The sky is growing lighter, showing her more of the graveyard around her: the corpses borne on the rising water, the maggot-ridden mud. Theophile’s face yawns into hers. Rosalie struggles against him and feels his sodden flesh give beneath her weight. She is beyond recognizing her love now. She is frantic; she fights him. Her hand strikes his belly and punches in up to the wrist.
Then suddenly Theophile’s body opens like a flower made of carrion, and she sinks into him. Her elbows are trapped in the brittle cage of his ribs. Her face is pressed into the bitter soup of his organs. Rosalie whips her head to one side. Her face is a mask of putrescence. It is in her hair, her nostrils; it films her eyes. She is drowning in the body that once gave her sustenance. She opens her mouth to scream and feels things squirming in between her teeth.
‘My cherie Rosalie,’ she hears the voice of her lover whispering.
And then the rain pours down again.
*
Unpleasant.
I tore myself screaming from Rosalie - screaming silently, unwilling to wake her. In that instant I was afraid of her for what she had gone through; I dreaded to see her eyes snap open like a doll’s, meeting me full in the face.
But Rosalie was only sleeping a troubled slumber. She muttered fitful disjointed words; there was a cold sheen of sweat on her brow; she exuded a flowery, powerful smell of sex. I hovered at the edge of the bed and studied her ringed hands clenched into small fists, her darting, jumping eyelids still stained with yesterday’s makeup. I could only imagine the ensuing years and torments that had brought that little girl to this night, to this room. That had made her want to wear the false trappings of death, after having wallowed in the truth of it.
But I knew how difficult it would be to talk these memories out of her. There could be no consolation and no compensation for a past so cruel. No treasure, no matter how valuable, could matter in the face of such lurid terror.
So I assure you that the thing I did next was done out of pure mercy - not a desire for personal gain, or control over Rosalie. I had never done such a thing to her before. She was my friend; I wished to deliver her from the poison of her memories. It was as simple as that.
I gathered up my courage and I went back into Rosalie’s head. Back in through her eyes and the whorled tunnels of her ears, back into the spongy electric forest of her brain.
I cannot be more scientific than this: I found the connections that made the memory. I searched out the nerves and subtle acids that composed the dream, the morsels of Rosalie’s brain that still held a residue of Theophile, the cells that were blighted by his death.
And I erased it all.
I pitied Theophile. Truly I did. There is no existence more lonely than death, especially a death where no one is left to mourn you.
But Rosalie belonged to me now.
*
I had her rent a boat.
It was easy for her to learn how to drive it: boating is in the Cajun blood. We made an exploratory jaunt or two down through Barataria - where two tiny hamlets much like Rosalie’s home village, both bore my name - and I regaled a fascinated Rosalie with tales of burials at sea, of shallow bayou graves, of a rascal whose empty eye sockets dripped with Spanish moss.
When I judged her ready, I guided her to a spot I remembered well, a clearing where five enormous oaks grew from one immense, twisted trunk. The five sentinels, we called them in my day. The wind soughed in the upper branches. The swamp around us was hushed, expectant.
After an hour of digging, Rosalie’s shiny new shovel unearthed the lid and upper portion of a great iron chest. Her brittle hair was stringy with sweat. Her black lace dress was caked with mud and clay. Her face had gone paler than usual with exertion; in the half-light of the swamp it was almost luminescent. She had never looked so beautiful to me as she did at that moment.
She stared at me. Her tired eyes glittered as if with fever.
‘Open it,’ I urged.
Rosalie swung the shovel at the heart-shaped hasp of the chest and knocked it loose on the first try. Once more and it fell away in a show of soggy rust. She glanced back at me once more - looking for what, I wonder; seeing what? - and then heaved open the heavy lid.
And the sixth sentinel sat up to greet her.
I always took an extra man along when I went into the swamp to bury treasure. One I didn’t trust, or didn’t need. He and my reliable henchmen would dig the hole and drag the chest to the edge of it, ready to heave in. Then I would gaze deep into the eyes of each man and ask, in a voice both quiet and compelling, ‘Who wishes to guard my treasure?’ My men knew the routine, and were silent. The extra man - currying favor as the useless and unreliable will do - always volunteered.
Then my top lieutenant would take three steps forward and put a ball in the lowly one’s brain. His corpse was laid tenderly in the chest, his blood seeping into the mounds of gold or silver or glittering jewels, and I would tuck in one of my mojo bags, the ones I had specially made in New Orleans. Then the chest was sunk in the mire of the swamp, and my man, now rendered trustworthy, was left to guard my treasure until I should need it.
I was the only one who could open those chests. The combined magic of the mojo bag and the anger of the betrayed man’s spirit saw to that.
My sixth sentinel wrapped skeletal arms around Rosalie’s neck and drew her down. His jaws yawned wide and I saw teeth, still hungry after two hundred years, clamp down on her throat.
A mist of blood hung in the air; from the chest there was a ripping sound, then a noise of quick, choking agony. I hoped he would not make it too painful for her. After all, she was the woman I had chosen to spend eternity with.
I had told Rosalie that she would never again have to wriggle out of flimsy costumes under the eyes of slobbering men, and I had not lied. I had told her that she would never have to worry about money any more, and I had not lied. What I had neglected to tell her was that I did not wish to share my treasures - I only wanted her dead, my Hard-luck Rosalie, free from this world that pained her so, free to wander with me through the unspoiled swamps and bayous, through the ancient buildings of a city mired in time.
Soon Rosalie’s spirit left her body and flew to me. It had nowhere else to go. I felt her struggling furiously against my love, but she would give in soon. I had no shortage of time to convince her.
I slipped my arm around Rosalie’s neck and planted a kiss on her ectoplasmic lips. Then I clasped her wisp of a hand in mine, and we disappeared together.
(1991)
Missing
It was high summer and the breeze coming over the levee from the river carried a hint of cleanly rotting fish, a phantom of oyster shell still slick with silver glue. There was another smell on the breeze, something browner, from a deeper part of the river, a smell that might make night strollers quicken their step and look away from the middle of the darkly shining water.
“Someone drowned a week ago,” said Andrew, and Lucian answered, “Bullshit—it’s sewage.”
But it was the smell, along with the heat like a dirty, oily blanket, that drove them out of the nightclub. Notes descending on a saxophone followed them into the street like a string of colored beads. In the street the smell was still noticeable, but it mingled with the grease-dripping odor of frying oysters, the sharp scent of oil paints and turpentine left behind by the street artists who had all gone home hours ago. Jackson Square brooded behind dark curlicues of iron. Within, pigeons might roost, a needle might roll from one unhappy hand to another.
Lucian pressed his face briefly against the railing. It was cool against his smooth pale cheek, but when he turned back to Andrew, a dirty stripe bisected his nose and forehead.
Andrew spit on a handkerchief and dabbed at Lucian’s face. “For God’s sake don’t lick your lips now. A thousand diseases on that railing.” Lucian twisted halfheartedly away from the sticky handkerchief, smiling.
Although they had left their nightclub, the club at which they listened to whatever might
be new and sometimes played their own music, their night’s drinking was far from over. On their way to Lucian’s room they passed a lone, shabby man bent over backwards pointing a wailing saxophone at the sky. A crack somewhere deep inside the instrument made the notes rattle like bones, but Andrew dug out a quarter and aimed it at the shoe box by the man’s feet. The quarter bounced out and rolled across the sidewalk, but the man didn’t stop playing.
They passed a pizza parlor that reeked of tomatoes stewed in oregano and a foreign grocery which, though closed, wafted out a thousand mysterious, delicious smells, the smells of a kitchen in the Great Pyramid. Under it all they could still sense the wet brown river scent. Lucian’s narrow nostrils widened imperceptibly.
They passed along the streets in silence, two white non-jazz musicians stirring up air in the French Quarter. The buildings they passed grew darker, more broken. Feet padded along behind them for two blocks, then, deterred by Andrew’s wide-shouldered bulk, disappeared down a side street that led toward the river.
A few minutes later Lucian passed a broken street light, turned down an alley, and nudged a heavy door open with his shoulder. They ducked under a flapping black curtain, sending down a rain of dust, and emerged in a dark little shop lit by two kerosene lamps. Orange shadows licked at the walls of the shop, which were lined with shelves of tiny bottles and boxes. The bottles were queerly shaped, long-necked, made of thick ancient glass colored blue and amber, with stoppers instead of screw-on caps. Most of their contents were murky and
indecipherable. The boxes gave off an odor of moldy cardboard. It was easy to imagine clicking, roiling nests of insects in the dark corners of the shelves.
Lucian stood slightly stiff-necked, embarrassed, staring at a spot somewhere to the left of the woman who sat in a corner of the shop.
“Good evening, Mrs. Carstairs. How’s business?” “As always. No one comes. No one wants magic anymore.” The woman pulled a gray blanket more snugly around her shoulders. At her feet sat a bowl of colorless mush, perhaps oatmeal, in which a bent spoon was buried at an angle.
“Sorry to hear it. We’ll just go on upstairs, then.” Lucian ducked through another curtain at the back of the shop. Andrew heard him clattering up a flight of stairs. He looked back at Lucian’s landlady, who didn’t appear to have noticed him. She was busily scratching herself under the gray blanket. His knee banged the corner of a long wooden box. He stiffened but couldn’t keep from glancing down.
Under the glass top the thin little figure reclined, grinning up at him. It should have been a skeleton, but a thin layer of iridescent parchment still stretched over its face and the ratty framework of its hands, and he thought there were small, opaque marbles left deep in its eyesockets—he had never let himself look closely enough to be sure. A few dry strands of bone-colored hair twisted across a rotten silk pillow.
“It isn’t so hard to do,” said Mrs. Carstairs, “if you love them enough.”
Andrew stared back at her. She made no acknowledgement of what she had said, turned her nodding head not an inch in his direction, but only huddled serenely, surrounded by vials of powdered bat’s tongue, boxes which contained fragments of the bones of saints and murdered men. And at her feet sat a bowl that might be oatmeal. Andrew swallowed the sour spit in his mouth and hurried up the stairs after Lucian.
Lucian had rummaged in his failing litde refrigerator and found a botde of beer for Andrew. For himself he had pulled out a Donald Duck orange juice bottle half full of a violet sludge. It was vodka mixed nearly half-and-half with a cheap Japanese plum wine that seemed to have about the same consistency as ketchup. It was vile, and it filled the tiny room with a rotten fruity smell that stayed in Lucian’s clothes. Lucian claimed the concoction could get him drunk faster than anything else on earth.
He sloshed some of it into a jelly jar that still had gray-white label scrapings on its side. At the first sip, his long eyelashes lowered in contentment; this was the taste he knew like the inside of a lover’s mouth, the taste of his world. He took another gulp and lay back on his unmade bed, gazing past Andrew at the window. The moon’s weak glow was diluted and made greasy by the dirty glass.
Andrew watched him. Lucian was languid now. In the street there was always a certain tension to his shoulders and slender neck, because Lucian was slight and exquisite-looking and wore silky little scarves and long black jackets that made him look rich even though he wasn’t. When he wasn’t being prodded for money he didn’t have, he was being harassed for the European fineness of his face, and on the darkest, narrowest streets his eyes took on a watchful look. Andrew, who was large and Aryanly handsome, usually walked home with his friend on late nights, not minding the long, lonely walk back to his own apartment.
Lucian nudged his shoes off. He wasn’t wearing any socks. He shook a few strands of feathery hair, dark auburn delicately frosted with silver-blond, out of his eyes and smiled at Andrew over the rim of his jelly jar. Andrew stood up, stretching, nearly knocking over his rickety chair. The ceiling of this room was unusually low.
It was all right for Lucian, but Andrew, who was half a foot taller, felt clumsy and claustrophobic here. “Do you mind if I open a window?”
“By all means, open a window—any window will do.” Lucian’s voice was heavy with plum wine and sarcasm; there was only one tiny window in the room. Andrew shoved at its smeary glass until it slid up. He hadn’t heard Lucian move, but when he turned back to the room, Lucian was holding out a fresh beer. Their fingers kissed briefly and sweat-stickily as Andrew took the bottle.
Lucian’s fingers were longer than the palms they stemmed from, very slim and clean, slightly flattened at the tips. The tips had been splayed and pressed out by Lucian’s Juno, the only expensive thing in the room. It stood on four stilt legs in a corner behind Andrew, its black and white keys gleaming opaquely in the half-light from the window. Lucian’s fingertips hid a crystalline magic, a sense of tone and pressure that could milk every spangle, every drop of color from a piece of music. He stayed in his room during the day, sleeping naked and innocent through the hottest part of the afternoon, then playing till nightfall, pulling spills and showers of notes from the battered little Juno to float out the window, to drift downstairs and be smothered among Mrs. Carstairs’ bottles and packets. Once every month a check arrived from a faceless, sexless relative in Baton Rouge. For a few days Lucian and Andrew would eat in prettily decorated restaurants, drink in well-lit, airy bars outside the French Quarter. Then it was back to dark clubs and sludgy plum wine until the next check came. Andrew could sing; the lyrics he wrote were attempts to capture in words the shimmering transparency of Lucian’s music, and he could barely play guitar. They tried to expand the boundaries of all the music they had ever heard, composing intricate symphonies together whenever Mrs. Carstairs was too caught up in her rituals to bang on her ceiling with a broom handle.
Lucian stretched out his feet, flexing his toes comfortably. His toenails were the color of pearls, faintly shiny. He slurped down the last drops of violet sludge and filled the jelly jar again. “That skeleton—” Andrew began. “What skeleton?”
“The one downstairs.”
“Oh, Mrs. Carstairs’ corpse. Very charming.”
“Why do you suppose she keeps it? Is it some kind of weird advertisement?”
“It’s her husband. Was.”
“No!”
“Something like that. It’s too small to be a man’s body, isn’t it? Her child, then. She told me about it at great length once. If I’d been sober it would have shocked me.”
“The skeleton of her child? In a glass box?”
“It died a long time ago. Her one and only, I guess. She couldn’t stand to bury it and let it rot. She’s a witch, you know, or calls herself one. She knew how to make it dry up. Mummify it.”
“Didn’t she have to take the insides out?”
“I suppose so. God, Andrew, forget it.”
Andrew stopped talking about it but did
not forget it. His eyes drifted and came to rest on Lucian’s midsection. Lucian had unbuttoned his shirt, and the hollows in his slatted ribcage were full of silver shadow. Andrew watched the narrow chest expand and collapse again and again. His mind slipped back to the little body downstairs. Mrs. Carstairs would have gone to bed by now, so it was alone down there, keeping company with the dusty bottles and nests of roaches. Perhaps a faint phosphorescence lit the spaces between its bones.
Mrs. Carstairs had been unable to let go of the child completely; she had clung to the only part of it left to her, and perhaps if she pressed her forehead to the glass she could catch its sleeping thoughts. She had preserved the essence of the child, the cleanest part. She had seen parts of its body no one had been meant to see, but those parts were gone now. He imagined its chest cavity stuffed with fragrant linen, its skull scoured with dry spices. It was an ivory being, a husk.
Lucian pressed his lips together, stifling a yawn. It overcame him and his jaws gaped. Andrew glimpsed two rows of even teeth, a soft little tongue stained purple. “It’s late,” Lucian said. “I want to go to bed.”
“Play for me first.”
“It’s too late.”
“Please. Just a little.”
Lucian’s eyes flicked heavenward, but he was smiling. “Five minutes. No more.”
He positioned himself behind the Juno, pressed buttons, twisted the volume knob nearly to zero. His eyelashes, black in the murky light, swept his pale cheeks. His hands moved and a flood of notes erupted, pouring away, cutting through the damp, heavy air in the room.
Andrew leaned forward, lips slightly parted. The music swelled and shattered. Each shard was a fragment of colored glass, a particle of spice. He closed his eyes and watched the music weave a tapestry across the insides of his eyelids. Its colors were streaky and bright, glittering.
When he realized that he was hearing nothing, he opened his eyes. Lucian had stopped playing and was sniffing the air. The tip of his straight nose twitched. “There’s that damn rotten smell again.”