Holiday of the Dead (26 page)

‘Well, there’s two sides to Noo Awleans. There’s the nice tourist side, which has its thrills, but is never too dangerous. And there’s the true face of this ol’ lady.’

The driver held the wheel with one hand while he rummaged in his pocket. ‘Mind if I smoke?’

‘Not at all. Please go ahead.’

‘This city has deep roots, even in soft ground. The French, the Spanish, refugees from Haiti.’ He drew on the cigar. ‘And Africa, it all goes back to deepest darkest Africa. This city was the heart of the slavery trade, but it had the biggest number of free black men and women anywhere. A city of contrasts you might say, white and black, light and dark, but never far apart. As close as sides of the same coin.’

Michael was sweating in the clammy heat. ‘Do you have any air conditioning?’

‘Sure I do, if you don’t mind the cigar smoke.’ He rolled up his window. ‘Getting towards hurricane season, so it is. You can feel it in the air. Energy, like electricity.’

The driver crushed out his cigar. ‘Anyhows, I was going to tell you about a fellow who might know a cemetery guide. Talk to Blind Willie. No-one knows the Big Easy like him. He doesn’t see with his eyes, but he sees damn well more than others with 20-20 vision. Sees beneath the surface of it all. You’ll find him in the Rising Sun, just off Bourbon Street before … I think it’s Dumaine Street. Tell him that Slim sent you.’

It was three o’clock by the time Michael checked into his hotel. He slumped on his bed, shattered by the long journey and the feeling he should be fast asleep despite the daylight outside. At least the hotel room was air conditioned. He drew the curtains and tried to doze, but sleep would not come.

He shrugged on a lightweight shirt and trousers and headed out. It was a short walk to Bourbon Street and its pastel-coloured French buildings, ornate Spanish balconies, and of course the sweltering heat. Most of the bars were shuttered, but there were a few strip clubs open. As he walked, he noticed the rainbow flags of gay bars increasing in number.

He found the Rising Sun. It was on a litter-strewn offshoot of Bourbon Street which stank of urine and vomit. New Orleans’ Oldest Coffee and Liquor House, proclaimed the faded sign. A tall black man in a porkpie hat lounged next to the door, chewing a toothpick and glaring at him through sunglasses.

The bar was empty of customers. A lone bartender was polishing glasses behind a chipped and stained worktop. The floor was wood, varnished with age and decades of spilled alcohol.

The barman pocketed the bill. ‘Drink’ll be extra. You need to wait awhile. Willie does his drinkin’ after sunset. Darkness means nothin’ to him.’

Although the bar stank of stale liquor, it was cool and dark, a welcome relief from the heat of the street. Michael felt the tiredness drain from him as he sipped the ice-cold bottle. He lifted up his bag and took out his small laptop.

‘Wouldn’t be flashin’ that around here, man,’ warned the barman.

Michael took out his notebook instead. He scribbled down his impressions of the city, from the airport to the hotel and the famous Bourbon Street.

‘Another beer, please.’

He read through a guidebook he had bought at home, intending to read on the aircraft, but which had been mistakenly packed in his suitcase. The city had been founded by the French Mississippi Company in the early 18th Century, named for the Duke of Orleans. It had passed from French to Spanish control, then back to the French before being sold to the United States in 1803. The cosmopolitan environment of the city was partly the result of the slave trade, and the migration from Haiti following their revolution of 1804, bringing a rich fusion of French and African cultures, also Catholicism and African Voodoo beliefs.

He finished his beer. It was getting dark outside, so he checked his watch. 7.30pm.

He signalled the barman, who pulled out another beer from the fridge. The barman was about to pop the cap, when he put the bottle down unopened. He pulled a dusty bottle from a high shelf and poured some clear green liquid into a shot-glass. He balanced a spoon over the glass and gently placed a sugar cube on top of the spoon, pouring water from an ice-jug over the sugar cube. The liquid turned cloudy.

The barman popped the beer cap and thumped the bottle down beside Michael. ‘Man’ll be in shortly.’

A few minutes later, a blind man walked in. He was dressed in a white suit, waistcoat, shirt and hat and black glasses obscured the milk-white eyes which were occasionally visible from the side. He was black and very old, with fissured ebony skin and a clipped white beard.

‘Well, I’m writing a book, you see,’ said Michael. ‘It’s about haunted graveyards and cemeteries. And nowhere’s as famous as New Orleans for graveyards.’

‘You got that one right,’ said Willie. He sipped his absinthe. ‘We got the Saint Louis graveyards just uptown from here. You’ll have heard of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen?’

‘Yes, I have,’ said Michael eagerly. ‘What do you know about her?’

‘Nuthin’,’ laughed Willie. ‘That story is voodoo bullshit! They say you need to knock the tomb three times and put three crosses on the tomb, but that ain’t no more than a tale to scare children. That lady ran a cathouse and was a hairdresser to rich white folks. She peddled voodoo charms on the side, to the poor and stupid. Plenty say she’s not even buried there.’ He spat, onto the ground.

‘Nope, that is just horse-shit. But there are plenty spirits in there. The dead are restless. And not just in Saint Louis. But all over Louisiana.’

Willie sipped his drink again. ‘Git yersef a beer, my man. And listen good. Only one phantom around here that’ll freeze your blood and kill you where you stand. And that’s Monsieur Fouet, or Mister Whip.’

‘I heard this story from my grandma. She told me stories a lot, seeing as I couldn’t read them. I was blind from when I was born, but she always said I had the Sight. I can walk down Bourbon Street outside there, and know when trouble is a’comin. Then I mostly get out of the way. And whenever I can’t get out of the way, I use the stick. I can hear them as they move and breathe, and the head of that cane is solid steel. Broken quite a few heads. There are other ways, of course, to protect yourself, but that’s another story.

Monsieur Fouet. Mister Whip. No-one could remember his real name. He came across from Haiti at the start of the century before last. Some said that he was a revolutionary, and others said he worked for the slave-owners. But he was fleeing something all right. Because he was a free man, he was able to hire himself out. And it wasn’t long before a plantation owner’s agent took him on as an overseer. For that man was good with a whip. Very good.

Didn’t matter that he was a black man. Some said he was a delicate featured mulatto, other that he was as black as darkest Africa but as beautiful as a Nubian. But he only cared for the red flesh under people’s hides. The cotton was planted and gathered in record times, because of that whip. Didn’t matter that people died under it, there was always plenty more and Fouet always knew which slaves were prized and which were not. He took to wearing a white coat, a bit like mine, but he needed to change it every day because of the blood. And he put on airs and graces, no matter that he was a nigger at the heart of it. Mister Whip. Monsieur Fouet.

His employer loved it, a man called Louvière. That was one sick motherfucker, both of them in fact. He was French, had all the decadences of the salons of Paris and then some. He had fled the Revolution and the guillotine. Rumours that he drank the blood of the slaves and even sacrificed their babes in black masses. Plenty of Society back then wouldn’t go near him, only bought his cotton because it was cheap. So he kept to his own devices. Took to listening to some of the wise men and women, the voodoo priests and such like, and learned even more devilry, visiting rituals in disguise, in a cloak and hood like a ghost. Some say that is where the Ku Klux Klan took their sheets idea from. Anyways, Mister Whip and his employer got on just fine and dandy.

Until Louvière came back from some midnight soiree, and found Fouet on top of his lady wife. What he was doing to her was never said, but that man was dragged out into the courtyard in burning torchlight. Plenty of slaves were willing to hold him down while the boss sliced off his lips and tongue and made him swallow them whole. Fouet knew he was lucky to escape with his life, as well as his balls, and didn’t seem to care much for his disfigurement. He went around with those grinning teeth and started painting his face like a skull, taking the lash to more and more of them, to the point of death.

One night, not long after, he whipped the hide right off one poor soul, laid his back open. When the fellow was still dying, Fouet took that knife from Louvière and cut the spine right out of his back and ribs. He hollowed those bones out in front of the poor man, carved them with voodoo symbols and threaded them onto his whip. When he cracked it, the bones would rattle. Plenty of things changed that night. It was a full moon, evil in the air, spirits in the bayous and swamps. Some said that Papa Legba had opened the gates to the Loa, and Baron Samedi himself walked that night. Anyhows, Louvière dragged his lady wife out and cut her heart out, in the light of the moon. They feasted on it there and then, Louvière and his overseer. Then they killed every last one of those slaves; men women and boys.

But they didn’t die.

Fouet lashed them with his voodoo whip, every one. And they bled and fell as the flesh was torn off them. But then they rose. And they were put to work in the fields, far cheaper than living slaves, the corpses that they were. But only at night time. The sun was no good for them, and no good for the Louvière either, who had taken to blood-drinking every day. Those fields sat unworked during the day, and no one would dare venture near them at night. Louvière sent his agents to get more slaves, who were bled and whipped to death, and who then rose again. And his cotton got cheaper and cheaper, and folks held their nose and bought from him. He used the money to buy more and more fields and to extend his plantation even further across Louisiana. He might have bought the whole God-damned State if things had carried on that way.

But it could never last, even if only because of economics and not morality. No morality among slavers anyway. Plenty of people with money saw plainly what was happening. They knew they could not compete with the undead slave-fields, and that they would end up ruined, their own fields trodden under decaying feet. So, one night, they formed a small army. Worthy men and city fathers amongst their numbers, so they said, but they were afraid of voodoo vengeance. So they put on white hoods and cloaks out of fear, like Louvière had done out of deceit, and as their descendents would later do out of hate.

They killed Louvière. He did not die easy, until someone hammered a length of wood through his heart. The slaves did not put up much of a fight, and were burned. But Fouet would just not die. They hung him from a tree and burned him, but still he twitched and jerked. Not knowing what to do, they wrapped him in that twisted whip, which seemed to still him. Then they nailed him in a hardwood casket and placed him in a vault, in the Saint Louis Cemetery, where he lies until this very day, unable to move. But, even if he could move and shrug off the whip’s cold embrace, he would be damned to scratch on the inside of that casket until Judgement Day. And, even if he managed to claw his way out, he would be damned to drag his bony fingers down the brick walls of the vault until Judgement Day. And let us pray that he never manages to wriggle loose, scrabble free, and pull down those walls, otherwise we will all be doomed. For he will bathe in blood and will raise all the dead around him.’

‘Where can I find his vault,’ asked Michael, draining his fifth beer.

‘Dunno,’ shrugged Willie. ‘Some say it is unmarked. Others say he is buried in the Louvière vault. That’s a common name here though.’ He sipped his absinthe, the third drink that had been prepared for him.

The wail of an amplified guitar cut through their conversation.

‘Anyhows, mister,’ said Willie. ‘Leave me be. I want to listen to the music in peace. Come around tomorrow at the same time and I’ll tell you more.’

Michael felt too tired to enjoy the bustling bars on Bourbon Street, which had burst into life in a river of noise and colour. So he had an overpriced sixth beer in the hotel bar, watching the silent newsreader on the TV screen as the subtitled headlines crept by.