DEAD AS DAVY JONES

Sometime after several hundred, Koizumi Yakumo had stopped counting the years. He had awakened in darkness in those first, saner days and lain still on his stone slab, certain that at any moment, a seam of light would crack the black that surrounded him, and that soon after, he’d hear Setsu’s cooing voice, feel her soft hands on his haggard cheeks, feel her soft lips kissing him awake. Expectant, he had drifted between nothingness and waking, memories of his former life drawing him to this moment or that.

He saw the boats docked on the Mississippi, their varicolored sails furled against the wind like birds sleeping with their heads under their wings. He saw his editor at the Daily Enquirer glaring across his desk: Really, Larry, marrying a Negress? You’ve given them the rope yourself, and it’s no wonder that now you’re thoroughly hanged… He saw Mattie, his first wife, her face in her hands, turned slightly away from him as she sobbed. I can’t. I can’t be the reason for all this. I love you, but I can’t. He saw his leather-shod feet as he stepped from his steamer’s gangplank onto the boardwalk on Martinique.

The air was alive with heat and perfume. An aching void rested in his heart, having taken the shape of New Orleans, but he felt drawn forward as if by an invisible cord, pulled east, and east, and east. Could it have been this way? Could he have felt himself nearing Setsu and their children? The Sea of Japan? The demon- and spirit-haunted islands, the richly folded gowns, the house with its stacked roofs, each curled at the corners? The clop of his children’s sandaled feet?

Confusion, memory, and loss fell on him like his father’s fists. He couldn’t remember his children’s names. There were four of them. Two boys and—three boys and—? Being here, there, now, then, was exhausting. The jumble of moments and locales… Unable to bear it any longer, he sat up on his slab and touched his cold hands with cold fingers. He felt them well enough, but where were his legs? They seemed to stop at his knees. Was that what had killed him? Had he lost his legs?

Sleeplessness settled on him like a dirty film. It thinned his skin, roughened his voice. Brought all his worst emotions and impulses to the fore. And this darkness. This black upon black upon black: Why couldn’t he see? Were his eyes shut?

The years enshrouded him. He felt swaddled in the passage of time. Minute woven to minute, hour to hour, decade to decade, tattered and ephemeral as cobwebs, but strong as the work of spiders, strong as fact. A vile taste rested in his mouth. He smelled grave dust.

If I am dead and dreaming, he wondered, how is it that I know what I know?

Startled by the light of language, his thoughts ran like palmetto bugs, this way and that… Something terrible coiled in his belly, growing in a mockery of pregnancy. But he was helpless to stop it. He could feel it stretching filaments into and around his organs. Eventually, it would take him completely.

And would he die? Again? Or would it just pilot him?

Stagger Lee paused outside a heavy metal door. Up till now, Brendy had been jabbering at him, trying to entertain him and keep him calm. Billy Pete’s presence let her know she could fight him if she had to, but if there was a chance he was really taking her to Daddy Deke, she’d rather not lock horns until she had to.

He had changed some since their meeting on the roof of Canal Place. He seemed less angry, more introspective, even worried and a bit sad. Brendy figured it was because he was an old-fashioned kind of man, and that the idea of lying to her about Daddy Deke and leading her into a trap didn’t sit well with him. She wasn’t sure what to do with that understanding, but she knew it represented an advantage for her team, a chink in Stagger Lee’s gangsta armor.

Stagger Lee pressed his palm against the door but didn’t push. “You hear that?” he said.

Billy Pete made a mournful, wordless noise that chilled Brendy to the core. “Hear what?” she said as brightly as she could. “I don’t hear nothing. Not even the weather no more.”

“Every time I come down here, he doing something,” Stagger Lee said. “He ain’t got nothing in there to entertain him, so he gotta entertain hisself, you know?”

“Maybe he ain’t there,” Brendy said. Maybe the time had come to stop playing along. “Maybe you just tryna trap me, Gun Man.”

HUSH WIT THAT, Stagger Lee said. WAIT HERE.

“Why I gotta wait outside? You said you was bringing me to Daddy Deke.”

I AIN’T SURE WHAT WE GONE FIND. HE AIN’T HERE, WE GOTTA FIGURE OUT WHERE HE AT AND WHAT TO DO BOUT IT. SO WAIT. HERE.

“You on thin ice with me, Gun Man,” Brendy said. She hadn’t meant to say it, but it was true.

“Girl, I been knowing that. You don’t make it easy switching sides.”

Rain fell like nails as Perry emerged back into the city. When he had spoken his incantation, Mr. Horn had stood at Perry’s left side, but now he was nowhere around. Perry craned his neck this way and that, squinting against the rain and wind, then realized that both his hands were full. In his right hand he clutched the Clackin’ Sack, and in his left he held a gleaming trumpet—except without the mouthpiece.

Perry dimly remembered his friend Troy at his old school arguing that you could too play a horn without one, if you used the proper technique. But that was where Perry’s memory ended. Not only did he remember no explanation, he couldn’t even recall whether there’d been one to forget.

The weather didn’t seem to touch the trumpet. No raindrops ran over its shining skin. Instead, it glowed softly, breathing its shine into the air. Raindrops hit the glow and did not pop, hiss, or steam as they disappeared. The instrument felt alive in Perry’s hands. He felt the same way looking at it as he did when he looked at his father asleep. He marveled at its quiet power.

The horn wasn’t silent, either. It emitted a faint but steady hum right at the edge of Perry’s hearing. It was like the sound you hear after striking a bell, juuuuust before silence.

How magic am I now? Perry wondered, his mouth slightly open. Could a normal person hear this? Could a normal person feel what I’m feeling?

He knew that one couldn’t hold, couldn’t use things like the Elysian Trumpet, like the Clackin’ Sack, for long without absorbing some of their magical properties.

As Perry stared at the horn, he felt his left elbow begin to bend. The horn rose slowly up, toward Perry’s lips.

Panic tightened Perry’s scalp. “No!” he said aloud. With great effort, he lowered the instrument, held it at his side. He felt a slight resistance in his elbow; it wanted to bend again. The fingers of his right hand twitched as he held the Clackin’ Sack, and he longed to feel his finger pads pressing down on the horn’s valves. The longing gave way to cold, quiet fear. He had almost played the trumpet without meaning to. He had almost ruined everything.

Perry knew something else about magical things: they wanted to be used, to fulfill their purpose. Unless he acted quickly to learn what he needed to know, to form a plan and enact it, either the Elysian Trumpet would force Perry to play it or it would play itself. Perry wasn’t sure which would be worse. He broke into a run.

Later—much later—after waking and wandering from the tomb in Mount Olivet Cemetery and making his way through some barely perceived veil that made his chest and shoulders ache, Yakumo had stood atop a ghostly dance hall on the Dead Side of Town, watching silvered figures flit up and down the muddy street below, the women’s skirts gathered daintily in their ghostly hands. Shining wigs stood piled upon their heads, ringlets falling about their ears.

Where was the port? Where was the cotton gin? He’d come here to collect ghost stories, and—no—to translate articles and write about cotton, the statues, the Negro women (Mattie?) selling rice balls in the dusty streets. The crumbling walls and fountained courtyards, the Italians gesturing with both hands as they exhorted their children, the regrets of ghostly pelicans…

Away to the west, he heard a deep, throaty blast of some awful horn. The stutter of unfamiliar music. Voices raised in chat, in song, the confusion of brass instruments. Something ugly twisted within him, curdled like milk with lemon juice mixed in.

seven hundred seventeen  i counted  i know  seven hundred seventeen years  and its been twice that at least since i stopped  better to live in new orleans in sackcloth and ashes  but this is not new orleans  where is my setsu  where is she  where is she  where  why is she kept from me    or am i kept from her  youll pay for this  youll pay  youll all of you will pay o yes

But the girl. He had seen a little redbone girl darting through the streets. He’d watched her knock a Garden District mansion off its foundation with a single punch. The mayor, the king and queen sought her out from time to time, solicited her help with crises. She fought the Axe Man to a standstill, trapped his spirit in a jar. The girl would be a problem. He must find a way to weaken her.

Stagger Lee opened the door into the dark and closed it behind him, leaving the ghostly little girl on the other side. His heart had sunk as soon as he touched the door and sensed nothing beyond it. The Ole Man usually had a charge to him. Stag wasn’t sure what it was—maybe a touch of music, or even just old-man sass, but whatever it was could always be felt at the door, and it had been strong enough for Stag to elevate the man in his mind from simply an old man to the Ole Man.

Had he stepped in water? Of course there was flooding all over town, but it hadn’t gotten so bad that water would have seeped in here just yet—or had Stagger Lee badly miscalculated the completion of Yakumo’s plan? What if Yakumo didn’t need him anymore? What if it was too late, and he had switched sides just in time to lose?

Maybe the Ole Man was just sleeping. He did a lot of that, but usually his slow, heavy breathing could be heard before Stagger Lee entered the room. Stag took a breath, reached up to the light, and flipped it on.

Peaches thought she heard someone call her name as she grabbed the heavy metal door and yanked it open. The latch popped straight off, the door swung wide, and Peaches’s mouth fell open as she saw Stagger Lee standing there, holding something limp and familiar in his rough brown hands.

At first, Peaches didn’t understand what she saw. The dirty lightbulb swung right to left, right to left, dragging its weak illumination to light one side of the room, then the other. Was that Daddy Deke’s purple zoot suit pants and yellow shirt?

Naw, she thought. Naw, Peaches. That ain’t no suit. That’s Daddy Deke!

Panic flared in Peaches’s mind. Time slowed as her breathing sped. Something was wrong with Daddy Deke. Something was wrong with his body. He had no eyes, no teeth, and his mouth gaped like a wound. Now she understood why she had confused his body for his suit. His skin was empty, drooping fleshless and boneless in Stagger Lee’s hands like a scarecrow without his straw.

As she watched, a wave of roaches, wriggling rats, and other vermin poured from Daddy Deke’s empty skin, bursting from the eyeholes, the mouth hole, from the sleeves of his shirt and the cuffs of his pants, splashing together in the black, nasty water standing on the floor.

Her panic left her. There was nothing to fear now because the worst had already happened. She’d failed. She hadn’t saved Daddy Deke. An icy calm radiated from the center of her chest.

“Where the rest of him at?” she asked. In her own ears, her voice sounded conversational—as if she’d asked whether someone had stashed the cold drinks in the refrigerator.

“What?” Stag said.

“If that’s his skin and clothes, where the rest of him at?” Daddy Deke must be okay after all. He must have shrugged his skin off like that of a snake, gone somewhere else to await rescue.

“This all of him,” Stagger Lee said. “This all that’s left.”

Peaches! The shout was formless, barely louder than a thought.

Peaches ignored it, her gaze fixed steadily on her enemy. Her calm deepened, marbled with relief. She knew exactly what to do next.

She balled her fists and put up her guard, relaxing into the cat stance her daddy had shown her when she was little. “You put him down, and you put up your dukes,” she said, her voice slow with command. “’Cause it’s you and me, baby, and this time…? This time, I’ma kill you dead as Davy Jones.”

Still later, Yakumo discovered the Department of Streets. Its libraries. Its offices yawning empty like graves on Judgment Day. It was connected, somehow, to every place in this mad, thrice-damned mockery of New Orleans.

Every so often, unable to bear consciousness any longer, Yakumo would retreat to his tomb, to the darkness he could draw about him like a blanket, and lie on his slab to sleep, to dream sometimes of Mattie, but mostly of Setsu and his children with her, whose names were still lost in the river of time.

Gradually, Yakumo had realized that the darkness did not stay behind when he emerged back into waking and into Nola. It didn’t follow him, either, or reek from his pores; it was him, and he was it.

He felt no spores, no fruiting bodies inside him now. Maybe he’d imagined them to begin with. But he knew he hadn’t. He knew his mind was likely only an echo of itself. He’d been eaten—well, not alive—from within.

am i mad  

yes of course the darkness answered  utterly  madness is the only sane response to the horror we endure

that we endure  who are we

we are lafcadio hearn

we are koizumi yakumo

we are this citys secret knowledge that it should not exist

we are its salvation and its end

Yakumo laughed or screamed—he wasn’t sure which.

Brendy clapped her ghostly hands against her disembodied cheeks as a wave of dread washed over her. The building rocked on its foundations, and the sound of another heavy slamming impact spread through the air.

Everything had gone wrong. Brendy had come here alone, thinking that when Gun Man inevitably turned on her, she would command Billy Pete to knock him flat and keep him subdued until Perry and Peaches arrived on the scene—but Stagger Lee hadn’t turned on her. He’d even seemed like he wanted to help, and now—!

Lordy Jesus, Brendy prayed. What I’m gonna do?

Billy Pete answered, clear as day: I stop the fight. I separate.

Yes! Brendy said. Billy Pete—!

Just then, Daddy Deke stepped around the corner. His eyes went wide and his mouth fell open as soon as he set eyes on his granddaughter.

Naw, not you too! he said. Lord, please tell me that stupid-ass haint ain’t killed my grandbaby!

Perry ran down Terpsichore Street at top speed. He couldn’t tell whether the street was clear of floodwaters because it was built on higher ground or because Perry was headed in the right direction. Did any of these houses belong to Doctor Professor? He remembered Manda Bird standing at the front of his class, summarizing a report about the sorcerer. She’d mentioned that in life he’d stayed on Terpsichore Street, but damn if Perry could remember the address.

Panic spurred him faster. He held the trumpet steady against his chest as he swung his right arm and worked his legs. He ran so fast that if he were to stop suddenly, he’d fall.

He felt the same panic a mouse feels beneath the shadow of a hawk. He felt a quake deep in the pit of his belly, and he reached for it with an internal grasp and stuffed it into his shoes. Now was not the time to come apart.

He tripped on a tree root and tumbled to the cracked sidewalk. He cradled the horn against his body, making sure no harm came to it. He rolled to sitting as the rain beat down on him.

“What do I do?” he asked aloud.

He looked down at the horn in his right hand. “What do I do?”

No answer came.

“Tell me,” Perry said. His words were ragged from exertion, but he spoke without waiting to catch his breath. “You were a man inside—inside the sack, so I know—you have personality and will. I can’t blow you—unless somebody shows me how. So if you want to get used, luh-lead me.”

With some effort, Perry calmed his breathing. He stood and relaxed, holding the horn at his side. He ignored the rain, the thunder, the blasting wind. He barely held the trumpet now. He shut his eyes and waited, willing himself still.

At first, there was nothing. Perry breathed and fought to keep his mind clear. He imagined himself as a dream catcher hanging in someone’s bedroom. He imagined himself as a colander, letting pasta water drain through it. He imagined himself as wind chimes, as an instrument himself, an instrument of—

His arm twitched. In his surprise, Perry nearly dropped the horn. He kept his eyes closed and let his legs carry him through the rain.

He tried not to think of Peaches. He tried not to think of her rich summery smell. He tried not to think of Daddy Deke and his beak of a nose. He tried not to think of Brendy, of his father, of Mama Lisa, of Fonzo, of all Peaches’s animals.

It occurred to him that if he and Milo ever met, it would be as equals, as two not-quite-boys who had seen and done the impossible.

He’s got that car, though, Perry thought. I could really use a car like that.

Thunder clattered overhead, but Perry didn’t flinch. He opened his eyes but didn’t stop walking. His legs carried him up a set of stairs and stood still.

Perry wasn’t sure where he was now. He stood at a door on a columned, wraparound porch with crazed white tile that reminded him of the tea eggs he’d eaten when Daddy Deke took him and Brendy to Hong Kong Restaurant.

What am I supposed to do now?

He shrugged, took a breath, and knocked.

When Mr. Horn—Perry still thought of the elderly man as Mr. Horn—opened the door for him, he realized that both his hands were empty.

“Hey!” Perry said. “You can—?”

Mr. Horn put a wrinkled finger to his lips and shushed him. “You hear to learn, ain’tcha, little pitcher?”

Perry couldn’t tell whether Mr. Horn had said “here” or “hear,” but it seemed imperative to keep quiet. If little pitchers had big ears, Perry had better keep his open.

“Heavenly God,” Mama Lisa prayed aloud into the inky black of the house, “God of my mother and her mothers before her, we approach your throne to entreat you now because you sit high and look low. Dear God, we don’t know what to do. Lord, my grandson has disappeared in search of a fearsome weapon, and my granddaughter is shrouded in a sleep from which she cannot or will not wake. Our family is fragmented. Our city is in peril. Help us. Help.”

She fell silent then but didn’t stop praying. Blindly, she reached for her daughter’s hand, and her son-in-law’s, and held them tight. She trembled with effort, searching for some sign, some sense of where her grandbabies and their friend had gone.

I thought you returned me to my family to help them fight this fight, she prayed. I thought you returned me to lead us to victory. Instead, all I have is uncertainty and fear. Please. Show me what to do!

Outside, the wind howled and rushed. Wave after wave of rain battered the roof and walls, trying to pry its way inside.

Please, Lord. Please!

A piano chord sounded in the living room.

When Mama Lisa opened her eyes the lights were back on, but they shone weakly, dimly. The piano chords walked up and down, and Mama Lisa drew Yvette along behind her as she headed for the living room, knowing exactly what she would find.

The Mess Around took up most of the room. Doctor Professor sat at the keyboard, hanging his head in shame or exhaustion. The stillness of his body cut a bizarre contrast with the constant motion of his hands.

“Henry Roeland Byrd,” Mama Lisa said. “Why have you come here?”

He didn’t answer right away. He seemed to be listening to his own playing, even though what he played was not exactly a song.

“I come because it’s time,” he said. “Time I put a end to all this.”