Music and Malice in Hurricane Town Read online

  But the moment the bandmaster passed through the charm gates at the front of the procession, a rotten and appalling scream started up. It cut through the band like a knife, silencing the music as the musicians all faltered to a stop, leaving only that blistering shriek filling the air. It was an insane sound, consumed with torment and rage, a scorching inferno of hatred and bile.

  “Good gods, where is it coming from?” somebody gasped.

  Everyone stared around, looking for the culprit. Most people immediately turned to the coffin itself, as if they thought perhaps Ivory Monette wasn’t dead at all and had suddenly woken to find herself entombed in a velvet-lined prison. But the scream wasn’t coming from the coffin. It was coming from the charm gates.

  “There!” Sharkey cried, pointing.

  They all followed the direction of his finger to a poppet that had been tied to one of the gate’s iron poles. It was, unmistakeably, supposed to represent Ivory Monette herself. The little doll was about the size of Jude’s palm and made from a sewn cloth bag adorned with colourful beads and buttons. It had many bright turbans wound around its head, long flowing skirts and big hoops in its ears. Cajou poppets usually had shapeless lumps for hands, but this one had actual fingers, with dozens of tiny rings sparkling from them. But what really identified the poppet as Ivory Monette was the big white snake on its shoulders.

  The Monette women had been cajou queens of Baton Noir for generations. Every year, on the sacred evening, Cajou Night, a queen would be picked from the city’s inhabitants by a magical pair of cajou snakes – creatures from the spirit world who were said to represent Daa, the Snake-God himself, the sky father and original creator of the universe. Although Daa had long since left their world to be run by the legba, he still picked the one human on the planet who would be crowned and allowed to see and speak to the legba directly.

  It was common for queens to rule for the duration of their lives, and this had been the case with Ivory. The Cajou Night ceremonies had mainly been a formality. She had owned the pair of snakes, until the black one mysteriously disappeared some twenty years ago. For the whole of Jude’s lifetime, Ivory had only appeared with one snake, a twelve-foot-long albino python named Beau. And this was the one draped around the poppet’s shoulders.

  Cajou dolls were inanimate objects. Everyone knew that. They had no actual life of their own. And yet there the Ivory Monette poppet was, with its eyes bulging and its sack mouth open wide and the loudest scream in the world coming from its throat.

  People were muttering and moving away from the cemetery, eager to put some distance between themselves and whatever dark magic this was.

  “What do we do?” one of the band members asked.

  “Keep going!” Benny, the bandmaster, called from the front.

  He turned and marched through the charm gates, straight past the screaming poppet. After a moment’s hesitation, the rest of the band resumed playing and followed him. The music helped to drown out the scream to some extent, but you could still hear it.

  When it was Jude and Sharkey’s turn to walk through, Jude saw that the poppet had bright green buttons sewn on to its face for eyes. As she met the doll’s gaze, those eyes seemed to get bigger and bigger until they filled Jude’s vision entirely. Everything else fell away – the cemetery, the band, the poppet, the gates. The entire world, in fact. Just melted away like fog, leaving only Jude and the poppet. Staring at each other.

  Finally the poppet’s mouth snapped shut and the scream abruptly stopped.

  Jude found herself sprawled on the dry, crumbly earth beneath one of the drooping ancient trees that filled the graveyard. Baton Noir preferred to bury its dead above ground and the space was filled with stone crypts and marble tombs. The air beneath the shade of the branches felt cooler and easier to breathe. She found herself sucking it in in big gulps.

  “That’s it,” Sharkey said and Jude realized he was kneeling beside her. “You just take nice deep breaths.”

  He helped her sit up and the tree trunk felt reassuringly solid behind her back.

  “What happened?” Jude asked. “Where’s everyone else?”

  “You keeled over, that’s what,” Sharkey replied. “As for everyone else, they’re off putting madam in her crypt before she can climb out of her coffin and start hexing everyone. Here, take this.”

  He passed her his flask, which was full of sweet iced tea. Jude sipped it gratefully, feeling the cool, sugary liquid glide down her throat

  “Did that poppet really start screaming?” Jude asked, lowering the flask. “Or did I dream it?”

  “It happened, all right,” Sharkey replied. “Creepiest damned thing I ever saw.”

  “What does it mean?” Jude asked.

  Sharkey waved the question away. “Beats me,” he said. “And who cares anyhow? I’m more interested in you at the moment. Feelin’ any better?”

  Jude nodded. She was feeling better, actually. The shade and the sweet tea and the rest had taken the edge off, even if she still felt like she was recovering from the flu.

  “Got you a present yesterday,” Sharkey said, drawing a small pouch from his pocket and handing it to her.

  “That better not be what I think it is,” Jude said, eyeing it with distaste.

  Sharkey didn’t say anything so she opened the strings at the neck of the pouch and shook out the small object inside. It was a delicate silver bracelet with a single charm in the shape of a snowflake.

  “It’s a cool-headed charm,” Sharkey said, an obstinate edge to his voice. “Meant for hotheads like you who can’t control their anger.”

  Jude rolled her eyes. “I know what it is.” She thrust the bracelet back towards her friend. “I don’t wear cajou charms. You know that.”

  In fact, she was the only person in the Done and Dusted Brass Band who didn’t own a single musical charm. From time to time she’d hear one of the others muttering that it was all an act and that she must keep her charms hidden, sewed into the lining of her jacket, filling her pockets or tucked into her panties. But Jude didn’t care what anyone else thought. She knew that her musical ability came from her and her alone, and that was enough.

  “You’re your own worst enemy, you know,” Sharkey said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not an idiot,” he said. “I know this little charm probably ain’t enough by itself. But it can’t hurt, can it?”

  Jude said nothing. The simmering anger she’d carried around for the last eight years had recently got worse and worse, almost without her even noticing. All her grievances bubbled up to the surface and she wasn’t able to control them. She picked fights she couldn’t win. She got hurt and she bled and she didn’t care.

  Sharkey peered into her face. “I could just murder that Leeroy Lamar.”

  “Don’t do that,” Jude said wearily. “I was angry long before he came along. He’s not responsible.”

  And he’s not all bad, some small, treacherous part of her wanted to say. He made me feel special once.

  That was the worst thing about it all, really. The fact that sometimes she still had confused feelings of affection for Leeroy mixed in with the dull ache of humiliation. It was still hard, even now, to accept that she could have got him so wrong.

  “Didn’t help none, though, did he?” Sharkey grunted. “What with being a good-for-nothin’ asswipe.”

  That boy’ll break your heart if you let him, Sharkey had warned Jude when she’d first started seeing Leeroy. And he’d been right.

  “I wish you’d let me buy a conjure ball to roll across his yard,” Sharkey went on.

  “No,” Jude said with a small smile. “No conjure balls.”

  Sharkey returned her smile. Then he put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed.

  “Something has to change, beautiful one,” he said. “You’re getting dragged down to a no-good place. You gotta stop all this fighting and raging at the world.”

  “I know,” Jude replied. “I want to change. It’s just tha
t it’s harder … much harder than I ever expected it to be.” She saw herself through Sharkey’s eyes and it made her feel all used up and spat out. All of a sudden it was difficult to meet his gaze but Sharkey moved his hand to her chin and wouldn’t let her look away.

  “No need for shame, darlin’,” he said softly. “Not with me. I can be every bit as much of a stubborn son-of-a-bitch as you can. And I ain’t letting you go down like this, you hear me? I ain’t.”

  “I am trying,” Jude said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “Sofia has been teaching me some exercises—”

  “And that’s great,” Sharkey replied. “But it ain’t enough. You know it ain’t. Jude Lomax, you need all the help you can get, so you’re goddamn gonna let me help you any way I can.”

  He pressed the snowflake charm back into her trembling palm. “Look at me,” he said, his dark brown eyes gazing into hers. “I’m on my knees begging you to wear it. Do it for me, even if you don’t wanna do it for yourself right now.”

  Jude found herself taking the charm. Actually taking it. Something she never ever thought she’d do. But then, lots of things hadn’t gone to plan.

  She put the bracelet in her pocket. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  Sharkey nodded. “That’ll have to do for now I guess.”

  There was movement on the other side of the cemetery and they looked up to see that the mourners seemed to be dissipating. The funeral was over. Sharkey jogged over to get their pay packets from Benny and then returned to Jude. Her entire body still throbbed from the beating she’d taken earlier and she felt absolutely awful, but she was back on her feet, and that was a start.

  “Late lunch?” Sharkey asked, tilting his head to indicate the Dead Duck café just over the road.

  As they made their way back through the charm gates, Jude looked for the cajou queen poppet, but it had vanished. When she asked Sharkey what had happened to it, he shrugged.

  “Probably got swiped by some ghoul,” he said. “Or one of the family. Perhaps they’ll keep it on the mantelpiece to remember her by.”

  Jude didn’t know much about Ivory Monette’s family, apart from the fact that she’d had a daughter who’d rejected cajou and left Baton Noir, but Ivory’s granddaughter, Charity Monette, was still here.

  They walked over to the Dead Duck, took a table by the window and ordered coffee and beignets.

  “Looks like you took quite a battering,” Sharkey remarked, eyeing Jude across the table.

  Jude shrugged and prodded her tooth with her tongue, hoping it might have magically re-rooted itself. Unfortunately it still wobbled in her gum, and stung like anything.

  “No worse than I’ve had before,” she replied.

  “Your landlord is a no-good piece of shit,” Sharkey said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Weren’t you supposed to be playing for the Monster of Moonfleet last night?”

  Jude rolled her eyes. “I wish you wouldn’t call him that.”

  “Well, that’s what he is, ain’t he?”

  Moonfleet Manor had a dire reputation in Baton Noir. Everyone knew that the Majstro family who owned the house were all mad. The blood of a cool legba flowed through their veins, and not just any cool legba, but Krag himself.

  It would have been over-simplifying it to say that warm legba were good and cool legba were evil, but it was a pretty good starting point for people who were new to Baton Noir. Some people said that the legba were cajou spirits, while others claimed that warm legba had started off as angels and the cool legba had once been devils, before the world became godless.

  Krag ruled over the cool legba and people were wary of his descendants because of the prophecy that, one day, one of them would unleash the chaos horses of the apocalypse and bring about the end of the world.

  There was no denying that the Majstros were a warped and wicked family. Fifty years earlier, a police raid had uncovered a nightmarish scene. Terribly mutilated people tortured in the attic – several of them still alive, still breathing, although some had had limbs removed, while others had had additional limbs sewn on, the subjects of ghoulish experiments. Violetta Majstro was lynched for these crimes but there had been other Majstros living in the house at the time and, because of the strange way descendants aged, it was difficult to know whether any of them were still alive.

  It wasn’t just that descendants had a longer potential lifespan, sometimes the aging process seemed to pause too. This could happen when they were anything from five years old to ninety, and could last for many years. It was therefore almost impossible to know exactly how old a descendant actually was.

  André Majstro, otherwise known as the Phantom of Moonfleet, seemed to be the only one now left at the house. Everyone said he was disfigured and deformed, and he was rarely seen in public, hence his unfortunate nickname. Even Jude had never laid eyes on him, though she’d been working at Moonfleet for a month now.

  Her pa had been livid when she’d received the offer. “Don’t you even think of going to that wretched place,” he’d said. “They’re devil people! He’ll want something from you. And how did he even find out where you live, eh?”

  “He says he heard the Done and Dusted Brass Band play and he asked Benny for my address,” Jude had replied.

  “You will not go to that place, Jude,” her pa had said. “Not while you live under this roof.”

  So Jude had meekly agreed that of course she wouldn’t go, and then had lied about getting a job elsewhere and gone straight to Moonfleet anyway. She’d made many mistakes in her life, but she’d never been dumb enough to turn down paid work.

  “This’ll tide us over for a while anyway,” Jude said now, pulling her pay packet from her pocket.

  In her head she was already doing the mental calculations for how much money they needed to keep them going until Cajou Night in a few days’ time. She knew that she, and every other musician in the city, would have work then.

  “How much is this danger pay anyway?” she asked. The envelope definitely looked fatter than usual.

  “About half again,” Sharkey replied. He took a nail file from his pocket and began filing his already perfectly shaped nails. “Ivory Monette requested us special.”

  “She did?”

  Jude was surprised. They were a decent enough band, sure, but they couldn’t compete with the likes of the Ruby Red Brass Band, the Okey Poke Marching Band or the Drunken Devil.

  “Perhaps she realized the fellas would be antsy about playing?” Sharkey suggested. “Worried about being cursed or hexed or the like. A poorer band like us is more likely to be swayed by the danger pay.”

  “I guess that must be it.”

  Jude looked down at the envelope in her hand. Having seen the way that poppet had come to life, she was starting to think that perhaps she shouldn’t have scoffed at the idea of being hexed from beyond the grave after all.

  “I’m going to give Sidney the rent straight away,” she said, stuffing the envelope back in her pocket. “He’ll only demand more interest otherwise.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Sharkey said, standing up.

  “You don’t need to do that,” Jude replied.

  “I ain’t got a thing to do for the rest of the day,” Sharkey said firmly. “I’m comin’ with you.”

  So they made their way to the Fountain District, with its rows of elegant white-columned houses and manicured gardens. Sharkey waited on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets while Jude delivered the money to Sidney’s unsmiling butler.

  When she rejoined her friend she immediately noticed a man standing a few yards away, leaning on a lamp post. It was the middle of the afternoon but he wore formal black evening wear, a silk top hat and a pair of smoked dark glasses. A watch chain hung from his pocket; he carried a jackal-topped cane in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It was hard to tell with the dark glasses but it very much looked as if he was watching them through the haze of his cigarette smoke. The moment Jude’s gaze fixed
on his face, his mouth slowly stretched into a lazy grin.

  Jude felt the skin at the back of her neck prickle.

  “How long has he been there?” she asked.

  “Who?” Sharkey replied.

  “That man dressed up like—” Jude broke off. He had suddenly disappeared, leaving only cigarette smoke behind. “Oh. He’s gone.” She looked up and down the street but could see no sign of him. “There was a man there, dressed up like Baron Lukah.”

  Sharkey pulled a face. “Why would anyone dress up like Baron Lukah?”

  Baron Lukah was perhaps the most famous cool legba of them all, the legba of death. He was always depicted in evening wear with a top hat and smoked glasses. He loved cigarettes and swamp whisky and carried a pocket watch to keep track of when people’s time was up.

  Ever since the Snake-God left, the world had been ruled over by identical twin brothers, Ollin and Krag. Ollin was the prince of the warm legba and controlled all the spirits of the day, and Krag commanded the cool legba, the spirits of the night. Known as the evil master of the crossroads, he was responsible for allowing the crossing of all bad luck, misfortune, destruction, injustice and suffering into the world.

  The brothers were always depicted as two old black men, wearing suits that had seen better days and wide-brimmed straw hats. They both carried smoking pipes that they puffed on lazily. In paintings, they usually appeared on opposite sides of the spiritual crossroads.

  One of the only noticeable differences between them was that Ollin was often accompanied by a faithful, grey-muzzled elderly dog, for dogs were sacred to Ollin. Krag had an owl on his shoulder and sometimes carried a horsewhip, with which to command the chaos horses of the apocalypse. The horses that would one day devour the world.

  Jude was amazed that anyone in Baton Noir would have the nerve to dress as Baron Lukah. She shook her head and tried to dismiss the unease that still prickled over her skin as they walked back to the streetcar. As usual the Citizen section of the car was packed, forcing them to squash tightly in with all the other passengers. Jude ended up with her face practically buried in a large man’s armpit and couldn’t help casting resentful looks beyond the velvet rope to the Royalty section, which had actual seats and was half empty.