Her shadow crept up, caught, and passed her as she walked by the hissing gas streetlamps in the better part of town. Her eyes hurt. Gardners weren’t supposed to cry. At the far end of Broadway, where the Stewart Beach Amusement Park waited at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, the moon was rising in a cream-colored haze. Sloane felt its gaze and dropped her head. Be small. Be silent. Two tears slipped over the edge of her aching eyes and crept down her cheeks. She wiped them off with the palm of her hand. Waste of water.
Every spring, the Mardi Gras parade followed the same route the Krewe of Harlequins had walked on that fateful night in 2004 when the world changed forever. They started at the old train station just west of downtown, long since turned into a railroad museum, then walked through the Strand, Galveston’s tourist and business district, and finally stopped at the gates to the Stewart Beach Amusement Park, where Momus had established his court on the first night of the Flood.
Here, where Broadway ended at Seawall Boulevard, the gap between the real Galveston and the Galveston still locked in Carnival was only inches. Jane Gardner had ordered a tall fence erected in her first year in office, so those having business along the Seawall would be protected from seeing the unholy carnival seething below. Fairground noises drifted up over the fence to Sloane, the rhythmical barking of the hucksters at their stalls, the clink and clatter of baseballs hurled at milk jugs and BB guns fired at metal ducks. Faint strains of calliope music, inexpressibly sad.
Sloane hovered on the corner of Broadway and Seawall Boulevard. A single doorway had been left in the wooden fence; through it a set of concrete steps led down to the beach, and the world of magic. Next to the door stood a ramshackle ticket-taker’s hut. Even by moonlight Sloane could see the gaily painted facade around the door, with clown faces and balloons, a Bearded Lady and a Wheel of Fortune. Silver letters on the door spelled out the motto of Momus’s kingdom:
It Just Doesn’t Get
Any Better Than This!
Sloane stood on the corner with her heart hammering in her chest. She lifted her left wrist up to her ear and listened to the patient tick, tick, tick of the Rolex, letting it steady her.
A snatch of mad calliope music greeted her as she headed for the ticket-taker’s booth.
Chapter Three
MOMUS
THE night smelled of crabs and salt and wet sand. The dark air was murmurous with laughter and shouts and distant music, and under everything else the rhythmic roar and hush of the breaking sea. Sloane glanced back over her shoulder. The faint glow of the last gas lamp on Broadway seemed very far away. She forced herself to step onto the sidewalk and walk to the ticket-taker’s booth.
“Evening, Sloane,” said a voice from the shadows. “Feeling lucky, are you?” The voice sounded neither young nor old, male or female.
I will not faint. “I, I, I’m sorry,” Sloane stammered. “You know my name.”
“I know everybody’s name.”
“Oh. Ah, I didn’t mean to trouble you. I n-need—” For God’s sake, woman, you’re a Gardner. Stop sputtering like a ten-year-old. “I need to see Momus.”
“Hold out your hand,” said the voice.
Goose bumps ran up Sloane’s arm as she stretched out her arm toward the ticket-taker’s booth. She flinched. “What are you going to do to me?”
“Give you a stamp. Hold out your hand.”
“Is that all?”
“Admission is always free.” The ticket-taker chuckled. “You’ll do your paying inside. Hold out your hand.”
Sloane squeezed her eyes shut. Pushing her hand under the ticket-taker’s wicket and into the shadow beyond was like sticking it into a drawer full of spiders. Something stung her on the wrist, just below the steel band of her watch. She gasped and jerked her hand back. A silvery caricature of Momus glowed on her skin, a round head with two little horns and an evil grin. Even now, sick with dread, she remembered to say, “Thank you.” You get more done with good manners than quick wits. Her mother hated it when Sloane said that.
She started down the concrete stairs to Stewart Beach. Admission is always free. You’ll do your paying inside. I bet.
The noise of the Carnival grew louder with every downward step. Fairground smells eddied up the stairwell: barbecue and cigarettes, spilled beer and…popcorn! Sloane was amazed how easy it was to identify the aroma. She could have been no more than nine years old when the last bag of popcorn ran out.
When she got to the bottom of the stairs she did not plunge at once into the Carnival to look for Momus. Instead she hung back in the shadowy doorway, staring out at the scene before her. Aproned stall keepers hawked cold beer, nachos, sno-cones, pickled jalapeños and cotton candy, corn-on-the-cob and licorice and popcorn. Tongues of flame reached up from a dozen makeshift grills to lick barbecued ribs and chicken and brisket and shrimp, German sausage and hamburgers and ballpark franks, all bursting and blistering. The air was full of smoke, clouds of it, wafting up from barbecue pits, cigarettes, fire-swallowers’ wands, and fat cigars.
There were hucksters’ booths by the score, each with a different barker, adorned with bunting or blinking lights or bobbing balloons. People milled between them, trying to knock over milk jugs with a baseball, to guess the weight of the Fat Lady, to ring the bell with one whack of a sledgehammer. They hurled pies at clowns and tossed rings at pegs and pulled mightily at a giant fortune wheel with gypsy letters that rattled and slowed and shuddered to a stop like an old heart giving out.
Even the weather was different in Mardi Gras than it had been outside, cooler and less humid. As her mother had warned her, it was always the same night in Mardi Gras: February 11, 2004. Sloane lifted her Rolex to her ear. To her enormous relief it was still ticking. It was said that clocks and watches ran badly in Carnival, or not at all, but the Rolex was a talisman as well as a machine, and some combination of superior workmanship and her mother’s love seemed to be keeping it safe from harm. What charm could be proof against the spells of Momus’s court, Sloane figured, if not a favor from his Duchess?
All the revellers in the crowd were wearing masks, it seemed. Sloane unpinned her veil and let it drop across her own face. No, wait—looking closer she realized that many in the crowd were not wholly human. A feathered woman stood on one leg like a heron, squinting hard as she tried to guess the Fat Lady’s weight. A man munching on a D-cell battery as if it were a pickle passed not three feet from where Sloane was lurking. He had steel teeth and his fingers were ridged like pliers. Sloane cringed more deeply into the shadowed doorway. These must be people the magic had been working for years and years. Caught in the first days of the Flood perhaps.
Their clothes were extraordinary. They wore cotton, immaculately carded and woven impossibly tight—blue jeans and denim vests of a quality Sloane had only seen in photographs. Some of the women had taken advantage of the gorgeous weight and beautiful hang of rayon. Sloane saw rough silks and smooth jackets of cool linen, clinging jersey camisoles, and more lace than an army of grandmothers could knit in a year. All the clothes were dyed in bright pre-Flood colors Nature only showed on flowers or fish—lemon yellow, glossy scarlet, copper and silver and ultramarine.
She soon found she could pick out the more recent arrivals by their clothes. Even the ones who had begun to lose their human form, growing whiskers or scales, were immediately recognizable by their rough cotton shirts, tire-rubber sandals, and the dingy, drab dyes Galvestonians made themselves from pecan hulls, live-oak bark, and broom.
With a shock Sloane realized something else: everyone seemed to be having fun. Men boasted, women smiled, children clapped and hopped, shrieking with excitement or chasing one another through the forest of adult legs. Somehow Sloane had always assumed that Carnival must be a kind of hell, full of tormented souls in a ghoulish parody of amusement. It had never occurred to her that it might really be a heck of a party. She blinked. It just doesn’t get any better than this. She found herself smiling at her own obscure sense of disappointment
. She must be more of her mother’s daughter than she realized, a disapproving ant made surly by the sight of grasshoppers at play.
A cat-headed woman in a gold lamé sheath padded by Sloane’s hiding spot.
Time to find Momus. Annoyingly enough, her legs wouldn’t move. Come on now. Scared? she said to herself. You’re the best-dressed woman in the place.
Sloane had spent a lot of time learning to be invisible; it had been part of her character from toddler days, the desire to sit quietly out of the way and observe others without being noticed herself. A useful skill for anyone acting as Jane Gardner’s assistant, but a rotten trait in a grand duchess, as she had tried a hundred times—politely—to point out. But invisible was exactly what she wanted to be now.
Bodies pressed and jostled against her as she stepped into the crowd. She hunched her shoulders, as any tall girl with large breasts learned to do, and kept her head down, careful not to risk eye contact. Now she wished she were wearing something less elegant than her lichen-colored evening dress. Nobody here is going to notice you, she told herself, but the old familiar dread that everyone was watching her spread like a flush across her skin.
“Peanuts! Hot roasted peanuts!” someone bellowed directly in her ear. “Cotton candy!”
“Everyone’s a winner, ladies and gents!”
“—Virgen Sagrada has blessed me with oracular—”
“Beads! Beads!” cried a black woman entirely decked in necklaces of plastic beads. “Honey, you need some beads!”
“No, thank you,” Sloane said, sidling toward a ringtoss as if she were extremely interested in the stuffed monkeys offered for prizes.
The black woman grinned. “You must be new, you think you don’t need beads.” She laughed. “Come see me when you know better, honey.”
“Easy shot, miss. Easy shot for a monkey,” said the ringtoss huckster, holding out a handful of plastic rings.
“Actually, I wanted to see Momus.”
The huckster cupped his ear. “What was that? Speak up, honey. Two sets of rings?”
“Momus,” Sloane yelled. “I need to see Momus.”
The god’s name dropped into the crowd like a stone falling into a pond. Silence washed out from her. Revellers glanced at one another and backed away. “Not so loud,” the huckster hissed. “Want me to lose all my customers?”
“Sorry.”
“Manager’s tent,” he growled. He pointedly turned his back and held out a handful of rings to a small boy wearing a snakeskin mask. “Take a few shots for free, sonny! Absolutely on the house, to show how easy it is to win a prize. Someone has to win, ladies and gentlemen—why not you?”
Sloane backed away from the ringtoss, trying without success to see anything that might be the manager’s office.
An emaciated young woman in a fancy dress yanked on her sleeve, bawling, “You always were a bit of a wet blanket, Sloane!”
“Omigod.” Sloane stared. “Ladybird? Ladybird Trube?”
“The one and only.”
“But how—”
Ladybird shrugged. “Either I’m crazy, I’m dead, or Odessa found out about the ghosts I kept seeing around our mansion and sent me to Krewes. To be perfectly honest, darling, I try not to dwell on it. I’m having a simply fabulous time, without Mother around to spoil it for once.” She raised a plastic wineglass to her lips and sipped a pale drink from it. “You know she was blackballed by the Daughters of the Texas Revolution again? Those seven lean and hungry kine who guard the application process cast aspersions on our paperwork. Mother keeps using little bits of Scotch tape to fix things up. I say, Sloane, could you tell me the time?”
Sloane checked her watch. “Almost midnight.”
Ladybird’s breath stank of sweet liquor. She leaned heavily on Sloane’s arm. “Thanks, doll. I don’t know why I ask, really, since it never does get to dawn here, but one likes to know. There’s a perfectly lovely party going on at your place, you know. Well, not quite your place, if you see what I mean. Miss Bettie will be playing that funny old square piano. Her taste in music is predictably antiquated, but she bangs away with great verve.”
“I need to see—” Sloane tapped the caricature of Momus stamped on her wrist.
“Of course you do, dear.” Ladybird gestured, drink in hand. She was flamboyant as ever, her hair piled atop her head in grand Spanish señora style and held in place with three large tortoiseshell combs. “Right behind you, walk past the Bearded Lady and then along the side of the Genuine Human Maze. You can’t miss it.”
“Ladybird…” Sloane looked at the heiress to the Trube fortune. She would have made a wonderful eccentric old lady, Sloane thought. But these days it’s not safe to be noticed; the most colorful flower is the first to get picked. “Shall I look for you on my way out?”
“I can’t get out, Sloane.” Ladybird smiled wearily. “When I walk out the door, up on Seawall Boulevard, you know, I’m not back home. I’m in this Galveston. Parties up and down the Strand. Grand drunks at your house. Cars that work. I’ve gone to Krewes, you see. It’s the Mardi Gras. Wherever I am, there it is.” She took another drink from her plastic wineglass and manufactured a smile. “I can’t say I miss the old place much! You ought to stay.”
“It does look sort of fun,” Sloane said uncomfortably. “But I have things I have to…There’s Mother and all.”
Ladybird laid a finger next to her nose. “Say no more. Off you go!”
Sloane waved and headed for the Bearded Lady.
“Sloane?” Ladybird called. Sloane turned back. Ladybird was standing up on tiptoe, already obscured by the crowd milling between them. “What time did you say it was?” she shouted.
“Eleven fifty-two.”
“Fabulous! Good night, and good luck with You Know Who!”
Sloane followed Ladybird’s directions. In a few minutes she found herself standing outside a small hut with the word MANAGER painted over the door. The cries of the lost came faintly from the Genuine Human Maze behind her.
She found she wasn’t knocking. Come on. You are the daughter of the Grand Duchess. Still no knocking. If you don’t do this, your mother will die. That almost did it.—And you will be doing her job, meeting by meeting, motion and motion seconded, for the rest of your life.
I am such a coward. She knocked.
“Come in!” The door popped open, and Momus stood before her, a hunchbacked moonfaced dwarf with two little horns atop his bald head. He wore a scarlet ringmaster’s suit and tails and black boots darker than the space between the stars. “Stepdaughter! At last!”
Time stopped.
Sloane’s mother always talked about magic as something impossible, something not real. The gods were wine or drugs that distorted your senses. Fever dreams and hallucinations. Nothing could be further from the truth. Standing before the hunchbacked god, Sloane knew that Momus alone was real. What she called life was a crayon drawing, crudely scribbled on a piece of paper, and Momus was the nail hammered through it to pin it to the universe.
As tall as she was, she found herself staring down at his bald old head. The god’s white scalp, webbed with blue veins, showed the dips and ridges in the plates of his skull. His skin gathered, thickening and rougher, at the base of his horns. He had no eyebrows, though the bony ridges above his eyes showed clearly under his thin white skin. She felt a terrible urge to reach out and touch him, to feel the craggy bones, the skin like wax paper beneath her fingers. She saw herself, withered and old, sitting in front of her vanity mirror with a brush in her hand, her thin hair coming out in clumps. “Sorry,” she whispered, seeing her old thighs, flabby and pale. Blue vessels broken into bruises all over them.
She gripped the steel Rolex.
Time jumped like a cricket caged in the god’s hands. Momus grinned and set it free again. “Heard about your mother,” he said. “Stiff, stiffer, stiffest, what a shame. Should have had more fun, that’s my philosophy. No sense being sober at last call.” He took her arm. His touch was lone
ly drunks and suicides. Sloane imagined her teeth yellow, her pretty smile gone. No shoulders worth showing anymore. Big tits sagging inside a dowdy dressing gown. Empty house. Loneliness.
“Are you glad to see me, Stepdaughter?”
“Honored,” Sloane meant to say—but the word turned in her mouth and “Horrified” came out instead. She yelped and covered her mouth with her hand.
“You are not in your mother’s house, Sloane. With me, you will speak only the truth.” Momus patted her fondly. “That’s the difference between a lawyer and a fool, my dear. A lawyer speaks to be heard, regardless of the truth. A fool must speak the truth, whether he will be heard or not.”
Momus took her hand and began to walk. “Come, catch your breath.” The noise of Carnival danced around her again, the laughter of drunks and the stall keepers’ patter. Footsteps fled and faded within the Genuine Human Maze. They followed a small path down to the shoreline. Lines of silver surf crawled and whispered on the dark sand. Momus walked toward the beach with her arm clasped in his. The bright, noisy fairground dwindled behind them, as if washed away by the eternal thud and murmur of the surf. First came the crash of a wave smacking into the sand. Then, in the gap before the next wave fell, bubbles of foam expired with a faint lingering hiss, the same sound Sloane heard at Odessa’s when the old witch poured her a glass of hoarded Dr Pepper.
“Are you going to kill me?” Sloane asked.
“No.”
“Trap me here?” The god didn’t answer. Whitecaps built and broke out from shore, ghostly in the moonlight. “Let me ask a favor,” Sloane said. “Grant it or deny it as you wish, but let me ask and then let me go. Please.”
“Ask away. Stepdaughter.”
When you sup with the Devil, use a long spoon. Odessa used to say that. But it was too late to be wise now. “You must know that my mother is dying. Your consort,” Sloane said. “It isn’t right. It isn’t time. Not yet.”