Orfeo (18 page)

But his body was too young, too strong. Life throbbed within him, slowly knitting his bones and healing his flesh. The bruises purpled and faded like old flowers on a grave, and in their decay his skin revived, ebony black, his muscles strong and powerful yet.

Nor would the outside world leave him alone. There was the ruckus of chaotic disorder in the house, of people shouting and yelling at each other, heavy objects clattering as they moved. With a sigh he sat up on the bed and placed his head in his hands. The pain in his chest was an ache now, but he could ignore it if he didn’t move too quickly. Despite everything he was still alive.

How long had he been here? For the first time the question mattered to him, but the reason for this was even more painful than his fractured bones. Where was she now? What had they done to her? He wanted to cry once more, but the sound of smashing furniture and yelling beyond his room disturbed him again. Couldn’t these people let a man die in peace?

With a sigh he stood up and walked toward the door. He was still naked, careless of such distractions as clothes, and the bandage around his chest reeked slightly. Tugging it from his body he threw it to one side and opened the door.

At the bottom of the stairs, neighbors he just about recognized were screaming at each other as they attempted to push a chest out of the door to their apartment. She was large, matronly, her dark cheeks flushed with blood, her eyes wide and white as she shouted at the man, telling him to get a move on. He in turn yelled at her to leave it, that they had to get out as quickly as possible. A young child clutched to her mother’s skirt, looking up at Orfeo nervously.

“What’s going on?” he asked. His voice was weak and raspy, an unfamiliar creature in his throat, struggling to make its way past his parched lips. The woman looked up at him, her face registering shock as she saw him naked at the top of the stairs. Quickly she bundled the child behind her.

“Are you some hopped-up fool?” she asked. “The hurricane’s coming. We gotta get out the city as quickly as possible.”

“It’s true,” the man beside her replied wearily. “It’s a big one, they’re saying. Gonna rip up New Orleans.”

“Hurricane,” Orfeo repeated, struggling to understand the word.

The woman stared at him as though he were deranged—or worse. “That’s what I said. A hurricane. Now get yourself out of sight! There’s decent folk still in this building you know. Best thing that storm can do is come and wash the filth right off the streets.”

Ignoring her, Orfeo closed the door and sat down on the bed. Muffled shouting and bumps still came to him but his mind retreated from it all. The hurricane was coming. In his mind’s eye he saw it, a vision that made his skin turn cold. For an age he watched the winds scream like demons across New Orleans, the deluge falling like brimstone from heaven, destroying the city. The woman was both right and wrong: it would wash everything away, not only the filth. The righteous and the just would be caught up in the destruction along with those steeped in sin.

He whispered one word to himself: “Ardyce.”

The desolation of the past few days sloughed off him, like a snake emerging from its old skin, gleaming and new. Crossing to the basin in the corner of his room, he gulped down a few handfuls of water and washed himself quickly before shaving off the beard that had grown in recent days. Pulling on clothes, he felt his body filling up with energy: he had looked at the entrance to death, but it was life now that told him what he must do.

There was some chaos in the streets but more than this Orfeo was astonished at how empty they were. He still had no clear idea of the time but sensed that it must be late afternoon from the sun’s position. From time to time he saw vehicles moving and heard people shouting in the distance, yet he felt that New Orleans had been abandoned, deserted by its citizens.

It was evening when he finally reached his destination. His feet were sore, though this time at least he had worn shoes, and his breathing came in ragged gasps. Although he had paced himself he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten and his body was weaker than it should have been. Nonetheless, he permitted himself a wide, almost manic grin as he saw his destination. Hades.

The lights were flickering above the doorway, but now there were no queues outside. The wind was whistling down the street which was empty but for one other figure that stood in front of the entrance. Behind him, the gray cliff-face he had seen before stretched up to the darkening sky.

The man wore a hat on his head, the black band contrasting with its pale color, the same hue as his suit in contrast to the gray-brown skin of his hands and face. As he lifted up his head, the wind tugging at his hat, Orfeo saw a pair of emotionless eyes watching him, eyes that would have filled anyone else with fear. Orfeo, however, was not afraid. He was dead already: he simply had one last task to perform.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” the man said. For some reason this didn’t surprise Orfeo, and he nodded in recognition, realizing at last who the man was. He simply nodded and stood there silently, his arms poised by his side, his body preparing to push forward into the club.

“Not so fast, boy,” Papa said. “Do you know who I am?”

“You’re Papa Legba,” Orfeo said. “You’re the gatekeeper. You are the one who stands at the crossroads, the invisible messenger to man. You should bring us Bondye’s words, father Legba, and show us the sun, but you’ve fallen into darkness.”

Papa smiled with his mouth, but his eyes looked perturbed. “You know me well, boy.” Reaching into his pocket, he took out a long strip of silken rope and wrapped one end of it around his fingers, a silent garrote. “Why are you here, Orfeo? I’ve been sent to kill you, you know.”

Orfeo nodded. “I know,” he replied. “I’ve come to do one last thing. Let me do it, and then you can kill me.”

At this Papa gave out a low laugh and this time his eyes twinkled with amusement, a flash of life in the dead expanse of his dark face. “I might just do that, I might just. Tell me, what is it you want to do?”

“I want to sing.”

Papa pulled a bemused expression and turned his eyes from Orfeo to the silken rope that he twined between both of his hands. “You know what this is, boy?”

“Yes.”

“I can kill you quickly, mercifully. There’ll be no pain. This is my angel, my bringer of death. I save it for the special ones, the holy ones. It’ll be my gift. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” A simple word, unflinching.

“Aren’t you afraid?” Papa’s eyes flicked up from his garrote to contemplate Orfeo. In response the young man shook his head.

“I don’t suppose you are,” Papa mused quietly. “Course, I could kill you very painfully, ensure that your last moments on this not-so-fucking-good earth were spent in torture and torment. That’s what Earl would want.” At the mention of this name, Papa grimaced. “Not that I fucking know what Earl wants anymore. She’s driven him crazy, you know.”

Orfeo nodded. “Is she in there?” he asked at last.

“Oh, she’s in there, along with the few other crazy motherfuckers who are just too plain stupid to get out of this city. They’re more scared of how they’ll keep their addictions going than the goddam hurricane.”

“And I guess we’re just as stupid as them for staying here.”

At this, Papa started to laugh again, his eyes glittering as he regarded Orfeo. “You’ve got guts, boy. I’ll give you that. Shame you’re going to die, but you’ve certainly got guts.”

Not bothering to respond, Orfeo began to step forward in order to pass Papa and enter Hades, but the older man placed a firm hand on his chest. “Not so fast. I’ll let you in, but you’ve got to pay the price first.”

“The price?”

“Yes, the price.”

“I don’t have any money.”

Papa snorted at this. “You ain’t got nothing I want—nothing at all except for that voice of yours. I heard it once, and damn me if I ain’t ever forgotten it. Sing for me, boy. That’s my price.”

Staring at the older man, whose face now was stern and unforgiving, Orfeo nodded slowly. Drawing himself away from Papa, he stared at him in silence for a moment.

As he closed his eyes, Orfeo felt the wind blowing around him and Papa. That was good: the storm was coming, its breath rising before it. For too long he had been silent, his voice lost, but now he could draw upon the divine whirlwind, take its breath as his own.

When first he opened his mouth, his voice croaked and rasped, unfamiliar with the sensations that rippled from his painful chest, dragging itself up through his throat and between his lips. His gift, the gift he had been born with, had never seemed so strange to him. As the words escaped from him, however, so his voice deepened, the rich baritone stronger even than the storm’s messenger, surrounding Papa with a spell he could not resist.

“Life’s best is over,” Orfeo sang, his melody quiet at first, rising only slowly, “is beyond your reach, and all you can hope for is not to be. Come, come, come, accept the wisdom I teach: accept you are dust and find joy in me.”

The breath of the hurricane filled his lungs as he spoke, its thunder was in his voice, swelling his words with a supernatural power.

“The hounds of madness fly to the mountain

and feed on the flesh of the wild kid goat,

Maenads dance and drink from the fountain

of sacred blood wine, cool fire in the throat.”

Now he felt the divine madness of the storm in his eyes, falling as a flood of tears that would wash this world away.

“The frenzy is holy, but only when pure,

for I am most just, omnipotent power:

whirling in heaven’s storm I shall endure

the lightning I bring, the winds that devour.

Most terrible god, most pleasant to man,

ecstasy’s gift within each mortal span.”

As he ceased, so his words seemed to echo in the wind and Papa looked about him, an expression of trepidation on his face. Then, hearing something else in the air, he turned back to Orfeo. His eyes were clear and he seemed to regard the young singer with a sense of understanding.

“Life’s best is over,” he said at last, his voice barely audible above the breezes that plucked his clothes more violently now. “Go on, get in there. Before I change my mind.”

With a terse nod of his head, Orfeo slipped behind Papa before the older man could change his mind. The red glow of Hades surrounded him as he pushed past the doorway.

Ardyce could almost feel nothing now. Almost.

There remained, of course, the rush of numbing pleasure when Earl injected her, but even that was no longer the ecstasy it had once been. Her body simply demanded it. She dreaded the moments when a fix would dissipate, the opiate intoxication that, she remembered all too well, could become a hunger, a clawing anxiety and then a vivid pain. She did not need to worry, however; for his own reasons Earl had decided to maintain her in a permanent high.

He had given her another fix before dressing her in some rich, white, satin dress that left her arms bare and was cut deeply to her full cleavage. “Everyone has to see how beautiful you are. Everyone has to see that you’re mine,” he had told her as he brought her out of the bedroom where she had been a prisoner for... how long was it? She no longer knew, nor did she care. So long as she received the drug, nothing else mattered any more.

She remembered other sensations. Sometimes when he lay on her there was a movement inside her which she was dimly aware of, but that was easy enough to escape by retreating even further from him. He did not hurt her, of that she was certain, but increasingly she worried less about that as well. She was dying slowly and all she could do was respond with an inner, apathetic shrug.

Yet although she was dying, she unfortunately was not dead yet. Sometimes she would remember
him
and the fact that, if he was still alive, she would never see him again. She would remember the flowering of a pleasure more vivid, more intense—more
alive
—than the opiate haze that filled her veins, and sometimes she would cry. Then she would demand more heroin, hold out her arm with a fixed expression until Earl satisfied the only empty desire she now had.

The charm he had given her when they last met still hung around her neck. Most of the time she forgot what it was and would feel it numbly in her fingers, the rough nails and bones coarse against her skin. When she recalled what it was and who had given it to her, she often wished to rip it from her neck and throw it away with all the pain it brought, but instead her hands would clench about it, refusing to obey her will. She had held it so tightly once that she had cut herself, and she stared at the blood in the palm of her hand for an hour until Earl had come and cleaned it up.

He had left nothing else sharp in the room, and the black iron nails were not enough to stab herself with more effectively. That made her sigh but she resigned herself to her fate.

There was one other sense that had not left her. At night, Hades throbbed and pulsed with a distant beat, a beat that would have driven her mad if her veins hadn’t been filled with dead nirvana. It was a creature, she knew, a terrible, living thing that slept during the day and came to life at night, a behemoth of darkness and chaos, a darkness very different to the beautiful, black man she vaguely remembered who had brought her flowers of song during evenings that seemed an age away. What was his name? Why couldn’t she remember? Shifting on a chair in Earl’s private apartment, she struggled for a moment, fighting to bring his name back from the cloudiness in her mind. Instead, it was driven from consciousness by that relentless, persistent beat.