PERAMBULATIN’

Deacon Graves Sr. knew something was up as soon as he heard the soft click of the door unlocking itself. He waited, certain that one of his captors would enter, but nothing happened. He sat on the edge of the bed, massaged his aching knees, careful not to look at the door. He’d tested it more than once—even spent time beating on it and screaming, to no response. This was a trick and a prank. Stackolee and the Haint of All Haints wanted to see what he would do if he thought he had a chance to escape.

How long you been here by now? he asked himself.

He had no answer. At first, he had thought to reckon his stay by the number of times he slept deeply and for an extended period. What he hadn’t counted on when hatching his plan was that the boredom would introduce him to a third state that was neither sleep nor wakefulness but included elements of both. For what seemed like hours and hours, Deacon would lie in bed, staring at the low ceiling until it seemed to shift and flow like the surface of the Gulf. He would watch the whorls and eddies, trying to remember every song he knew. Sometimes he’d hum aloud, and sometimes his voice remained inside him, and just as it became difficult to know wake from slumber, it became difficult for him to divide sound from the memory of it.

My baby she got that velvet step…?

Wait. Naw. That was one version, but wasn’t there another that started differently?

Ha. Now he had it:

My baby got them twinkling toes

She dances like a dream!

You might think your girl can dance

But she can’t out-step my Ernestine.

He smiled, tested his knees: Their aching had subsided a bit. Maybe a walk would do him good. Of course he wasn’t really free, but a jaunt outside before they dragged him back might be just what the doctor ordered. At the very least, it would break the monotony of his predicament. Hell, maybe he’d even get a breath of fresh air.

He rose humming from his cot and sang as he tested the door.

Careful not to make a sound, Daddy Deke pulled the door open just far enough and slipped out into the darkness of the corridor. We perambulatin’, baby, he thought. Thass what we doin!

Peaches smelled salt, vanilla, and turned earth. Things seemed to move a little more quickly once Doctor Professor played her and the others out of the car yard—which was just fine with Peaches, because she’d had enough of standing round talking today. It occurred to her that she was about to fight Stagger Lee. The prospect did not frighten her—or it did, but that fright piqued her interest, made her more ready to scrap.

Last time, his breathing fire had caught her by surprise, and she’d gone down, burnt pretty good. This time, if he tried to belch up a cloud of flames, she’d knock them right the hell back down his throat.

Hold steady, now, y’all, Doctor Professor warned. Better stay good and close.

“Where we is now?” Brendy asked.

Nowhere in pattickler, baby.

Peaches supposed that Fess had not fibbed after all. She had spent enough time observing Grown Folks to know that they sometimes failed to tell the truth even when they weren’t lying. Now, though, the old haint was spot on. They were nowhere in particular.

The Mess Around hung above a great and featureless void. Peaches couldn’t tell whether the Nothing below them was bright or dark. It reminded her of the glowing blankness of a television screen sitting in an empty room just after it had been turned off.

Just before they’d left the yard, Peaches had heard what must have been First Chief dancing and drumming elsewhere in the city. She’d also heard a dark and oily tinkle of piano music followed by the truncated sound of a single step. In her mind’s eye, she saw Stag bloom into being out of nowhere, setting his nasty square-toed shoe on the pavement in the middle of walking. The thought made her clench her fists, squeezing her fingernails into the softness of her palms.

She strained, but Peaches could hear neither song. Fess played a circular snatch of music, walking his fingers up and down across the keys, ascending and descending from chord to chord.

Now, listen here, y’all. I brung us this way ’cause we need some time to figger how we gone handle the present situation.

“Good idea,” Perry said, and as he spoke, Peaches found herself paying too much attention to his lips and the way they shaped his words. She remembered the feeling of him against her in that other no-place, the things he’d said to her, and her cheeks heated pleasurably.

Now ain’t the time, she told herself. We got work. “We ain’t got time for this,” she said aloud. “I heard Stag gun click. He probably done shot First Chief by now.”

I can’t do this forever, baby, but we got time, Fess said. You can’t tell because you live in it like fish live in water, but time in Nola ain’t what you think. And it don’t pass nearly as quick as it seem to.

“What?” Peaches asked, and immediately wished she hadn’t. She didn’t want to know exactly what the haint meant. It wouldn’t make Stagger Lee any easier to fight. It wouldn’t put the songs in any less danger. She looked to Perry and flashed her eyes at him, silently asking him to jump in. Something about this place made her uneasy, and the sound of Perry’s voice always helped steady her.

“Doctor Professor, can you hang us in the sky as easy as you’re levitating us right now?” His speech was so precise. All his Rs and Gs had hospital corners.

Sure can.

“Good,” Perry said. “Then I think you should bring us in about twenty-five feet above Stagger Lee. Peaches can drop straight down on him, and then you lower us down to the street. I’ll use my Clackin’ Sack on First Chief, and then I’ll use it on Stagger Lee.”

“Do we want him in the bag with the songs we already caught?” Brendy asked. “What if he gets around easier in there than we did?”

“Damn,” Perry said. “You’re right. I’ll use it on First Chief, but Peaches, do you think you can hold Stagger Lee?”

“I can hold him,” she said. “I’ma whup his whole ass.”

“Okay,” Perry said. “If things go wrong, though, I’ll use the sack on him, too. Even if he gets around easily in there, there’s more songs to endanger outside the sack than in.”

Not as many as there used to be, baby, and if we don’t act fast, it won’t matter none. The city changing faster now. I just felt the trolleys go.

“What?” Peaches said. “Oh no…!” Now Peaches’s attention began to wander. Something dark hovered at the edge of her mind, beginning to press in. At first she thought it must be her fear of Stagger Lee, and she knew she could master it easily. Her father had taught her never to let fear control her, stop her from acting in the right. No, this was—Peaches smelled the ocean. And the sound here—a tuneless hum rose up from the Nothing. She could hear it past Doctor Professor’s playing. Could her friends?

This was what the darkness must have sounded like in the infinite moment before God spoke the world. The thought made the hair stand up along Peaches’s arms. She focused her attention on the hum, trying to listen past it, imagining—or not?—that she heard waves somewhere far below. And was that the rolling of thunder?

The question led her in a direction she didn’t like. She remembered the sensation of sodden wooden planking beneath her bare feet and the sight of the vast and terrible ocean reaching out like an angry mama intent on a good smack—

“What?” Peaches said with a shake of her head.

“I said I don’t like it here,” Brendy said.

Peaches knew she must be telling the truth. Her heartbeat sounded loud and jagged—and it wasn’t just her. Both Brendy and Perry had begun to sweat. Peaches didn’t like their discomfort, but sensing it relieved her just a bit—she was glad she wasn’t the only one who hated this Nowhere.

Don’t surprise me much, Fess said. Ain’t no mortal been here before. We better get the hell on.

His playing changed. Instead of the slow walk-up and -down, he thundered into a song Peaches had never heard before.

Listen to me, baby, and listen good!

Get to dancin’ honey and hit that flo’

Cuz I ain’t gonna suffer no mo’…!

“You good, baby?” Lyle the bartender asked as he finished cleaning a glass. He was a big, round, light-skinned man with short hair parted in the middle and polished nails.

“I don’t know,” Nola Casey said. “Yeah. Yes.”

“Your friend good?” He nodded toward a sign hanging by the special board. It read, MUSIC ONLY IN HERE.

“I think— Yeah,” Casey said. “Why?”

“Cuz whenever there’s more than two magicians in a room, shit finna jump off,” the bartender said. “You, him, and Jack make three.”

“Oh,” Casey said. “Oh. No. I’m not—” He stopped short. He couldn’t be sure his denial would be truthful. Having a compass that spoke in his head and could take him from place to place didn’t seem as serious as what musicians did, but he supposed it was more than nothing. “… Can I get a couple sidecars please? Single tall.”

“Okay, but I’m serious. Y’all do your business and get on out. You ain’t the one worry me, though. That other Negro packin’ heat.”

Just before he’d left the table to buy drinks, Casey had noticed a faint buzz coming from Trizz. That must be why. He wondered whether he was handling this all wrong. What if Trismegistus wasn’t a friend?

Casey put his money down and accepted the drinks without waiting for change. He carried them over to the petrified wood booth where Trizz sat waiting. Casey wasn’t sure, but the other man’s shoulders seemed a little narrower than his own. It was hard to tell as he sat down, but Casey thought Trizz might be a little shorter, too—but the bartender hadn’t lied. It wasn’t just the buzz: The air around Trizz was alive with invisible energy. Maybe it was the fact that he belonged to another world. Maybe his being here caused a disturbance of some kind.

He looked like he made money. His clothes were more expensive than Casey’s—his diagonal blue-and-yellow striped polo shirt was a genuine Ralph Lauren. His skin and hair were better, too, as if he got styled more often and used product Casey couldn’t afford.

“So, uh,” Casey began. “If we’re the same guy, why are we so different?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“And I mean, you’re—you’re from Away?” Even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t right. He himself was a transplant, but this other version of him was from worlds away.

“I’m from New Orleans,” Trizz said. “I mean, I came here from there… this morning?”

“Listen. I don’t know how to— Who brought you here? Was it Roux?”

“I came on my own,” Trizz said. “I drew the path.”

“So you’re magic. Real magic,” Casey said. “I don’t—I don’t even know what to ask. My compass told me to come here, but it didn’t say why or… or what I’m supposed to do. There’s—there’s a storm coming. It’s trying to kill the city, and I’m supposed to… I’m supposed to help. Use the compass to help.”

“I saw,” Trizz said darkly. “Before I came here, it made all those flying streetcars disappear.”

Casey’s scalp tightened. “What? The skycars are gone?”

Trizz nodded, staring at his hands. “Maybe fifteen minutes ago,” he said. “I think Reverend Keith said something about all the horses and carriages disappearing, and City Hall, too.” He sipped his drink. Casey noticed that his elbow trembled. His cool was manufactured.

Seeing that comforted Casey a little. Trizz might be vastly powerful, but he was still human.

“The Reverend says this isn’t my fight,” Trizz said. “The thing is… my cousin and I might be responsible. Jaylon created an opening when he came here from our world, and I think the Storm came with him.”

“The storm in the Gulf?” Casey asked.

“No,” Trizz said. “Yes. But not like a hurricane. Like all of them.”

A calm crystalline terror settled like a cape around Casey’s shoulders. The other man explained what he knew of his cousin’s death. Casey tried to listen, but what his doppelganger said about the Storm stole his focus. What he gathered from half-following the explanation sounded crazy, but what did Casey know? He’d seen a fire-breathing gangster song jumping into Bayou Saint John.

One detail stuck in his mind. “Wait. Your cousin’s a tagger? He makes graffiti?”

“Yeah,” Trizz said. “Why?”

“Well, I dunno,” Casey said. “There’s always been graffiti all over, but I think there’s more lately? Stronger?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, they used to clear it out quicker, or there’s more of it. It’s not usually all over town all the time. But it seems like it gets blown everywhere now.”

“What? What gets blown?”

Casey was a little frustrated. “The tags,” he said. “The graffiti. Come look.”

He slid out of the booth and crossed to a broad window overlooking the intersection of Frenchmen and Chartres. One lone tag rippled in a breeze as it hung by the river side of the street. As they watched, someone in a powder-blue VW Beetle carefully guided their car past it before heading on in the direction of the lake.

“Goddamn,” Trismegistus said. His voice was full of wonder. “Goddamn. That nigga did that shit!”

“You think your cousin the one painting them?”

Trizz didn’t answer at first. He kept staring out the window at the tag. From here, it looked as if it read JAY and then some numbers. As Casey watched him, tears brimmed in Trismegistus’s eyes and began rolling down his cheeks. He didn’t seem to notice.

“He’s here,” Trizz said. “Somewhere.”

“Listen,” Casey said.

Trizz cut him off. “I shouldn’t have quit.”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t have quit drawing. I shouldn’t have… I shouldn’t have left him to do it alone.”

“Who? Your cousin?”

“He didn’t stop because he couldn’t,” Trizz said. “It called to him like it called to me, and he couldn’t block it out.”

“Are you talking about art or are you talking about magic?”

Trizz seemed to recover himself, but he still didn’t wipe at his tears. “I quit drawing and painting when my art started acting funny. Jaylon’s art got weird, too. We promised we’d stop, but he didn’t. If—if—if I’d kept working, if I hadn’t shut down, maybe I couldn’t have protected him, but I could have— It was wrong. I stopped painting because I thought what was happening wasn’t natural. But not everything that’s natural is right.”

He fell silent, still weeping. Casey wanted to take Trizz in his arms, to comfort him; but what would happen if they touched? There was something hard about this other version of himself, and at first Casey had taken it for a stony resolve. It wasn’t, though. It was guilt. Guilt and grief.

“My mother said there’s nothing wrong with me,” Trizz said.

“She’s right,” Casey offered. “Just look at you.” He paused. “Help us. Please. Come with me and help us fight the Storm.”

“If there’s nothing wrong with me, then there’s nothing wrong with you, either.”

Casey’s head rocked back. “You don’t know me,” he said. “I’ve—I’m not like you. I got— Things aren’t easy.”

“Look, I know,” Trizz said. “That’s what I thought when I heard it, too. But that’s not what she meant. She didn’t mean that things are easy for me or that my mind always does what I want or that I don’t have problems. What she means is that my problems aren’t me. They’re not the same as me.”

“Okay, then,” Casey said. “But that’s you. I can’t just pick up and go to another world. We need—!”

“I didn’t just pick up and go,” Trizz said. “But I gotta find Jaylon. It’s why I came here.”

“You got real power, though,” Casey said. “You can help.”

“I can,” he said. “I am. I’m you.”

“Please!” Casey said. Now he did reach for the other man, but Trismegistus disappeared with a BAMF as the air closed in the space he left behind.

First Chief cut a slow turn on the sidewalk outside the Pancake House. He glanced sidelong to his left to make sure Pretty Little Thing had not been swallowed by the crowd of onlookers gathered to watch him. The woman had agreed to walk with him to the Seventh Ward in search of his Peoples, but first he found it necessary to settle his troubled mind with ritual. None of the Lessers seemed to mind. A few of them even hooted and hollered as he turned and shuffled to his own beat.

He stretched out his massive feathered arms and turned the small feathers on his back and his loin drape to make colored animations of Negroes riding horses, loosing arrows to bring down buffalo, or emerging from their tepees to greet the smiling sun. Those images served to comfort him as they moved to the rhythm of the music that poured from his back. He threw his head back and began to sing:

Heyyyyyyyy, getcha grass skirt on

And paint up ya face

The crowd chanted back. “Ride on down that Zulu line!”

His broad chest swelled at the response. Maybe things weren’t so bad after all. If these Lessers knew the chants, then his Peoples must not be so far away as he had feared.

“I wear my feathers they mighty fine!”

“When I ride on down that Zulu line!”

First Chief cut another turn, and this time he didn’t think to look for Pretty Little Thing. He lifted his left foot and bent his elbows, swaying to the rhythm. The crowd before him beamed as if to reflect the sunlight. They looked like sunflowers growing in the field. They looked like magnolia trees dancing liquid in the wind. They—

A hard, dark face appeared above the heads of the people closest to him. With one swift and overwhelming motion, he swept the people standing before him to one side and raised a gun.

Albert stared into the darkness of the barrel aimed right between his eyes. Here was danger. This was the fight. He crooked his fingers into claws, ready to rend and tear.

SORRY, NEGRO, said the gunman. THIS AIN’T NO MARDI GRAS.

Hard, fast piano music split the air. First Chief did not hear it fade up from nothing. It just began right in the middle of a chord and started rocking away. Something heavy and fast dropped from above, like a dive-bombing bird, and slammed straight into the gunman.

“First Chief!” someone called, and Albert turned to see who had spoken. He saw the piano now, sitting in the middle of Canal Street, and a boy standing beside it, holding a potato sack.

“Clickety-clack, get into my sack!”

Albert roared his displeasure, but there was something lacking in his voice. He realized too late what it was. He wished he felt otherwise, but part of him knew the truth: This world was all wrong and First Chief was only too glad to leave it.

Daddy Deke shut the cell room door softly behind him, pulling it to slowly… slowly… slow. The latch clicked softly, and he sighed, relieved. He tested the door again just to see if it would open for him—after all, what if it was somehow worse out here than it was inside? He wasn’t no Institutionalized Negro, but he at least understood the possibility of dangerous-ass bullcrap running round in the Haint of All Haints’s Evil Lair.

Evil Lair. Daddy Deke grunted his contempt. More like Triflin’-Ass-Knucklehead Lair.

He depressed the door’s handle as slowly as he’d released it, but he couldn’t control the final click. He winced as it slapped the air loud as a gunshot. So the door was completely unlocked now, and Daddy Deke could open or close it as he saw fit. Now to find out what was what. He turned to the corridor and saw only darkness.

Damn and a half. The darkness was so profound, so complete, that it was more like blindness than like an absence of light. Well, Daddy Deke supposed it was a plus. At least there were no clues lying around, trying to lead him one way or another. His captors must be manipulating him, but at least they’d given him room to breathe, an illusion of autonomy.

Daddy Deke took a step and his shoes echoed against the floor. He waited. No response. No movement, no sound of Stagger Lee. He took another, waited again. When no response came, his courage grew, and he started walking—not quickly, but without such painstaking slowness. He held his arms out before him, let them quest through nothing, hoping his eyes would soon adjust.

What if he got lost?

Negro, be real, he thought scornfully. How could you be any more lost than you already is?

He walked for a long time, navigating mostly by scent. Climbing up a couple stairwells had taken him from what must have been a basement area that smelled of mold and soggy concrete into what might be an abandoned office building smelling of dust, old paper, and, faintly, of oil soap.

By now, he’d been walking long enough to grow hungry. If he didn’t find his way out of here, he might just starve. He doubted Stagger Lee and the Haint would let that happen, but what if they wasn’t in charge no more? It seemed only reasonable for Deke to consider the prospect that maybe he really had, with the aid of some unknown benefactor, escaped.

It was a possibility, but that was all it was. Deacon Graves Sr. knew better than to embrace the idea. After all, he didn’t think he’d left the original building in which he’d started—not unless one of the doorways he’d encountered had magicked him elsewhere—and he hadn’t heard a snatch of music but his own since stepping out of his cell.

Slowly, Deacon realized that the darkness had abated some. His eyes adapted just enough to show him a dark-and-light checkered floor and the outlines of doorways to his right and left. He couldn’t tell where the light was coming from until he turned down a curve in the hallway and saw a door spilling candlelight into the air. Without stopping to consider, Deacon went straight for the door and let himself into what looked like the most disorganized library he’d ever seen.

It reminded him of the years he’d spent working as a security guard at the Stone Pigman law office downtown—only, the law office took great pains to keep things swank. Here, piles and piles of books stood up from the dusty green carpet. Other books, open and closed, lay atop full shelves, as if whoever was reading them had set them down midsentence to search for something else. Deacon wasn’t sure why, but his surroundings gave him the sense of a ransacked house, only in this case, the thief wasn’t after money or valuables, he was after words. No. Not words, Deacon corrected himself—knowledge.

“That one in front of you there,” said a genteel voice. “Is that Armstrong or Bechet?”

He froze. The sound of a normal human voice other than his own was alien after so many days. Unable to think what else to do, Daddy Deke grabbed the book that lay open before him and checked the cover for the title. “This one here’s called Jelly’s Blues: The Life, Music, and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton.”

“Where is that damned Bechet?”

Negro, run, he thought. Beat feet! Skedaddle! Get outta town! But what good would running do?

“I help you look for it if ya let me use your telephone.”

Now the owner of the voice stepped into view. He was a white man wearing a rumpled powder-blue suit with sweat stains at the armpits. His salt-and-pepper hair needed combing, and his left eye lay shut. Something about its lid made Deacon think its owner was unable to open it. “Larry Hearn. What’s this about a telephone?”

“Deacon Graves—the First,” Daddy Deke said. He heard himself speaking as if from another room. His skin tingled. “I need to get ahold of my family, let ’em know I’m alive and kickin’.”

“I’m sure we can figure something out.”

A silence yawned between them. At first it seemed companionable, but soon Deacon began to sense ice beneath it. He hadn’t felt an eerie silence like this since the Great War.

He cleared his throat. “You do that for me, you let me just—just talk to them—and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

“Heh. Why, Mr. Graves, I do believe you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

“No I ain’t,” Daddy Deke said flatly. “Whatever game you playin’, I’ll play along, but I ain’t stupid, and I ain’t gone play stupid.”

“Were I you, given the choice, I’d opt to speak with my dead wives over my living relatives.”

“She ain’t my wife no more,” Daddy Deke said. “We vowed ‘till death do us part.’ Well, death done parted us a while ago now.”

“So the moment she died, your love perished with her?”

“If we gonna be conversatin’ like this, I want you to tell me straight: When you say things like what you just said, are you just running your mouth, or are you actively tryna test my nerves?”

“All right,” Hearn said. “Why have you come to the city?”

“I don’t— I told you. I’m born and raised.”

“Born and raised in New Orleans,” Hearn said. “But you crossed into Nola after your death. To deliver a message? A talisman? Give me the horn. Do that, and I will spare your life and the lives of your family.”

Silence again. Deacon’s mind raced. He didn’t remember any horn, but something tickled at the edge of his mind, and he let the tickle fade. He’d done so many many times before, but it wasn’t as easy now.

“I don’t remember no horn,” Deacon said. “Honest. But sometimes I dream about another place. Another life.”

The ghost took a breath, and even in spite of the turn in their conversation, Daddy Deke wondered if he was right after all. Could this man, who seemed to live and breathe, actually be the Haint of All Haints? He seemed genuinely abashed by his own behavior.

“I spend most of my time alone,” he said. “Death separated me from my own wife many, many years ago, and I often wonder whether she still loves me, or…”

“… Or if she stopped loving you when you died.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“I never did stop lovin’ my Nettie,” Deacon said. “I just don’t think it’s worth reachin’ into the afterlife to bother her. If she wanted to contact me, and if she could, she woulda by now, ya heard me?”

Now what light there was seemed to drain from the dim air of the room. Blackness flooded close, surrounded Deacon—but it wasn’t the same absence of light he’d experienced as he explored the corridors beyond his cell. This darkness was a presence, not an absence, and instead of a quiet nothingness, it was horribly alive.

Mr. Larry’s manner didn’t change, but a ragged edge crept into his voice. “What if she couldn’t?” he said. “What if she tried and tried, to no avail? What if, even now, centuries later, she longs to speak to you, hold you again—but to do so, she would have to do something… drastic?”

Daddy Deke’s heart skittered wild in his narrow chest, but he tried to keep his cool. “Well, shit,” he said. “Then I guess I’d rather she didn’t.”

Mr. Larry’s face irised open. His teeth yellowed and sharpened, and red-orange tentacles unfurled from the flower his head had become. Laughter and an overlapping susurrus of whispers filled the room. Far away, Deacon heard rolling, sizzling thunder and the hiss and pop of hard rain.

unfortunately for us all deacon the first it is not her choice to make  whispered the haint. it is mine and mine alone    i say unfortunately because i suspect that an eternity trapped in this perpetually crumbling   toilet of a city has driven me quite mad    

The orange tendrils danced together for a moment like tube worms on an underwater reef. Then they stiffened, arcing straight toward Deacon’s open screaming mouth.