Our Blissful Bayou Beginnings Read online

Our Blissful Bayou Beginnings

  Danielle Peterson

  Copyright 2012 by Danielle Peterson

  Chapter One

  Love eternal.

  And not love in that generalized “love for your fellow man, love of knowledge, love of art, love of abstract beauty” arena, I mean the love between a man and a woman. And not just between any man or woman, but between myself and what I at the time of my error believed to be the most perfect woman who could ever grace this moribund planet.

  How wrong I was. It is almost comical in retrospect. Almost.

  She is still beautiful, make no mistake about that. Her long brown hair still cascades down like some sort of waterfall of personal mockery towards me. It shines with an unholy radiance in the glow of the sunset, even more visually pleasing than it was when I first met her. But the heavy whalebone enforced corsets have long been cast aside in favor of the liberating and promiscuous fashions of these modern times.

  Sometimes I can almost forget that I am a cursed man. To have seen empires turn to dust and the dark reaches of the stars penetrated in pissing contests between ideologically radical governments is, admittedly, an interesting thing. When I made my mistake I wrote on imported paper with imported ink; such decadent scribbling were the dominion of the upper echelon. Nowadays any idiot can produce endless literary vomit and share it with the world. My fascination with the internet was very quickly quelled by a bottomless chasm of utterly pointless nonsense. But I use it still. It helps me keep tabs on her, and she on me. And I am a fan of the digital piracy. I am always looking for something interesting to watch. I have a lot of time to kill.

  But I digress. Surely the introspective ramblings of two hundred and twenty six year old man will not find warm welcome on this internet. Perhaps I should encourage you to get off my lawn. We could all have a laugh over it.

  No, you’ve come here to read about my folly. I should say it began with my birth, but that was interesting only to myself. Please indulge me though, as I share it. I was born on February 16, 1785. My mother had been a French duchess, or something, I am not sure, she never really spoke of it to anyone and I had heard only second hand accounts from family members. I found that to be odd. After all, what was the point of being royalty if you did not tout it? I have long since deduced that she had been disgraced in some manner but years and years of research have produced nothing. She had a certain amount of class and sophistication that made the men of New Orleans easy pickings.

  Mother was quite beautiful, or at least that’s what Father told me. She died of malaria when I was but a baby. That was all Father spoke of her, not that she was kind or short tempered or well read or a deft hand at crafts. Mary, my sister, and I were raised by a succession of black nurses. Is it alright to say black? I have been chastened in the past for my usage of descriptive words for the people of African descent. I mean, of course, no disrespect. She, my ‘eternal love’ is of African descent. I just want to be clear. These were the times wherein my Father owned black slaves, I do not wish to whitewash history, nor do I wish to anger anyone. Regardless, Mary and I were attended to by a series of young to middle aged black ladies on our father’s sugar plantation in what is now called the state of Louisiana.

  When I came of age I was sent to study law at the College of William and Mary. I did not want to lead the plantation life as my father had. I found it terribly dull compared to life in the slowly growing city of New Orleans. I wanted a neat and tidy house in the Spanish style and a dutiful and beautiful wife. Of course, that all changed when I met her.

  I came back from Virginia with my head swirling with Latin phrases and enough confidence to open my own law office. My name was painted on a door to the office and my many noble ideas of saving an innocent man from the hangman’s rope or an help an indigent woman claim justice against her ravisher were soon mitigated into endless lawsuits over the most mundane things. It turned out that the market for criminal law was not as lucrative as I had hoped and I had to fall back on litigation. Still though, it paid well, and I was well on my way to becoming a very eligible bachelor.

  You young men today, and by that I mean the past century or so, have it all too easy. To be handsome or charming or having some remarkable skill is enough to convince a woman to sleep with you. When I was in my early twenties dating wasn’t so simple. My family name was a respectable one and as such there was an elaborate courting procedure to be followed. Once I had made enough money and successfully represented enough men about town I proposed marriage to a mousy young woman named Louisa Honore, the daughter of one of the most successful dry good merchants in the American South. My memories of her are not very clear. I recall that she was of a highly religious conviction, constantly attending masses and invoking saint this or that. She was pleasant enough though, and I suppose I must have found her attractive in some way because I agreed to marry her and I had my pick of many young ladies.

  Now, I would not be marrying until I was almost twenty-seven years old, which meant that I had been a sexually mature male for some fifteen years or so. In my day women just didn’t have a roll in the hay with you because they wanted to themselves, at least not the sort of women a prosperous young plantation raised lawyer came in contact with. Nor was there unlimited free streaming pornography in the comfort of your own home. In 2012, of course, only the saddest and least attractive of men have need of prostitutes. But when I was a young man it was a necessity. Either you were celibate until you wed relatively late in life or you paid a woman to pretend to enjoy copulation with you. As my male readers will understand, most men ended up paying for sexual services before their wedding, and after it as well.

  Which is where I met her. She actually came highly recommended to me by a client. In those days brothels were not what they are today-sad places with blacked out windows, masquerading under euphemism of Massage Parlor. Of course there was the lower class whorehouses with bare planks and homely women, but the ones that I and my peers patronized were well maintained and appointed with the latest fashions and the most attractive and well mannered women. The ladies were charming and well spoken and one could even imagine that one was not in the company of whores.

  But that illusion did not last long, of course. I’d rut my whore and leave, go home to my stately Spanish home and review my briefs or pen a letter to my sister Mary, who had long since been wed herself and was now living in Georgia. But not with her, not with my beloved. The illusion never wilted. It was as if all the ridiculous romantic poetry I had read in college (times were different then, and the artistic movement of Romanticism was all the rage, just as videos of friends farting in each others sleeping faces is the fun thing now) had been distilled down into a single point of heart rendering sentiment. I am embarrassed as to what a fool it made me.

  A short note-all quotations are paraphrased from my memory, which has been stuffed over the past two centuries. Sometimes I think I will have written something that is one hundred percent accurate, and then she would remind me that it didn’t happen that way, or that she wasn’t even there when I am convinced that she was. I am still in contact with her, of course, because the ranks of us, the longliving, are not great and we just seem to keep running into each other. And also because I am still a sentimental fool I still love her, despite all of the seemingly endless decades of painful intimacy we have shared.

  So, back on track here. One day in early spring of 1810, I am fairly sure it was early spring because my fiancé was having some sort of religious conniption over Lent, I was just finishing up with a client, Mr Blackwell, who was in the middle of suing his half brother over a contested will. He was a notorious patron of Madame Layfette’s, a brothel that catered to a
white man’s taste in women of color. Again, that’s one of those things I am not sure I can talk about. But it was common when I was young. Well, I still am “young” but I will address that later.

  “You must ask for Mademoiselle Violet,” Blackwell suggested as the topic turned to the women we paid to satisfy our animal urges. “She is clever, too clever for such a position. A shame she wasn’t born a white man, then she could really do something with her life.”

  “What do you care if she’s clever?” I said.

  “Don’t you like to talk afterwards?” Blackwell was about ten years older than myself. He had a naturally gregarious nature and I imagine that yes, he did like to talk afterwards.

  “No. I like to go home and sleep.” I think I probably said more, in fact I am fairly sure I did. Somehow the conversation turned to the merits of sparkling conversation after a good copulation, something Blackwell swore by. So I agreed that yes, next time I was at Madame Layfette’s, I would ask for Mademoiselle Violet.

  Next time turned out to be the following evening. Or maybe a few days later. Also, I would like to point out this was all happening in French. I grew up speaking it and it was only later in my education that I learned English. But I have had enough time to become comfortable in English. I suppose I should be a proud Francophile, but I honestly prefer English, probably because that was the language of my sentimental British poetry. Mostly I speak to her (clearly Mademoiselle Violet was not her real name. There was a trend at the time to use flowers as ‘professional’ names. I romped my way through many a garden.) in French, it was only later that she learned English, along with the many other languages we encountered on our travels. Still though, she comments on my Facebook in her misspelled French (she never could spell, I blame it on a lack of formal education) to this day.

  I had been to Madame Layfette’s several times before. I did not have an exclusivity to any particular race or combination thereof- a beautiful woman is beautiful in any color. Goodness, I cannot stress how easy the men of today have it. I had read travel accounts of the mysterious Orient and I would have given my left testicle to even see a beauty from those distant shores, much less have at her. Now you can summon up all manner of distressing Japanese pornography on a computer. On one hand, there is no more mystery, and in a way I suppose I feel bad for you.

  I put in my request. I had gotten there early enough and she was available. Since I had already made a selection I didn’t need to muck about in the salon, so I was shown upstairs by a servant and ushered into a lavishly appointed bed chamber. She was getting dressed, or undressed, or however you would like to phrase it, so I removed my hat and gazed at an framed etching, depicting a rather plump lady with her skirt up, getting prodded by a tonsured monk. I found it incredibly unerotic, probably because of the religious connotations. I thought that it was an ill omen and perhaps I wouldn’t enjoy my time with Mademoiselle Violet after all.

  How wrong I was. If I hadn’t had enjoyed myself I would have long since been dead and happy. I’ve had a long time to think about it and still I find words lacking in describing my attraction to her. I don’t mean she’s sublime, or rather, she is, but sublime beauty is a concept that’s understood. My fascination with her cannot be expressed. Either you have personally experienced such a flood of desire and of attraction, of earth shattering need, of all consuming lust, or you haven’t. It is best if you haven’t because it is likely to destroy you in some way.

  Her mother had been a free mulatto prostitute and her father a white landowner of some fame, considering that to this day a small town is named after him. She grew up in the back rooms of whorehouses and had been selling herself for a premium since she was fifteen, parlaying her remarkable beauty, sharp intelligence, and bewildering charm into a modest fortune financed by a select group of clientele. When she was twenty-two she destroyed my ambitions for normalcy and transformed me into a cliché of tempted passion.

  The fact of the matter was that to this day she still will not tell me how many clients she had before me. She tells me that it is not important and I am forced to conclude it was a great deal. For goodness sake, she’d been in the game for nearly seven years when I met her. Last time I asked her on MSN Messaging she claimed she did not remember. I know that she’s lying, she’s always had a great memory. She should be writing this, not me, but she has declined as she is too wrapped up in her latest endeavor. That’s always been a major point of friction between us. She always had some sort of scheme brewing, be it actual brewing like she did during prohibition or opening a Betamax rental shop. I still rib her over that one. Right now she’s selling gourmet cupcakes in Boston, I think it. She enjoys her eternity much more than mine. She calls me a sour puss and encourages me to engage in some sort of lunatic scheme. Says it’s fulfilling.

  As I previously mentioned, she didn’t need my money. She moved in with me not because she needed to; in fact, she would be financially better off should she continue to work and earn capital in which to invest. Since she was born to a free woman, she herself was free, and was allowed to make her own investments since she had no husband to default to. Property rights for women at the time were not exactly fair, but she had enough admirers in the local government to overlook the more unfair parts of the law and ensure that when she retired she would be a woman of independent means, should she wish to be.

  But, getting back to the story, (there will be lots of these little side ramblings, so get used to it or GTFO) she was a professional at feigning interest in men. I am not going to get into the details of our physical interactions, if you want such sordid details I am sure you can find them elsewhere. Suffice to say she was justified in charging a high fee. As Blackwell claimed she was indeed good at conversation and managed to keep me with her for long after our business, as it is strictly defined, was over.

  I wandered back home that night through alleys and streets I was unfamiliar with in order to preserve the intoxicatingly wonderful feeling she had stirred in me. I convinced myself it was love. It was an emotion I felt much more keenly than the tepid and lackluster attraction I had to my fiancé Louisa. I returned the next night. And the next. For several weeks it continued like this. I was even more indiscrete than usual about it and I believe word may have reached Louisa that I was having an exclusive affair with a whore.

  Certainly word got back to Louisa when Mlle Violet moved into my home. At that point I was so far gone I didn’t care what Louisa or my family or the neighbors thought. I was not the first man to have a colored mistresses, but I may have been one of the few bold enough to lodge her at my own home. It was a scandal, but a scandal whispered into cocked ears and gasped at by women. It may have been enough to call off the wedding even, but I didn’t not particularly care, at least not at first. It was an impossibility for me to marry my most beloved. Shameful as it is, interracial marriages were not permitted in my home state of Louisiana until the late year of 1967. But the longer I laid with her, in the dark and humid bedroom that we shared, holding her soft and perfect body against mine, conferring over my legal business (she is terribly clever. Clever enough to make any man believe she loved him, but perhaps I mark myself as the largest fool of all when I say with all certainty she really and truly loved/loves me), particularly cases that had frustrated me, listing to her tell me about the particularities of the side of the city I had never seen, and of course all manner of vulgar interactions, made me rethink the cruelty of the law.

  I loved her so much, much more than I loved Louisa, if you could consider my feeling for Louisa love of any kind. I began to fantasize about fleeing this cruel land and taking her with me up to the frozen north’s where a man could have a blackish wife, presuming that he didn’t parade about in the wrong places with her. I believed we could have a farm or something. I was too drunk on love to really think it all the way through. But I would have done anything for her, as you will soon discover.

  We lived in this comfortable limbo for about a year. I kept del
aying my wedding, trying to work up the courage to flee with her to upper New York state, hoping that our unorthodox relationship would likely go unnoticed in that vast wilderness. She had agreed to it, which is what convinced me that she really did love me too. Her willingness to start a new life with me in a frigid wasteland was something that I treasured, and still do. Down through the years it has remained a source of comfort to me to know that at that point our love really was everything I dreamt it had been.

  Then it all went to Hell.

  Spring, 1811. I had been delaying my wedding for far too long. All of my family and friends and acquaintances had figured that my reluctance stemmed from my obsession with her. It was one thing to keep your mistress in her own home and discretely visit her while your proper wife kept house for you; it was another to live with your mistress and keep your fiancé waiting. Louisa would wait though, she found religious justification for it. Her family, however, would not.

  I remember the date. April 15, a Monday. The day after Easter. I had seen Louisa and her family at mass the day before. Her father took me aside and informed me that on no uncertain terms was I to not delay any further. He referred to my beloved as she was, or had been, calling her a harlot. That incensed me, regardless of it’s accuracy. I lost my good breeding and education and shortly informed him that I would wed my harlot before his daughter. I rode back to our home, where she was waiting for me (she attended another church, much more exotic, flavored with remembered rituals from Africa). I was supposed to attend a family gathering but she was spurned by them, of course, so I chose to spend all my free time with her. We spent the entire day as we were wont to do, celebrating my decision to finally pack up and bail for the north, since I had told Monsieur Honore to more or less piss up a rope that morning.

  Her eyes sparkled like I had never seen them do or had since seen. “Really? No more waiting? No more excuses?” she asked me. A smile was hiding behind her hopeful expression and I wanted nothing more than to draw it out and have it on her forever.

  “Yes,” I answered and pulled her onto the bed with me. “Yes. Soon. I will dismiss the servants this week. I will close my practice. I will take out all the cash I have from the bank.” Of course I am sure that love had given my words more eloquence, but the effect was the same. We had decided that since she owned more property than I (I actually owned nothing other than the house, I had just always assumed that I would inherit my father’s plantation) that she would keep it, at least for the time being, should we need income to fall back on.

  “Oh, mon canard, how wonderful!” She kissed me, but then sat up. “Really?” she asked again.

  She always seemed to doubt me. Perhaps it was because other men had promised her such things before and always disappointed her. I wanted to make her feel secure and safe in my love for her, for her to know that I would not proclaim to love her on one hand and on the other wear a wedding band from another woman. I did anything I could and I was about to do the ultimate act, or at least what I thought was the ultimate act, and marry her in complete disregard for society at the time.

  “Oui,” I said again. I am going to do this bit here in French because it sounds much better in French. “Ma bichette, je ne te quitterai jamais. Je t'aimerai toujours.” Plug it into Google, you uneducated punks, some things I am not going to translate because it’s how it happened. I’ve seen and experienced remarkable things in my two-hundred plus years, but nothing has ever left as much of an impact on me, and in so many ways, than my feelings for her at the moment in time. But should you be lazy and not care exactly what I meant, bichette does not mean bitch. It means my little doe. It would be unthinkable to refer to the woman you love as your bitch. Tsk tsk indeed, you young punk bastards.

  I hope she believed me. I ask her now if she did and she says yes, yes she did. But if she truly believed or just really wanted to and made herself do so, I am not sure. These things are irrelevant now, of course, but it’s a detached curiosity that I have now about our shared past. I wonder how things might have played out differently had I not been a passionate fool, or had I not delayed my marriage for so long, or had I just conformed and kept Ma Bichette on the side as was to be expected. I have mentioned my idealism earlier, however, which had been influenced by my tutor as a young boy, who had told me of his own beliefs which had been influenced in turn by the radicals who wrote the American constitution. He claimed to have spoken to Thomas Jefferson himself on several different occasions. If that was true or not I didn’t know. But what mattered what that it had worked, against all odds, which got me to thinking about the conformities placed on my own life. I saw no reason why I couldn’t have a black wife. Later I would see society catch up to me, but far too late for it be of help for me and her.

  But I digress. Easter Sunday was to be last full day of my mortal life.

  Chapter Two

  Monday, the 15th, began normally enough. I started the process of closing my practice as I swore to her I would. I had fried clams for lunch at the tavern across the street from my office. Before heading home for the day I lingered behind with an associate. We smoked cigars while I went over with him the clients I was handing over to him. He was grateful for the business. I rode home around sunset, eager to be in the arms of Ma Bichette again.

  Our cook, Jean, was standing on the porch, grimly staring at me as I approached. She was a spindly woman who I had owned since I came back from Virginia. I had told her I was giving her her freedom at the end of week when we fled, as well as the fourteen year old boy who tended to my horses, and Ma Bichette’s maid, Bess.

  Jean shook her head as I walked up the steps.

  “Dark times,” she muttered to me. “I’m sorry.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She sighed. It was a deep sigh and I still can hear it. “They’re wanting to talk to you.”

  I felt my stomach drop out. “Who is wanting to talk to me?”

  “Inside.” She did not want to break it to me. I cannot blame her.

  I entered the house, a sense of foreboding spreading throughout my body. Two officers of the police force stood in my entrance hall. I could hear another speaking in the parlor. “Monsieur Toupinier?”

  I nodded, although part of me wanted to deny my name and flee from whatever awful thing I was about to learn.

  I listened as they explained to me that they were sorry. She was dead.

  I didn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.

  “Monsieur Toupinier?” they asked, perhaps fearing that I had gone daft.

  “Where is she?” I demanded to know.

  “Monsieur, there is nothing you can do.”

  I heard a door upstairs close. Her boudoir. I recognized the creak in it. Before they could stop me I dashed up the stairs.

  Before I reached it, the door opened and her personal maid, Bess, tried to push me away. “No, don’t, she wouldn’t want it,” she tried to reason with me, but I pushed her aside.

  Ma Bichette.

  I was dimly aware of Bess crying from behind me. At the time I did not wonder who had done it, who had wrapped a hemp rope around her lovely neck suffocated her original life out of her. She had not gotten far that morning, she was still wearing the dusty pink dressing gown she had been wearing that morning when I had left for work. She lay limp on the floor.

  I knelt down to her and picked up her hand.

  “Ce n'est pas la fin.” I held her cold hand in mine. This is not the end. And that’s when I went completely insane.

  My mind went to rumors I had heard since my childhood. Of a house deep within the recesses of the bayou where a sorceress or a witch or whatever you would call her would bring the dead back to life. Seems ridiculous, I know, and I always had presumed that it was the belief of the uneducated underclass. As I write this I know how preposterous the whole arrangement was. But I was desperate and beyond grief. I simply could not exist without her. I was willing to believe anything if it could bring Ma Bichette back.

&nb
sp; I must have knelt there for over an hour. I was aware of the voices from downstairs. Investigators of the fledging police force questioning our servants. Since I was a member of the legal establishment they were extending professional courtesy to me by giving her murder a high priority of investigation, at least for the time being. Eventually I heard footsteps climb the stairs behind me.

  “Monsieur Toupinier, I must ask you about this morning.”

  I did not turn from her. I hadn’t even let her hand slip from mine. “Ask.”

  “Did anything unusual happen this morning?”

  “No.”

  “Has anything unusual happened recently? Have you run into unsavory characters in your professional life? Did she have any former lovers?” The investigator threw a series of questions at me, all of which I numbly shook my head no to. Their investigation was not a concern of mine. Their investigation would not breathe life back into her.

  I took her arm and laid it across her stomach. I stood up and looked out the window. My bay horse was still where I had hitched him, the stable boy was too distraught over the situation to attend to my mount. Dusk was enveloping the city. I could not wallow in my shock any longer. I needed to attend to business.

  I bent over and scooped her up into my arms. She was so cold and still. To pick up a corpse is unlike picking up a living body; there is an innate emptiness in a corpse. I ignored the investigator’s protest that I set her back down. Yes, now I know how crazy I must have seemed. I am not denying it. I left the rational investigators and servants behind in the house. No one seemed to know quite what to do to stop me, but nothing short of a hail of gunfire would have stopped me. I know I am coming off as quite dramatic, but I had taken leave of my senses. Every now and then you read about a criminal who is using temporary insanity as a defense. I cannot say if it’s true for them, but I can guarantee you, dear reader, that such a thing exists.

  I rode to the west, propping her up in front of me in the saddle. I had no idea where I was going, but I was determined to find the witch. I rode along the road that led from New Orleans towards Father’s plantation. I passed several travelers and a wagon on my way out. They stared at me. As they should. I was holding a dead woman in my arms, for God’s sake.

  The horse soon grew tired of the full run I had him at and after a while began to trot. Ma Bichette’s head lulled unnaturally from side to side. Never once did I have a moment of realization that this was madness, a flash of “what in the Hell am I doing?”, an outside look at myself. No, I was going to ride with her until Judgment Day if that’s what it took. Of course, she would decompose long before that, and I like to think that I had spent several days roaming about the bayou with a rotting corpse my senses would have returned to me and I would have wandered back home, tail between my legs, begging the police to continue their investigation. I would have bought her the most ostentatious tomb in New Orleans, and that is no mean feat.

  I had not passed anyone in some time. The musical harmony of crickets and frogs and the primordial growl of alligators gave no illusion of a calm and sleeping wilderness as I slowed down to give the horse a chance to rest. Several fishflys had landed in her hair and I brushed them off. I dismounted and she slumped forwards, almost sliding out of the saddle. I held the reigns in one hand with the other I arranged her in a more balanced position. The horse drank from a stagnant pond, which normally isn’t something I would allow, but I had much more important issues on my mind.

  From the recesses of the swamp I saw a bobbing lantern light come towards me. That’s another one of the rumors and stories that had been perpetuated in my youth-that either the Devil himself or a delegated minion would lure unwary and lost travelers deep into the swamp with a beacon of help or safety they’d never reach. Alas, the true Devil is not that straightforward. But the light was supposed to be moving away from me, not towards me. Within a few moments a female voiced called to me.

  “I think you are looking for me,” she said. It was odd. She must have been a hundred feet from me, yet she didn’t yell. I heard her as if she was standing next to me.

  I didn’t say anything, but I am no fool. When in that sort of situation, you recognize when you’ve found your supernatural goal. I thanked God. That was premature.

  “Come,” called the voice. “Leave your horse, there is no way for him to get through.”

  I tied the reigns on a nearby branch and took her from the horse. Cradling her against me, I stepped into knee deep water and waded through the filthy muck until I came to the sorceress, who was standing on dry land. The sorceress grabbed me by my arm and pulled me up onto the small island she was on with surprising strength.

  “Can you?” I asked. Since she knew who I was, apparently, or at least what I wanted, I figured she could surmise what I meant by my question. The witch had tanned skin, but was a white lady with dark hair and almost black eyes. I was mildly surprised, I had expected her to be a vodou priestess, similar to the ones that could be glimpsed in New Orleans. She spoke butchered French with a Spanish accent and I had to concentrate to understand her.

  “The body is whole and it is here. Yes, of course I can.” She studied Ma Bichette’s face and frowned.

  “What? What’s wrong?” I asked, afraid that there was something wrong. I mean, other than the obvious.

  “I can still do it,” she said. “Follow me.”

  I followed her for what must have been hours. Never once did her feet leave dry ground, she expertly knew her way through the winding swamp. I said nothing. My arms were beginning to ache from carrying her for so long. Finally, we reached our destination.

  A stone house. It was not what I was expecting. I am not sure what it was I was expecting. A ruined wooden shack, perhaps, or something even more archaic, like a thatched roof earthen hut. But it was a neatly built small house of rounded stones. I followed her into the house. Boxes and baskets and bottles filled dozen of shelves and tabletops. The sorceress pointed to a conspicuously empty table. “Here.”

  I carefully laid Ma Bichette on it.

  The sorceress came up from behind me with a fine crystal glass. In it was an amber liquid which to this day I have never tasted the likes of. “You look like you could use a drink,” she said. I obediently drank it. It was both fiery and sweet and I could feel it slide down my throat as the sorceress rummaged about in a chest at the end of the table that Ma Bichette was lying on.

  I leaned against the wall. “Do you have a name?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Well, because you’re a witch, I thought.

  She laughed from across the room. “Witches have names too. Alava, you can call me, if you want to call me something other than witch.”

  Having my mind read like a book would have bothered me before but now it was comforting. At least she was a real witch.

  Alava opened up a small leather bag and pulled out a handful of worn and polished bones. They looked like human finger bones. Again, had Ma Bichette’s corpse not been lying before me I would have been worried. Alava tossed the bones on the table next to her, examined the bones, and then repeated the action twice more.

  “There has been a misfortune,” she said and turned to me.

  I hadn’t eaten since lunch and my head was swirling with my particular madness and whatever liquor Alava had given me. “I know. She’s dead.”

  “That is not it. When a person dies, the soul is separated. Usually the soul lingers for a day or so, then leaves. But hers is not here.”

  “Where is it?”

  “No longer on the Earthly plane. I can call it back, but, it is a different process. You will be subverting the will of God. It is not a thing to be taken lightly.”

  I took it lightly. “Do it.”

  Alava nodded. “It will cost you.”

  “You can have my soul.”

  Alava turned from me and began to collect boxes and bottles from around the room. “What would I do with it? You think I haven’t got enough alread
y? No, I want your house. I want out of this swamp. I think it is safe for me to return to civilization.”

  I didn’t care what was safe or not safe or why she had been exiled. I just wanted her to get on with it. “Fine.”

  She laid out a plethora of containers next to Ma Bichette. “This comes with conditions you must realize. Since her soul is no longer easily available I have to use dark magic to reanimate her body with her soul in it. That means she is no longer mortal. She will walk in her body, ageless, until Judgment Day.”

  That caused me pause. I did not want to her to wander about alone forever. “Do it to me too then.”

  “I cannot. You still live.”

  Alava’s mental power was distracted by her examination of Ma Bichette. I spied a bottle with a skull on it (cliché, I know, but I suppose clichés exist for a reason) on a shelf not too far from me. I grabbed it before Alava could detect what I was up to, lest she try to stop me since this was going to complicate her job considerably.

  “You want that house, you bring us both back.” I then tilted my head back and dumped the contents of the bottle down my throat.

  I would like to detail what a bad idea that was. Whatever poison it was was both fast acting and painful. My insides felt aflame, and not just aflame with spicy flavor. It literally felt like flaming coals had been teleported into my torso. I fell to my knees, then collapsed entirely. My body tried to vomit out the poison, but the bile and fluid went no further than my mouth, upon which point I swallowed it and drowned in my own vomit.

  I cannot stress how absolutely idiotic my actions were that night. Not only to kill myself in an emotional rampage, but to do so without hearing the full terms and conditions of my resurrection was also a very bad idea. There was no guarantee that Alava would not just roll her eyes, decide it wasn’t worth the trouble, and toss us both out to be eaten by alligators. But I wasn’t thinking clearly. All I was thinking of was Ma Bichette and being with her again. I wasn’t the type to kill myself out of love, after all, that would have been much easier. No, I had to have her back, with me, alive here on Earth and not in some distant paradise.

  Well, I suppose my own thoughts on my foolish behavior aren’t as interesting as me actually physically dying and coming back to life. You probably want to know what dying is like. It hurt, for me at least, but I think that had more to do with the poison I had ingested then the act of my soul being ejected from the body. Choking on my vomit had been fairly merciful actually, had the poison had it’s own sweet time to kill me I would have writhed about in agony for almost an hour, or so Alava told me later. All I knew was that at what seemed to be the climax of the pain it abruptly stopped and I was standing, if that is the word for it, over my own rumpled body.

  “Satisfied?” I heard Alava say to me. Her voice echoed oddly in my ears, as if it the sound was rippling through a thick ether.

  The novelty of the situation distracted me from Ma Bichette for a moment and I stared at my own body. I was lying face up, khaki colored vomit and drool lining my lips. My eyes were still open and I looked simply ghastly. Everything seemed slightly out of focus as I remembered why I had done such a foolish thing. I turned back toward the table, hoping to see Ma Bichette’s soul. But like Alava had said, she wasn’t there.

  “That was terribly rare, you know, what you drank.” Alava lectured me as she knelt down to my body.

  “Keep the furniture in the house then. Half of it is imported,” I said, or tried to say, but my words came out as faded static.

  “Don’t try to talk.” Alava shook her head as she hoisted my body up onto the table, wedging me next to Ma Bichette. She actually passed through me, or my ghost, or my soul, or whatever form I was in at the time. She wiped my mouth off with a damp rag and positioned me on my back. There wasn’t enough room on the table to lie us both on our backs along with her potions and ointments, so she set them on the ground underneath us.

  Next, she cut off the rope that was still tied around Ma Bichette’s neck. I had neglected to do so myself and now I wondered why I hadn’t. The imprint of the coils were clearly visible on her flesh and I found that even outside of my body I was capable of emotion. My poor dear dead little doe. I hadn’t given the actual act of her murder much thought up until that moment, I had been too focused on bringing her back. How frightening it must have been for her, to be going about her own business and then to have had a rope tightened around her. It must have hurt, too. I wondered where to and why her soul had fled. I tried to touch her hair but my fingers slipped right through her head as well as the table. My own death was unimportant to me, except for a brief acknowledgment that I had died a very unglamorous death. When one envisions his own passing, rarely does vomit come into the image.

  Alava was preoccupied with grinding various seeds and herbs in a mortar. She mostly ignored me, save for the advice that I not speak to anything else that might pass through her small stone home. I wondered what she meant until a small furry creature crawled in through the window. It was about the size of a house cat, but I have never seen a housecat with human-like hands and feet or empty eye sockets. It called my name and then jumped onto my body.

  “Nice, nice,” it said as it poked at my face with it’s miniature human hands. “Might if I try it out?”

  I attempted to swat it away but of course it was an ineffective gesture. A tube-like organ shot out of it’s right eye socket and probed my still open eye. “I see, yes, I see,” it muttered.

  Up until this point I had been fairly blasé about being dead. It all seemed to be going according to plan and I was getting what I wanted. But this was just all too bizarre and I was beginning to get seriously freaked out. Again I tried to bat it off my corpse but it quivered with suppressed laughter at my efforts.

  “Pretty girl, dark rooms, paper, paper, paper,” the creature said in a high pitched voice as it spied on my memories.

  “Alava! Alava!” I yelled to the best of my ability, hoping to get her attention somehow.

  My distorted voice got her attention and she turned. “Tsst! Tsst!” she hissed at the creature and it scampered off and out through the window.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Alava said as she went back to her preparations. “It’s harmless. There are much worse things.”

  I felt terribly uneasy and for the first time I began to wonder if I had made a mistake. From the same window the little cat thing crawled in I glimpsed a spectacularly huge feathery thing scuttle out of sight when I turned my attention to it. I wanted Alava to hurry up. I began to pace about the table. I realized that my ghost or whatever was completely nude but I was much too distracted to care.

  After what seemed like hours Alava began to resurrect us. First she removed our clothing and then rubbed every inch of our bodies with a translucent oily paste. In our left hands she placed a white egg that had symbols written on it in indigo ink and in our right hands she placed a half of an onion that had been boiled in the blood of the chicken that had laid in the aforementioned eggs.

  “Since it’s the same onion the same spell will bind you two to each other until the Lord Himself comes to have you explain yourself,” Alava said aloud. “If you do not follow the correct monthly ritual you both will perish. If she doesn’t not follow the correct monthly ritual you will perish along with her. Both your souls will be thrown into oblivion.”

  “What?”

  Alava must have sensed my confusion despite my inability to be coherent. “You should have waited for me to explain everything before swallowing that poison, hm? Lovesick fool.”

  Whatever ritual she was referring to I was not too troubled by at the moment. Soon, I thought, soon I will be back with her. And we will have forever. The entire world, all the time to enjoy it. I believed that I would be in as much love with her forever as I had been in the past year, and she with me. But forever is a long time. A year isn’t. And not just that forever is a long time, fifty years is a long time. One hundred years is a long time. And two h
undred years is longer still.

  On our foreheads she drew an ouroboros in scarlet ink. Alava tied red and white strings around my flaccid penis and she pressed a white ceramic bead and a red glass bead into Ma Bichette’s vagina. With a silver knife she made an incision on both our chests in the shape of an upside down V, and in that she rubbed a black paste. Finally, in our mouths she placed a rolled up mass of herbs and clay and a specialized ingredient for the both of us-in hers, a pieces of the rope that had killed her and in mine, shards of glass from the bottle of poison I had drank.

  “I am going to bring you back first,” Alava said, as she took an iron hammer out of a drawer from a chest that must have had a hundred tiny drawers. “She will be in shock when she comes back, the intensity of it depending on where her soul has been.”

  Without further explanation or ritual Alava smashed the egg in my hand and I felt a rush of air and a flash of light and an instant later I had shuffled back into my mortal coil. I rolled over the table as my body twitched and jerked as I settled back into it. The ointments she had rubbed on me stank strongly and the strings she had tied around my penis were less than comfortable. I immediately arose, eager to have Ma Bichette’s egg broken. The ball of herbs and glass and clay Alava had placed in my mouth had dissolved, but it left behind a stinging sensation.

  Alava handed me another glass of the liquor I had drunk earlier, this time diluted with crisp and cold water. “Everything working okay?”

  I nodded. “Can I take this stuff off now?” I swallowed the contents of the cup and felt a bit better.

  She gestured towards a basin sitting on a low stool. “There is a well behind the house. After you’re done fill it back up.”

  I untied the strings and set them on the table. Eager to have Ma Bichette back, but wanting to not be covered in stinking goo when she returned, I washed off the ointment the best I could. As I did so Alava gathered up the broken egg shells and the onion half. After Ma Bichette returned she would do the same with her and then burn them, thereby sealing the spell. Once I had done the best I could I dressed again and went behind the house and refilled the basin. I rushed back in, remembering to wipe the mark off of my forehead before Alava summoned her back.

  “Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  When Alava smashed her egg there was no rush of air or flash of light. Instead there was only silence. For a moment I feared the worst, that something had gone wrong, but after a moment or two she moaned and her eyes fluttered open.

  “Ma bichette,” I whispered and suddenly forgot the presence of Alava. “Ma chérie, mon amour, tu es de retour d'entre les morts. Tout va bien. Nous avons toujours maintenant. Oh, mon biche, nous ne serons jamais défait de nouveau.” I grabbed her hand, which was slimy with egg and ointment.

  “What? What?” she said. “Where am I?”

  “You’re with me darling, you’re safe, we have forever.” I said to her. I had never felt happier. She was alive again and now we could begin our absolutely wonderful lives together.

  She sat up slowly and her eyes took in the interior of the stone house. She was shaking and she seemed unable to focus on one thing at a time. Her eyes darted around, looking at me, looking at Alava, glancing about at the cramped personal pharmacy. “What happened? Where was I?”

  “Shh,” I said as Alava pried the onion half from her hand. “It’s alright, ma bichette, it’s alright. You were dead but now you are not.” I ignored the ointment and embraced her bodily. “Ma chérie, mon amour, mon trésor,” I whispered into her ear. “Mon amour.”

  “Lovesick fool,” I heard Alava say. “She’s in shock. She probably doesn’t know who you are. You’re scaring her.”

  I didn’t let her go. “You know who I am, don’t you?”

  There was a pause and Ma Bichette’s breathing became heavy. “Mon canard,” she mumbled after a moment, and then repeated it a bit louder. “Mon canard.”

  “Oui,” I whispered. “Votre canard éternel.” Good God. I know that I just came back from the dead and all, but even that was a bit too far. That was pretty much the high point of my overly melodramatic overture, however.

  Alava gripped my shoulder. “For God’s sake, give her some air.”

  I let go of her. Ma Bichette stayed seated on the tabletop, still quivering and confused. “What happened?” she repeated. “Why am I here?”

  Alava handed me the basin. “Explain it to her.”

  I started to wipe the ointment off of her. “Do you remember being killed?” I asked her.

  She stared at me. “Yes,” she said after a moment and then started to cry. “Oh, mon canard, it was so horrible.”

  “It’s all right now,” I reassured her. “Who did it? Was it Monsieur Honore?”

  She said she didn’t see who had attacked her, just that she had told Bess to leave her alone for the day since she was feeling a bit nauseous and was going to lie down and rest without the distracting noises of Bess going about her chores. Bess then left to go visit her grandmother on an outlying manor. She was in her boudoir, combing her hair, when she felt a handkerchief being pressed against her mouth and nose. She tried to fight, but a garrote was tightened around her throat and she was both strangled and suffocated. It took a long time, she said to me, as she fought back tears of terror. She assured me that it was indeed a man who had done it because only a man would have been so strong.

  “What happened then?” I asked her.

  Ma Bichette’s eyes focused on mine. “Well, I died, that’s what happened.”

  “Yes, but where did your soul go? It wasn’t here.”

  “Oh.” She shivered as I wiped the residue from her breasts. “There was tall trees with flowers instead of leaves, and it was raining. I was alone. I don’t remember it very well though.”

  “The Magdalenian Plane,” Alava said. “A place of purification for those who have bartered flesh.” She went to a closet and pulled out another cloth and handed it to me.

  “I brought you here,” I said to her as I moistened the fresh cloth. “I have heard of Alava, that she could bring the dead back. So I asked her if she would do it to you.”

  “And I did,” Alava said. “Your idiot lover here killed himself as well so I could bring you both back under the same conditions.”

  “Really?” she asked me. “Did you really do such a thing?” I nodded and she smiled. “Oh, mon canard, how romantic!”

  Alava laughed. “But he did it before I could explain to him exactly what he has signed you both up for.” Alava then began to explain what I should have waited to hear before I swallowed liquid death.

  Basically, it boils down to this: she and I are still, technically speaking, dead. We breathe and our blood still is pumped about our bodies, but that is only through artificial black magic. Our bodies are invulnerable to damage, but beyond that there was no special gifts. Our bodies have to be invulnerable since our souls would not be able to leave them. It wasn’t so much a deal with the Devil as it was cheating Death himself. The only thing that will void Death will be Judgment Day, and then and only then could body and soul be separated again. Until that day, however, we need to fuel the dark magic that resides in us. Should we not fuel it, we would begin to rot. There would be no end to the decomposition of the flesh, and should we not fulfill the dark rituals our souls could be trapped in inert bones and dust until Judgment Day.

  Ma Bichette gasped in horror and I was taken aback, to say the least, when Alava told us what we had to do to continue to cheat death. Once a month, within three days of the new moon, we would have to eat a human heart. A fresh one, Alava stressed, that had been taken from it’s owner with our own hands. That would apparently satisfy Death, since we were bringing him a fresh soul to replace our own on a regular basis.

  “Mon Dieu!” she weakly said. I was rendered speechless.

  “But because it was the same spell, you can share the heart,” Alava summed up.

  “Mon Dieu!” Ma Bichette said again. “No, it
cannot be, this cannot be, this is all a nightmare!”

  “No,” I said. “It’s alright. We will just do it to people who deserve it, we’ll harvest them out of prisons, men who are awaiting the rope.”

  Alava laughed. “Fool,” she said to me. “How are you going to do that? How will you walk into a prison and start ripping out hearts without being noticed?”

  Ma Bichette burst into tears. “We are damned!”

  “No,” I said over her sudden hysteria. “No! That will not happen! Ma Bichette, I swear to you, you will not be damned! This was not your choice, only mine!” She collapsed into my arms, weeping and still half covered in the ointment. “I know who we will do first too,” I said to her. “Your killer. That cannot be wrong, can it? And we will find more killers, and cruel masters, and the sort of men who beat your friends from Madame Layfette’s. There is a whole world full of them, and we cannot be damned for stopping them, can we?”

  She didn’t answer. She was out of sorts for a long time over this, even after we begun our dark rituals. My ideological views helped mold me into what I believed was a dispenser of justice. The man who cursed at us for being a mixed race couple in Oklahoma in 1986, the British socialite who was acquitted of murder on a technicality, our neighbor who beat his children black and blue; I justified my ghoulish actions by convincing myself I am doing the right thing. Even to this day I when I can find a suitable victim I tell myself that I am not a murderer, I am a vigilante. That’s what makes the internet so great. So easy to find and track down wrongdoers. But when I don’t, when the new moon has come and I haven’t found someone who has sinned enough…well, I have to find someone. I try and distance myself from it, to have a detached coolness, to classify myself as just another natural cause of death that strikes down even the good.

  But she did not share my view. For the first few decades I exclusively hunted our quarry and provided her with the hearts. By the time we separated for the first time, however, she had to learn to do it herself. Now days she isn’t so sensitive. Nor is she as discriminate as I am with my victims. It is a point we fight over and has caused us to break up at least twice.

  Alava caught my eye as I held my weeping love. “We need to discuss payment,” she said. Except she didn’t say it with her mouth. I heard it in my head. Looking back, I realize she was being deferential to Ma Bichette.

  “Now?” I thought.

  “Yes now. I want to get out of this swamp,” I heard her in my head.

  I nodded and soaked the cloth in the basin and started to clean off her back.

  “The dawn after your first feed I will arrive at my house with my lawyer and make all the required changes. I want this to be legal. You will be there?”

  I nodded again. I wondered if I knew her lawyer, but considering what abnormalities I had seen that night it would be a unlikely that her lawyer be a mere regular attorney like myself.

  “You are not stupid enough to cheat a witch, are you?”

  “Of course not,” I thought at her.

  “Good. Are you not satisfied? You got what you wanted.”

  “I did,” I thought and stroked Ma Bichette’s hair. “How long will she be like this? I’ve never seen her cry before or even be upset.”

  “It’s a very traumatic thing,” I heard Alava in my head. “She’s in shock, I told you. But shock or not, you need to have a heart inside you and her within three days of the new moon. You can fry it, boil it, bake it in a pie, it doesn’t matter. But you will have a terribly unpleasant afterlife if you don’t.”

  Ma Bichette suddenly stopped bawling and brought her head up. “What if we are imprisoned? We will stay there forever! And will be unable to get our food!”

  She raised a good point. Ma Bichette is and always has been clever and this wouldn’t be the first time her foresight would save us.

  Alava nodded. “Most do not think of that.”

  I sighed. “Is there anything that you do?”

  “Of course,” Alava said in her ear-shredding butchered French. “But that was not the deal we made, you stupid duck.”

  Before I could answer Ma Bichette addressed her. “He has got me the most beautiful dresses, made with silk and fine cotton, and fans and bonnets and shoes from Paris, all because he felt bad he couldn’t marry me. A year of guilty gifts.” She grimaced and seemed to become aware of herself again. She wiped off the egg on her hand onto the rag she had just taken from my hand. “I don’t know why you’re here, Madame Alava, but I bet you can’t get anything pretty to wear out here.”

  “Yes,” I said while Ma Bichette started to wipe herself off. “The clothes, they were not part of the deal. Just the house.”

  Alava rolled her eyes. “Very well. It isn’t a big process anyway.”

  Alava turned to the same chest she had taken the hammer out of. She began to open drawers, looking for something. I turned my attention to Ma Bichette. “Do you feel better now?” I whispered to her.

  She nodded. “Yes, a bit. It’s still strange, but, I suppose that’s the way it is now, isn’t it, mon canard?”

  “Yes it is ma bichette.” I touched the black upside down V between her breasts, trying to wipe it off, but it seemed to be permanent. Well, not seemed, it is. Mine is as well. A few years ago I was at the gym (I enjoy swimming) and I saw another man with a similar mark. It is difficult to begin that conversation. It is not easy to say “So, when did you sign up for an immortal life of murder?” so I had to start it a bit more discretely. He saw mine though, and caught my eye (sounds rather gay, doesn’t it?) and over a game of racquetball we exchanged stories. He had been changed some four-hundred and fifty years ago in Germany. I asked him if it got easier and he said the first three hundred years are the worst. I certainly hope so.

  “Did many people see me dead?” she asked me.

  “The police came,” I said.

  She frowned. “I must stay dead. People will suspect me of being an unholy monster should I come back.”

  You are, I thought. We both are. Alava laughed.

  I don’t think Alava had been communicating with her telepathically but Ma Bichette seemed to understand what had transpired. “I don’t want to be a monster,” she said.

  “Too late,” Alava said as she came back with a small wooden case in her hand. “You’d better not be lying to me,” Alava told Ma Bichette. “Those clothes better be nice.” She opened the case and took out a small silver key, the sort of one that people only see in cartoons or gothic horror these days. And when I say silver, I don’t mean tarnished, as you would expect a swamp-dwelling witch to have. It was so polished it caught the meager light of the candles and shimmered enticingly in the nest of black sand it was resting in. I was hoping that this would not involve more oily creams or pagan symbols. Alava told us to hold our hands out, which we obediently did.

  Much to my surprise the end of the key was razor sharp and Alava quickly plunged it through our hands, deeply enough that the point passed straight through our palms. The lack of pain was more alarming than the pain would have been. I stared in amazement as the key passed through my hand, causing no blood to pour forth, only a gelatinous ripple as she withdrew the key and my skin healed itself.

  “Unnatural,” Ma Bichette whispered as Alava did it to her.

  “Any lock you touch with that hand will open. It’s a very popular procedure with dedicated thieves,” Alava said as she set the key back in the box. “Of course, most of them bleed.”

  My eyes wandered about, my episode of madness draining from me, to be replaced by a dazed and detached feeling. I had sort of expected that this night would last forever, but I noticed that the blackness had been replaced by a predawn blue. I realized I had no plan. I realized that I had run out of my house with a corpse in my arms and disappeared into the night. By this time word of my actions surely must have spread throughout the neighborhood, if not the city. And if they hadn’t heard, they would soon. It was all very dramatic. A good story, which is one of the
reasons why I am writing it.

  Alava noticed me staring out the window. “Your horse is still there,” she said as she handed Ma Bichette her dressing gown. “It’s a long walk.”

  “What if we have questions?” I said as Ma Bichette pulled her dressing gown about her. The gown has long since rotted or been eaten by moths or surrendered to whatever forces should consume organic materials, but I can still see it clearly in my memory. There are good chunks of my afterlife I don’t remember. For example, I spent almost three years in Cuba after the American Civil War and I hardly recall any of it and that despite the large fight we had before I went there (it was one of the more epic ones) I missed Ma Bichette greatly. But the towns I visited, the people I met, even the false name I assumed for myself-nothing, none of it. But I remember the gown. Watered silk, which gave the impression of ululating hues of dusky pink, a wide cream colored sash that tied just under her breasts, and loose sleeves. She had been wearing nothing under it. Now days I watch television and I have come to understand that her dress would have been just swarming with evidence, as would have the boudoir and even the rope. But such things did not occur to us.

  “Questions?” Alava laughed at me. “Do you think that this is something that can be coded like your laws? This is not a science.”

  “That may be,” I said. “But there certainly seems to be all manner of ridiculous rules about the hearts, and magical keys, and whatever the hell it is you smeared us with. I would just like to know if there isn’t a book or manuscript or something that explains this better.”

  Alava and Ma Bichette both stared at me. Ma Bichette had a better innate grip of the mystical nature of whatever it was that had reanimated us. I chalk that up to her being a woman. To her, me asking for a rulebook was the earliest manifestation of what she calls my “unrelenting wariness of all things”. I disagree, of course, had I been so wary in the first place we wouldn’t be in this situation. She makes me out to be a joyless miser, which is not the whole story. Of course I have become a touch bitter over the years, having had my heart pummeled so many times, but just because she is unstoppably optimistic, even haphazardly so, does that make me the worse half of our pair? Oh, of course she says it isn’t an issue of who’s the better half, but when she is calling me the ultimate bring down (which is unwarranted, I assure you, I still know to have fun) how can she claim that she is not making me out to be the bad guy? How can I be the ultimate bring down, my dear one, if you keep wanting to me to come and visit you?

  Anyway.

  Of course there wasn’t a guidebook for it. Alava laughed again at me. “Go,” she said. “You will figure it all out soon enough.”

  We exited the stone house, Alava a few steps behind us, carrying her lantern. I looked about for the path we had followed but soon realized there was none. We were on an island. In the surrounding waters I noticed an unusual amount of alligators, gliding through the water in a clockwise pattern around the island. Our invulnerability had not yet sunk into our minds completely and I put my arms around Ma Bichette as they began to crawl onto the island, creeping towards Alava, completely ignoring us.

  “My pets,” Alava said to us. “I will miss them.”

  I said nothing and felt Ma Bichette lean against me. Once she had told me of a close encounter she had with an alligator as a child. If she was scared she was doing a good job of not showing it. I, on the other hand, had simply been through far too much in the past eight hours or so to be afraid of something as mundane as an alligator. The creatures throatily growled to greet their mistress and Ma Bichette moaned softly.

  “Where is the way we came?” I asked. Ma Bichette kept her eyes on the alligators.

  Alava outstretched her lamp over the black water and a path emerged from under the surface. It stretched into the labyrinth of cypress and, hopefully, to my bay horse.

  “Remember what I told you,” Alava said. “Dawn.”

  Apparently tiredness is not a vulnerability. Long before we got to the horse my eyelids began to droop. But I talked with her for as long as I could, formulating our plan to both get revenge and our first “meal.”

  By the way, we both still eat normal food. Undead or not, all the rudimentary chemical reactions your body uses food to sustain, we need as well. Remember, we are just cheating Death, our bodies still work. In fact, they sometimes work much harder than yours. For example, I have been shot several times. To patch myself up, I need lots of calories to do it. It’s a shame really, that there isn’t a guidebook, because I have become truly curious as to the mechanics of my undead husk.

  We rode back that day, with her in front of me on the saddle like when we had rode out, playing dead in case anyone saw us. She played dead very well. Unnervingly well. Every fifteen minutes or so I would whisper into her ear and ask if she was feeling all right still, just to reassure myself that she was indeed alive again and that I hadn’t dreamt the whole encounter. She would answer yes, she was fine. She looked a mess. I had wiped the ouroboros off of her forehead, but she was sweaty and still stank of the ointment, although we had managed to scrub most of it off. At some point she said that she felt something in her “chatte” and fidgeted around until she removed the beads. She still has them. She calls them her good luck charms and have made them earrings. Yes, I might be a touch aloof now, I’ll admit that, but at least I didn’t make a blasted friendship bracelet of my penis strings. She’s a bit batty at times, Ma Bichette, and after a while that stops being charming and starts grating upon the nerves of a dignified gentlemen such as myself.