As Jude walked, the laughter of the Gravedigger rang in her ears the entire way. When she arrived home, she made straight for her room before her pa could see her and start asking questions about the twelve-foot cajou python round her neck, the jar of graveyard dirt in her hand or the contents of any of the odd-smelling bags she carried. She closed her bedroom door, locking it behind her, and deposited Beau on her bed, where he promptly curled into a coil on her pillow.
“Right,” she said to Ivory. “You’d better tell me what to do.”
You need to set up the altar first, Ivory said. Can’t perform any spells or rituals without an altar.
Jude sighed. As someone who hated magic and cajou with a passion, the last thing she wanted in her bedroom was a black magic altar, but she proceeded to follow Ivory’s instructions.
You need to include the four elements, the cajou queen said. A bowl of water for water, a stick of incense for air, a black candle for fire and a jar of graveyard dirt for earth. Arrange them in a cross shape, with the incense at the top and the dirt at the bottom. The candle is in the east and the water in the west. I don’t suppose you care but the cross shape is very powerful in cajou. We used to make all our deals with devils at a cross in the road, after all. Before the swamp devils arrived and pushed the old devils out. Now you just need a grugii.
“A what?”
A grugii. It’s like a kind of guide to direct the magic. Beau will have been working on one for you. It’s probably ready by now.
Jude looked over at her bed, and the snake was already gliding down towards her. He stopped beside her knee and then opened his mouth wide and started to make a gurgling noise. Jude recoiled.
“Oh no, he’s not going to be sick, is he?” she asked. She dreaded to think what kind of things the python might puke up on her bedroom floor. “What does he eat anyway? Should I be feeding him?”
Don’t worry about that, the cajou queen replied. He gets his sustenance from the spirit world. And he isn’t going to be sick. He’s giving you your grugii.
The next second, an object slid from Beau’s jaws, landing on the floorboards with a clatter. Jude grabbed a handkerchief to wipe off the snake saliva before holding it up to examine it properly, and gasped.
When Jude was at her lowest, when her pa was being particularly difficult and she felt wrung out with the effort of trying to keep them going, she had often imagined her despair as a sort of octopus. A tentacled thing that clung to her back and refused to let go. And now here was another octopus in her hand – only it wasn’t dreadful and debilitating, it was weird and beautiful and lovely.
Despite herself, Jude was a little bewitched.
“She’s glorious,” she breathed.
The object in her hand was about the size of her palm and made from delicate china. Half girl, half octopus, she lay on her front, propped up on her elbows, gazing dreamily at something only she could see. Her top half was human, with red hair tied up on her head and red freckles dusting her pale face and shoulders. Her bottom half was a mass of octopus tentacles, black as night, shiny as oil. They looked as if they’d suddenly frozen mid-writhe. It was a peculiar, dark thing, but Jude loved it immediately.
Place it on the altar, Ivory said. Then you light the candle and the incense and put the gris-gris bag in the centre of the cross.
Jude did as she’d said. The gris-gris bag was a small velvet drawstring pouch, red for protection, with magic words inked on to the lining. Ivory had Jude bless each of the items she’d bought at Sofia’s store and put them into the bag one by one. Then she had to pick up the bag in both hands, raise it to her lips and breathe into it.
Now draw the cords tightly, Ivory said. At this point we would normally soak the bag in chicken blood but you’ll just have to hope that your lie does the trick instead. And pray that nothing untoward happens tonight.
Jude prepared a simple supper for her pa and then told him she was going to band practice. He didn’t think anything of it, and why should he? Musicians all across the city would be practising every evening in the days leading up to Cajou Night.
Jude couldn’t exactly walk out of the house in her evening gown, so she stuffed it into a bag and then went down to the wooden pier at the back of the house where she hopped on to the swamp boat. It was a relic from their life before, when her pa had still been able to work as a gator man and swamp guide. He never set foot in the boat now, of course, but Jude still loved it.
She had decorated it with the orange cajou beads and plastic trumpets her guardian angel had sent her over the last couple of years, and the necklaces clicked together as she got on board. The propellers started up their usual roar and Jude eased the stick forward to set off carefully down the swampy canal.
It was wide enough for a couple of boats to pass each other in opposite directions, but nowhere near large enough to be able to put the accelerator down full throttle and tear around, skimming over the water, as she had loved to do when they still lived in the Firefly Swamps.
There were no fireflies here but there were ancient, knotted trees that lined the banks, leaning their crooked trunks out over the water, with long tendrils of swamp moss and cajou ivy hanging down in thick curtains from their branches. You had to keep watch for the cajou ivy because it seemed to have a mind of its own and would move around in the shadows, reaching for you with its hairy branches.
The trees were thought to absorb evil and negativity so if a hex or a jinx was placed at their base, the tree was supposed to neutralize its power. This explained the dolls. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, resting against the base of every tree, their misshapen heads lolling on their shoulders, their bright button eyes staring without seeing.
Jude figured they were dolls that people had found hidden under their front porches or buried in their backyards. Not all cajou dolls were supposed to cause harm. Some, like Ivory Monette’s leapfrog poppet, were protective in nature. But the dolls here all seemed to have malicious intent behind them, as evidenced by their sewn-together lips or scorched hands, the nails driven into their stomachs or the needles in their eyes. After discovering these mutilated versions of themselves, people would offer them to the swamp trees in the hope that they would be able to absorb the evil from the dolls.
Leaving the poppets behind, Jude found a deserted side river to get changed in, then navigated the boat straight down Squid Ink Canal towards the Gargoyle Bridge. The old stone structure was hung with dozens of glass zombie bottles decorated with feathers and beads, with misshapen clay heads for corks. Most of the heads had lopsided eyes and lips that had been sewn shut. Zombie bottles were dark magic that had been illegal before the war but now hung here in plain sight, brazen and bold. People paid a great deal of money to cajou priestesses and conjurers to obtain these items, in the hope of turning the object of the spell into a zombie who would lose their free will entirely and do only the bottle owner’s bidding.
It was dark by the time Jude arrived at the Railway Pier but the moon was full and shed plenty of silvery light over the dark jagged outline of the Smoky Mountains, as well as the Ghost Station at their base. It loomed before her in all its ruined, faded glory, the moonlight reflecting off its hundreds of dirty and broken windows.
Fifty years ago, it had been the largest, grandest railway station in the world. But then the war broke out and changed everything and Baton Noir became a corrupt place, a hotbed for cajou Royalty, and no one wanted to visit any more. The funding dried up and the railway fell into disrepair.
Cajou had always been part of Baton Noir but the city had historically belonged to Ollin. The two brothers always allowed the people to decide which one they wanted. When Ollin ruled, there was order and there were rules. Some of the most evil types of cajou were banned, like the zombie bottles. But when Krag ruled, there was power, corruption and a certain amount of chaos. And that suited some people better.
Such as the young Ivory Monette, who didn’t want to do things the same way her mother had done them. On her mother’s death, there was still almost a year to go until Cajou Night, meaning that the country would have to go without a cajou queen until then. Ivory used the time to campaign relentlessly in favour of Krag.
Many people agreed that it was time for a change, but others dreaded the idea. The city – in fact, the entire country – seemed to be split right down the middle. And so fighting broke out, starting in Baton Noir before eventually spilling into the surrounding provinces that lined the Razzmatazz River and together made up Burnt Bones Country. (So named for the scorch marks left by the fire devils that had once roamed there, before the swamp devils chased them all away.) Baton Noir was the country’s capital but all provinces got a vote as to which of the legba brothers sat on the throne.
And so the civil war raged on, becoming bloodier and bloodier with every passing day. By the time Cajou Night came around there was hardly anyone left to vote, but when the votes came in, the survivors had decided overwhelmingly in favour of Krag. Ivory was crowned and the very next day Ollin’s churches were closed down all across the city, while altars to Krag were erected in their place.
Few ordinary non-magical people wanted to come to a city where he ruled. The life of a Scrap was not one to be coveted. Of course, technically, the people of Baton Noir and the Burnt Bones Country had the choice every year to change their minds and give the country back to Ollin. But the Royalty charms system came in as soon as the war finished and no one wanted to go up against the magical elite, powerful and ruthless as they were. And so the city had stayed Krag’s domain. Many magical people also moved away, often to a different province altogether.
The Grand Smoky Railway Station closed its doors after a few years of dwindling tourism and then slowly fell to rot and ruin, causing the locals to rename it the Ghost Station. Even the pier itself was crumbling. Built alongside the railway station, it had once boasted elaborate mooring posts, carved alligator heads snarling ferociously from the top, with a painted boardwalk and elaborate cast-iron lamp posts. Now the posts were covered in moss and algae, the paint had long since peeled from the boardwalk and the lamp posts were dark and strung with hundreds of strings of red cajou beads, the colour of the vampires.
Flickering candles lined the length of the wooden walkway, leading all the way to the station itself. The main doors were propped open and Jude walked through into the lofty ticket hall. Candles flickered within the building too, reflecting off the hundreds of crystals still strung from the dusty chandelier above them.
It was a huge thing and Jude peered at it uneasily in the gloom, not wanting to walk beneath it in case the rusting cord holding it up snapped. She could make out the outlines of balconies from the floors above, as well as velvet drapes hanging in tatters from the walls. The candle-lined path had been cleared away, exposing the exquisite tiles beneath depicting trains and steamships, hot-air balloons and maps, dirigibles and compasses – from a time when travel had been exciting and glamorous. Aside from the path, though, the rest of the floor was covered in dirt and dust that had built up over some fifty years, as well as broken glass from the windows above and pieces of plaster where parts of the ceiling had caved in.
It was all frightfully unsafe but vampires did love a Gothic, dramatic setting and Jude wasn’t surprised that they still wandered into the building. She hurried across the dark ticket hall, through to the platforms on the other side. They too had fallen into disuse and neglect, and the ever-present moss had crept over some of the railway lines, as if the swamp was trying to reclaim the Ghost Station. Jude could spot the odd disused railcar slowly rotting away in the dark, and the air stank of iron and decay. A warm wind whistled down the platform, tugging at Jude’s dress like fingers clutching at the silk. She looked left and right, trying to get her bearings and work out where to go.
And that was when she saw the feather lying on the tracks. Large and blue, it almost seemed to glow in the moonlight. The next moment, the wind picked it up and it fluttered down the tracks. Jude looked back and quickly spotted another feather.
“Where are they coming from?” she muttered, a bad feeling stirring in the pit of her stomach.
She set off down the platform, following the trail of feathers until she turned a bend and immediately saw the girl lying on the train tracks.