What October Brings Read online

  “Conduct life gently that you may die a good death…” immortician Ayodele began.

  Buck’s almost unblinking eyes stared right into Anaea’s as her shaking hand closed them with only minor resistance from him.

  “…that your children may stretch their hands over your body in burial,” Anaea completed the prayer.

  The sun’s rising green flash flared at 5:53 am. Buck lay still in the water, and Anaea’s sigh of relief was cut short when he reopened his glowing green eyes.

  “Iná l’ọmọ aráyé lè pa kò s’éni tó lè pa èéfín!” Buck said in a voice that startled both women and rumbled through the early morning air. “You can put the fire out but you won’t get rid of the smoke!”

  He grabbed immortician Ayodele by the throat then threw her with inhuman strength out of the pool and into a section of the tables and chairs arranged around it. She lay unmoving amidst the upturned furniture. His other hand wrapped around Anaea’s throat. He effortlessly lifted her while he walked out of the pool, glistening water dripping from his nakedness in the rising sun.

  “You know what I used to do, girl? I used to raise the dead. I was an immortician, a babalawo of Orunmila for almost a hundred years. I got older and older until I realized I was terrified of dying… so I didn’t. My body just started getting younger, aging backwards.”

  Anaea tried everything she could to break free, every move to break an arm, every kick to his body or head but none worked. She began to see spots but could still hear Buck’s booming voice.

  “Columbus was pretending to discover America when I was discovering myself and what I could do. Worst thing was when I got thrown in a slave ship heading for the U.S. a lifetime later. Fuck, it wasn’t even the United States back then. I did what I had to do to survive. You’ve got to be cold to live forever. All that love and compassion shit doesn’t work when you hit the middle of your second century and everyone you love is dead, when people only know you as an old man. You forget about your wives, and your kids’re just meat you make and leave behind. I can’t tell you how many of my kids and grandkids I’ve fucked but most of them weren’t as pretty as…”

  There was a click behind him as Jack shouted, “You sick fuck!”

  Buck didn’t flinch as Jack unloaded six rounds from his Glock pistol into the immortal man’s chest. Buck merely turned around to face Jack, reaching out with his free hand wreathed in green flame.

  “None of that shit!” Jack shouted as he fired two bullets through Buck’s head. “I play video games!”

  Anaea gasped for breath when she and Buck’s body fell to the wood deck, and she scrambled to Jack’s side.

  “What? How?” were the only words she could manage through her bruised throat.

  “Detective Bosch called me when she couldn’t reach you.”

  “Turned phone… off…”

  “Your idiot cousin in South Carolina? Dan? Police found him beaten to death last night. His last call was to you trying to get some of the hospital settlement. They called Bosch. She’s on her way here now.”

  “Why… you… here?”

  “When do I ever listen to you? I was already coming to make sure you were alright and that son of a bitch died for good this…”

  An invisible force bashed in Jack’s nose. Blood spewed all over his shirt and Anaea’s wet white dress. It hit him twice more, lifted him into the air, and threw his body and his gun over the edge of the infinity pool into the deep, wooded gully beyond.

  “Jack!”

  “Cudn’t… mmmgm… do dat…. gggh… fore I died,” Buck slurred. A bloody scalp flap attached to a chunk of skull swayed as he shambled toward Anaea, the green energy beneath working to heal his gunshot wounds.

  Anaea crouched, clenched her fists, and rushed him. Buck smiled crookedly, his brain still rewiring itself, and tried to take a defensive stance. The world heavyweight boxing champion from eighty years ago wasn’t prepared for the swift kick to his exposed testicles that was her specialty. When he hunched over in crippling pain, Anaea pulled his head down and shattered his nose with her rising knee, sending him crashing to the floor. She wanted to snap his neck but something unseen punched her in the stomach then forced her to her knees.

  The Buck that approached her was a smiling, bloody mess.

  “If I’d known I could do this just by thinking about it, I would’ve died the first time around and let another babalawo bring me back on Halloween. We called this the Season of Souls back then, and an adamant soul reborn in an immortal body? Power from the other side is bleeding through me!”

  Anaea struggled helplessly against the invisible grip.

  “After I kill you, I’ll go find Vanessa. I’ll have her calling her Papa Buck ‘daddy’.”

  “Did you always know?” Anaea asked in a strained whisper.

  “What?”

  “That you were afraid to die because you were going to burn in Hell?”

  Now fully healed, Buck crouched beside Anaea. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

  “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.

  Maman Brigitte was a loa, a goddess, the Queen of Graveyards and the wife of Baron Samedi, who was the King of Death. It was to summon her that Evangeline had swept the streets of one of Maman Brigitte’s domains today. This was the third time the lady had appeared to her.

  “Bonjour, ma petite,” Maman Brigitte said. The beautiful loa spoke French even though she had originally come from Ireland. “How the fuck you doin’, Evangeline?”

  Evangeline giggled in spite of everything. Maman Brigitte also swore a blue streak.

  “I’m sad and scared, Maman, is how I’m doing,” Evangeline said, and Maman Brigitte pulled aside her veil to let Evangeline snuggle inside, then drew it back over her. She had turquoise eyelids and long black eyelashes, crimson lipstick on her bone lips. The crown of her wavy red hair was clustered with roses like a Day of the Dead sugar skull. “All I was doing was listening for my mother’s heartbeat. But then I heard the drums. They say a bad man is coming. They say the bayou is shaking.”

  “How do you know the drum language?” Maman Brigitte asked, and Evangeline blinked, thinking the question over.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know it was a language. I thought it was just what they said.”

  Maman Brigitte brushed springy coils of hair away from Evangeline’s forehead. She had cigarette breath. She said, “It’s a gift then, sha. You gotta a knowledge other living folks don’t.” Her teeth clacked. She had lots of them and they were very white. “The drums are right. He’s gonna show up in three nights. On Halloween night. And you can’t be anywhere around here when he does.”

  Evangeline’s heart did a little leapfrog. “Why not? Who is he?”

  “The Black Man.” Her words were a whisper of a whisper. “Old Pharaoh come out of Egypt’s land. He gonna turn the bayou red and the moon green, m’enfante. He’s bringing his army. You gotta steer clear. You gotta swear to me that you let us dead folk take care of it.”

  “He’s got an army?” Evangeline cried.

  “Ssh, ssh, Evangeline,” Maman Brigitte cautioned. “The Evil One has good ears. C’mere, sha.” She eased Evangeline out of her lap and stood. Then she took Evangeline’s hand and together they climbed off the pile of red bricks. Maman Brigitte’s black skirts flared out, a triangle, as she took Evangeline’s hand. Sometimes skin, sometimes bone.

  Together they walked down the dead road toward the saddest part of the graveyard, where none of the graves were intact and weeds tangled one over the other over another like kudzu. Marble angels lay in mud with their wings broken off, bricks were sinking; a fragment that read ROBICHAUX was drowning in a rain puddle.

  And Maman Brigitte’s husband Baron Samedi, King of the Dead, was sitting on a big chunk of plaster, legs crossed, top hat tilted, smoking a cigar. His skin was dark and his eyes were soulful and deep-set. His eyebrows and eyelashes were thick. His nose was hooked and elegant. He wore a black suit with narrow white stripes and a blood-red rose was pinned to his lapel. Or maybe it just grew there from out of his heart. Evangeline wasn’t sure. But she had seen him two times before, and that same rose was always there, but it was real.

  “Bonjour, bell’enfante,” he said. “Ça va?”

  “She knows,” Maman Brigitte cut in. “Knows the whole thing.”

  “Not the whole thing,” Evangeline said, and Baron Samedi chuckled.

  “I’m guessing she don’t know much.” He tapped his cigar; a
chunk of ash fluttered toward the rain puddle. “There’s going to be a war between folks like us, sha. Dead folks. You need to stay outta the way.”

  “I already fucking said that,” Maman Brigitte informed him.

  “Who is the Black Man?” Evangeline asked. Most of the folks she knew were black.

  The baron looked at his queen and she shook her head. “She’s too young for this,” Maman Brigitte said.

  “From where I sit, she’s nearly grown up,” Baron Samedi replied.

  “Tais toi. She’s a human,” Maman Brigitte said. King Death puffed smoke out of his cheeks and fished a piece of tobacco from between his teeth. “I’m telling you, little one. This is not your affair.”

  “Affair,” Baron Samedi said. “Yes, an affair.” He gestured with his cigar. “Tell your little girl there, Brigitte. This living bebe who adores you. Tell her that’s why her precious new maman is bringing hell out our way.”

  Maman Brigitte put her arm around Evangeline and squatted down, coming nose to nose with her. Her ghost eyes darted; she licked her lips. She gave Evangeline a little squeeze and said, “The Black Man is in love with me.”

  “Oh,” Evangeline said. Her voice was very small. She was a little lost. Was Maman Brigitte her new maman now? A queen? Could she have more than mother? She didn’t really know what to say. “Do you love him?”

  Baron Samedi broke into peals of laughter that clanged like church bells. He rocked back and forth like a bell, too. Maman Brigitte huffed.

  “Of course I don’t. How could I, when I got a man like this?” She waved her fingerbones at the baron.