The monstrous, p.34
The Monstrous, page 34
Now, I don’t mean to be rude, but a lot of women find God when their men leave them, know what I mean? And Ms. Samedi’s friends had found religion big time. Not just Christianity, though. I met up with Tamasha Woodfall, an old follower who lived in an apartment full of plants by the river, where she sat on an overstuffed stripey sofa watching the boats, her corkscrew copper hair piled on and around her head, her beads and bangles and bracelets clattering every time she moved her arms. Her plumpness protected her from being dated to any era, but I figured the stuff in her apartment went back at least sixty years. I liked her a lot, but she was crazy as a loon.
“Warena didn’t just have knowledge of the old religion, she was a living part of the process,” she told me. “Come over here and sit by me, boy.”
Frankly I didn’t know what she meant at all, and admitted it. And I wasn’t going to sit beside her either, because I could tell the old broad had wandering hands. “Are you talking about love potions, curses, stuff like that?” I had to ask.
“Oh, that’s just front-of-house sales,” she said, waving the idea aside. “And nobody needs love potions, they just need to get in touch with themselves and their sex-u-al-ity, you know?” She smoothed her fingers down the side of her breast, and I could see she’d be big trouble after dark and a few whiskies. It’s the old ones you have to watch out for.
“So what did Warena do that other people couldn’t?”
“All kinds of things. But her biggest talent? She could restore a form of life.”
“You mean she could bring someone back from the dead?”
“I wouldn’t use those words exactly, ’cause it’s not like that. I mean, the corporeal remains stay behind and go down to the grave, bless the Lord. It was more—a conjuration.”
I wasn’t sure there was such a word, but gave her the benefit of the doubt. “You ever see this happen?”
“Oh sure, plenty of times.”
“How did it work?”
“The usual way. There was a service, songs and prayers, a series of incantations, rituals to observe, certain powdered herbs and minerals scattered in a proscribed sequence—sometimes she used the blood of a chicken, but I think some of that was for show, you know, so the clients felt they was getting value for their money.”
“And what did they get? I mean, at the end?”
“A restoration of the spirit, like I said, entirely separate from the body, but a kind of—” she watched the wide grey river for a minute, carefully formulating her words, “—essence of the departed. It wouldn’t stay long, a day or two at the most, but it was most definitely visible. When my Sammy died she brought him back to me, just for a few hours.”
“Sammy was your husband?”
“No, my dog, praise Jesus.”
“But what was the point?” I wondered if I was missing something obvious. “Why bring someone’s spirit back at all?”
“Bless you, to bring peace to those left behind, of course. How many times have you wanted someone back, just for a few moments, for one last look of tenderness?”
I realized that she was staring intently at me. “But you’ve never lost anyone, have you?” She made it sound almost sad.
“No,” I admitted. “No one really close. I don’t know much about death.”
“Then you don’t know about love, neither. You should testify to Christ the Lord and find the love.”
The conversation closed quickly after that, but I promised to look in on her again if I heard anything more. The other woman I went to see was Missy Allbright, who was nothing like her name, and lived on the first floor of a rundown apartment out in Metairie. The stairs were dark, the room was dark, and she was dressed in black. The floor was covered in cats, some of them stuffed, and I couldn’t tell which ones were alive as I stumbled through them to her guest chair.
“I’d give you some tea but I don’t really want you to stay that long,” she announced, seating herself opposite.
“Well, at least you’re honest.”
“I have to tell you no good will come of mentioning that woman,” she told me straight off. “Warena Samedi—her real name was Miriam Fellowes but that didn’t sound so enticing to the press—underneath that pretty hide she was a vengeful, messed-up, mean old bitch.”
I remarked that she didn’t look so old in the pictures I had seen.
“That’s ’cause she never again let herself be photographed after she was thirty. She played with fire all her life and got old real fast. You don’t race an engine without wearing down the parts.”
I asked Missy if she’d read the book about Warena. “I did, and I can tell you there wasn’t one word of truth in it.”
“But did she really have a gift?” I asked.
“I can’t deny her that, but the way she used it—well, that wasn’t how we were taught.”
“You have it too?”
She caught the rise in my voice. “Why is it everyone thinks she was the only one with special abilities?”
“She had good PR and prominent tits,” I ventured.
That got a laugh from Missy. “Maybe you and I’ll have some ginger tea.”
We talked until it got even darker. I thought the storm was going to suck the windows clean out of the room. “There was only one man she ever really loved,” Missy told me. “You should have heard the sweet music they made in that bar of a night. Stormy worshipped her, but he couldn’t give her what she needed.”
“What did she need?”
“More. More of everything. The problem was that by this time she couldn’t turn it off.”
“Turn what off?”
“The sex energy, the power, the darkness that channeled right through her and kept on going until she became its slave. It destroyed everything around her and it finally killed her. After she was gone old Stormy lost around a hundred pounds, like something was eating him from the inside out.”
“How did Warena die?”
“She and Stormy were fighting all the time. She’d go out and stay missing for three, four days at a stretch, and he’d always take her back. Then she finally left him for good, and nobody saw her around here again. All I know about her death is what I read in the papers, but it was ugly. No one really found out the truth. The cops got a call late one night to a filthy house with a bunch of dead men in it, and the story goes she was sleeping with all of them. Of course, there was something weird right at the end. The city coroner got himself fired for incompetence, because he swore the men died after she did, even though they’d been killed with her knife and her prints were all over the handle.”
“That’s an incredible story,” I replied. “Did the state ever follow it up and find out what really happened?”
“They had their hands full, son. Katrina hit the shore five days later.”
I thought about Missy’s story all the way back to the hotel, and how it fitted with Stormy’s death. It seemed I was missing something, and that something was probably connected with Sam Threefinger, so that night I sat down at my laptop and did a little digging. Sam’s real name was Laurent DuChamp. He’d been in a soft-touch annex of the Louisiana State Penitentiary a couple of times for fencing stolen goods, and it seemed he hadn’t learned his lesson. He’d set up his antiques shop in 2002, after his last stretch. I wondered if he had approached Stormy about buying the piano before, so I called LaVinna, who told me it had been in storage for years. And that meant the first time Sam saw it after Warena’s death was when it appeared on the new stage.
The thing that struck me most was how Stormy had managed to cheat his old rival by destroying Warena’s most coveted possession at the moment of his demise. It was a kind of justice, but I wondered if there was more to it than that. I admit I wanted an ending; I had the material for a good article, but needed to give it a more satisfying punchline.
The next morning it seemed the storm had blown itself out, but Ren called me to say his plane had been grounded because Louis Armstrong Airport was in the eye of the storm, and the worst was yet to come, so rather than sitting around cooling my heels waiting for Sam Threefinger to call me, I decided to take a cab over to his store.
The sign on the door said closed and the place was locked up tight. I cupped my hands and peered through the rain-streaked window. The interior was so murky it could have been filled with pond water. It was mainly cluttered with 1960s furniture and musical instruments, but looked as if no one had been there for days. I talked the cabdriver into taking me out to Sam’s house. He didn’t want to go there, complained it was beyond his working area, the weather was too bad and he wouldn’t wait around for me to come back, but by this time I was getting desperate. Ren was delayed, I’d already spent my fee for the piece just holing up at the hotel, and there was no other work on the horizon. I needed to sell the story, period.
The rain was thundering loud enough to drown out the cab’s radio. We came off the I-10 at Lovola, left the main strip and turned into a chain of tree-filled avenues. The house had an antebellum grandeur that seemed out of place. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the old Rosedown Plantation outside St. Francisville, with Greek Revival–style wings and a long verandah, only scaled down to fit a modern neighborhood—because this house was freshly painted and no more than ten years old. I rang, then knocked on the screen doors, but there was no answer. By that time the damned cabdriver had slammed into reverse and beaten a retreat from the property.
I could do nothing but circle the house and see if Threefinger was out back somewhere. Although the lawns were neatly trimmed, water was pooling fast on the grass and I was quickly covered in mud. The rear screen door was bashed in, the nets torn, the door hanging off its hinges. I tried to see inside but it was too dark to make anything out. I should have called the cops right then, but just didn’t think of it. There was no one around, and I couldn’t see across the street, so I went in.
The house lights weren’t working but I had a lighter in my pocket. It looked like there had been a fight of some kind in the downstairs rooms; a chair lay on its side, and what I thought at first was torn-up paper proved to be broken white crockery. The rugs were squashy with blown-in rainfall. Not wanting to risk getting shot as an intruder, I called out Sam’s name a couple of times, but there was no answer. I was about to leave when I heard the ceiling floorboards creak.
I figured maybe Threefinger had been attacked by someone from Stormy’s who blamed him for the old man’s death and wanted to make a point about it. You get that feeling about New Orleans; there are plenty of nice people, and plenty of crazies looking to get back at the world. Wherever you get old-school religion, it follows you find old-school vengeance. I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of looking upstairs with no lights and no weapon, but I had no other choice. Besides, I had no personal beef with Threefinger, and for all I knew the guy could have had a heart attack. I fantasized a heroic race to the hospital, where the recovering old man would pour out his heart to give me a nice dramatic wraparound to the story.
I could smell something acrid, like burning paper that had been put out. As I climbed the stairs, the rain pounding on the roof grew louder. It was hard to see, but I could make out a long brown corridor leading to several big rooms, most with their doors open. I figured the one at the front was the master bedroom. I could see something moving beneath its windows, wrapped in a gray blanket. As I came closer, the pile shook a little and shifted backwards.
“Stay away,” it suddenly warned, “don’t get any nearer.” The room stank of whisky. A red, puffy face emerged from the blanket cocoon and stared blearily back. Sam looked like shit. “Who the hell are you?” he asked, pushing to his feet.
I explained I’d been leaving messages for him, and wanted to talk about what happened at Stormy’s. I figured he could at least give me some background to their feud, and I’d be able to give the article some shape. I had the end, I just needed the beginning, or so I thought until Sam said, “He’s back,” and I knew he meant Stormy, that somehow his guilt over the old man’s death had manifested itself in the kind of magic the old women professed to believe in. I didn’t buy the voodoo end of the deal, but it gave me a great angle.
“He’s dead,” I said, “I saw them take Stormy off to the morgue. What happened here?”
“Nothing.” Sam had suddenly sensed he was talking to a stranger and shut his mouth. “This is private property. You should go now.”
“You’ve had some storm damage downstairs. Back door’s blown in.”
“That weren’t no storm, fool, it was him.”
“Stormy.”
“Who else?”
“Tamasha Woodfall told me that Warena could bring people’s souls back from the dead, but only for a short time. If Sam’s spirit returned and you think you saw him, he’s gone now. It’s over.” Disabusing people of their notions is no way to win friendship, so I was trying to go along with him.
He gave no reply. Shuffling over to the liquor cabinet, he filled a tumbler, keeping the blanket hitched around his shoulders. “See, that’s the problem, right there,” he said. “Outsiders never see the full picture. You think he’d just turn up and go away again? Revenants come back for a reason, and they stay until they’ve done the job. Most appear so they can give the living some comfort. You get a hug like a warm breeze, they dry away a tear, then they’re gone. Sam’s back to do some damage.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“Don’t fuck around with me, sonny. You been speaking to people, you know damn well why he’s come back.”
“Well, there’s no one here now.”
“You can’t be sure, with this rain keeping up.”
I didn’t understand what the rain had to do with it. “Look, I’ll go and I’ll close the back door on my way out.”
“No.” Suddenly I knew he was terrified of being left alone. “LaVinna told me who you are. You want an interview, I’ll be happy to give it to you, but downstairs where I can keep an eye on the place.”
We moved to the front parlor, but couldn’t get the power up. It really looked like there had been a fight in the room. Sam was twitchy as hell, shifting back and forth, checking both sides of the house. “He wants to give me the piano,” he said, and now I knew I was dealing with a crazy man.
“The piano’s gone,” I reminded him.
“No, you don’t understand.” He held up his hand and cocked his ear. “Listen, damn it. You hear that?”
And there, behind the drumming rain, I swear I heard something like a piano being played. No, not played, jangled, like a cat was trapped inside it and was rolling around on the wires. “What is that?” I asked.
“So you do hear it.”
But now the rain renewed its strength and the sound was lost once more. We both stood in the middle of the room listening like a pair of crazies. I knew I was being a fool, half expecting a snaggletoothed corpse to coming walking through the porch door with its arms outstretched like a character from an old EC comic, but the dark house, the storm, the crazy old man all got to me.
Then I heard it again, closer this time, a sound like a harpsichord being dropped on its side, discordant high notes and bass echoes that underscored the movement of something shifting hesitantly outside the walls. With each step there was a glissando, as if someone was dragging a piano, bumping and crashing it.
“You do hear that.” Sam was triumphant but terrified.
“Give me your car keys, I’ll get you out of here,” I told him.
“They’re upstairs on my dresser.” He couldn’t take his eyes from the front door, which was strobing with the shadows of the storm-beaten trees.
“I’ll go get them.”
“No, don’t leave me alone!”
“Then you get them.” He was spooking me now. This, I knew, was how voodoo worked, spreading its fear like a contagion, turning skeptics into believers. I followed his eyes as he turned his gaze toward each of the windows, listening. He was tracking its path around the house. The blinds were all down, but I could see a shadow passing from one bay to the next. I ran for the stairs. I found a set of Oldsmobile keys and grabbed them, then headed back, but halted on the landing. The terrible jangling was inside now. I looked down and saw that the doors I had propped shut had been kicked apart. Something had dragged itself inside. I tried to find Sam, but figured he had retreated into a corner behind the stairs.
As I came down, I looked between the banisters. I had only met Stormy alive once, and I suppose the thing below represented him. It was tall and bony, and still wore a baseball cap, but it walked as if moving on broken stilts. The piano’s wires were threaded through its wasted body, and where its stomach should have been keys and cables were strung with bits of dried-out gut. Wires stuck out everywhere, through staring red eyes, elbows, leg bones and vertebrae. The fingers looked like piano keys, but it was hard to tell where meat and wood met. Warena’s revival power lived on, but Stormy’s spirit had been mashed with the piano in such a way that both had come back as one tortured creature. It stumped and staggered toward Sam, who was scrabbling away in a corner of the parlor, whimpering and pleading.
The strung-up keyboard fingers tore at his face and throat, wires slashing and stinging across his flesh, ripped at his soft stomach until I couldn’t tell where Sam ended and the piano-man began. The whole thing was a bloody mess of flesh and wood and steel, and although it tried to pull away at the end of the attack, I could already see it unraveling and falling apart. The keys bounced to the floor, the wires lost their tautness, and the spirit of Stormy Beauregard evaporated, leaving behind a few sticks of varnished wood and the splintered remains of a man who looked like he’d been pistol-whipped with piano wire and eviscerated. And as the last of Stormy faded, I swear I heard a few chords play out in perfect harmony, before they were swamped by the drumming of the rain.
