The Heavens Rise (21 page)

Beignet. His dog. That was it. The little slobberbox had been snoring up a storm on the porch just outside. And now he was gone.

The building had a side yard shared by both the upstairs and downstairs apartment, but it was Anthem who had turned it into a veritable jungle. And he’d done most of the work on those first early nights of trying to stay sober while he was on call, when he had no choice but to avoid friends who hadn’t taken his pledge seriously, and women who liked to knock back a beer after a hookup, and his brothers, who were the absolute worst. Those guys spun through the nearest drive-through daiquiri shop on their way home from just about anywhere.

First he’d planted the banana trees, then he’d started work on the birdhouses and then he’d gone about laying the flagstones for a circuitous
path from the tall wooden back gate, through the dense leaves and to the foot of the exterior wooden staircase that climbed the side of the building. His neighbor, an overworked paralegal, had once remarked to him when he’d caught him working on the pathway, “You realize we don’t own any of this, right?” As if Anthem hadn’t known, as if he’d been doing it for any other reason than to keep his hands busy and his head filled with something other than the terrible fear that he wasn’t going to make it through another night sober.

Now he stood on the second-floor landing, staring down at a million places where his pet might be hiding. But Beignet was an English bulldog, which meant he wheezed like a runner in the Crescent City Classic wherever he went; if the little guy was down there somewhere, Anthem would be able to hear him. But he couldn’t hear him. Just the rustle of the banana leaves in the humid breezes off the river.

When he noticed the shadow in the garden below, Anthem’s mouth opened, but nothing came out and then it appeared to him as if the shadow itself had turned into a column of darkness, shot upward and swallowed him whole.

T
he darkness cleared and Ben found himself lying facedown on a twin bed, lips parted against a chemical, institutional taste he couldn’t quite identify. He braced himself for the agonizing throb of some head injury, or the stomach-twisting aftermath of Goldschläger shots. But all he could feel was a clean and quick release from a previously impenetrable darkness, and the same sense of lost time he’d experienced during hernia surgery as a child, after they placed the mask over his face.

He had to have passed out in the waiting room. Some kind of delayed reaction probably; shock or, God forbid, some injury he’d sustained during the blast.

He opened his eyes and saw the retro starburst comforter his face had been pressed to; the distant familiarity of the design made him recoil off the bed so quickly his back knocked into a wall of cabinetry just a few feet away.

The trailer he found himself inside of was all 1970s but everything about it had a new sparkle. The place was homey, but fake, no personal
items anywhere he could see. He’d visited a few movie sets since New Orleans had turned into Hollywood South, and he felt like he was on one now. Nobody lived here. This trailer was some kind of re-creation. As soon as this word strobed through his mind, as soon as he found himself staring down at the comforter that had frightened him so badly, he realized where he’d seen it all before.

Elysium.
Before Noah Delongpre had tried to turn it into a compound, when it was just two trailers parked together like lovers on an acreage of mud beside a serpentine bayou.

The door was barred from the outside, and he was on the verge of crying out when he saw the leather-bound journal sitting by itself on the immaculate kitchen table. READ ME, read the notecard sitting atop the scored leather cover.

Ben flipped the cover back. The sight of Nikki Delongpre’s handwriting, still familiar to him after all these years from the labels of the mix CDs she used to make for him at least once every few months, forced a sound from him that was something between a gasp and a yelp. And soon Ben was sinking into the tiny booth that served as the trailer’s pathetic dining area.

But even as he read, he told himself not to surrender to hope, told himself that this could be some kind of fake. Most of all, everything he was reading could have been written before that terrible night—the day Anthem had transferred to their school, some disjointed thoughts about Elysium and the well her father had dug, none of which Ben could quite put together in his race to find proof that this journal had been written after her disappearance

Then he saw the word
Katrina,
and he was forced to blink madly to keep the tears from spilling down his face. But then the swell of emotion hardened as he kept reading, like a charging ocean wave suddenly saddled with an iceberg.

My name is Niquette Delongpre and on the night before her 47th birthday I killed my mother . . .

P
atience,
Marshall told himself.

He’d lost his cool in Beau Chêne and the resulting conflagration had made clear the one, unavoidable limit to his power—he could control only one person at a time. And while it was doubtful the police would find his lost ring after what he’d done to the crime scene, Marshall couldn’t afford two mistakes in one night. He had to remind himself that Ben Broyard had never been target numero uno; that title belonged to the giant shadow now standing frozen and ramrod straight, one story above Marshall’s head. Still, when the little fucker had literally floated into the middle of the crime scene, the opportunity had seemed too good for Marshall to pass up. But by giving into temptation, he’d come close to scorching himself to death and losing his shot at Anthem altogether.

Now he was here, and the connection had been made, but the visions coursing through him—the raw, unedited flashes of Anthem’s
very soul—were far more vivid than anything thrown off by the other souls he’d violated over the past few weeks. Compared to Stevens, his secretary and Allen Shire, this stuff felt like a fire hose blast that might knock him into the banana leaves. The burst, as he’d nicknamed it, was usually one or two brief pulses of hallucination that gave way to silvery, distorted vision (and the power to do whatever he wanted with the person in question). But this was movie quality.

Nikki Delongpre was embracing him (embracing Anthem), and he could feel the fleece of her pullover, could smell the chemical odor coming off the Mardi Gras pearls around her neck. All around them, a press of bodies, the familiar raucousness of an Uptown parade, a dance of flambeau fire and shadow beneath a ceiling of interlocking oak branches. Bloodred plastic beads smashed to the asphalt; Marshall recognized the spear-shaped logo of the Krewe of Ares parade. And pulsing beneath every sight and smell was the endowed knowledge that he was being flooded by the happiest moment of Anthem Landry’s life. And even though Nikki was smiling at him—not just smiling,
beaming
—he could hear her voice in his head (in Anthem’s head):
My hero, my God, my angel.
A soft, intimate whisper that didn’t match the jubilant expression on her face, an expression that seemed to hold and hold and hold until it took on the appearance of a mask.

Jesus Christ,
Marshall thought,
is that how they really spoke to each other? In those kinds of stupid clichés? Or were these supposed words of Nikki’s more dream than memory?
Then he saw that the giant figure atop the Mardi Gras float rattling past them wasn’t the typical shuddering papier-mâché rendering of some third-tier pagan god. It was a statue of Anthem Landry as Michelangelo might have realized him, impossibly flawless muscles, skin some shade between marble and flesh, and when the beautiful giant’s eyes opened and stared right at Marshall, as if sensing the presence of a spiritual interloper in the midst of this hallucinated crowd of shadows, Marshall cried out, and the great, sickening burst was over. Now it was just him and Anthem, separated by the
long exterior staircase. Everything in Marshall’s vision fluoresced in the way it normally did once a hook had been established, but the pulse of it was stronger. Everything about this was different.

Stop,
and it was his voice he heard now, not Nikki’s.
Stop. He’s different.

But how could that be? How could Anthem Landry be the only anomaly after weeks of exercising his power on others without incident? The injustice of it was almost too much for him to bear. And the connection had been forged, hadn’t it? He could force the guy to leap from the porch right now and break his neck. But he couldn’t settle for that. A fall? That wouldn’t do at all. Not after all the work Marshall had done to get to this point. That would be a downright cheat.

Besides, this wasn’t the last game he planned to play; if there was something different about Anthem Landry, he had to find out what it was, even if it meant being forced to dispatch Anthem in some less than impressive way.

“Patience,” Anthem Landry said quietly, giving voice to Marshall’s thoughts, and the steadiness of his voice reflected the new steadiness in Marshall’s mind.

“Indeed,” Marshall answered himself.

•   •   •

And just like that, the leaping shadow was gone and Anthem Landry found himself still standing at the railing, the garden below him still rustling in the breeze. His heart was racing but that was probably just the result of whatever strange trick of light had convinced him a ghost was rocketing toward him from the foliage below. A train’s locomotive blared, which wasn’t a shock, given the tracks were just on the other side of the floodwall. But usually he heard the trains approaching before they got this close. Not this time, apparently. And there was someone down there in the garden, and Beignet was at the guy’s feet.

“Hello?” Anthem barked.

And when the guy stepped forward into the security light’s halo
across the bottom few steps, Anthem gripped the railing in front of him to make sure he was still standing upright.

“Holy crap. You’re . . .”

“Alive?” the man said.

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“Well, it’s been interesting, to say the least.”

“Jesus Christ. I can’t even remember the last time I saw you—” Anthem started descending the steps, quickly, as if he thought the ghost of Marshall Ferriot might vanish before he reached the bottom. But Marshall kept talking, his voice sounding fairly earthbound, if Anthem said so himself.

“PE. Senior year, first semester. Neither one of us played football, so we weren’t exempt. You convinced Coach Clary to let us do badminton ’cause everyone thought it would be a breeze. And he agreed, so you were this big hero. Then he showed up the next day with an eighty-page packet on the history of badminton and told us there’s going to be a test the next week. Suddenly you weren’t such a hero anymore.”

“Right! Shit, man. Good memory.” Once they were face-to-face, Anthem clapped one of Marshall’s hands in both of his. But after a few pumps, he realized the guy seemed a little thin and weak, so he let up.

“Yeah, well, for me, it’s like it all just happened yesterday.”

“Marshall Fuckin’ Ferriot. Pardon my French, but welcome back to the land of the living, my friend!”

Anthem didn’t know the guy’s whole story; they’d never said more than a few words to each other back at Cannon. (There’d been too much other shit going on that summer for Anthem to keep tabs on some suicidal classmate-turned-vegetable.) But he knew the highlight reel; the coma, the father killed by the fall, the move to Atlanta. Kinda odd that Ben had never talked about any of it to him; he was usually all over that kind of scandal.

“You look good, man,” Anthem said.

“Do I?”

“Yeah . . .”

“I’m sorry about Nikki.” Anthem must have flinched, because when Marshall spoke again, he dropped his voice to almost a whisper. “I know it was a long time ago, but I just found out recently, given my . . . situation . . . My memory of the days before the accident, it’s not really that good. The doctors say it should improve. But it’ll take time, I guess. I just wanted to say—”

“Right. Yeah. Thanks.”

“So the police . . . they never found anything?”

“Some pieces of the car. That’s it.”

Marshall winced and shook his head. “Sorry, man,” he whispered.

“Is that why you—” Anthem looked around, as if it might be possible Marshall Ferriot was meeting someone else at this late hour, across the street from Anthem’s apartment. “You just wanted to give your condolences? Or are you here to see Tim?”

“Tim?”

“My neighbor. Lives downstairs. I don’t think he’s home though.”

“Oh, no. I’m here to see you.”

“Yeah?”

Marshall struggled with his next words, hands wedged deep in his pockets, shoulders slumped, staring at the bricks under Anthem’s feet. “I saw something,” he said finally, slowly and deliberately. “When I was under . . .”

“Under? You mean, like, in a coma?”

“Yes. I don’t know what it was, exactly. But it involved you and I felt like it would be irresponsible of me not to tell you about it.”

“You mean, like, a vision or something?”

Marshall straightened and looked him in the eye. “A message,” he whispered.

Anthem felt like he’d been doused in cold water, and it must have shown on his face because Marshall winced and looked away suddenly.
“This is ridiculous. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come. It’s late, and you don’t need me . . . I mean, it was years ago and it was . . . I’ll just . . .”

As Anthem watched the guy hurry toward the back gate, he found himself struggling to remember exactly how many days had separated Nikki’s disappearance and Marshall’s flying leap? A crazy, Hollywood-inspired image blazed bright and big in his too-sober mind: Nikki’s soul zipping past Marshall’s in some realm beyond this one, like those bright pulses of light at the beginning of
It’s a Wonderful Life
.

Angels,
he remembered.
Talking angels is what they were.

“Hey!” Anthem shouted.

Marshall stopped walking.