What October Brings Read online

  What about the two mothers, then? She loved her maman. She didn’t remember her very well, but if she didn’t love her, she wouldn’t be crying over her, right? Was it all right to get a new one?

  “Well, it could be like children. My gramma has seven grandchildren but she loves each one of us the same,” Evangeline said. “And I think my old maman loved more than one man.”

  The baron roared with glee and Maman Brigitte smiled and kissed Evangeline on the forehead. Maybe she had lips now but maybe they were still bone. Everything drifted in and out, then snapped into focus, then blurred again.

  “This one understands the complexities of life, her,” Baron Samedi chortled. “Told you she was grown up.”

  Maman Brigitte narrowed her eyes. “You stay away from my little girl. She ain’t got folk and she misses her human maman.”

  “She got plenty of folk,” the baron said. “Some of ‘em here and some of ‘em down below with us.”

  “Down below? Do you know my cousin Jimmy?” Evangeline asked. Jimmy had been shot in an alley last year. Folks said it was over a woman. There was a lot of that going around.

  “Jimmy Chevalier? Oui, I do,” Baron Samedi informed her. “He’s in my army. He’s got a bazooka made of hexes. He gonna shoot it at Nyarlahotep. That’s my wife’s boyfriend’s name.”

  Baron Samedi’s smile shifted as he looked over at Maman Brigitte and pulled the brim of his top hat even with his eyes. His cigar smoke rose lazily in the damp, gray air. Maybe it formed the shape of a skull.

  “Are my other dead people in your army?” she asked, crossing her fingers behind her back for luck.

  “Oui, sha, they sure are,” he said. “Got more cousins of yours. And they are gonna rise in three nights to kill that ol’ black man.”

  Evangeline’s balloon-heart filled with more air. The air whooshed into her throat and made it impossible for her to swallow. Finally she ground out the words: “Is my real maman in your army?”

  “Oh, ma sha, non she is not,” Maman Brigitte said softly, and Evangeline burst into tears. Loving bone-arms slid around Evangeline and pulled her into an embrace. “Dear little darling girl.” The lady-god rocked her back and forth, back and forth, and Evangeline held onto her like someone sinking below the surface of the bayou.

  “Her grave is too far away,” Baron Samedi said.

  “I want her to come up.” Evangeline’s voice shook. Maman Brigitte, I called you because I don’t know where she’s buried. And she doesn’t have a headstone, or flowers. But if she can come up…”

  “Someday, when you’re older, you can go,” Maman Brigitte said. “I’ll tell you where—”

  “Now! I want her now! I’ll do hexes! I’ll be in the army! I’ll-I’ll kill someone if you want me to. I’ll kill Nyarlahotep!”

  Maman Brigitte kissed her forehead. “No. This war is for dead folks. Nyarlahotep, he’s a god, like us. He can zap you to a cinder with a look if he wants. Or make you fall in love with him.”

  Baron Samedi spit out his cigar with a guffaw. “Don’t give him powers he don’t have, Brigitte,” he said. He gazed at Evangeline, then put a hand on top of her head. Felt like an ice cube seeping into her brain. “This is who he is, sha. Listen and stay away.” He crossed his legs and took a fresh cigar from his breast pocket, rolling it between his bone fingers.

  “Nyarlahotep is an ancient god,” the baron said. “Some call him the Crawling Chaos, and see him with bat wings and tentacles. But my wife sees a tall, thin black man with an angel’s smile. He’s got tricks, lots of tricks”—the baron reached into his coat pocket again and this time drew out four playing cards, all aces, fanning them into the air, where they floated “—tricks that make you fall all over him in a swoon. His own army’s standing—that means it’s always ready. We been building ours, sweet-talking our dead into joining this battle.”

  “He could capture them, take them away to his kingdom. His hell,” Maman Brigitte said. “You don’t want that for your maman.”

  Evangeline shifted uneasily. She didn’t want bad things for her mother, but oh, what it would be to see her again, even if she was dead. Even if her face was a painted skull. She thought about that a moment. How much could change before her maman was not her maman?

  “How could you love someone who can take dead folks to hell? Someone with tentacles?” she asked Maman Brigitte.

  Maman Brigitte shrugged. “I never loved him, sha. Me and the baron, we step out now and then. We live forever. If all you ate every day was donuts, wouldn’t you get tired of them, maybe want a piece of chicken?”

  “Is that why you showed up when I brought you a chicken?”

  Both the loa chuckled. Then Maman Brigitte stopped smiling and touched Evangeline’s cheek. She said, “Honey, I gave that chicken to my hungry dead children. Dead folks are the same as living folks—they need food and love.”

  “Is my maman hungry?” Maman Brigitte cocked her head. “Don’t be so worried about her, sha. When this is over I’ll go check on her. I promise.”

  “Unless Nyarlahotep’s army beats your army,” Evangeline said. “Then what happens?”

  “It won’t happen,” Baron Samedi said.

  Evangeline’s balloon-heart swelled, ready to pop. Her forehead beaded with sweat and she looked at Maman Brigitte, so pretty. “But what if it does?” She grabbed Maman Brigitte’s fingertips and held them tight. “I want to fight. I can fight!”

  “He take one look at you, he eat you up,” Maman Brigitte said, and Baron Samedi nodded.

  “C’est vrais, sure enough,” he concurred. He pushed back his top hat. “I’m thinking you best go home now and stay away. In three nights, it’ll be over.”

  ***

  Two nights left:

  The drums chanting: Crawling Chaos, Lord of Infinity, King of Madness, he come from the power, he come from the glorious kingdom. Baron and Maman, give up now!

  “There’s bad stuff in the air,” Evangeline’s cousin Beau said to someone in the back yard, a man she couldn’t see and didn’t know. It was dark out; the fireflies buzzed around. Frogs croaked. “I don’t understand it all, but—”

  “It’s a devil coming, Beau,” the other man said. “I brought you a hex to keep your family safe. Put it over your door. It’ll keep that devil away.”

  “Merci, my friend,” her cousin said. “Hey, so how’s your sister?”

  “You stay away from her,” the stranger said. “She’s engaged.”

  “So?” Beau asked.

  The two men laughed.

  ***

  One night:

  The hex was a circle of straw with a tiny stuffed doll stuck with sewing pins stretched across the center. When no one was looking, Evangeline got the rickety wooden step-ladder out of the shed where they kept the pirogue. Once, twice, three times she raised up on her toes and flailed her arm to grab it. When her fingers wrapped around it, lightning sizzled down her arm. She cried out and dropped it. Smoke fluttered upward and she crouched on the ladder, rubbing her arm as tears sprang, watching the smoke as it traced a thin line in the sunshine, then faded away.

  “Evangeline, honey? Can you go to the store for me?” her gramma asked from inside the house. “I got the list.”

  Catching her breath, Evangeline clambered off the stool, grabbed up the hex, and stuffed it in the pocket of her jeans. It burned. Burned bad. She jumped in a little circle, then checked to see if there was smoke or if her pants were on fire, but no; she dashed inside and saw her grandmother with her straightened hair and grabbed up the list.

  “Going!” she ground out, and she flew down the path and ran for all she was worth to the graveyard.

  “Maman Brigitte!” she shouted, whirling in a circle. “Please come! I got something for you!”

  Between the tombs, dusty weeds baked; her hand throbbed and suddenly—

&nb
sp; Immediately—

  Without warning—

  A horrible fear washed over her like the river water at her baptism. Washed right over her, clogged her throat; there was a pin-prick stabbing against the walls of her balloon heart.

  Danger.

  Terror.

  She was rooted.

  Il arrive.

  Farther down in the City of the Dead, a shadow hovered. Her eyes watered as it stretched upwards, sideways, floating and undulating like something underneath the bayou water; she thought tentacles and then she forced herself not to think at all because if this was who she thought it was, she didn’t want to call him to her.

  I got the hex, she reminded herself. But she didn’t know if it would work.

  The shadow thickened, darkened. Blacker than black.

  She blinked, and the next thing she knew, a tall, thin black man in a robe and a cloth wrapped around his head stared at her with purple-black eyes from atop the pile of bricks where her mother’s hair was buried. Dizzying sickness clutched at her stomach and she staggered one step to the left. The hex burned a mark on her thigh—she was sure of it—but she pressed her hand against it; her head pounded with warning drumbeats. Or maybe it was just her heart, ready to explode.

  “Hello, lovely one,” said the man. His smile was as pleasant as Baron Samedi’s. He raised a hand and pointed at her. His whole arm seemed to stretch like a garden hose. “What do you have there on this fine afternoon?”

  The ground under her feet shifted and rumbled. He looked startled. Was it the loas’ army of the dead? Then his face kind of closed in on itself. Blurry and hard to see, the crackling air waved around him. Tentacles.

  “I got something to keep you away,” she said, raising her chin. She was shaking so hard she thought she might throw up. This was Nyarlahotep, the devil-god who might kill Maman Brigitte and her husband and their army. And she was just one skinny little human girl.

  And then all the blurriness was gone. She stared hard at him; at dark brows and heavy lashes, deep, dark-brown eyes and a pleasant smile. He was actually pretty good-looking, which was a shock, because he was evil.

  “Why do you want to keep me away?” he asked and his voice lulled on a breeze, soft and gentle. He tilted his head. He couldn’t be more than eighteen.

  Before she could answer, a tear spilled down his left cheek and spattered in the dust. He dropped to his knees and reached down, raised up his hand and showed her a single red rose petal—had to be one of Maman Brigitte’s.

  “I love her,” he murmured. “I love that beautiful coffin queen.”

  She stared at him. She didn’t know what to say. Another tear coursed down his face and he raised the petal to his lips. He kissed it. “She is my lady, my life.”

  “She’s no one’s life,” Evangeline said. “She’s dead.”

  “Where I come from, what I am, there are so many variations on that theme. There’s not just dead and alive. There are worlds…” he trailed off. Then he said, “You don’t need to worry about your mother, dear one. The only thing wrong with her is that she misses you.”

  Evangeline’s mouth dropped open. He nodded. “Yes, she and I have talked.”

  Her legs went out from underneath her. She fell hard onto the dusty ground and the hex burned into her thigh. She cried out.

  He stayed where he was but knelt on one knee like a prince and reached one hand out to her. “Sha?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, but tears coursed down her cheeks. “Can you make her come up? My maman?”

  He paused. “Maybe.”

  And then she remembered about the war. The Crawling Chaos. The tentacles. He wanted to kill Maman Brigitte.

  “No,” he said. “I do not want to kill her. I love her.”

  Her eyes widened. “Can you read my mind?”

  She turned and ran all the way home, swearing to herself that she would stay away.

  ***

  But the night of the war, the night, la nuit:

  Beau took her to the Krewe of Boo Halloween parade because some girl he liked was jiggling her stuff on the Frankenstein float. Hundreds of people with skull faces danced and marched down the streets while thousands of people cheered, and the glowing floats towered into the sky like the Egyptian pyramids—mummies plus werewolves, ghosts, vampires, skeletons. Beau kept hold of her hand while he waved at his girl. The drums were screaming, shrieking, and she told Beau over and over that she was not a little kid and she wanted to go trick-or-treating, not stand there looking stupid in her witch costume. She had a pumpkin-shaped trick-or-treat bag. The hex was lying at the bottom of it and she could smell stinky burning felt. She wished she had made a costume to look like Maman Brigitte, but she hadn’t known the loa then, and anyway, Maman Brigitte was beautiful.

  “I’ll come back and meet you here,” Evangeline told Beau, but he wasn’t even listening to her. The drums shouted and her ears pounded and her balloon-heart threatened to lift her up into the sky—up—

  She gasped. The sky was pitch black; there were no stars. Not a one. She tugged at Beau’s hand until he looked down at her and said, “What?” in an irritated tone of voice. She pointed upward and he looked, huffed, and started back down at her again. “What?” he said again.

  “There are no stars.” Her head was thundering with the drum-talk. Nyarlahotep, Nyarlahotep. Il arrive!

  Beau scoffed. “What are you talking about, girl?’

  He didn’t—couldn’t—see it. Didn’t understand the drums. Evangeline looked up again, looked hard, hoping that she had imagined it. In the bleak black sky, something blacker swirled and moved, crawling across a field of ebony; tentacles and talons pulsated in and out of existence. Something as big as the moon threw back its head and teeth towering at a height beyond her ability to understand dripped with blood.

  “Beau, Beau!” she shouted.

  But her cries were lost in the chaos of the parade, and Beau’s attention was riveted on the beautiful Frankenstein girl who sauntered toward him in a tiny black-and-red top and a spangly black skirt. Evangeline yanked his hand. He didn’t even notice. The girl was skakin’ her boobs and telling Beau that she had to be careful because Antoine might see them.

  The drums were screaming, shrieking. It gange! He is winning! Nyarlahotep was going to kill Maman Brigitte!

  “No!” Evangeline cried, and she dropped to the ground, breaking Beau’s grip. He might have shouted but she didn’t hear him; she scrambled to her feet and ran out of the crowd, arms failing, shouting, “Out of my way! Get out of my way!” She went wild, baring her teeth and hitting and pushing; she would have bitten someone to get them to move if she’d had to. Lots of folks were drunk and they laughed as they wobbled and stepped aside.

  Someone shouted, “It’s all just pretend, honey!”

  And then she was running for all she was worth to the graveyard, rolled by the drums—

  La guerre Maman Brigitte Baron Samedi the war the war the war

  —falling and struggling to get back up as the ground buckled. The entire world was pitch dark; green light blazed down from the sky, shoot-shoot-shoot like falling stars; a thousand skeletons charged forward, scrambling over the tombs in the city of the dead; the earth broke and spewed into the air, bringing bones and grinning skulls that assembled into skeletons as they plummeted back against the dirt. They charged forward; she gaped as her cousin Jimmy flew past. In their midst, Baron Samedi rode a sort of float drawn by skeletal horses with black plumes in their manes of smoke.

  Then strange, luminous things shambled from the direction opposite the skeletons. They were human-shaped, their faces elongated; they sharpened and became people she could see through: ghosts. Phantoms. And carried on the shoulders of two of them, Maman Brigitte was urging the horde of boogies toward the skeletons.

  “Maman Brigitte! Baron Samedi! I have a hex! I can
help!” she shouted. She pulled it from her pumpkin-shaped trick-or-treat bag and lifted it up.

  A roar exploded the tombs nearest her, blam-blam-blam; the sky broke apart and pieces careened and cartwheeled, slicing away more of the starless night. Skeletons and ghosts dervished and whirled; the Crawling Chaos blared out a sound that threw Evangeline to the ground and made her throw up. Darkness ground down on her like a falling marble angel. Then someone’s hand brushed hers, cold and hard and bony. Whoever it was took her hex. She tried to look up, but it was too much for her. Pain, swirling, vomiting, fainting.

  Her eyes closed.

  Heat.

  ***

  Heat.

  On her eyelids.

  Evangeline groaned and opened her eyes. Golden dawn shone down on her. The air was still. Her witch costume was thick with red dirt.

  She rose up on her elbows. All around her, blood-soaked bones were heaped like haystacks—legs, arms, spines, skulls. Crimson. Inert. And on the tallest heap, Baron Samedi was stretched out on his back, arms and legs spread-eagled, head tipped. His mouth was open; his eyes were closed. His suit was soaked in blood. His red rose was missing.

  Farther back in the graveyard, a man in a robe with a cloth around his head was trudging away, his back to Evangeline. Head bowed, shuffling through the weeds and dusty dirt. He turned and looked at her. The Black Man, Old Pharaoh. He looked old now, not eighteen. He looked like he had given up, shot his dog, and doused his truck with gasoline.

  “Ma sha.”

  Maman Brigitte appeared, standing over Baron Samedi, dipping her hands into his chest, her fingerbones scooping up thick, viscous blood, and covering her face with the gore of her husband. “Ma petite, ma belle.” She smiled down at Evangeline and gestured for her come closer. “Merci. Thank you.”

  Evangeline could not find her voice. It had floated away. All she could do was stare as Maman Brigitte, white face blood red, descended from the bone pyramid with her arms outstretched. The bones beneath her feet cracked and shattered. Evangeline shrank back, and then Maman Brigitte laughed and wiped her own cheeks with the hem of her black lace shroud. The blood was still there, smeared all around.