Catacomb

by Madeleine Roux

  Dan, Jordan, and Abby paused at the bottom of the stairs, sharing a glance while obviously eavesdropping.

  “Friends of your uncle’s?” Dan asked.

  “Never seen ’em before in my life, but now doesn’t seem like the time to make new friends,” Jordan replied. He had bought a monumental number of board games at a bookshop they’d found, and now he was sinking under the weight of the shopping bags.

  “They look fancy,” Abby added in a whisper. Her dark eyes drifted to the young woman. “I need her dress.”

  “Well, you know I absolutely depend on your vote this year,” the man was saying. He was tall and, as Abby had noted, well dressed. Dan didn’t know the first thing about designer clothes, but even he could tell the man’s suit was probably worth a small fortune. The two made a tidy pair, him in light, summery gray and her in a peach-colored sleeveless dress.

  Jordan took one step up toward the door and the others followed.

  “What happens in the voting booth stays in the voting booth,” Uncle Steve replied, but he winked.

  The other man laughed, jutting out his hand and taking Steve’s, pumping it vigorously. Dan didn’t tend to like politicians, but the man had an infectious energy to him and a laugh that was warm and booming.

  “You’re a pillar of the community, Mr. Lipcott, and having your vote is a true honor.”

  “Pillar of the community?” Jordan repeated in an undertone. He snorted, setting his heavy bags down on the cement stairs. “What a load of—”

  “Ah! And who are these three bright young things? Are they of voting age?” The man opened his hands wide as if to hug all three of them in one go. The woman turned, too. Dan had a hard time not staring; she was stunningly pretty, with glossy dark skin and hazel eyes like Abby’s. Her lips were lacquered red. It looked like someone had cut her hair with a very sharp razor.

  She hugged a clipboard to her chest, eyeing them up and down with a pinched smile.

  Dan looked away. Her eyes made him want to wither on the spot.

  “This is my nephew, Jordan,” Uncle Steve said, shuffling out another few steps onto the stoop. “His friends are just visiting for a summer vacay and helping him settle in. He’s moving here for a bit. They’ve been scampering all over the city, making friends with the folks over at Berkley and Daughters. Kids, this is Connor Finnoway—sorry—Councilman Connor Finnoway. He’s running for reelection and shamelessly courting my vote. But he plays a mean saxophone, so I don’t mind too much.”

  The councilman gave another booming crack of a laugh and turned to smack Uncle Steve on the arm good-naturedly. “Shameless, yes, and not too proud to admit it.” His green eyes sparkled behind a big, patrician nose. His hair was thinning and almost bald on top, but it didn’t detract from the bright, youthful energy that poured out of him.

  Some people were just born to be politicians.

  “You made a fine choice by visiting our city. I trust you’re enjoying yourselves so far? Oh, and you have a photographer among you, too.” He adjusted his tie and took a step down toward them, gesturing to the camera around Abby’s neck. Dan suddenly didn’t like the man’s enthusiasm or his smooth smile.

  “Yeah, I’m doing a photo project about some of the old gin runners that used to operate in the South. It’s a fascinating history,” she said.

  “Any history buff worth their salt visits Madame A’s while they’re in town. Berkley’s is nice, but it can’t hold a candle to her establishment,” Mr. Finnoway said, glancing first to his assistant and then to Steve for confirmation. He was given enthusiastic nods. Then his eyes redirected to Dan and lingered. “It’s really not far. Here, I’ll show you.”

  His assistant offered him his phone. He deftly brought up a street view of the neighborhood and traced his finger along the route for her.

  “See? A brief walk from here. It’s an absolute treasure trove for the hungry historian,” he said, chuckling. “I go often myself.”

  “You’re a historian?” Abby asked, her brow furrowing as she studied the map.

  “Oh! No,” he laughed, throwing back his head. “Dentist by trade, but it can get a bit grim staring down throats all day. We all need our hobbies, right? And one would have to be dead inside not to love history, living in a place like this.”

  “It’s a shame you can’t be there to show them around the shop yourself,” Steve said, smiling. “That place can be overwhelming for first timers.”

  Mr. Finnoway actually paused to consider this.

  “Say, Tamsin, what’s my schedule like tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Busy, sir. But Ms. Canterbury did cancel her noon appointment.”

  “Fantastic.” The councilman clapped his huge hands together and then opened them again. “Why don’t I join you all over my lunch break and show you the lay of the land?”

  “Take it easy now, Connor, they don’t live in the state. Hardly future constituents for you to butter up,” Uncle Steve said with a snort. It was the exact snort Jordan gave so often.

  But Abby was already nodding and hugging her camera. “Would you? That would be amazing.”

  “Tomorrow around noon then,” Finnoway said. He glided past them down the stairs, his assistant following. A sharp, lingering perfume followed her. Dan didn’t know how anything could smell French, but she did.

  “Get out of here, you old rascal,” Uncle Steve called, waving to the backs of Finnoway and the woman. With one last burst of strength, Jordan gathered up all his bags and pushed up the rest of the stairs. “Did you buy the whole store?” Steve asked, grabbing one of the bags to help.

  “Making decisions is too depressing. . . .” The rest of their conversation was lost as Dan and Abby trailed behind.

  “It’ll be fun to see that shop tomorrow,” she said. “I know your mind is on other things, but we should try to relax a little, too.”

  Dan nodded, but relaxing was out of the picture. “Let’s get something to eat. Oliver will be calling soon.”

  Dan pressed his nose to the window, staring out into the bleak, naked expanses of the northern neighborhood. It was immediately and terribly apparent why Sabrina had refused to let them go alone; the houses on these blocks were sparse, entire lots emptied and never reclaimed after the hurricane had washed them away.

  The devastation rippled visibly across the neighborhood. The farther they went, the worse it got. It was destruction on a level Dan had never seen before, and scariest of all was the fact that they were just a few miles from the vibrant French Quarter. He watched the road wander in and out, no real edge to it, its surface so pocked with holes they could barely go above fifteen miles an hour.

  The sad silence that had descended over the car was interrupted by the sound of Dan’s phone dinging. For obvious reasons, they all tensed—but it was only Sandy texting. She wanted to know how his second full day in New Orleans had gone. The empty message return box glowed up at him, so tiny and inadequate to answer that question.

  We’re having tons of fun, sorry for not messaging sooner. What kind of souvenirs do you guys want?

  He returned to staring out the window, turning from one unhappy thought to another.

  “There’s people with heart here,” Sabrina said to no one in particular from the passenger seat, slicing through the silence. “And they don’t want your pity.”

  “It’s not pity,” Dan said. He didn’t know what it was. “I just . . . didn’t expect it to look like this.”

  Abby had brought her camera but hadn’t lifted it once since they’d entered the fringes of the dilapidated streets.

  “You weren’t dumb enough to tell your family where you were going, were you?” she asked.

  “No,” Jordan answered. “Uncle Steve wanted to take us on a barge ride. I told him you guys were taking us to a concert.”

  They were quiet for the length of a few more blocks, and then Oliver slowed the old Challenger and veered to the side of the road. A light came on in the house two lots down, and Dan stiffened
. A dog barked in a long, lonesome wail. The streets weren’t exactly empty, and each driver who moved to pass them gave their car a thorough look.

  “Let’s make this quick,” Oliver muttered, kicking open his door.

  He told Sabrina to wait in the car and left it running. Abby and Jordan chose to wait in the car, too, but that was fine. The fewer of them out in the open, the less attention it would draw. It was hard to see, but Oliver and Dan used their phones to give themselves minimal visibility.

  “This area is seriously rough,” Oliver said. “I don’t know if that’s why the Artificer chose it, but there it is.” He moved swiftly to a mailbox sitting at the edge of a bedraggled lawn. A few sluggish weeds poked up from what had been a sidewalk. The mailbox was crooked, slumped over, the box perching at such a severe angle it seemed to be regarding them skeptically.

  Someone dumped a bag of garbage into a bin a block or so away, the sound of shattering bottles sending a finger of cold up Dan’s spine.

  “Hold this,” Oliver said, shoving his phone into Dan’s hands. He worked by the tiny bit of light, yanking on the lid of the mailbox until it gave with a screech of protest. It looked to Dan like there was nothing inside, but all the same, Oliver thrust his hand into the open box and groped around the edges. “Christ, I’m gonna need a tetanus shot after this.”

  He withdrew his hand, and a tattered, waterlogged scrap of cardboard was pinched between two fingers.

  “Is that it? A new assignment?” Dan asked.

  “That’s it. Now we’re getting out of here.”

  They swapped, Dan taking what Oliver had found and the other boy taking back his phone. That noisy dog bayed again, closer, and Dan half threw himself into the backseat. Oliver pulled away from the curb, making a messy U-turn and then picking up speed.

  “Find anything?” Abby asked.

  “Yeah,” Dan replied, holding up the piece of cardboard for her to see. Using his phone for light, he leaned back in the seat and examined what they had unearthed. “Looks like a postcard maybe.”

  He held the light to the cardboard and then brought it close to his face. There was faded writing on it, and the pen had cut so deeply into the paper that he could see the indented slices behind the ink.

  “Hang on,” he said, reading. “I don’t think this is an assignment. It’s a poem, and I’ve seen it before.”

  “What? How?” Sabrina blurted.

  “Listen.” He held up his hand, taking a deep, shuddering breath before reading over the familiar lines. It was longer than he remembered. This time, it sounded complete. “‘Be not too happy nor too proud, beware your luck, crow not too loud; the Bone Artist steals and then he leaves: the Bone Artist, the Conjurer, the Prince of the Body Thieves.’”

  The car rolled along steadily, bumping now and then, but that rhythmic jostling only made him drowsier. Dan struggled to keep his eyes open. He felt drugged, like he had been awake for days on end, sheer willpower alone keeping him upright. It was a sudden feeling and all encompassing; even his toes felt tired.

  It didn’t seem natural, which made him think it would pass. He was starting to feel anxious about it, and he put his hand in his pocket to grab his meds before realizing he’d left them at Uncle Steve’s. He leaned to look past the center console at the windshield. They started to speed up, accelerating so abruptly he felt his stomach give a nauseating jerk. He tried to focus his eyes, watching the road twist and then straighten—and then drop out altogether. There was nothing in front of them, just empty space and what looked like a distant line of trees.

  Dan called out. He didn’t know what he ended up saying, but he wanted it to be, “We’re going over the edge!”

  Driver and passenger spun around to look at him. It wasn’t Oliver and Sabrina. Shouldn’t it have been Oliver and Sabrina? Dan flattened himself back against the seat, shaking.

  They had no faces. God, there was nothing there at all. They were just blanks with bodies and hair, heads like clean, white ovals, like eggs turned on their points. The faceless faces hovered in front of the bleak oncoming landscape as the car veered off the cliff edge, and then they were suspended. They watched Dan silently. How could they watch him without eyes? But he felt it, the full weight of their attention pinned on him.

  For a second he was weightless inside the fear, rising up as the car plummeted down toward a blur of blue and white foam. A river. They would hit it any second now. He closed his eyes and braced, waiting for the final, hard crunch of impact.

  Instead he flew awake in his bed, gasping so loudly and desperately his throat felt instantly raw.

  For a full minute he couldn’t remember what had come before—there’d been the car ride, and finding the postcard with the poem, and then . . . ? When he thought about it, hard, the memories started to come back, as if they were from a year ago and not from last night. Oliver had had no idea what the poem was supposed to be—it didn’t look like the assignments he used to get—but Jordan had remembered the poem, too, from the library in Shreveport. They had all agreed to regroup at Oliver’s shop tonight after it closed.

  Dan grabbed the top sheet and wiped his sweaty face across it. He didn’t want to close his eyes again, terrified of the white faces.

  The room was already bright with morning sun, and though he didn’t feel rested, a quick glance at his phone confirmed he had slept through the night. Any minute now, Abby would be knocking on the door to make sure they were awake.

  Dan got up and put on a faded T-shirt. When the knock came, Dan was surprised to find that not only had Abby showered and gotten dressed, she’d come armed with three coffees and a bag of beignets.

  “You went out?” Dan croaked, opening the door fully for her. She breezed in, setting the drinks down on the table with Jordan’s computer.

  Jordan groaned and huddled under the sheets, pretend sobbing when she yanked the blinds open.

  “Yeah, I couldn’t sleep in.”

  “I can always sleep in,” Jordan whimpered, still hiding.

  “And anyway Steve was up, too, so we did our morning yoga together and then went out to get breakfast for everyone.”

  “Of course you did.” Dan smiled wanly at her, wishing he had a fraction of her taste for mornings.

  “So I’ve been thinking,” she said, turning and flouncing down onto the chair in front of Jordan’s laptop, “what if this poem is like some kind of anthem for the people Micah worked for? Think about it, they definitely deal in bones, right? The ‘bone artists’? It makes sense.”

  “Would you slow down? My brain’s still booting up,” Jordan murmured, finally crawling out of his cocoon of blankets. It was the first time Dan had seen his hair look truly unkempt instead of stylishly messy.

  Abby zoomed onward, gesturing with half a beignet in her hand.

  “I think we should ask that councilman about it today,” she added.

  “No.” The response was automatic. Jordan and Abby both paused and stared at him. Dan shrugged. “I just think he’s too friendly, you know? Nobody should be that friendly.”

  “That’s the most depressing thing you’ve ever said,” Jordan said, rolling onto his back. He punched a few pillows into shape and wedged them under his head. “Although Uncle Steve does say you should never trust anybody in a suit that costs more than a car.”

  “Uncle Steve is an aging hippie,” Abby countered.

  It was a little vicious. Jordan sputtered.

  “What? It doesn’t make him any less lovable, but it’s true.”

  “I just think it’s better if we keep all of this between us,” Dan said, redirecting. “This bone stuff is creepy.”

  “Us and Oliver and Sabrina, you mean.”

  “Abby . . . Okay, yes, between the five of us, then.”

  Jordan held out an empty hand, opening and closing his fist until a beignet landed in it, thanks to Abby. “Let’s rewind for a minute here. What do we actually know from the poem? What did it show up on before?”

  “On
the newsprint you and Dan borrowed from the archives in Shreveport,” Abby said impatiently. “Not that I’m complaining, I guess. I know you grabbed that article for me.”

  “An article about that gangster you’re researching,” Dan added, regarding her evenly over his coffee. “Which is, I’m guessing, the reason you’re so interested in the whole situation today.”

  She took the accusation in stride, wiping the powdered sugar from her hands. “Fair enough, yes, there appears to be some overlap between Oliver’s former employers and Jimmy Orsini. Can you blame me for wanting to know more? This is a project I’ve been thinking about all summer, so pardon me if I’d like to follow up on this connection.”

  “I’m glad, Abby. It’s nice not to feel like the Lone Ranger in this,” Dan replied. “And I think you’re right. We shouldn’t overlook anything as coincidence at this point.”

  “Then we agree,” Abby said, lifting her chin into the air. “We’ll ask the councilman about it today.”

  “I didn’t say that—”

  “God, it’s too early to argue,” Jordan interrupted, shutting both of them up. “We’ll flip a coin before we head to the store. There? See? Now someone hand me a coffee before I get grumpy for real.”

  Madame A’s, a sloped, mauve-colored storefront, was not on any street Dan could discern; it huddled between the sidewalk and a back alley, a single dingy lantern and sign whispering its presence.

  A strong reek of hot garbage wafted toward them from the shadowy courtyard at the end of the alley. The familiar, discordant whine of jazz musicians warming up—fiddle and trumpet and saxophone clashing against one another—drifted just above the stench, which was so thick it seemed to have its own bitter flavor.

  “What an interesting smell we’ve discovered,” Jordan mumbled dryly, sticking close to his friends, wedged right in the middle of them.

  The windows of the shop were blacked out, smudged with paint or grease. A cat wandered out to meet them, a one-eyed calico with three quarters of a tail. It watched them with its little fuzzy chin tilted up and imperiously to the side. The door to Madame A’s was already open a fraction, a curtain behind the door perfectly still in the rank doldrums of the alleyway.