The Map of Moments (34 page)

Down a side street, a dozen or more ghosts danced half-naked around a dull orange fire.

Max blinked, twisted around to get a better look, staring down the street. The men and women were both topless, their skin an array of brown hues but also transparent. The fire seemed pale and cold and very far away.

“What?” Artie asked.

The street was behind them, and though Max still looked back, all he could see now were the buildings at the corner.

“What's wrong?”

Max shook his head, righting himself in his seat. “Nothing. Sorry. Just thought that might be the corner we wanted.”

“Nah. We got a way to go yet. Judgin’ by the map you drew, you want to be up past Elysian Fields, a little south of Mirabeau Avenue. You sure about that map?”

“Very.”

“All right, then.”

Artie took a right, threading through a neighborhood where the tide mark from Katrina lingered like a scar on most of the buildings, then turned left. Max peered at every house, down every street and alley. He ought to have been prepared; when Coco had forced him into the ritual circle in front of the ward, he had slipped into a Moment that wasn't on the map. He felt certain he'd just glimpsed another. The static he'd accumulated spilled off of him now, filled him so much that his altered perceptions were seeing more than just what Ray had intended.

He took a breath, tried to focus. The neighborhood
improved dramatically as they drove, but Katrina hadn't chosen her victims by their social status. Roofs had caved in. Chimneys had collapsed. One house was missing half its second floor. Blue tarps were everywhere, though in the moonlight they seemed closer to black. Gentilly had been hit hard, but already the repairs had begun, and that was the difference between this place and some of the others Max had been through. Here, there were homes left to repair.

Movement in his peripheral vision caught his eye, and he glanced up just in time to see a young boy throw himself from a third-story window. Max's breath hitched and he reached for the dash to brace himself, nearly screaming at Artie to stop.

The phantasm vanished halfway to the ground.

“I'm startin’ to think maybe it ain't healthy for you to be hanging out down here. You're spooking me a little, son. Maybe there're some meds you supposed to be takin’ and forgot?”

Max's face felt cold and he could only imagine how pale he must have been. He smiled and shook his head. “I'm good.”

“So you keep sayin’, but that don't make it true.”

Unable to stop himself, Max shot Artie a dark look. For a guy who had made noise about not prying into other people's business, about just helping, no questions asked, he certainly seemed to have gotten more comfortable with both questions and opinions.

Artie got the message. He raised his eyebrows with a sniff, as if to say
Ain't that a fine thing, try to help a guy out and that's the thanks you get.
But he didn't say anything else.

A few more blocks and Artie pulled over to consult the map Max had drawn. He scratched his beard again, peered out through the windshield, then put the map aside. Another couple of turns and he pulled over again, but this time he threw the truck into park and looked over at Max.

“Here you go, partner. Far as I can tell, this is where you want to be. Look familiar?”

Max looked around at the houses. Only a few had lights burning inside. The rest of the buildings on the block were dark, and two had sustained massive wind damage.

“Nope. But it will.”

He popped the door, which opened with a shriek of rusty metal, stepped out with his hand-drawn map in his hand, then peered back in at Artie.

“Look, you really saved my ass tonight. I'm grateful for that. I'm sorry if I—”

“Don't mention it. None of my business, anyway. Good luck to you, Max. I hope you find what you're lookin’ for.”

Max nodded. That might be a blessing or a curse, but he knew Artie meant well. “You have a good night.”

Artie hesitated one last second; it was clear he didn't like the idea of dropping Max off out here. But then he gave a small wave before driving away, leaving Max alone on a Gentilly street without a clue where he was supposed to go next.

If he'd thought about it, he could have asked Artie to stop so he could buy a tourist map, but it was too late now. He could feel time constricting, funneling down into this instant. For
once, the Moment he was in seemed just as vital as the ones New Orleans had left behind.

Studying each house on the block, he started walking along the street. He looked at the map in the moonlight, turning around and around, but kept going in the same direction because that felt right. Just as, after a few minutes, he knew he had gone too far, and turned around.

Far off, he could hear cars going by. In one house a TV had been turned up loud enough to deafen. But no headlights turned down the narrow, residential street, and for that he was glad. Paranoia held him in its grip. At the approach of any car, he was liable to run for cover, fearing that Coco and his cronies had found him again.

Frustrated, Max stepped up onto the scruffy, postage stamp–sized yard of a little house. A fallen tree had been cleared off the road, waiting to be cut up and taken away. There were branches and scraps of debris scattered everywhere. Max picked up a twig and tried digging into the soil at the edge of the yard, sketching lines to represent the street he was on and the few blocks around it. But whatever had inspired him in Mattie's Crab Shack had abandoned him for the moment.

He started back the way he'd come, thinking he'd have to try each house individually. He could start with the ruined ones and hope that he would not have to disturb those with their lights on. A strange man showing up after dark in a crab-logo sweatshirt and filthy boots two sizes too big for him? He could get shot. At the very least they'd call the police, and that he could not afford.

One side of a duplex ahead had its lights on, and Max started to cross the street, trying not to draw attention. Something on the front walk caught his eye and he paused, then cut back toward the two-family. He glanced at the house to confirm he was unobserved, and crouched down, reaching out to pick up a piece of pale chalk. Half a dozen pieces in various pastels had been left scattered about. On the walk were crude renderings he recognized as Sponge-Bob SquarePants and some of the other characters from that show.

With the piece of chalk in hand, he moved on down the street to a spot as distant from any of the lighted windows as he could get without actually moving to another block. Dropping to his knees, feet sliding inside the big work boots, he began to draw, outlining the street he was on and several blocks in each direction.

When the box appeared, and the words describing the Seventh Moment, they were in pale yellow chalk, and there could be no mistaking which house the arrow pointed at.

The little one, with the downed tree lying half across its yard.

Max steeled himself but did not hesitate. The time for hesitation had passed. Retracing his steps, he returned to the little house with its bay window and the single gable above the front door. Some of the roof had been stripped away and the bay window shattered. Unlike some of the other darkened houses, no one had bothered to board this one up.

An icy prickle went down the back of his spine. The
magic crackling that had suffused him all afternoon and night had receded but not departed. He looked around once more, waiting for menacing figures to emerge from the shadows or for headlights to snap on, engines to rev, enemies to appear. And when none of these things happened, he walked quickly and quietly to the front door.

Sometimes when he slept wrong, maybe with his arm trapped underneath him, he'd wake up with a sensation like a million tiny needles gently tapping his skin. As a boy, his father had referred to this as his arm having fallen asleep. But Max remembered his mother's phrase best. She'd always called that feeling “pins and needles.”

He had it now, over every inch of his body.

As he reached for the door, the temperature changed. The night turned sweltering, the heat beating down on him, the air so thick with dampness that he could barely breathe. He remembered many nights such as this, though he'd trained himself to forget.

Summer in New Orleans.

The bay window was no longer shattered. He didn't need to glance over his shoulder to see that the tree was still standing. But other than that, the place looked much the same. Whatever year this was, it had to be recently.

Max paused with his hand on the door, troubled. What year
was
it? Every Moment had been clearly dated, except for this one. The place mat upon which he'd drawn a map sat folded in his back pocket and now, knowing he had to enter the house but also curious and unsettled, he took it out and unfolded it.

There were the words again, just as they'd been before.

Only something had changed. There had been no date when he looked before, but it was there now, at the bottom of the message. And as he looked at the date, and it took root in his mind, he understood that the magic he had been accumulating was not his own, and never had been. The Map of Moments had led him where he needed to be, but it did not serve Max Corbett. The map served the man who had given it to him, along with that little stone bottle to drink from. The date in which he now stood, when the Seventh Moment took place, had been withheld from him until now.

This was the worst night of his life.

The night he'd walked in on Gabrielle and Joe Noone, in the attic of the house over in Lakeview.

Jaw clenched, Max let the place mat flutter from his hand, gripped the doorknob, and turned it. To others it might have been locked, but not to him. The door swung open. Even as he stepped inside he heard the chanting, its cadence now familiar to him, its intent making him recoil.

He forced himself on, down a short corridor, through the kitchen, and into a kind of den at the rear of the house, where the lights were off and the shades were drawn, and where a circle of candles provided all the light he would ever need.

Max had seen Gabrielle in candlelight before, and when he glimpsed her now, in silhouette, he could not breathe for
the tears that began to choke him. For Gabrielle was crying as well, shaking her head as Coco pressed the knife into her hand and the others continued to chant.

“You have to, girl,” Coco said. “You know you do.” The sincerity in his eyes was hideous and painful to watch. He cared for her. He meant her well. “You don't have his strength, and Mireault won't hesitate to kill you. You're with us, or you're alone.”

“I can't!” Gabrielle wailed, her anguish stabbing at Max.

Coco's eyes flashed with anger and his lips tightened in a grim line. “You swore to me, girl! You made a promise. I let the teacher go and you don't fight anymore. I even let you pick the one to substitute for him. You go back on your word now, and when Mireault comes for you, I'll be the one to hold you down.”

Gabrielle stared at the gagged figure on the floor, in the midst of that circle. He squirmed, but the other Tordu gathered for the ritual held him tightly. She turned to Coco, eyes imploring, but his gaze had gone flat and merciless. Gabrielle squeezed her eyes tightly shut, tears streaming down her cheeks, and then she whipped her head around to look again at the man on the floor.

He shook his head wildly from side to side, eyes huge, staring up at her, pleas muffled by the gag in his mouth.

And Max knew.

“Gaby, no!” he screamed.

Coco spun as though he'd heard, stared at Max, eyes narrowed as though he couldn't focus.

But Gabrielle
had not
heard. With a cry of sorrow, utterly devoid of hope, she knelt, raised the knife in both
hands and brought it down, driving it into the struggling man's heart. Blood sprayed into her face, but she brought the blade down again, and then a third time, and she might have done it again if Coco had not stilled her hands.

“Good girl,” he said, kissing the blood on her cheek.

She had stopped crying, arms and expression slackening at the same time.

“I'll take it from here,” Coco said.

And he started to carve into the corpse of Joe Noone.

M
ax staggered down a nameless street—no sign, no identity, just one more empty place left hollow by Katrina's passing. The sidewalks were strewn with debris, but unlike some of the other areas he'd passed through in New Orleans, the flotsam and jetsam left behind by the storm and the lives that had been lost or abandoned here had been gathered into heaps. Every twenty or thirty feet there were piles of refuse—children's toys, broken furniture, roofing and siding, ruined appliances—but no one had come by to pick it up. Some order had been brought to the chaos in this one neighborhood. Compared to other places, it was moving on.

For a while, Max had stopped noticing the debris. He'd become numb to it.