overnight go-bag, and there wasn’t room in it for her exercise gear, even if it weren’t gathering dust in the back of the bedroom closet in her apartment. She was just grateful that the hotel had workout clothes and shoes for guests to borrow. Trying to jog in her jeans and boots wouldn’t have been much use.

  The light changed after the truck had passed, and Izzie continued across the street, past the looming shadow of the Pinnacle Tower and up towards Northside beyond. Her plan was to get to the bottom of the hills before returning to the hotel, and then try sleeping one last time.

  She couldn’t run like she did before, of course. Not since the silver blade had sliced open her leg. Jogging was the best that she could manage, and even then only for shorter distances and durations than she used to run. Not that jogging was really the goal tonight. It was the movement itself she was after, really. That, and the hope that exertion would clear her head and tire her out.

  It was at least three hours until dawn, and Izzie hoped to sleep for at least a short while. In her experience, even one hour of sleep was better than none. But after her last attempt had ended so badly, she needed to try something else.

  She had been so certain that she heard the voice of her grandmother speaking to her out of the darkness. Not imagined that she was hearing it, like the chattering voices that echoed silently in her hypnagogic brain, but an actual audible sound.

  Which was impossible, of course. And yet …

  What had she been thinking about? Or dreaming about? She remembered something to the effect that her professional reputation would be damaged if her colleagues thought that she believed in the supernatural, but then somehow she reached a point in the train of thought where she forgot that she didn’t believe, and started making plans as if she did….

  And what was that about the loa? Where had that come from?

  Over the course of her long life, Izzie’s grandmother had incorporated bits of other Creole faiths like Cuban Santeria and Gullah Hoodoo and Brazilian Candomblé into her own brand of Voodoo. In Mawmaw’s eyes, they were all simply different roads to the same destination. A mambo asogwe from Port-au-Prince had taught her about the loa, and instructed her in the rites through which the intermediary spirits could be summoned to possess the bodies of the faithful like a rider mounting a horse, with the ridden bodies remaining under their complete control until the loa withdrew.

  Izzie had seen a few loa ceremonies when she was young, and they had unnerved her. She knew now that it was a simply a matter of fervent believers whipping themselves into a state of ecstasy, like Pentecostals speaking in tongues and handling snakes or firewalkers dancing themselves into an ecstatic trance so their feet didn’t register the heat of the burning coals. But hearing strange voices coming out of neighbors and family friends, seeing the strange ways their bodies moved across the floor until her grandmother “enticed the spirits to depart” with one last swig of alcohol or one final drag on a cigarette … it had been disconcerting for an impressionable young girl to watch.

  But Izzie hadn’t thought about those evenings in years. What had brought them to mind now, as she lay on the edge of consciousness, half a lifetime and half a continent away from the last time she’d seen her grandmother in this world?

  “Girl, you best wake up,” she had imagined her grandmother saying in the darkness.

  There seemed a sort of bitter irony in the thought of her grandmother trying to wake her, when going to sleep was the one thing she most wanted in this world right now.

  “Thanks for nothing, Mawmaw,” Izzie said aloud, glancing up at the sky. The moon hung overhead, waxing and almost full, shining in the midst of a golden halo as it passed through the thin layer of clouds. It looked almost like an eye gazing down, maybe watching over her in protection, maybe looking down in judgment. “And I do have work to do, thanks very much. But if I don’t get some sleep I’m going to be useless in the morning.”

  She had already gone halfway up the Northside hills, lost in thought. If she didn’t head back soon, it would be dawn before she got back. So she turned a corner and headed back towards the hotel.

  Izzie had managed to get turned around in the side streets that wound their way up the Northside hills on her jog back down, and didn’t realize that she was heading back in the wrong direction until she hit Prospect Avenue. If she’d been heading towards City Center as she thought she was, she would have passed her hotel on Hauser before reaching the businesses and shops along Prospect, but here she was still on residential blocks surrounded by homes.

  The lampposts on this stretch of Prospect were spaced farther apart than she was used to, and when she pulled her phone out of her borrowed hoodie’s pocket, the screen seemed blindingly bright. She squinted against the glare as she brought up a GPS map, and discovered that she was in the Hyde Park neighborhood, a good dozen blocks to the east of her hotel and half a block south.

  Izzie swore under her breath. At this rate, sleep seemed like an ever-diminishing possibility.

  She slipped the phone back into her pocket, and turned right to continue west down the sidewalk. The houses that lined this stretch of Prospect were older than the mini-mansions that stacked up the hills of Northside, relatively modest one- or two-story Craftsman bungalows dating back to the 1920s, and while most of the homes Izzie was jogging past were in good repair, there was the occasional exception showing signs of neglect. But even with the odd moss-covered sagging roof or broken shutter hanging off its hinges, this was still a solidly middle class neighborhood, the flower gardens and well-tended shrubs that could be seen in many of the postage-stamp front yards a clear indicator of the care with which most of the residents kept up their homes.

  This was a residential area, and unlike Oceanview or even Ross Village where there might be a few stragglers heading home from the bar or frequenting twenty-four-hour coffee shops, Izzie didn’t expect to see any other pedestrians out and about at this late pre-dawn hour. The bus lines had stopped for the night long hours before and wouldn’t begin again until shortly before sunrise, and there were hardly any cars out on the road, either. A produce truck rumbled by, probably heading to make a delivery at some hotel or restaurant in City Center, and as its headlights shone along the sidewalk ahead of Izzie, she was surprised to see a pair of figures coming towards her. And though her breath fogged in the chill air, the two men approaching her weren’t wearing jackets or coats, just long-sleeved patterned shirts and jeans.

  She thought at first that they were simply drunk or possibly on drugs, as they lurched forward one staggering step at a time. But the two men didn’t seem to have the loose-jointed listing sway of people who had had too much to drink, or the jittery twitches of meth users. These two moved like marionettes whose strings were being pulled by a first-time puppeteer, or human-shaped robots being piloted by tiny aliens who hadn’t quite gotten the hang of how to drive yet.

  As the distance between Izzie and the staggering pair closed, she began to tense up defensively, and couldn’t help but wish that she had her firearm with her. She’d left the pistol in a locked safe back in her hotel room along with her handcuffs and badge, when the weight of her hip holster proved too heavy for the waistband of the borrowed sw
eatpants to support. And while she was well-trained in hand-to-hand combat and confident of her abilities to protect herself if things went south, she knew that just the simple act of brandishing a gun might serve to keep things from getting that far.

  She pulled her hands out of the hoodie’s pockets and let her arms fall to her sides, loose and limber. The two were staggering directly towards her now, showing no indication that they planned to step aside and let her pass. Had they even seen her? Or were they so far gone on whatever it was they smoked or swallowed or shot up that they didn’t notice she was there?

  When they were maybe a half-dozen steps away, Izzie saw that what she had taken to be two men were actually a man and a woman. And she suddenly wondered whether their awkward movements weren’t due to intoxication, but were instead the result of injury. What had appeared at a distance to be the long sleeves of patterned shirts were actually bare arms covered in large black bruises or lesions that continued above the collars of their ragged T-shirts, and bloomed on their necks and faces as well.

  “Are you two okay?” Izzie raised her voice as they closed the distance between them. “Do you need any help?” She felt suddenly queasy, as if something she’d eaten was disagreeing with her.

  The pair didn’t speak as they continued to stagger forward, and instead drew raspy breaths through their open mouths, jaws hanging slack. They didn’t meet her gaze, and instead their half-lidded eyes continued to stare vacantly into the middle distance, the expression on their bruised faces blank and impassive.

  “Are you sure I can’t—?” Izzie said, then stepped aside just in time to avoid colliding with the pair. They continued past her without a word or a second glance.

  Izzie watched their retreating backs as they lurched on down the sidewalk. She considered going after them and insisting that they obviously required some kind of assistance, but decided against it in the end. They were clearly adults, and capable of making their own mistakes. And since they were ambulatory and didn’t seem to be breaking any laws, she had no reason to contact the authorities. Besides, there was the sense of nausea that had swept over her, and she didn’t want to be caught out in the open if she were getting sick.