Kzine Issue 11

by Graeme Hurry

  I took a minute for my eyes to adjust before following him. The floor was loose and noisy; unanchored plywood, maybe, or just two-by-fours set down and painted black. The walls were dark red, as mute as burgundy but shaded toward blood. Elaborate sconces, no two alike, held misshapen homemade candles that cast a sickly light. It was stifling, with an odd low smell in the air. Like pork at room temperature two days after slaughter. Not bad, not yet, but decay was close, breathing on my neck.

  Wendy strode on without a shiver. I followed her and the black boy through a doorway curtained with wooden beads that clattered against one another. Beyond it was a much larger space than the gloomy parlor. It was illuminated by a large campfire snapping in the middle of the floor, which seemed to be dirt or dirt-covered cement. The air was heavy in here, but neither hot nor smoky; the temperature had dropped ten degrees at least beyond the bead curtain. The hairs on the back of my neck lifted so high I thought they might pluck themselves right out of my skin and start doing the cha-cha on my collar.

  A platform off to the left elevated a four-piece jazz combo evidently on break. The drummer and the piano player stared into space, their hands dangling, and the saxophonist and the bass player fiddled with their instruments. They glanced up at Wendy and me when we came in. A dozen other people stood or sat in a semicircle around the rightside edge of the fire, facing the low stage. His task done, the boy crouched by the fire and stared into it. Wendy and I were the only white faces in the room.

  I no longer had any idea what the Kintner dame had gotten me into. The silence was so total it was bizarre, and no one but the musicians looked at us, as if we were barely even here. The other people were dressed in everything from bones and beads and fur, like tribesmen, to linen suits like my own.

  This was one of those places, one of those gatherings, that you always secretly believe must be happening behind some of the doors in the lower quarters of this town, but you never really think you’ll see it. The time that Kelly got himself killed was a little like this, but that was out in the swamp, near a graveyard. We were only two blocks from Bourbon Street, here.

  Wendy Kintner cleared her throat. “I came to trade with Mama Merle,” she said, her voice trembling such a little bit that I guessed only I could hear it. “I brought what she asked for.”

  The shape of a woman materialized from a dark corner of the room. I wasn’t trusting my eyes in this light – she could have come from another doorway, or she could have been standing in an especially deep shadow – but it looked to me like she came from a corner of nowhere. A tourist looking for a voodoo queen would have snapped her picture: bone and bead necklaces, a patchwork of shawls and skirts, hooded eyes with a black gleam that danced as the fire did. Her feet were bare and weathered. The whole nine yards, friend.

  “Who’s the other one?” she said, and it came out in a voice like molasses, the words conjured through a thick accent. Whose da udder wan?

  “He’s with me,” said Wendy. “Nothing to do with the trade.”

  “He’s tangled with these things before,” said Mama Merle. Eez tangled wit dese tings befoah. “And he smells like a Creole.”

  “I’m not here to quarrel,” I said.

  “Who was your father, boy?”

  “He was Irish. My mother’s French Acadian, raised about a mile from here.”

  “Cajun potatoes!” cried Mama Merle, and threw open her gappy mouth in a raucous, rasping laugh. The room laughed with her, except for the jazz combo. “I don’t know where you been before you come here, boy, but you best not interfere. Me and Miss Wendy here, our business is fixed. And it don’t concern you.”

  “That’s just the way I see it, ma’am.”

  “Good.” She directed her attention toward the Kintner dame, and I felt as if a hot spotlight on my face had been switched off. “I see you brung me something.”

  “Two tunics.” Wendy held up the bag.

  Mama Merle unzipped it and reached inside. She handled the coats intimately, clutching the shoulders and humming with her eyes closed, sliding the cuffs over her cheek. The people around the fire got to their feet, one by one, as she spoke.

  “Oh, my Johnny boys,” she whispered, “you’ve suffered so. But not enough, no. Not enough for these of us gathered in. You’ll pay the rest this night. Before dawn come you won’t have no more to give.”

  She zipped the bag and took it from Wendy. The skinny boy hopped up and toted the parcel to another darkened corner. He skittered back to the fire in a moment, his arms empty.

  “What about my item?” said Wendy.

  “We’ll come to that. First you come and warm your hands, child.” Mama Merle took Wendy by the shoulders and steered her to the fire.

  “I’m not cold.”

  “You will be.” In one movement, Mama Merle tossed a handful of powder from some hidden pocket into Wendy Kintner’s face. She tumbled to the dirt, and the powder that landed in the fire sizzled and popped.

  Wow, McHugh. Pretty much exactly what you were here to prevent and it happened anyway. “Hey—”

  “You hush now,” said Mama Merle, and pushed my chin up. Teeth met teeth and all desire to speak fled. I knelt down to Wendy nonetheless and pulled her body over my lap. She was breathing shallow and cold, so cold.

  Somewhere, elsewhere than in this flickering room, a clock chimed.

  Midnight.

  A long string of syllables rolled out of Mama Merle. Molasses on fire. It sounded sort of like French, but not; sort of like Cajun English, but not. I’d heard it before, of course, living here all my life. Most recently I’d heard it right before Kelly stopped breathing and went face-first into the bayou. The alligators got most everything but his hat and his shoes.

  Keening took up from the people around the fire. Mama Merle muttered on, lifting her arms, which looked as strong as an ox’s heart. She focused every atom in her on the jazz combo set up on the little platform.

  I looked that way. The drummer and the pianist stood up almost as one. The saxophonist and the bassist already looked a little spooked at what was going on down here by the fire, and at this, they grabbed their instruments and bolted for the beaded curtain.

  It wouldn’t move. It had transformed into a beaded wall. They cowered there by the only exit we all knew about, the firelight glinting on the fellow’s sax.

  The pianist and the drummer took short, jerky steps, coming off the stage and toward me and the unconscious Wendy. Their eyes were clouded white. They were not breathing, near as I could tell from this distance, which was closing a little too rapidly for my taste.

  “The dead want company,” said the skinny boy, and grinned at me, shifting from one foot to another in his squat.

  That’s nonsense, I tried to say, but it didn’t come out. My jaw was still wired up from Mama Merle’s cute little trick on me. I wasn’t sure at all that it was nonsense, either. The not-quite-rotten-pork smell seemed to emanate from the pianist and the drummer, getting stronger as they got closer. And they did look dead, now that I could see them. They had loose open mouths, and their nerveless fingers wagged with every shuffled step. The men and women around the fire hummed, open-throated, swaying and patting their feet.

  I got up and hoisted Miss Kintner’s delicate body over my shoulder, and then found I had nowhere to go. I lacked the skill to melt into one of these corners, and the only exit I knew of wasn’t working. I made an idiotic scuttle back toward the wall, trying at least to put some distance between me and the musicians. Wendy’s limbs swayed against me, her black suede heel catching on my pocket.

  “No way out, cher!” cried the boy, holding his feet and rocking back and forth in delight. “You done for if you can’t throw no spell.”

  My mind snagged on that word, throw. I cast a glance at Mama Merle, who was still chanting in that shaded patois, louder now, her arms high. Wendy slipped half off my shoulder then, and I heaved her like a sack of cornmeal, tossing her at Mama Merle.

  It was a poor throw, and
not really a wise thing to do with a paying client, but it unbalanced Mama Merle enough for her to sit heavily under the burden and for me to think of something else to do. My jaw loosened right as she went down. I dodged around her as she rolled Wendy onto her back, yanked her gray hat off and tossed it into the fire. A chunk of black silk hair went with it, but Wendy didn’t stir.

  I plucked a burning log out of the fire and held it at arm’s length, swinging it at the undead instrumentalists and generally toward the others in the room. “Back!” I barked, feeling like a fool on the gallows, threatening his executioners with a tie pin.

  Mama Merle had recovered her poise, but in the meantime, the piano player and the drummer had sagged into themselves. Chins on chests, arms hanging boneless. I hoped she had to build up all over again whatever had animated them. Even if she did, though, that extra time wouldn’t help me unless there was an exit. I ran to the nearest wall and began feeling along it for a door, a curtain, something other than dampened, sooty wallpaper. Nada. The torch I carried didn’t dissipate the shadows unless I held it close enough to the wall to singe the paper.

  Mama Merle lifted her arms and set up muttering again. I’d never hear prayers the same way again.

  Suddenly a tremendous crash rolled out from the direction of the door. The bead curtain splintered in a huge ragged hole, and a metal trash barrel tumbled end over end, spilling refuse across the dirt floor, before it fell on its side, rolled a few feet, and came to a stop against the bare knee of the boy.

  Silence settled in the room for a brief moment, and then the saxophonist and the bassist legged it through the brand-new doorway, shoving each other a little. Mama Merle stared as Wendy Kintner, dressed in a coat made from some kind of long-haired, silvery creature, entered the room.

  I checked, but Wendy Kintner was still unconscious by the fire.

  “That’s me, too, Mr. McHugh,” said the silver-coated Wendy. “Stay calm.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I know you don’t. Let me finish my business here.” She turned to Mama Merle, still advancing in slow steps, like a hunter coming on a wounded animal. Every other soul (or body) in the room was still, hardly breathing. “You see I have the coat.”

  “I see that,” said Mama Merle, low in her throat. Her eyes burned.

  “You’ll give it to me. You’ll let me and Mr. McHugh out of here. That’s the way this goes. That’s the way I lived it.”

  Mama Merle stared for a moment, but something about the sight of the silver coat must have changed her mind about this whole thing, because she nodded. “Aye, cher.”

  “And no tricks after. Our business is over. No vengeance, no other payments.”

  Mama Merle’s body kicked, in miniature, resisting. “Arrigh,” she said at last. “Our business is done.”

  Wendy turned to me. “You have to tell me every detail of what went on here, Jean-Jacques. When we leave. We’ll go to Arnaud’s. Every last second, while I was knocked out.”

  She knew my real first name. The name I hardly told anyone. I could only nod.

  She touched two fingers to the man’s fedora she wore and walked out.

  Another of those little silences fell around us. The fire offered up a loud pop, which seemed to spur Mama Merle to move. She lurched toward the upright piano on top of the little platform, grumbling under her breath, grunting at the step up. The other people around the fire stood quietly, not even murmuring, looking at their feet. I could smell the garbage from the barrel Wendy had used to break open the door.

  Wendy. I tossed the burning log into the fire and knelt by her. I slapped her cheeks gently, but it didn’t bring her around.

  “I wake her up,” said Mama Merle from the stage. She opened the top of the piano cabinet and pulled out a slightly dirtier version of the silver coat the other Wendy had been wearing. “You don’t have to worry about her.” She shook the coat out, and even in the low light I could see the dust fly.

  She returned to the fire with the coat across her arm, leaned her bulk over Wendy, and smacked her open palm on the prone woman’s forehead. Wendy gave a huge gasp, as if coming up from under water. Her eyes flitted around and she sat up. “Mr. McHugh? What happened?”

  She fixed on the silver coat. “There it is.” She took the coat onto her lap and gazed at it with her mouth slightly open.

  “This is the end of our dealings,” said Mama Merle, straightening up. “You too dangerous.”

  I had a few thoughts on that, but the dozen silent people around the fire were not my pals. Nor were the two musicians, rooted right where Mama Merle’s juju had stopped working on them. “Let’s get out of here,” I said, grabbing Wendy by the elbow, trying to hustle her to her feet. “You can walk okay?”

  “Sure.” She felt at her head. “What happened to my hat?”

  “Someone thought it didn’t suit you.”

  She picked up her purse from the dirt and hung it over her arm, dropping the coat on top. I took a last look backward as we stepped through the jagged hole in the beaded wall. The boy came scampering back to the fire with the two moth-eaten Confederate tunics; a few of the other congregants cleared up the mess from the garbage barrel; another tended the fire. Mama Merle stood before the drummer and the pianist with her hands above their heads, murmuring a little less intensely than before. I could have sworn one of her eyes was pointed right at me, right into the flat of my soul, before I turned to follow the Kintner dame out through the parlor. I caught one more whiff of overripe pork and then we were on Conti Street.

  “Spill it,” I said, with no preamble. “What the hell was that?”

  She held up her hand. “What happened to put me out?”

  She was a nervy girl, all right. I was unused to being on this end of a question, but answering her seemed the fastest way back to what I wanted to know. “She threw some powder at you. These two fellas from the band started coming towards us. Then you – a different you – came busting in wearing that coat, said a few things to Mama Merle, and walked out. After that she woke you up and gave you what you wanted.”

  Wendy threw the coat over her shoulder and put her hands on her hips. “You sure it was me?”

  “Sure as I’m sure you’re you, right now.”

  “Mr. McHugh, you’ve got to tell me every detail of what happened tonight. Word for word, if you can.”

  “Yeah. That’s what your double said.” I fought to keep my voice quiet. “I’m not telling you anything until I hear the whole story on those two guys, and that coat, and the whole megillah. I’ve been scared pretty good here, and that doesn’t happen often.”

  She glanced over my shoulder at the orange door. “We can’t stand here and argue. Let me buy you a drink. At Arnaud’s, okay?”

  I took a breath and let it out slowly. Arnaud’s. My headache was coming back. If I could just get a bourbon in me, I could keep from shouting. “All right,” I said. I shook out a cigarette and lit it. “But you owe me a long damn explanation.”

  She smiled. Her hair was all tangled from being knocked down and her hat yanked off. It made her look a lot less delicate. A lot prettier. “I’ll say what I can.”

  We headed off down the lane, toward streetlights and music. There was too much to ask, so I fixed on a simple question, just to keep us occupied. “What’s going to happen to the tunics?”

  She shook her head and took my cigarette from my fingers. I let her. “Those poor fellas. Such spells she’s going to lay on them. But it couldn’t be helped.”

  “I guess I have to take your word for that,” I said.

  “You’ll hear why,” the Kintner dame replied, exhaling smoke. “You and I are doing a trade, too, the same as me and Mama Merle. Didn’t you know that already?”

  SO LONG AS YOU’RE FREE

  by Imogen Cassidy

  There is a short story in my head that I recite whenever I think about what happened the day I lost my leg. I do it a lot, because I think that maybe when I get to the big part, the signific
ant part, I’ll actually remember it.

  …I went out on a job one day…

  There is supposed to be something here that happened. Something big. The point around which the rest of my life revolves. A fulcrum. But instead there is just…

  …And then I woke up in a hospital bed missing my leg.

  I woke up in a hospital bed missing my leg. Of course I didn’t notice that straight away. It’s not something you do when you wake up regularly— sit up, rub your eyes, make sure you have all your limbs. I just woke up feeling like crap and wondering where I was.

  It didn’t take me too long to work it out.

  There was a nice looking man sitting on the chair with a data pad in his hand when I woke, while someone (I guessed, nurses?) held onto my shoulders and helped me cough up the tube I’d been breathing through. My throat was raw and I wanted water more than I’d ever wanted anything.

  “Ms Loyola, good to have you back with us,” the man with the data pad said. He finished typing a few more things then put it back in its slot.

  I tried to say something, but my voice was too dry. A nurse held my head up and let me get a straw in my mouth to drink— some sort of orange electrolyte mixture, like what mama used to give me when I’d been vomiting. I tried not to gag. “What happened?” I managed to choke out.

  “We’re not exactly sure,” the nice looking guy said. He looked about fifteen. I sure hoped he wasn’t my surgeon. “Although from what your brother says it was a minor collision with an asteroid. Ship’s hull didn’t breach but an oxygen tank fell on your leg.”

  I was surprised at the surge of relief I felt to know that Marco was still alive, so I missed the pause before he said the words. “My leg?”

  I thought about my legs. I had been avoiding thinking about anything that might be wrong. You don’t end up in hospital having surgery if everything was all right.

  “Ms Loyola I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  They gave me physical therapy. Psych tests. Counselling sessions. I didn’t care— not as much as they thought I did. Oh I did the therapy because the damned thing hurt, but apart from that, apart from the pain in my shoulders and wrists from walking with crutches (who would ever have thought that I would learn to hate the crush of gravity so) it wasn’t as if being legless (ha ha) was going to stop me from doing my job.