Barbara Hambly - 03 Graveyard Dust

As he clattered down the stairs a few minutes later to the kitchen a wave of nausea gripped him, an agony in his belly and the big muscles of his thighs, and he remembered his sickness at the courthouse. Dear God, no! Sweat came out all over him as he gripped the stair rail, trembling, retching himself now...

Please God!

The epidemic in Paris. Last summer's cases here in New Orleans. The explosive indecencies of the sickness, the dried pinched faces, the agonies of cramp and vomiting and purging. ... please God...

He stumbled into the kitchen, cracked his shins on a bench, groped in his pocket for lucifers and struck one on the scratch-paper. By its light he found a pitcher on the table by the wall, next to the emptied bowl Gabriel had brought last night. The match had burned down to his fingers and nearly out when he saw the rat.

He lit another lucifer, as a second spasm of nausea seized him. He fought it down, and looked again.

The rat lay close to the corner of the table, its back bent in a spasm of agony, its tail still thrashing in pain. The lucifer went out. January cursed and scratched another, and looked around this time for a candle. The smell of tallow acrid in his nostrils, he walked around for a closer look at the rat. It lay beside the blue pottery bowl that had contained the beans and rice. The spoon he'd used to wolf down the leftovers before going to the trial was licked clean nearby. Bella would wear him out with a broom handle for that kind of untidiness. Another wave of nausea hit him and he clutched at the edge of the table, dread and cold and enlightenment all exploding in his mind at once as he thought, Not cholera. Poison.

Dr. Yellowjack coming toward him through the dancers, congris and lemonade in his hands. He'd waited for a long time for January to slip up and eat something that had stood unwatched in the house. And in the end he had done so.

How long?

When he could stand again January filled one pocket with candles, the rest with whatever eggs Bella had left behind in the egg basket and staggered into the yard. Filling the largest bucket he could find from the cistern he hauled it up the stairs with an effort that made him weak. He stuck candles in every crack and on every level surface in Hannibal's room, then wobbled into his own for his medical bag and ipecac, iodine, medicinal salts, anything... In the midst of administering as much of a stomach lavage as he could to his friend he was sick twice more, but didn't dare stop. There was no telling how much earlier Hannibal had eaten the poisoned food, haw much of a margin he had.

Laboring in the heat, in growing pain and fear, racing to overtake a goal that was itself hidden, in darkness, he was conscious of how very silent the night was. How isolated the gar?onni?re, tucked away back from the Rue Burgundy behind his mother's house. How isolated he was himself. If he cried out, would anyone hear? If he shouted, "I am dying-there's a dying man here! " would anyone come down the dark passway from the street? Or would they say, as he had, Cholera? And flee?

He mixed water with egg whites-throwing the yolks and shells on the floor in his fumbling haste, his vision starting to play tricks on him in the wavering candle light-and gulped them down, heroic quantities. He gagged, then induced vomiting and purging, as he had done for Hannibal.

The fiddler lay stretched now on a blanket on the floor, like a drowned elf dredged from a gutter, wet with sweat and spilled water and slime. In the jittering dimness January thought for a moment that he saw, not the bones staring through the skin, but the man's skeleton itself, a nest of snakes creeping in the cage of the ribs...

He blinked, and jerked his head, and found himself lying on the floor with spilled saline solution and nastiness everywhere about him. Doggedly he prepared an other draught for himself, fighting the pains in his belly, his thighs, his arms where they'd been twisted nearly from their sockets last spring... Had old Mambo Jeanne at Bellefleur been right, all those years ago, about certain poisons making snakes and lizards grow under your skin? He looked down at his arms and found that the old woman had indeed spoken true: His skin was moving with them, bulging out or twisting in long tracks. He forgot the draught, stared fascinated, horrified... And then he was in Paris. It was late, past two, the dead slack leaden hour of exhaustion, and stars burned, opium-crazed diamonds in a sky black with the velvet abysses of infinity. Summer heat like boiling glue, and the stenches of Paris in the summer; and every light was quenched, in mansion, flat, attic, and hovel. Where he was coming from he didn't know-the Marais Quarter across the river, he thought. Someone's Christmas Ball. And he saw Death, skipping and dancing down the street. Death looking just like He should, with his black cloak draped over a raggedy mess of stained wool shroud, and bony feet clattering a little on the slippery cobbles. Death messier than engravings portrayed, Death the way January was familiar with him from years at the Hotel-Dieu, shreddy flesh dribbling gobbets of black fluid and maggots.

Death with his attendant skeletons-revolting in their stained shroudless nakedness. They knocked on doors, climbed through windows where no one would open, came out of alleyways, dragging men and women by the wrists or arms or hair. Fat butchers and slender milkmaids, a nightshirted child clutching a carved wooden horse, stockbrokers digging through their pockets looking for coin to pay off those grinning Guede... The coins fell through the bony fingers and clattered ringing on the stones. Some people came dancing, skipping. Ayasha tossing her scented hair. A woman leaned out a garret window and called her son's name, frantic with weeping. The boy didn't hear.

Carts rolled behind them, heaped with bones. Baron Cemetery was driving one of them, tipped his hat to January, and winked behind his spectacles. "Care to come?" His voice was creaky, shrill and hoarse. "Free ride. Good to see an old friend from home."

"I can't." January's words came out harsh and whispery as the skeleton god's. "I have to find Olympe." The boy who was dancing beside the cart turned, waved to January, and held out his hand. January saw it was Gabriel.

"Gabriel, come back!" He stepped off the curbstone, something he knew he should have known better than to do. His feet sank ankle-deep in the black mud of Paris. "Gabriel, don't go! " Gabriel only waved again, with one hand. The other gripped the hand of a young man, dancing, too, a slim light-skinned youth with a black trace of mustache, whom January knew was Isaak Jumon. January tried to follow but the ooze held him fast. "Gabriel..." "He'll be all right," said Mamzelle Marie. January shook his head. "The Baron," he tried to explain. He climbed the stairs in the Paris house, put his hand on the doorknob... "Who?" asked Hannibal's voice.

"The Baron," explained Mamzelle Marie. January opened the door, and saw Ayasha sitting on the bed, sharing a glass of wine with the Baron Cemetery, who had one bony arm around her waist. "Don't look at me," said the Baron. "I haven't got him in my pocket." And he dug in his pocket with one hand to prove it, coming up only with some shards of broken crockery, such as the slaves at Bellefleur had stuck around graves. Then he laughed and dragged Ayasha down onto the bed, lying on top of her while she giggled and squirmed, pulling up her skirts, her long hair trailing onto the floor.

"Baron Cemetery," explained Marie Laveau, unnecessarily, January thought. "The lord of the spirits of the dead." (You don't have to tell me that!) She touched January's hand.

He was lying in his own bed, he thought, and felt as if he were coming off a ten-month drunk.

Cholera?

The image returned to him, of a rat dying by candlelight on a table.