The Tangled Bridge (45 page)

Madeleine stopped, searching his face. “Then it really is like what Zenon and Chloe are saying. That we become slaves.”

Marc was smiling at her with those blue eyes like Daddy's. Like Zenon's. Like her own.

“Not slaves, honey. Protectors.”

She heard an insect buzzing and realized it was the sound of her own wheezing. When had she gotten sick that way? Her lungs were filling with fluid.

Madeleine said, “If Chloe survives she's going to get to Cooper.”

“If she doesn't, then Zenon will. You gotta survive, honey.”

She gave a tearful laugh. “You're preaching to the choir, sweetie, I'm all about pulling through this alive.”

“Then pull your body out of this.”

“How?”

“You saw it in the halfway, didn't you?”

“The halfway?”

She shook her head, frowning, but then remembered the symbol deep within Gaston's tree. The hobo scrawl.

Marc turned and stepped away from her.

“Wait! Marc, honey, stay on with me a little longer. Please.”

He turned. “You ain't got a little longer, baby. You dyin. But if you get fixed you can find us again. Now that you figured out the bridge.”

And then his face crumpled into laughter, a deep, good-old-Marc hilarity. “Too bad you had to let your body and mind go to pot in order to figure out the rest. Only you, baby!”

She laughed, too, just because he was doing it, though it really didn't seem funny at all. In fact it seemed pretty damned morose. She could still hear her own wheezing and looked down at herself. But she didn't see her own body. Not at first anyway. It was somewhere below. Far below. She was down there lying in some kind of bed. Other people in the room with her.

“Get on, now!” Marc said with a wave, and she felt herself falling. Fast.

 

fifty-five

BAYOU BOUILLON, 1933

ALL WAS BLACK FOR
Patrice. True black. If there were any chance Trigger might be alive somewhere down in that water she would have found him by now. But it was too late.

She dove after her brother again and again though she knew he was gone. She could see nothing in that night water. But she could sense much. She sensed a ghost's presence. But Trigger, there was no sign of him. She sensed only the absence of Trigger. Could hardly believe he was dead. Her heart denied it. Assigned it as false.

But.

A piece of her accepted the truth of what she'd seen. Trigger was torn from belly to sternum. His body had slid into the bayou and was lost. Even if she recovered his body, her brother was gone. Gone, gone.

Up above on the boardwalk, she sensed the hearts of those who had come to take them to her mother: one dead body, one alive. That's what they were supposed to bring to the witch in New Orleans.

Patrice's mind functioned in waves: twenty seconds of searing anguish, twenty seconds of paralysis, and then twenty seconds of vengeance.

In the latter, she pigeoned each of those despicable men on that boardwalk above and brought them tumbling over the side into the cold boil with her.

This pigeon exercise required complete calm. She executed it with that calm. Cold boil calm. Brought them down and bade them fill their lungs with bayou.

Twenty seconds of searing anguish. Twenty seconds of paralysis. Twenty seconds of death.

There had been seven of them. It had continued until she'd claimed each one. The last two had been difficult—they went into the water and swam without drowning. And so she turned those two on one another so that they fought, strangled, crushed, drowned together.

By the time Ferrar pulled Patrice out she'd nearly drowned herself, her body no longer able to stay afloat.

The ghosts were gone.

 

fifty-six

BAYOU BOUILLON, NOW

MADELEINE AWOKE ON A
pallet in a floating room. The sound of creaking wood came from beneath, and also a gentle rocking, so very slow. Daylight poured in from a sizable gap in the corrugated roof. Gaston was chewing on a hangnail there in the corner by the door, the click beetle necklace around his neck. A beautiful girl with golden-bronze skin was wringing out a washrag and wiping it over Madeleine's forehead. Madeleine was naked and wrapped in a blanket.

She said to Gaston, “Are we still supposed to be ghosts?”

The girl's eyes flashed. She swallowed and seemed to be holding her breath, and very slowly looked over her shoulder at Gaston. Gaston turned and faced the wall.

Madeleine clamped her mouth shut. The effort of speech was excruciating anyway. There were fire ants nesting in her lungs.

The girl took Madeleine's hand and fit it around a jar of warm liquid. Madeleine tried to lift her head to drink but she couldn't. She couldn't lift any limbs. Could lift her fingers but not her hand. Her gaze swiveled up to the ceiling and beyond it, where Marc and Daddy both were watching. Marc waved her on.

She nodded more with her heart than her head. The girl had lifted the jar to Madeleine's lips and she found she could drink. Probably, the stuff tasted awful. Everything looked to be moving in waves. Even the gingham pattern of the girl's dress seemed to move like charmed serpents.

Madeleine was going to fall back asleep if she didn't hurry.

“Severin,” she called in her mind.

And Severin appeared, crawling up from somewhere beneath the bed, maybe even beneath the floorboards, and she kept low. For once she wasn't wearing a grin.

Severin put her tiny, filthy finger to her lips in a shushing gesture.

“Just us, yes?” she whispered.

Madeleine nodded in her mind. And then, mercifully, she felt herself being dislodged from that wretched thing that had become her body. Briar mist cool and quiet, all around.

*   *   *

THEY DESCENDED AT ONCE
from the forest into the fractured tunnels below, Severin whispering, “A secret in your heart, a thing to find, yes.”

Madeleine nodded in reply. Severin was dragging her along, Madeleine's weakened mind unable to do anything but focus on the fissure she'd seen in the symbols, and she saw it in her mind now. Saw it clearly though she'd never been there before. The compulsion came not from her mind but from somewhere else deep within her, a part of her she'd felt when she was talking to Marc and Daddy.

And she knew Severin was taking her to that fissure. Uncharacteristically obedient. Probably because Severin held her own stake in Madeleine's survival.

“Are Zenon or Gaston anywhere nearby? Or their river devils?” Madeleine asked.

Severin halted and gave Madeleine a fierce look. “Hush that! Why invoke them?”

“Invoke? I was just asking.”

“To say a name is to pray it. And the feeling in your heart wraps around the name, too, fury or love or death, so surely.”

Madeleine, listened, bewildered. They were in an underground grotto, roots dangling above and water washing along beneath them. A smell of mildew and rot.

She felt so drowsy. Losing consciousness now would be deadly.

Madeleine said, “Alright, fine. Is
anyone
nearby we should know about?”

“Not as of this moment. And luck, that. What you seek is a secret.”

“OK, so let's go.”

Severin said, “You know the way, not I. You've stopped looking at it so now I cannot find it.”

“Me?”

Madeleine thought backward, trying to figure out where the fissure was, her mind flitting over the places she'd been inside the briar. But she'd never before been to this particular place.

Severin glared at her. “What are you doing? You wish to take us on some lengthy voyage?”

“I … don't know how to find it.”

“Just do as before!”

Madeleine swallowed, erasing all thoughts, then pictured the carving she'd seen in the root system of Gaston's tree. The plus sign with a circle and dots. The long-tailed triangle.

The sense returned. The coarse groove that she'd seen in that wood became a new, living dimension, a cleft in stone.

They were moving again, this time with the seven-league steps Severin took when covering long distances, and suddenly they were there.

*   *   *

FOUR TREES, JUST AS
in the carving. And there was the crevasse.

Madeleine and Severin were standing at a bend in the river that had gone black with shadows—unnatural shadows, those that had never been framed by light. An immediate sense of danger swept over Madeleine.

Where the water turned, an eddy had formed. Only, the water did not look like water. It swirled black and thick. A vestigial body like an appendix that once served to filter sludge but now only acquired the worst toxins of its environment, storing them in a pool that could never empty itself.

Madeleine narrowed her eyes at the odors emitting from the eddy, and watched as the water moved … strangely, as if a creature made of tar were stretching along the surface. An unsettling sight. There were many traps in the briar. Most caused you to lose your way so that you might wander for weeks, even years. Some caused physical pain or loathing. As Madeleine gave a nervous glance toward that shape that seemed made of tar, she noticed thornflies crawling along the roots dangling above.

The fissure was shaped much like the triangle in the carving, with the longest end being on top, and the point of the triangle falling below and to the right. The mouth was covered in moss, mottled with green and rust colors like the duckweed at the briar's surface. A breeze came from within. It smelled sweet like a meadow just before a rainstorm is about to break.

“Inside, now,” Severin was saying, and her eyes were bright.

But this fissure was tiny. About the size of the glove box in Madeleine's truck. They couldn't exactly crawl inside. Madeleine looked at Severin, puzzled.

“In!” Severin said.

Madeleine peered inside but saw only darkness. And movement. She steeled herself and reached inside. Felt something covering her arm. She pulled her arm out again and saw it covered with thornflies. They poured out of the opening.

Madeleine kept her breathing steady, refusing to give in to alarm. The thornflies had their stingers curled and waiting, crawling up her arm and following to her neck and body. She felt a wave course through her, one that ought to be panic but she let it pass through her like a shadow and it did not catch.

Everything was slipping away from her. Like a giant fan slowly turning its blades over her vision, she knew she was about slip into unconsciousness. Death.

“Go on! Stupid thing!” Severin cried.

Madeleine went tense, and felt the first few stings of the thornflies.

Severin said, “You are going to die here, right here. In this moment. A breath away.”

The stings throbbed, but Madeleine released a slow sigh and let the pain happen. The thornflies stopped.

Madeleine looked again into the crevasse, and suddenly realized what she needed to do.

A clear mind. An open heart. Her spirit lifted.

And she was inside. She alone, not Severin.

*   *   *

SHE LAY PRONE ON
something soft. Without Severin's will to pull her along she found she could not move. Not an inch. Much like being back in her body.

The fan blades turned. Madeleine counted each turn. Such comfort in counting. It took the last reserves of her consciousness. And then consciousness slipped, too.

*   *   *

SHE FELT HER BODY
churning. Her awareness was bogged down in something like sleep, only heavier. More resistant. But after a span of time her mind broke through the blackness into something she couldn't attach to briar or material world. If anything, it felt like a dream: In her ear, she felt a cocoon had formed, then hatched. Both agony and relief to feel it seize and move. She wanted it to eject itself from her. She felt bending delirium to the point of vertigo. Her body wanted to writhe, too, like that anxious, fervent thing in her ear.

All the little cuts on and throughout her body formed over clean, and they ejected the heat and puss and scab into tiny itchy balls that fell away from her like dry rice, leaving behind only smooth pink sensation. Her ankle where Gaston had cut her, her knees and hands. Her kidneys, even, and her bladder—she felt them knitting over with coolness where there had been heat and pain. Her lungs planed themselves clean and filled with a substance that, it seemed, had she not found the skill of subsistence without breath, might have drowned her.

She was aware of rolling over onto her belly to cough it out, and this time her consciousness rose even higher from the dream state. She retched.

The creature in her ear was working, working. She felt a strange sort of wrenching. It pulled the pain away with it. The heaviness. She placed her hand to her ear. Inside the ear canal, the creature went
flap flap flap flap.
Then it was vibrating, soft and furtive. It emerged, spread its wings, and flew away. She watched it go. A moth, but with briar enchantments. Had she created that? A thing that she learned from the soft, cool, mossy retreat. In its absence her ear was clean and her hearing sharp.

No real awareness of where she was, as all her sight had gone inward. She collapsed back down onto the feel of soft, spongy moss and let her body plunge back into real sleep.

This time it was restful.

*   *   *

SHE AWOKE IN THIS
same fissure. And when she opened her eyes her mind was immediately brighter though she could see only in fractals.

This was a good place. An anomaly of the briar. She could feel a kind of ambient tension, a delicious sense, sort of like the way her muscles felt when she was treading water very slowly. Drawing warmth into her body. Exploring her own strength. The scent of impending rain was strong though she knew it would not rain.

She rested there, keeping her mind easy. A strange kind of euphoria filled her, light and beautiful.