The Book of the Unwinding Read online

  The room was empty.

  She reached back without looking to close the cooler’s top drawer, then startled as she felt a finger trace down her hand and wrist.

  At the same moment, as if by sympathetic magic, the embalming room’s exterior door slammed shut. Nathalie jumped and faced the door, then advanced on it, ready to pry it off its hinges if the damned thing didn’t open back up with a tug.

  Music, a scratchy ragtime tune, began playing in the front part of the house. She stopped in her tracks and exhaled, laughing at herself. Frank was here. Probably upstairs in his private quarters. It was only the magic, the odd sparks and light, that had her spooked.

  A heavy double-hinged door on the embalming room’s northern wall separated it from the older, but nicer, part of the mortuary. On the door’s reverse side was an “Employees Only” sign, its oversize, bold font intended to save mourners from any trauma they might experience if they were to discover the clinical horrors hidden within. Nathalie crossed the room and pressed the button beside the door, using the automated function more out of habit than necessity. Most times she passed through this door, she was either wheeling a body to the viewing room or heading in the opposite direction, back through the embalming room, to load one into the Demagnan hearse. A single click as it swung open and held itself in place, gaping before the dark hall that led deeper into the mortuary.

  The cold fluorescent light of the embalming room stretched her shadow out long and thin before her, like a finger pointing toward the mortuary’s heart. Nathalie patted the wall, feeling around for the hall’s light switch. Her fingers brushed it, and the hall lit up. No spooks. No goblins. Only a hall she’d walked twenty times or so. Still, she hesitated at its mouth, once again struck by a sense of wrongness.

  The music had been turned up even louder, and she could hear Frank shuffling about on the floor above, his footsteps heavier than she would’ve expected. She nodded, a confirmation to herself that she was going in, and—affecting confidence—took a few strides up to the open door of the viewing room. The overhead light was off, but the dim light filtering through the room’s sole window, an oval bull’s-eye window over the dais, showed it was empty.

  The music stopped. The shuffling continued.

  Nathalie advanced to the foot of the stairs. “Mr. Demagnan?” she called. “It’s me. Nathalie.”

  No response.

  The music started over. The same tinny piano playing the same plunky tune. She couldn’t think of the song’s name, or even pull a single lyric to mind, but the old bit of ragtime sounded familiar. A fuzzy recollection surfaced from her early childhood, a point where all her memories were golden, if blurry. This was a tune she’d heard played on a fiddle by someone from the shunned side of the Boudreau family—the relatives who made no objection to working magic.

  “You all right up there?” she said. “I don’t want to disturb you if you are.” A thousand images of what Nathalie might confront if she surprised Frank when he thought himself to be alone flooded her mind, most of them involving the ghastly sight of his naked, too-pale flesh.

  No answer. The music started over.

  Maybe he had the recording on repeat. Maybe the heavy shuffling she’d heard was Frank up there, sick or injured, crawling across the floor rather than walking. Nathalie squared her shoulders and mounted the first few steps. “I’m coming up, Mr. Demagnan. I just want to check in on you.” With no one around to witness it, she decided to let her extra sense scout ahead and prepare her for what her eyes might soon discover. She focused on a spot in front of her, envisioning a quarter-sized orb, silver and undulating like a ball of mercury. She blew on the orb and watched as it rose toward the landing.

  A quick sharp sound, like the pop of frying bacon, and her head began reeling. She rocked back, dizzy, but somehow managed to catch hold of the railing and resist the urge to hurl. The music ended and the same song started up again. Another flash of memory, a bit sharper this time, of a smiling gray-haired man with wild eyes, working the bow across his fiddle till the bow’s hairs smoked. She shook off the image and decided to turn back. Get out of here and find her cell phone, which she’d been charging with the hearse’s cigarette lighter. Incongruous to the moment, the realization struck her that a person would have to be a hard-core smoker to light up in a hearse. She pushed the thought away. Get out. Get the phone. Call emergency services and report a gas leak. Let the firemen find what they find.

  Something brushed up against her leg, and she nearly fell backward down the stairs she’d climbed.

  A flash of gray fur passed her, then stopped at the topmost stair and turned back to look at her. A small cat with saucer-like green eyes. Nathalie realized it must have crept in while the outside door was open, and followed on her heels through the automatic doors. The cat yowled at her, and she had the strangest sense it was trying to communicate with her.

  “You come on back down here,” Nathalie said, keeping her voice low. The cat tilted its head and stared at her like she was an idiot. “Come on,” she tried again, this time with a beckoning wave. The cat corkscrewed around on the step and advanced to the landing, disappearing from Nathalie’s view.

  Get out of here. Get to the hearse. Get to your phone. Call the fire department.

  A chilling cry. The cat, afraid or maybe in pain. Nathalie cast a glance down the stairs, toward the hall that would lead her out of this place.

  Another cry, this one heartrending. “Well damn,” Nathalie said, and climbed the remaining steps to the landing.

  Get the cat. Get out of here. Get to the hearse. Get to your phone. The music stopped, then started up again.

  A fresh bowl of the lavender potpourri Frank had peppered all over the house rested on a walnut demilune table beneath the landing’s window, but the cat was nowhere in sight. “Kitty?” Nathalie said, feeling foolish. If she were watching herself on screen, she’d be the first to scream, “Get out!” A mewling, weaker but more desperate, sounded from one of the rooms near the end of the long hall that bisected the upper floor. The next-to-last door on the left creaked open. Nathalie half expected to see a disgruntled Frank exiting the room, carrying the stray by its scruff, but the hall remained empty.

  A pathetic keening pulled her down the hall to the open door. She bounded through the doorway, planning to throw herself on whomever—or whatever—was harming the poor cat, but other than the cat itself, the room stood empty. Nathalie scanned the space, trying to sense if there was something her eyes couldn’t register. Being invisible, Nathalie had learned, did not equate with being absent.

  The cat sat on a dark wood credenza, surrounded by framed photos, and contemplated her with a look of triumph in its eyes. Opposite the credenza, to Nathalie’s right, sat a gray metal tanker desk like the one she remembered her first-grade teacher having. The two pieces of furniture seemed at odds with each other. A clicking sound coming from the direction of the facing windows caught her attention. An old-fashioned record player, housed in a wooden cabinet stained the same color as the cat’s perch, stood between the windows. The record player’s arm lifted and moved outward, dropping its needle back onto the black disc spinning on the turntable. Nathalie crossed to the player and snatched the needle off the record.

  By instinct if not from memory, she knew to twist the volume knob to the left. The turntable slowed. She reached out and touched the record to stop it from spinning. Most of the label had peeled away from the disc, and what remained had faded, leaving only the words “Don’t Scare Me Papa” legible. She noticed a switch on the record player offered three options: 78, 33, and 45 rpm. The first had been selected. The extra speeds told her that even though the player looked old, it was newer than the record. A reproduction.

  A commanding chattering drew her eyes back to the tiny cat. Not much bigger than a kitten, really, but in possession of a lion’s regal mien. Nathalie felt the feline will her forward, the animal’s continued vocalizations so close to a spoken language, she found herself
saying, “Pardon?”

  Nathalie reached out to touch the cat, but it sidled backward, knocking over one of the frames as it did. The action appeared deliberate, so she kept her eyes on the cat as she picked up the frame. “Don’t think you’re not in trouble for tricking me into following you.”

  The cat responded with a flat and unimpressed-sounding meow. Nathalie looked down at the picture she held, expecting to see the pale, pinched face of a member of Frank’s family, but it was instead the familiar portrait of a woman with a strong nose and high forehead, her dark hair parted down the center. Nathalie recognized the face in an instant, the Vieux Carré’s infamous Madame LaLaurie. When the fire brigade had come to put out a kitchen fire in the LaLaurie mansion, they discovered a nightmare scenario of murder and twisted medical experiments. Stories about Madame’s fate differed, but Nathalie had always hoped the woman had found herself a fitting one. The photo looked like one of the old postcards you used to be able to find anywhere in the Quarter. She returned the frame to its place on the credenza. Behind it sat a color newsprint photo that depicted an even more familiar face—a good-looking guy with a radiant smile and dimpled chin.

  She’d actually met this guy, not long after Katrina, when she’d drifted back home to New Orleans from Natchitoches. Bars weren’t as stringent about checking IDs in the months following the storm, so she’d had a few shots with him, even though she hadn’t quite hit drinking age. He was a fixture in the French Quarter right up until the day he jumped to his death from the roof of his North Rampart Street apartment. After the police scooped him up, they discovered he’d killed and cooked his girlfriend before taking his deep dive.

  Beside his photo sat an old daguerreotype showing two men sitting side by side. Their heads lay at unfeasible angles on their shoulders, the crowns touching. Nathalie caught herself tilting her own head, trying to touch her ear to her shoulder like the men in the photo. A neck didn’t bend that far unless it had been broken. The men’s eyes were open but—she leaned in to get a better look—held the glassy blankness of death. The inscription on the bottom of the picture’s silver frame read “John and Wayne Carter.” She’d always figured these guys were part of the city’s folklore, like the fictitious sultan of the LaPrete mansion, but if her eyes were to be believed, the blood-drinking brothers had indeed lived, and they’d died just like the story claimed—at the end of a rope. Her eyes darted around the other photos collected there, picking out the black-and-white image of Lee Harvey Oswald.

  She took a step back. There were twenty or so other photos crowded onto the credenza’s top. The one thing the people portrayed in them shared was murder.

  Front and center on the credenza was the collection’s sole double frame, an ornate silver thing with a nymph holding a flower branch at its center. Scrollwork ran down each side and met at the bottom to create a platform beneath the nymph’s feet. The image on the left was what appeared to be a somewhat recent photo of an older man with a thick mane of gray hair and piercing black eyes. She didn’t recognize him, but she found herself wondering what he could’ve done to earn himself pride of place in Frank’s murderers’ row. The man exuded confidence and charisma. She found it hard to pull her eyes away, but when she did, she felt her heart flutter. The right side of the frame held a picture of the most beautiful woman Nathalie had ever seen. Any fear Nathalie had felt coming into Frank’s quarters evaporated.

  This woman’s features struck Nathalie as familiar, too, but her memory was blurred, like they had met in a dream, or, far more likely, when Nathalie was two shots past tipsy. The photo seemed to be a candid shot, the woman’s light brown eyes turned down and away from the camera. She’d been photographed running her fingers through her pixie-cut chestnut hair. Her eyes showed a vulnerability that made Nathalie eager to protect her, but she seemed to glow with a power that made her doubt the woman could need protection. The inclusion of her image in this gallery of monsters angered Nathalie—a powerful gut reaction she knew better than to doubt. Nathalie might have met this woman, or she hadn’t, but she knew with absolute certainty her face didn’t belong here among these murderers.

  The cat wound its way through the maze of frames until it arrived beside the woman’s photo. It rubbed its cheek against the frame’s edge, then gazed up with a look of expectation in its eyes.

  Nathalie brushed her fingers over the cat’s head in acknowledgment. Unable to help herself, she lifted the frame and focused on the woman, the man to her left now forgotten. She began examining the picture in detail, trying to find any clues to the woman’s identity. The lighting was poor, so she removed the photo from the frame and carried it to the window. A sliver of blue sky showed on the photo’s upper left, a white stone wall in the background. No. It wasn’t a wall. It was a tomb. An open tomb. She squinted to make out the name carved into the lintel: Marin.

  And then it hit her. The night of the massacre, the night she’d offered herself up as chwal to Soulange Simeon. Her memories of that night, from the second Soulange had entered her until Nathalie came to outside the old church, her pant legs soaked to the knee with blood, were confused, fuzzy. Nathalie had seen the woman in the photo, only she’d seen her while Soulange was in the driver’s seat. She picked through the jangled pieces where Soulange’s thoughts had once intertwined with her own, surprised when she turned up a name. Alice. In the photo, this Alice looked like an innocent, but during the slaughter, she’d been standing on a stage, above the gore that had pooled all around.

  Standing beside Babau Jean.

  Nathalie had a flash from her childhood—the pale bogey with the bottomless black eyes, watching her from her closet mirror while she lay in bed, her sheet pulled up over her head, and dragging his sharp nails rtch-rtch-rtch down the glass.

  The cat hissed like a hot pan doused with ice water.

  Nathalie startled and dropped the photo to the floor. Something compelled her to snatch it up and slip it into the inner pocket of her suit coat. She turned her attention to the cat, then scanned the room, trying to figure out what had set it off.

  She couldn’t see anything, but she sure as hell felt something.

  The cat stood and arched its back, fixing its own gaze on the hall. The shuffling sound Nathalie had heard from downstairs began again, this time punctuated by a click. The cat hissed and jumped, disappearing in midair. Nathalie staggered backward and then spun around, sure that it had been a trick of the light, and the cat was somewhere nearby.

  In the hall, the sound of scraping followed by another thump, like something heavy being dragged and dropped. Click.

  Scrape. Thump. Click. The sounds chased each other, gaining speed.

  Scrape. Thump. Click. The sounds grew louder, closer.

  Nathalie’s heart mimicked the accelerating rhythm, her eyes fixed on the doorway. A pale hand near floor level reached around the frame.

  She started to advance, certain Frank must have fallen ill, then stopped in her tracks as her brain registered what her eyes were seeing.

  It was Frank all right. She watched, horrified and sickened, as he dragged himself into the room.

  First she saw the rough stitches around his wrist. Thick black yarn tied together an angry red gash, reconnecting his hand to his wrist, but the hand had been sewn onto the wrong wrist, the thumb pointing outward. His head and torso pulled into view, the same cruel stitching around his neck. His head pointed upward toward the ceiling, but so did his shoulder blades. Nathalie’s rational mind insisted that he had to be dead, that nobody could survive such a gruesome alteration. Scrape. His right hand, attached to his left wrist, dragged a revolver along the wooden floor. He pushed into the room and then collapsed. Thump. The hand fumbled with the pistol, struggling to point its muzzle at his temple. Click. He strained to raise himself back up. Nathalie realized that his left and right legs had also been switched. Not only switched, but reattached at the thigh backward so that his feet pointed in the same direction as his chalky buttocks.

 
He pushed back again, this time falling to his side. His eyes met hers and widened—despite her shouting, he mustn’t have realized he was no longer alone. His lips began working, but no sound came out. His chest pushed up, his right arm flailing out in a wide, wild circling gesture before he collapsed again. One by one, the fingers of the hand nearest the desk folded in toward the palm, leaving his index finger to point in the general direction of the desk. The hand rose and slapped against the floor, beating a desperate tattoo.

  Nathalie reached out to try to read his thoughts, something she didn’t often do, but whether blocked by his trauma or her own fear, she couldn’t glean anything.

  “The desk?” she said, surprised by her own restraint in not trampling over the sad body on her way to the door. The hand banged against the floor with even greater vehemence. She crossed to the desk, positioning herself so she could keep one eye on both Frank and the exit. The desk’s surface was empty except for a red stapler and a dish of the horehound candy he was always sucking on whenever guests weren’t present. Rejecting both as possibilities, she started tugging open the desk’s top drawer.

  Click. Click. Click.

  She looked up over the desk at him. His hand had once again found the pistol and was pulling its trigger over and over. She knew then what he wanted. She riffled through the remaining drawers until she uncovered a box of .38-caliber bullets. She pulled out the handkerchief Frank had insisted she carry so she could offer it to any mourner in need and retrieved the box. Her DNA was bound to be all over the damned place, but that much she might be able to explain away. Her fingerprints on the bullet box would without a doubt be a bit harder to dance around. She may want to help him, but she sure didn’t want to get caught up in the aftermath of his actions. She set the box on the desktop, closed the drawer, and then carried the wrapped box to his side. Kneeling beside him, she held the box up so he could see it. The relief in his eyes confirmed she’d understood correctly. He pushed up once more, grasping for the box and knocking it from her hand. The box tumbled to the floor and fell open, letting a handful of bullets slip out and roll toward the desk.