Patricia Briggs: Home Improvement: Undead Edition

“Here you go,” Mrs. Hopkins said, handing me a velvet pouch. I poured a quarter-carat diamond onto my hand, and even in the dim evening light, I could see the sparkle. I slipped it back into the pouch and then put it on top of the coffin.

Von Doesburg said, “What’s to keep you—I mean, an unscrupulous houngan from pocketing the diamond when nobody is looking and then pretending that the loas took it?”

I wanted to tell him that if I’d pocketed a diamond every time I raised a body, I’d have a better car than my six-year-old Toyota, but he wasn’t the first one to ask, so I restrained myself. “Tell you what, why don’t you come over here next to the coffin? Just be sure to step over the salt line.”

His eyes got wide, and I think he’d have made an excuse if C.W. hadn’t snickered. That was when he stomped over. “Now what?”

“Hold out your hand.”

He obeyed.

I reopened the pouch and let the diamond fall onto his palm. “Now make a fist and hold it over the coffin while I do the ritual. If that rock is still there when I’m done, you can keep it.”

Papa Philippe, my sponsor at the Order, wouldn’t have approved of my letting a civilian get involved, but I figured it was the best way to prove my point.

Once Von Doesburg was in place, I began the ritual, which really isn’t that much to see unless you throw in the voudou special effects and dance numbers some of my fellow houngans favor. First I knocked on the coffin three times. With some jobs, I add a knock-knock joke at that point, but this didn’t seem like the right crowd. Then I gathered my will and reached into the body of the man in the coffin, though to the onlookers it probably just looked like I had a real bad headache. That was pretty much it.

When I felt Gottfried stirring, I started unscrewing the fasteners holding the lid shut.

Von Doesburg stepped back in such a hurry that he broke the salt line, but I didn’t need it anymore anyway. It would have been nice if he’d helped me get the lid open, but I managed on my own and looked inside. The mortician had done a good job with Gottfried. He looked fairly natural.

The revenant blinked up at me, and when I held my hand out toward him, he let me help him out of the coffin. His skin was cold to the touch, of course, but I’m used to that. Fortunately he was wearing a real suit, not one of those backless things. A dead man’s ass isn’t particularly appealing to me.

“Gottfried?” I said.

“Yes, I’m Gottfried,” he said, showing the usual amount of new revenant confusion.

“Do you know where you are?”

“I’m . . .” He looked around the cemetery, then at the coffin he’d climbed out of. “Am I dead?”

“Yes, you are.” Back when houngans first went public, it had been tricky to convince a fresh revenant that he was actually dead, but I’d never resurrected anybody who hadn’t already known it could happen to them. That made it easier for everybody concerned. “I brought you back to finish your last job. Do you remember what that is?”

It’s important for a revenant to know why he’s back in this world. Houngans, at least licensed ones, don’t just bring people back for fun. First off, we need the permission of the next of kin. Second, there has to be a compelling reason for us to take on a job. It was okay to bring back Grandma to tell the family where she’d hidden the Apple stock certificates, or Dr. Bigshot to finish a research project, but not to bring back Marilyn Monroe for a reality show. Third, the revenant has to be willing to take on that task. Once Gottfried’s was done, he’d have to go back to the grave.

It’s like Papa Philippe says: we just raise the dead, we can’t bring ’em back to life.

Gottfried hesitated just long enough to worry me, but then said, “The house. I was renovating a house. I’ve never done a house before. It’s special. It’s going to be my famous house, like Frank Lloyd Wright had Fallingwater.”

It wasn’t the explanation I’d been expecting. According to Mrs. Hopkins, the house was special because after Gottfried fixed it up, it was going to be sold to raise money for the Stickler Syndrome Research Foundation, of which she was the chairman. But as long as it was important to him, the ritual would work.

“Are you willing to stay long enough to finish the house? Because if you’re not, I’ll lay you back to rest right now.” I could tell Mrs. Hopkins didn’t like it when I said that, but I’d explained to her that no houngan could make a revenant walk the earth if he didn’t want to.

So we both relaxed when Gottfried said, “I want to finish the house.”

“Awesome. Now do you remember these people?”

That was another test: to be sure Gottfried had come back with enough of his faculties to finish his work.

Gottfried focused on them, his reactions getting closer to normal every second. “Yes, of course. Hello, Shelia.”

“I’m glad to see you, Gottfried,” Mrs. Hopkins said, but she didn’t come any closer. No surprise there. No matter how determined my clients are, they still tend to freak when they see a dead man walking.

Gottfried went on. “C.W. Elizabeth. Von Doesburg.” He looked at me. “I don’t know you, do I?”

“No, I haven’t had the pleasure. I’m Dodie Kilburn. I’m going to help you get that house finished.”

“Good. I want to finish the house.”

Revenants aren’t known for their conversational skills—once one has focused on a task, that’s all he’s interested in. Gottfried must have had a strong focus even while living to have already fixated on his.

I said, “Gottfried, I’m going to take you to a special hotel for the night.”

“Because I can’t go home anymore.”

“That’s right.” We started down the path to the cemetery exit, and I said, “Mrs. Hopkins, I’ll bring Gottfried to the work site tomorrow.”

“That’ll be fine.”

“And Mr. Von Doesburg, you can open your hand now.”

He did so, then stared at his empty palm. The diamond was long gone.

THERE WAS NOneed for me to stick around once I’d checked Gottfried in at the Order’s Revenant House. It was the job of the apprentice houngans working there to explain what he’d need to know about being a revenant: stuff like him not having to eat or go to the bathroom, though drinking water would help him speak; how his sense of touch wouldn’t come back completely, which meant that he wouldn’t feel much pain but would have to be careful to keep from damaging himself, since he couldn’t heal anymore. Of course, he’d likely seen a revenant at some point, so he might remember how it worked, but it was different when you were the dead one.

I was walking back to the parking lot when I saw a shadowy figure waiting for me. I stopped, and a man dressed in a shabby top hat and a tailcoat worn over a bare chest sauntered toward me. He was carrying a cane with a silver skull for a knob, and there was a chicken foot sticking out of his hatband. His black skin gleamed as if it had been oiled, which it probably had been.

“Dude,” I said.

He didn’t respond.

I sighed, then said, “I see you, Papa Philippe.”

“Dodie Kilburn,” he said in a husky voice, “I hear you raised a man for no good reason.”

“Says who?”

“The loa be telling me.”

“Don’t the loa have better things to do?”

“They do,” Philippe said, dropping out of his voudou patois, “but Margery doesn’t.”

“I should have known.” Margery, the woman who ran the office of the Order, knew the business of every houngan in the Atlanta area. “Then she should also have told you that I had an excellent reason to bring Gottfried back.”

“Actually, I should have heard it from you, what with being your sponsor.”