Tomb It May Concern

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Southern Gothic
I. Blood – Scene II
New Orleans, Louisiana, 1822
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“Life was created in the valleys. It blew up into the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.”
(William Faulkner. As I Lay Dying)

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With the mid-dinner hush fallen over Rue Royal, the wrought iron lattice spilling it’s mottled shades over the wide gallery overlooking the narrow strip of earth below, she slips undetected to peer across the road between the slats in the shutters of the wide French doors, closed to the mezzanine. Already, Anna finds a wooden ladder propped against the lamp post at the cross-street, and a man is descending with the torch used to light it. Some passersby stop and marvel for a moment, admiring the new invention. Other hurry on, their lanterns in hand – conspicuous only as much as they allow themselves to appear. Life trickles through the streets with the wash water; part of Mayor Roffignac’s newest sanitation effort, it turns the gutters to mud where stray dogs scavenge through the refuse and the human waste with the cockroaches and the rats.

Not so strange that she imagines what the rough earth would feel like beneath her bare feet, Anna savours it a moment: longing to know if the sour scent of sweat from the unwashed traders and the heat and the garbage is all as raw and vibrant as she imagines it to be. It must be frightening. It must be wonderful.

“Miss?”

She gestures that he should stay quiet, pressing a gloved finger to her mouth.

If she strains, if she stays perfectly quiet, she can almost hear the dancers at Place du Cirque, their feet hitting the ground in time with the drums. It’s the sound of clattering bones. It’s the sound of life pulsing from the depths of the earth, concentrated just beyond the palisade walls.

Instead of explaining this to him, she fixes Cody with a baleful look.

“She can hear you,” she mouths, reminding Cody of the thinness of the walls. The Mam’zelle is home this evening, which makes Anna’s covetous glances outdoors all the more furtive. Narrowing her eyes at the street below, she searches for a face that only emerges just before the day settles; when night hungers the most for the last slivers of bruised and bloodied sky. He’s come often since the first twilight – the evening in the garden that had ended abruptly with a clatter from the upper levels of Mama’s townhouse that brought Mathilde into the street, shouting for the gens d’armes and for water to douse the blaze from a fallen candle on the Mam’zelle’s altar to St. Expedite.

Perhaps its fanciful that Anna’s come to think of the strange young man who appears and vanishes so suddenly as a spectre. Somehow, she believes she’ll recognize him when he materializes again, even though she’s never seen his face, and the one thing he graciously left her with was more ephemeral than a name or a promise that he’d visit again: a kiss.

Yet, Anna is certain of his return, as certain as she is that the same strange young man is the one responsible for scaling the porte-cochère gates and setting the fire. Surely, the thief was aware of his own cleverness: he’d set an ample distraction, disappearing with the Mam’zelle’s silver and allowing himself to be seen by the one person who was least likely to give him away.

What else would send the Mam’zelle into such a rage? What else would set the Mam’zelle to perfuming the entire house with the smell of pungent roots and rusting iron nails, the noxious vinegars and loamy graveyard dirt that promised a thousandfold retribution once the work was done and the prayers were said?

Over her shoulder, she flashes Cody a rogue grin – mischief pulling her features near skeletal in the dim light. She catches her reflection in the mirror beyond his shoulder: Ivory pale, her eyes heavily ringed from sleeplessness, she seems a part of the shadows, but as long as the Mam’zelle keeps to her kitchen, obsessed with revenge, Anna lives in clandestine bursts.

“Come on, now, Miss Anna,” Cody whispers, debating whether or not he should edge closer into the front room, now that its clear she’s alone. He looks like he wants to cross himself. Not that such a gesture would help. Mama’s told her that they’re all connected, somehow – the whites and the blacks and the shades in between, their religions mixed in for good measure. It’s a nice idea that doesn’t seem to matter in practice: they’ve opened Girod Street Cemetery just this year to keep the Protestants away from the Catholic burials.

“It ain’t right for no lady to go skulking around like that,” Cody insists. “You’ll put a fright into the servants.”

“Ah’m not a lady,” she mutters below her breath in a tone that would get her slapped if Mama were to hear. “And no one’s here. It’s Sunday. They’ll be at the Commons.” She purses her lips. “Can’t you hear the drums?”

Cody doesn’t, that much is obvious by the way the tension unwinds from his shoulders. Still, he doesn’t fully step into the darkened parlour. Cody Robbins isn’t a complete fool. He knows his place. Maybe he even senses something strange about her – something more than the thin excuse of her “illness” that keeps everyone else at a distance – not that he’ll admit it.

Even the very best appearances are often unable to conceal the ugly things masked over by fashionable presentation:

The salle, for example, is fit for entertaining, certainly – heart pine and trimmed in cotton and lace; a mix of creams and rich red-browns that surely have red brick and Mam’zelle’s urine mixed in and embedded between the floorboards with the wash water for protection from their enemies.

Anna herself smells faintly of anise and vetiver, perfumed herbs still clinging to her skirts from the sachets kept in the armoire – a trick to mask the distinctive, cold perfume of her flesh.

Though he is unbothered by these things, Cody, however, is unique for the very simple fact that he is the only person to offer Anna his shy smile. It lingers around his mouth and his blue eyes; hesitant little quivers of invitation that draws her attention to the faint laugh lines etched into his tawny skin.

A traitorous voice in the deepest recess of her mind reminds her that a smile is not the same as a kiss, and only one person has been so fearless to attempt that. It makes her all the more earnest to be left to her own devices this evening.

“I brought coffee from the market,” he ventures, “and sugar? I could have Tante make some fresh for you.”

He hesitates as if he wants to offer something more. His company, she thinks. If Anna were to ask for it, surely, Cody would willingly sit with her, even if it meant a lashing from the Mam’zelle later on.

Between them, there is the knowledge of the precise way in which a handful of years, once accentuating the very things that create childhood companionship, turn into the increasingly awkward appetites of adolescence.

“You could take it to the court yard?” he persists, the unasked question hanging between them like silken bit of spider web. “I cleaned the fountain just this morning.”

“Is the garden dark, now?” she asks, her attention lingering on the boys roughhousing on the corner; the sunset making them squint when they turn to see if she’s ventured out to the gallery. From beneath her lashes, Anna regards them with a mixture of well-concealed envy and absent interest. “Is that why you’re asking, Cody? Because you know Ah care for coffee about as much as Ah care about enjoyin’ it alone.”

Shamed, Cody ducks his sandy blond head, the hat in his hands twisting with worry. “I’m sorry, Miss Anna, but Mam’zelle said –”

Coolly, she turns from the window, folding her hands before her neatly, her head held high as she regards him. Long necked, slim-wristed, poor, pale, sickly Anna Marie stares him down in a manner that dares him to challenge her. She lifts an eyebrow, and he cracks ever so slightly like a porcelain cup.

Cody wets his lips. “I-I am sorry,” he says again. He doesn’t turn away, however, and there’s an earnestness about him that makes it seem genuine, the sorrow he wears plainly. “It wouldn’t be right t’ keep your company.”

“Because of what they say,” she says, bitterness making her sound older than her seventeen years. She can’t squash the stab of disappointment quickly enough. What “they say” is gutter talk: Whispers passed under the shelter of cloaked corners in secret amongst the bondspeople, telltale untruths exchanged for lingering glances as she passes them in the halls. These things have weight; Anna senses them as surely as she would feel a hand laid between her shoulder blades. (Sorcière. Salope. Revenant. Rougarou. Cursed.)

It’s enough to chalk out markings below the rugs; seals writ out in languages so old that there’s no one left alive to remember what they mean, and always framed in the telltale hexagon that lets her know Mama’s been at work on her behalf. Without them, she’s been told, without Mam’zelle Raven’s protection, she’s as good as picked out her pine box and had it sized to fit the top shelf in the family crypt.

Cody seems surprised. “N-no? Because I’m beneath you.”

So preoccupied in her own moribund imagination, at this confession, Anna recoils as if she’s been slapped.

Cody, at least, has the decency to look embarrassed, but his expression quickly gives way to fear. Perhaps Anna’s perfected her mother’s look of scorn too well. Perhaps she’s used her own breed of sorcery to convince him she can do him harm. (Perhaps the rumours of her dalliances with the devil precede her, she thinks with no shortage of derision.) Instantly, she wishes she hadn’t put on airs. Shame strikes her below the ribcage. On impulse, her fingers flutter to the spot where regret begins to thicken.

“I-I’m sorry, Miss A-Anna. That was u-un-unacceptable,” he hurries to apologize, fumbling the words like he fumbles his cap between his hands. The fabric twists, and while Cody flushes scarlet, Anna takes an unconscious step forward – wanting to comfort him but finding herself mesmerized by the way his cheeks redden with the heat of humiliation. “I should’na – I should’na said nothin’ so outta line. Please –” He flinches, as if expecting a reprimand by way of an open palm to his face. “Please don’t –”

Anna stops her curious progression towards him, seeing that he shrinks away and feeling her stomach plummet in the same breath. Like an indistinct reminder of the days spent fasting for Lent, something tickles the roof of her mouth. Her palette is dry, and in her ears, she imagines she can hear the sound of a heartbeat. It’s Cody’s.

He expects that she’ll hurt him, she realizes – this boy who she’s known as long as she’s been in the company of the Mam’zelle. Her friend through forcible circumstance, but her friend in whatever awkward capacity Cody Robbins could offer the likes of her. Never once has she given him reason to fear her so.

A lump lodges midway down her throat. She turns from him, her vision blurring unexpectedly.

In that moment, a pleasant tingle lights across the dimly-lit periphery of her consciousness. Cody, babbling, fades in increments beneath the sensation of familiarity: the knowledge that she is being watched.

It’s as if a shroud is drawn across the face of the world, and everything dulls to feather-soft dullness except the one, insistent pull of recognition:

He’s here, she realizes. He’s come at last. The thief.

She doesn’t pause to consider how she knows this. Her feet move of without will of their own, cold toes brushing the cotton of her underskirts as she moves over the floor.

Drawn to the gallery, Anna forgets that with the shutters closed to the outside world, it’s impossible for anyone to spy the front rooms so high above the streets. There are certain things that offer no logical explanation; the sudden thrum of her pulse in her ears, the intuitive need to see him again for herself, to see for certain that he wasn’t merely a product of fantasy –

She’s fleeing to the doors and the mezzanine beyond even as Cody rushes after her; reaching; fingers grazing her sleeve and forgetting propriety altogether in the panic that Anna has so easily forgotten –

She sees none of this and hears less. There’s a deafening drone in her ears that wasn’t there a moment ago; it spills into a velvet brush of invitation that rubs across her nerves and sets them ablaze.

“P-please, Anna,” Cody stammers, “don’t tell Mam’zelle Raven.”

It halts her in her tracks, her cotton skirts swinging against the backs of her legs as she reaches the French doors, but its not warning enough to stop Cody’s momentum as she turns halfway to face him. Crashing together, the pair tear through the shutters as they racket outwards into the balmy evening. With the rickety slap of bone-dry cypress hitting the bricked exterior of the townhouse and Cody’s reach catching her about the waist, both stagger into the shadows on the gallery in a crippled waltz, dragged off-center by the tangling fabric of her dress around their legs.

There’s a shout from the street below. The boys on the corner have seen her.

She’s falling, she realizes distantly, the motion slowing as the seconds crawl by. Anna floats, hands reaching far too slowly into the waxy green canopy of scarlet bougainvillea that spills over the wrought iron. Through the lace enshrouding her fingers, she feels cold metal as she clutches at the railing. Blossoms crush between her hands. The leaves slide from beneath her grasp, and without purchase, there is nothing to halt her tumbling face-first descent into the canopy of variegated leaves.

“Miss Anna!” Cody exclaims, and at once, the seconds spin together with a whirl of cool green, a flash of a smirking, upturned face on the street below, and a glimpse of the gallery railing rushing to meet her face.

She stalls, somehow, a ringing “thud” halting her progress before she finds herself blinking away a hot and rapidly prickling wash of numbness blanketing the lower half of her face.

“Miss Anna!” Cody says again from just above her. She blinks, not understanding fully what has just happened. He’s pulling her up by the shoulders, trying to urge her gently into a seated position. She blinks again against hot tears, registering vaguely that something bad has happened – not because she understands that the disjointed lancet of pain preceding the scalding dye spreading down her front in a rich shade of carmine is hers… but because all she can see is the blood.

Fingers to her lower lip, she blinks dazedly at her once cream-coloured lace gloves.

The smear of heat dribbles over her lower lip and down her chin.

Anna’s vision shrinks and expands with her breath, the edges fading to darkness as she looks up to find Cody standing over her, his worried expression turning to horror as each pulse in her ears escalates in time with the oozing warmth.

It drips from her chin to her lap, turning black with the falling night.

It’s sticky and as sweet as praline syrup.

“Cody?” she whispers, a thread of calm expanding with the miasma of rising scent that surrounds her; that makes her shut her eyes sluggishly. It makes her tongue thicken in her mouth.

It smells of scrubbed copper pans and rusting iron gates; it tingles her nose and causes her back teeth to click together involuntarily.

On the verge of fainting, Anna opens her eyes. She is blind to the dark, save for the smell: It guides her, coaxing her tongue from her mouth to take a tentative taste.

“Cody, Ah’m cold,” she says with effort, reaching for him blindly, knowing by instinct that if she could only draw him to her, she could share in his warmth: it pulses like a beacon; so close, so comforting.

“Miss Anna, your chin – you’ve split your chin on the rail!” Cody says, fumbling to wrap his arms around her. He wants to carry her into the house.

“Feast.” The command brushes across her consciousness like the cool caress of a serpent’s skin. Anna shivers, reaching involuntarily. Her eyes flutter open from her swoon to find Cody has been successful in his effort to lift her to his lap. Head lolling against his shoulder, she moans weakly beneath the wings of rushing darkness. Vaguely, Anna realizes it reminds her of folds of silk brocade brushing together: deeply soothing, and below that, even further, is the chugging, steady percussion that calls forth a longing so deep she can barely ask for help to save her from its thrall.

“Tell me what to do, Miss Anna,” Cody says fearfully. “Whatever I can do.”

But Cody’s done enough by just being there, and as Anna’s sight darkens to the deepest night, she rests her head under his chin with a shudder and a sigh, and surrenders to the deepest part of herself that desires nothing more to draw nearer to the sound of the drums.

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To be continued...
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Post Script:

Rather than pointing out my effective form of over-the-head cruelty in not including a post script in the previous two instalments of this story that would adequately illustrate the research peppering this bit of fiction, I’ve decided to compensate. As it were, I would assume that were I to ask you directly, “What does ‘the Goat Without Horns’ refer to without resorting to Google?” I’d likely receive a few blank stares. Likely. Not a hundred percent certain that everyone passing through would be unaware that such a thing refers to human sacrifice, but likely. I’ve decided to… make an effort at playing fair, because no one likes it when a nuance is misplaced:

- Gens d’armes: The police and fire brigade. Loosely organized, not wholly effective – most relied upon during Roffignac’s mayorship to “help put out fires, repress tumult, and keep the negro population in a properly submissive state” (Kendall’s History of New Orleans. p 118).

- Gens de couleurs libres: “Free people of colour.”

- Girod Street Cemetery: Ah, one of my favourite Cities of the Dead. I’ve frolicked through Lafayette no. one and St. Louis no. one, Holt Cemetery and Metairie, and now, my fanfiction writing career has led me to Girod. Girod no longer exists in the city today. Girod lies beneath the parking garage of the New Orleans Superdome. Its maintenance was left to families of those there entombed, but within a century it fell to disrepair, eventually being claimed by the steady overgrowth. It was excavated in 1970 with little fanfare, but with many rumours circulating about games of catch being played between workers with certain stray skulls from the crypts, its garnered some notoriety. (“Head’s up for Aunt Martha!”)

- Goat Without Horns: Purported as referencing human sacrifice. I’ve read several tests about Haitian Voudou and New Orleans voodoo as a syncretic practice, and much of it points to hearsay, rather than fact. It should be noted, however, that ritualized sacrifice factors into several religions, including a handful of Western traditions, and to attempt to summarize the meaning and methodology here in such a brief summary would be a disservice to anyone who’s studied theology at any point in time. It’s frequently glamorized, and rarely looked at analytically. (Hence the reason I’m writing fanfiction and not a dissertation. I am entitled to my guilty pleasures. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.)

- Le Grand Zombi: This is tricky. To really understand the reference, I’d recommend brushing up on Marie Laveau (the first) and some of the rumours revolving around her participation at Congo Square in the early 1800’s. Several accounts reference her entry to the Commons with a large snake draped around her neck – I would humbly propose that the snake was either a representation (or manifestation) of the Lwa (the deities), Aida Wedo or Damballah Wedo. Snakes feature predominantly in Voudou practice, so I wouldn’t be surprised. I make mention of this, and in particular, the appellation, because if you’ve heard anything about Haitian Voudou, you’ve likely come across mentions of zombification. It’s unlikely that the making of the “zombi” and the “Grand Zombi” are deserving of the same classification, but I’d be open to discuss it. On that same tack, I made mention of a “fish soup” in the previous chapter, which was intended as a reference to puffer fish – a paralytic fed to victims intended to become “zombified” after a prolonged period of asphyxiation. (Can these poor souls be considered “real” zombies? Well, they likely won’t eat your brains, but being poisoned and suffocated causing irreparable brain damage won’t make you any smarter. I was corrected once, a long time ago – and firmly at that – that zombification is an unsanctioned ritual practice that you likely won’t encounter because its has more founding in myth, paranoia and stereotype than anything else. If it can be found anywhere, it’s origins are likely to originate from Haiti. During the setting of this story, Haiti is called Saint Domingue, or Santo Domingo.)

- Place du Cirque: Also known as Circus Place, the Commons, or Congo Square. It’s official name on all maps was Place du Cirque, but for the purposes of this story, you ought to know a couple of things: it’s the place where slaves were permitted to congregate on Sundays (since assembly at all other times was forbidden), and the one place on the limits of what is now known as the French Quarter where dances were held.

- Porte-cochère: The “carriage door” or carriage gate, into which a horse (or mule, in this case, as mules tend to be of stouter stuff when it comes to the heat and humidity of New Orleans) can pass. The model for which the Rue Royal house is based on a floorplan of a Creole townhouse, an architectural style which populated the city after its second Great Fire, post 1794.

- The Pomegranate Tree: (Note the capitalized letters.) ishandahalf very firmly pointed out that massive, orange-blossomed overhanging metaphor. Yes. Yes! YES! Both Lucia and I and particularly interested in descent motifs – and in particular, dealing with initiation themes: the pre-liminal, liminal and post-liminal (or reintegration) of an individual as they undertake a journey. (“The Ante” follows this cycle as well, in case you were curious.) The pomegranate tree was a deliberate choice that also fits the climate and the par terre garden’s structure (courtyards were, at the time of this story, used for an outdoor kitchen and the privy as well). If you’re at all aware of your Greek mythology, its Persephone who is tricked into eating the seed of the fruit after being abducted by Hades, ensuring her return to the underworld each winter season (much to her mother’s dismay.)

- Once again, I extend my humblest thanks to those that reviewed last chapter. Your verbal donations make it a pleasure to continue toiling away: vikingprincess, penyn_1600, baruchan, vivienn, KateSilver, cajunspice, Pretty Shimmie, Zimo, Candyglue, knoxvilleloversc, l'etoile du tricherie, Wiccamage, ishandahalf, GothikStrawberry, gambitfan85, lonelyeyedgrrl, Jutwfiniei, allyg1990, Terez, enchantedlight, vega-de-la-lyre, and Elirrina. Much affection to you, from dear old Carmine.

- At last, the first slice of folklore comes to the fore. I’ve left one very brazen indicator of what dear little Anna Marie Darkholme’s “illness” is. Did you spot it?