“The Recluse made it for me.”
“Of course.” Odessa must have stolen her veil. “How long ago?”
“A year, at least. We’ve been watching you, you know.”
I’ll bet you have. Thoughtfully Sloane touched the mask that fit like a second skin over her face. With her heart gone, she found she could think more clearly. Looking back, Sloane doubted that Odessa had ever really intended for the mask to help her challenge Momus. Surely the witch’s purpose had been to give Sloane the power to walk in both Galvestons. And maybe, make her a little more like the daughter Odessa had never had. What had she said? Jane Gardner isn’t the only one who needs a successor, Sloane.
Momus stuffed the doll back in his pocket. “It’s interesting, how different people die. Your mother, now: she froze up, like a stone. But the Recluse: she’s wearing through, like a piece of cloth. I talk to her more and more often these days. Right after the Flood she would send folk to Krewes all manner of ways: push them down the stairs at Stewart Beach, lose them in the Maze, turn them into dogs or fish or brambles. Lately though she just tends to drown ’em, one after another. Hard to stay creative as you age, they say.”
“What will happen if Odessa ever dies?”
“When, not if.” Momus tapped the rigged bowling pin. “The house always wins, remember?”
“After she dies, then.”
“What happens after,” Momus said. “That’s really the only question that matters, isn’t it?” He winked. “In this case, your godmother and I finally came to an agreement, though we never could persuade poor Jane. As to what will happen after the witch dies, why, that’s partly up to you, my dear. But I will tell you one thing: If there is no angel to stop me, the Harlequins will get all the magic they think they want.”
“Fine with me,” Sloane said. “I’m not interested in playing witch. Odessa will have to join the long list of people disappointed in me. And you know what? I don’t care.” Sloane’s grin broadened. “Ooh, that felt good. I’ll say it again. I don’t care. I don’t care what happens to you, or her, or me, or the whole rotten little Island.” She curtseyed and backed toward the door of the little storage shed. “Thanks. About the heart, I mean.”
Momus waved. “A trifle. It’s hard on humans, spending time with gods. Bad for the skin,” he said, as she backed out into the noise of the fairgrounds. “You might consider that, before seeking me out so freely.”
SHE was Sly, wholly Sly, laughing and stumbling through the Carnival. Sly loosed like a hawk on the night.
She wandered the streets of Mardi Gras, completely carefree for the first time in her life. A mad energy sent her dancing through the mansions she knew so well, spinning and careening with gleeful abandon in the Fords’ ballroom at Open Gates and the sprung-wood floor at the Bishop’s Palace. She found friends in the night, and champagne in crystal flutes at the Gresham Mansion, and bourbon at the Commodore Bar. She found music and dancing and games of chance, though she did not find Ace again. She lost Sloane and she found Sly. She found men and they found her.
She lost her purse and she lost her shoes. She danced along Seawall Boulevard in her stocking feet until she came to the Balinese Room. Strange sacrifices had been laid at the bottom of Odessa’s pier: a bottle of wine, a handful of withered violets, a wreath of snakeskins stretched over a bone frame. A saucer of what Sloane took to be ketchup until she poked her finger in and licked it and the salt taste of congealing blood brought a rush of spit into her mouth.
A tiny, ferret-faced man with pliers and snips and wrenches at his belt came and knelt beside her. His knees as he lowered himself made a sound like sheet metal bending. In front of himself he had placed two car batteries and a pair of jumper cables which he touched together in a jerky rhythm, making sparks arc and gap in the darkness. “What are you doing?” Sly asked.
“Offering for the Lady.” he grated. “Got two kids back on the Other Side. Need looking after. Bring the Lady gifts to keep an eye on them for me.”
Sly blinked. “I never knew Odessa to take particular care of any family after she sent someone to Krewes. Look at the—” Tranhs, she still couldn’t say. Poor Vince, that Sloane had betrayed. The silly bitch.
Sparks arced and jumped in front of the kneeling reveller. Sparks popped and hissed around his tin-colored face. “Have to do something,” he said.
“Try drinking,” Sloane suggested, backing away from the witch’s house. She didn’t really need to see Odessa tonight. Or ever again, come to think of it.
She headed back into town to drink. She drank and she drank and she drank. When she’d drunk too much to dance she spent a long, drowsy time of walking up and down Galveston’s streets, exhausted yet buzzing, her limbs twitching, driven forward as if by a clockwork in her back that would never run down. She backed into a doorway and pulled up her skirt and squatted to pee, warm wetness on her stockings. She had lost—it was wonderful—she had lost her ability to be embarrassed, but she had lost her talent for invisibility, too. She had nowhere near enough strength to keep the man in the dog mask from raping her, and the one with the monocle, and the one on stilts, but they couldn’t hurt her. Afterward she stumbled down to Stewart Beach and threw herself on the dry sand next to the Seawall, determined to sleep, only to find herself rhythmically rocking, humming, digging little trenches in the sand with her toes, thirsty, dizzy, nauseated, sleepless. Rocking and rocking. Rocking and rocking.
The more of Sloane she lost, the better she felt.
“HEY.” Someone shook her shoulder. “Hey!”
She curled more tightly in on herself. She was hard and dark, an undersea thing without feeling, a crab hidden on a beach. The voice was far away and faint, coming from above the water; the shaking was the swell of surf overhead.
The shaking intensified. “Get up. Sly. I ain’t about to carry you.”
There was sand under her cheek. It smelled of vomit and urine. She curled up tighter.
Two hands hooked under her armpits and pulled her into a sitting position with her back against the Seawall. She slumped over. “G’way!” She turned her head and blinked at the blur in front of her. “Ace?” The card player wavered in and out of focus. “Hey, you old son of a bitch!” She giggled and then retched. “What brings you here?”
He looked at her sourly. “Just lucky, I guess. Can you walk?” She started to laugh and then stopped as he hauled her upright. Gold and white stars flashed and faded in front of her eyes. Her knees buckled and she sagged in his arms. Ace grunted and straightened her up again. Somewhere in the distance a ragtime band was playing. Fireworks twinkled over the harbor and laughter echoed from a balcony across Seawall Boulevard.
Bit by bit she took her own weight on her legs. She bent over, breathing hard, hands on her knees. Her feet stung and throbbed. “A little support,” she said. Ace offered his arm and she clung to it. The reek of her clothes rose up to her, stinking of vomit and urine and wine. “Damn. Ruined another pretty dress.”
“I know a place to get you cleaned—uh-oh.” A gang of young men in masks pounded down the Seawall steps to the beach, whooping and yelling. “Can you run?” Ace asked quietly.
“Nope. Too tired.” Sly turned and grinned at the knot of revellers. Sloane would have tried to run, or cowered in the sand, hoping to remain unseen. Sly’s grin grew broader. “Hey, fellas!” she shouted. Her voice was raspy and hoarse. Whoops and cheers greeted her. She picked out one of the leaders, a thin, curly-haired teenager wearing a gold domino mask and a Texas A & M T-shirt. Lost in the Flood before Sloane had even been born. “Hey, handsome!” she said, lurching into him and rubbing her filthy dress against his shirt. She sighed gustily with her vomit-foul breath.
He recoiled. “Beat it, skank.”
“Filthy slut.”
“Jesus, even my old man would have more pride.”
“I got nothing but cold sores down below,” Sly promised, rubbing against his thigh. “I don’t have nothin’ bad. C’mon, baby.” Her chos
en boyfriend cuffed her and backed away. She fell to her knees on the sand next to Ace. “C’mon, fellas,” she said. Somebody spat at her. The revellers backed away, jeering and pretending to puke.
“That was close,” Ace said when they were gone.
Sly struggled to her feet. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat, as my momma says.—Oops!” She giggled. “Used to say.”
Ace led her up to Seawall Boulevard and then turned east. A block down Ship Mechanic Street she let herself get distracted watching the fireworks over the harbor and slashed her foot open on a broken bottle lying in the street. Strangely, although she developed a slight limp, the foot didn’t bleed, and she could barely feel the hurt. No heart, she remembered. A great improvement.
Distant Creole music wound through the night. They fell in behind a barbershop quartet on stilts and passed into a neighborhood of dilapidated Victorian houses just west of Big Red, the haunted UT Hospital. The streetlights were smashed, but the glare of the full moon made it easy to see. At 13th Avenue Ace stopped in front of a run-down three story house. The front porch sagged and part of the roof had fallen in. “Why here?” Sly asked.
“Nostalgia.” He helped her stagger up the porch steps. “This is where we were living, me and my wife, the night the Flood broke. It was a shared house, seven of us in all. We called it the Asylum. That was funnier before the Flood. Me and Amanda were the only ones who made it through that week. We had it all to ourselves for the next ten years. They say it was bad after the Flood, and it was, but for a while there, with most people dead or gone, those of us who were left had a lot of stuff to choose from.”
Sly blinked. “You weren’t taken in the Flood?”
“Nope. I’m one lucky son of a bitch, remember?” He pulled open the screen door and tested the wooden one behind. It was unlocked. A musty, moldy smell rushed out of the darkness inside.
“Did the Recluse get you?”
“Sort of. She couldn’t if I didn’t want her to. I was too lucky,” Ace said. “I guess I ended up in Hell pretty much of my own free will. Which I’ve come to believe is the way most folks do it.” He stood in the doorway for a long moment. “Sly, we need some light. Wait here on the porch.” She slid down the wall and sat facing the street. “That’s it. I’ll be back directly.” The porch boards squeaked and shifted as he left.
A mosquito whined around Sly’s head, suddenly loud in her ear. The whining stopped and mosquito legs tickled her cheek, but she was too stupefied with tiredness to slap at it. Joke’s on you: I’ve got no heart and no blood to suck, you scheming little bitch. She slid into sleep, grinning at the thought.
HER chin was on her chest and she had a terrible crick in her neck when Ace shook her awake. “Come inside. I’ve made up a pallet.” He helped her to her feet. On a stair just inside the doorway Ace had set a candle. Darkness lapped at the shifting light it threw into the foyer of the ruined house. Shadows clung in the corners as if stuck to the cobwebs there. Banisters ascended into the upper darkness. Across the dusty hallway, a few shapeless hanks of rotten cloth dangled from a coat-and-hat stand. The stink of mold was overwhelming at first but faded gradually as she got used to it. Ace said, “There’s a bathroom at the end of the hallway. I put a bucket of water and a bar of soap in there.” He handed her a lump of fabric. “Here’s a dress to change into.”
“Where’d you get this stuff?”
“Spent some more of the money you made me.”
The bathroom was awful, a riot of mildew crawling with roaches. They squished and crunched under her feet. She stripped out of her old clothes and put on the ones Ace had brought her, a loose grey blouse, knee-length skirt, and a pair of plain rope sandals. Dreary stuff, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Standing at the sink she washed her face, working a lather out of a ball of rough, clean-smelling soap with flecks of sage in it. She was careful never to dislodge her mask, running her fingers up under it as gently as possible, inhaling its leathery smell like perfume.
Ace was waiting for her when she came out of the bathroom. “Better,” he said. “Reckon you should take the mask off, too?”
“Never again.”
He shrugged and led her into the kitchen. A second candle sat on a small table. Boxy pale blurs sat around the edges of the room: refrigerator, no doubt, and a stove, and probably a dishwasher or a microwave oven. He lowered her onto a puffy blue rectangle of plastic beside the table. What? Oh—swimming pool furniture. An inflatable raft. “We had one of these when I was little,” Sly said. “I used to float around on it for hours, until my mother had the pool drained.”
“Didn’t trust the stairs up to the bedrooms. Didn’t trust the mattresses either. Too many spiders.”
“Yuck.” Sly made a face and lay down on the inflatable raft, worried that any sudden pressure might cause the old plastic to burst or leak air. Ace took off his dark jacket and hung it on a chair back, then sat down at the kitchen table and started softly shuffling a pack of cards. He looked frail in his cotton undershirt. His chest was thin, and his round shoulders were beginning to hunch. His face in the flickering candlelight was gaunt and sad with shadows.
“Mister.” Sly said at last, “you’ve lost a lot more than an ear.”
“Wait awhile,” he said. “You will, too.”
Sly turned on her side, facing away from him so the candlelight wouldn’t fall in her eyes. The plastic bed felt strangely cool where it touched her jaw, below the line of her mask. It had a strange smell, too: a faint remnant of the clean, artificial odor she always associated with the time before the Flood, so different from the smells of her world. Her Galveston smelled of mildew and steam, hot cloth and sand. A memory from Sloane’s childhood came to her: sneaking into her mom’s dresser drawers and touching the crinkly plastic packages of panty hose Jane had started hoarding immediately after the Flood. Every year at Christmas, Galveston’s Grand Duchess would give one to herself as a present, letting Sloane play with the cellophane wrapper and touch the stockings themselves, impossibly sheer and fine, like caramel-colored spiderweb. Sly could still remember the way the muscles in her mother’s calves had bunched as she flexed her feet, pulling on her panty hose. Disease hadn’t yet wasted her legs to sticks back then.
“Did you ever have any kids?” Sly said lazily.
“One boy.” Cards riffled and fell. Ace squared up his pack and shuffled, squared and shuffled. “When I first came to Mardi Gras, I thought I’d never go back to the real Galveston. I had folded my hand there, just like you.”
“Kind of cold for the kid. You didn’t even miss him?”
“I lost him to Mandy fair and square, you see? I didn’t deserve him. He was better off without me. Mandy believed that for damn sure, and I guess I did, too. I guess maybe I still do. But even so…” The cards tickered together in a long waterfall, a dry, rushing sound like the beating of insect wings. “One day the Prawn Men told me Amanda had died. My wife, that was.”
“I didn’t know they could talk.”
Ace squared his pack, held it in the middle with a little-finger break, cut it one-handed and squared it up again. “You have to be pretty patient.”
“I guess you must be.”
“Patience is the scar left behind when certain kinds of hope have burned away.” Ace was thin and sharp at the edges from hunger, and after so many years trapped in a night that never ended, his skin was waxy white. Paint a joker on him and stick him in the pack for a spare, Sly thought, grinning to herself.
Ace cut and shuffled. “Be that as it may. The thought of that boy alone—it ate me up. I decided I ought to go see him. Just observe how he was doing.” Ace squared up his pack. “I didn’t know any way to get back. I asked Miss Odessa to let me through, but she said her door was never going to swing that way, not if she could help it. So I found the only card in the pack to trump her. I played Momus for passage home. In the end I won, although the betting was heavy and I took some losses.” Ace fingered the nubby scars around his ear hole.
He smiled with no great humor. “Imagine if I weren’t so damn lucky?”
Bugs were coming out of the darkness, drawn by the candle on the kitchen table. Sly watched a moth flutter and whirl around the flame until one of his wings burned and he fell to the table. Love is blind, she thought. “I hope the boy was glad to see you.”
“You know, I never did talk to him. Watched him for a while. Followed him,” Ace said. He licked his lips. “The way I figured it, he didn’t need any more interruptions in his life.”
Sly guffawed. “You were chickenshit, you mean. But hell, that was probably the smart thing to do.” Sly put on Jane Gardner’s tight-lipped, disappointed voice. “Children these days, they’re more trouble than they’re worth. Always let you down in the end.”
“I took a good piece of change over to the parents of a friend of his,” Ace said. “Asked them to watch out for him. A good piece of change.”
Sly propped herself up on her elbow for a moment to look at the old man. “I guess pride doesn’t heal as fast as I thought. You didn’t have the decency to speak to your own son face-to-face? Man to man?” Ace’s hands had gone still. With a snort, Sly settled back on her pool raft. “Well, good for you. Good riddance.”
“I always try to fold my weaker hands,” Ace said. “I don’t bet more than I can afford to lose. But sooner or later life deals every man a loss too terrible to accept.” He slid a card under the crippled moth and flicked it off the table. “Anyone can win, Sly. It’s how we lose that measures us.”
Sly laughed. She thought of all the rubes and simpletons still milling around Stewart Beach, throwing baseballs at lead bowling pins and shooting at tin ducks with defective BB guns. “Sell philosophy to some other sucker, old man.”
Ace held his pack. After a moment he began to deal, six hands of Texas Hold ’Em. Cards clicked and slid against the tabletop, steady as rain falling. “Go to sleep,” he said.
WHEN she had rested up enough, Ace taught her to play poker. She sat across the kitchen table from him, studying the cards by candlelight.