“When I was first young, our people believed in reincarnation through your bloodline… but some souls were too evil for that, some souls would only know torment forever. I brought back one like that by force, a woman whose family was happy she died. She told me about the absence of light and hope, the nothing, the pain… and she told me she’d see me there soon. We had nothing like it in our religion, no place where the dead were punished! The truth was too horrible, too unimaginable! You can’t fathom getting older, feeling the dread getting worse and worse, knowing there was only horror on the other side of life!”
“But you beat it. Your genes…”
“Genes, blasphemous prayers, who fucking knows?! I reveled in everything this life had to offer for centuries. Drinking, fighting, fucking… but that car accident must have been too much for my already addled brain. I turned into an invalid who forgot he could become young again, a fool who let himself get killed. I have to thank you for bringing me back, Anaea.”
“So you could kill the nurse and Dan?”
“Worthless little shits deserved it, and I’m sure a lot more will, too.”
“You’ll stay alive and keep murdering, sending souls where you’re afraid to go?”
“Those few hours I was dead were an eternity of being broken over and over again into smaller and smaller pieces that screamed louder and louder! And there was something there, girl, something… something happy. I’m never going back to the devil of the shards!”
“But you have called it by name, Buchanan Robinson,” immortician Ayodele said from her unmoving position amidst the disarrayed furniture in a voice unlike anything Anaea had ever heard before, “and you have spoken of your fate in its realm. Now say ‘yes’ to the pit of shards, Buchanan Robinson, and break for all eternity!”
The grip on Anaea slackened, and she uppercut the terrified Buck away from her into the infinity pool which immediately started to boil. He screamed unintelligibly before there was a flash and the superheated water disappeared in a burst of annihilating steam.
Anaea crawled to immortician Ayodele’s unconscious side. Whatever said those words, it wasn’t her. With as much strength as she could muster, Anaea got to her feet and looked over the edge at the now empty pool, its spotless white tiles, and the brown fingers that clung to the outer edge of the pool’s glass back wall.
“I knew… you’d kick him… in the nuts,” a hoarse voice croaked.
Anaea gasped in surprise and happiness, and rushed to pull a traumatized Jack back from the other side of infinity.
Nyarlahotep Came Down to Georgia
Nancy Holder
Il arrive.
He’s coming.
Three more nights until All Soul’s Day and the drums were flapping their yaps.
Bone fingers snapped alors alors zut alors. Fireflies and gators winked, blinked, scooted away through the murk and the muck of the bayou. Things was about to go bad, sha.
Spanish moss tugged at Evangeline’s hair as she cried and swept the alleys between the tombs with a twig broom she’d wrapped herself, every twist counted three-three-three. Go home, sha, get out of here, ain’t no place for you. This the battleground. Go, go, go.
She kept sweeping, gaze locked on the mound of bricks where she had buried a lock of her maman’s hair. A spiral of shiny black curls was all she’d had. Her mere was planted in a different place far away. Her cousin Beau had a picture on his phone of a mound with a wooden cross marked Marie Belle Chevalier September 25, 1992–September 30, 2018 he said that someday he would take her there to lay down flowers. But not today. Not next week. It had been a month since Evangeline got the news and everyone else had stopped crying but she wasn’t even sure that her maman was dead. Maybe they were just making it up because her mother was so wild, such a trial, and so her gramma told Evangeline that her maman was never, ever coming back to the bayou. It done, it over, life is like that. You move on.
Her heart hurt; it ballooned inside her chest and bobbed against her ribs. Bee sting tears prickled her cheeks. She shook all over as she swept, tears and dust on her beaded flats. Gramma was going crazy. Folle. She said godlessness had stolen Evangeline’s maman away and if Evangeline wanted to make it to twenty-one herself, she had to give herself in all honesty up to Jesus Christ. Evangeline had said it over and over, Yes, Gramma, yes, I am saved. The blood of the lamb done washed me clean.
But the truth was, when she had buried that little pinch of shiny black hair, Evangeline had tiptoed out to the walls of this very graveyard with a chicken and a knife and no idea what to do but ask for some help. Ask for someone to tell her where her maman was now.
Her brush made a swishing sound, chaka, chaka, chaka. Shotgun tombs in rows, walls all around, tombs losing their roofs and stoving in. There were renovation efforts in some of the more historical New Orleans graveyards but this one was old and neglected. No-account. Graffiti decorated walls and steps, nasty words voodoo signs. Weeping angels with shiny green faces perched on tombs of brick and plaster; stones and the statues shimmered with the drumbeats.
Evangeline was eleven. Her hair was a dark brown cloud as she kept her head down and swept. She was trembling all over as if the spirit had filled her. She knew something bad was coming. The drums zummed the warning inside all her bones.
Dust kicked up in the dying sunshine; the world was purple-green like Mardi Gras, a fuzzy blowsy yellow-brown like dried-up chickweed. Beyond the cemetery walls, New Orleans was gearing up for Halloween, Day of the Dead, All Soul’s, bontemps. For weeks there had been ghost walks and voodoo tours for the tourists and a fais-do-do in every shack and plantation mansion still standing. Her grand-mere was not so strict that they didn’t celebrate; she had no idea that chicken they were missing was the one Evangeline had snitched so she could open up a conversation with the loa of the dead.
Shake-a shake-a shake-a; she was trembling hard; spirit possession maybe, or just pure silvery fear; something was changing in the air; the drums and the nutria ca-woo ca-woo and the swaying cypresses; a wind—
And there she was.
Evangeline dropped the broom and sank to her knees.
She glimmered in and out of sight; shrouded in black lace, seated on a tumbled-down pile of bricks and blurring. Wearing a top hat rimmed with roses and crow feathers, the rest of her a secret, a mystery. One arm extended from the black lace shroud; it was covered in ebony silk that glittered as she crooked her finger at Evangeline. Evangeline tried to rise but she was too awe-stricken, only just now aware that she was drenched in sweat and had been ever since she started cleaning the charnel streets. Now her sweat was a flood, and there were fresh tears, too, dripping down her nose to across her lips to her chin.
“Ma sha, ma belle,” the figure murmured softly, maybe not even a whisper. “Why you so frightened? Not on account of me.”
She gestured again for Evangeline to come to her, top hat, lace, a ghostly presence perched on some family’s ruined bonehouse. Evangeline still wasn’t sure she was truly there. The drums, the chattering drums … then Evangeline forced herself to stand, ran to her, and clambered up the bricks like a baby goat; then she was enfolded in a bouquet of jasmine and rum and scratchy lace and for a moment, smooth bone; then a lady with soft white skin and big green eyes and long shiny red hair curled around her in the most loving of embraces. Maman Brigitte.