The New Hero: Volume 1 Read online

  ‘I’m sure you do, Madame. Your man’s in town, and expects you to be his table at the Sunday Driver Bingo Hall tomorrow night.’

  ‘I don’t have a man,’ I reply, irritated, briefly dropping my poker face. ‘And I’m not permitted in any gambling establishment in Carolina Territory, Lieutenant Weed, even if I’m just there to meet someone.’

  I stand up, stretching backwards to avoid Weed’s groping fingers, then take a step back toward the door. The other Horsemen, now close behind Weed, follow my steps into the house. I read no malice from Lieutenant Weed. I read amusement. I step away faster. I do not wish to mess with an amused Horseman.

  ‘They’ll make an exception for you, just this once,’ Weed continues. ‘You can do something for your city, little lady.’ And with that, he slams the butt of his rifle up side my head and knocks me senseless.

  Frank and I met at the Sunday Driver Bingo Hall on Market Street. That’s how the Devil introduced himself: Frank. The name certainly rolls off the tongue easier than ‘Prince of Darkness’ or ‘The Man Who Waits at the Crossroads’. Lots of women have nice regular guys named Frank, suitable lovers who bring them flowers, rub their feet in the evening, and write bawdy love songs about them. My Frank―the Devil, rather―did those things, too. Naturally he was handsome and soft-spoken, and made no effort to conceal his identity. At the time we met, he was just ‘The Devil’, a supernatural being who had come to make our lives a little more chaotic. He’s got a great public face, and charming as, well, all Hell. Up until a few years ago, few really believed we were in the midst of The End Times, because the agents of Hell and Heaven are so personable.

  Frank once mused that New York fell so quickly because when Gabriel came to warn of Armageddon, everyone just wanted to hear him sing and play renditions of Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’ on his trumpet. He told me that he didn’t even bother to send Flatterers, demons skilled at stroking the ego, to tempt Gabriel to listen to his fans. He didn’t need to. Next thing you know, Gabriel gives up warning people and takes to singing at open mic shows in the East Village. Of course, the Devil is the Prince of Lies, so I take that account with a grain of salt, but it is a reasonable reflection of our times. Demons, ghosts, even angels walk among us and indulge in the whims of the living so much that we just don’t take them seriously.

  I didn’t take his Devil nature seriously at first either. I just wanted to test my gift as a Reader and see if I could read and beat the Devil at cards. Now any Reader worth her salt can cheat the Devil. It takes a special Reader, daring and foolish like me, to charm him and let herself be charmed. I beat Frank in five consecutive rounds of poker, and not through honest means. I read him deeply. I found his vulnerable spot. I read that he was lonely in his mission of destruction, and his loneliness melted something in me. He took a liking to me, and I to him.

  Five years in gambling halls all over the Southern Territories, garden parties at his villas in Hell, the scorched beaches of South Texas, even the ruins of Disney-world, those were good times. The fact is, despite being a great boyfriend, the Devil is the Ruler of Hell, and Supreme Leader of Evil and all. And he’s the Devil. When I introduced the idea of us settling down, taking our relationship to the next level, and perhaps his giving up Armageddon, he tried to steer the conversation to me selling him my soul. I ended the relationship then and there, returned to Charleston to find my Aunt Sungila, and lay my mischief to rest. Aunt Sungila took me on as an apprentice Rootswoman. Honestly, my heart isn’t in it, and most breathing people will not let me read them. It’s only been a couple of years since the Devil and I split up. People remember seeing us around town together, even though I never did anything wrong, the Devil is a bad crowd.

  I come to in the living room, on Aunt Sungila’s sofa, just as the clock strikes eleven. Someone has draped an afghan over me, carefully folded my spectacles, and put them on the coffee table. Has the Devil been here? It doesn’t feel like it. I lay under the afghan, staring at Sungila’s herb shelf over in the kitchen, my heart full of regret. If my head didn’t hurt so much, I’d get up and make some lavender tea. I’m the Pariah of Charleston, but the Devil wants me bad enough to send the Horsemen of the Apocalypse to invite me to dinner. I fall asleep troubled, lonelier than ever. Readers often go crazy because we distance ourselves from people. I’ve heard that before the End Times, few people believed Readers, psychics, telepaths, whatever we were called, could read heads. These days, folks believe alright. Folks believe and don’t fault me for my Gift. They fault me for keeping the wrong company. I was the Devil’s girlfriend when the mountains swallowed Asheville, Knoxville, and the Eastern Territories lost contact with the West. The distancing works both ways in my case.

  Aunt Sungila wakes me up some hours later. I open my eyes cautiously. I feel her eyes boring holes into my forehead, where Lieutenant Weed’s rifle must have left an ugly mark. She looks displeased. As I sit up she hands me an ice pack.

  ‘Put that on your head, Ivy.’ She instructs flatly. ‘Looks like you had a party here last night.’

  ‘No ma’am.’ Confused, as I put the ice pack on my head, I scan the room to see what gives her the idea I had a party. Sure as day, while the parlor looks tidy, on the table I spy several stacks of poker chips, and bottles of Elijah Cross, Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, and, naturally, Jeremiah Weed on the table. Strewn all over the floor is a deck of playing cards with a black fiddle on their backs. They knocked the daylights out of me, and then drank whiskey and played cards at my parlor table? Classy.

  ‘Auntie, you know I―’

  She holds her finger to her mouth and turns to the kitchen. I hear nothing. She looks back at me and her eyes narrow. ‘You’re gonna be late for work, child.’ She pulls the afghan off of me. ‘Get your shoes and your hat and get on! Keep the ice on your head to keep down the swelling.’

  ‘But I need to change my clothes.’

  ‘No, you don’t!’ She shouts with fire in her voice. ‘No time. If you lose that job, I’ll see to it that you spend the next ten years in the Georgia Penal Colony. You put me in danger by bringing folks here for what I’m sure you thought was a harmless game of poker or euchre, or whatever it is you play.’

  Stunned, I fasten my shoes, straighten my blouse, button my jacket, and run out the door with Sungila sweeping a broom at my heels. It’s not until I’m just about to the harbor do I realize that not only did I forget the ice pack, but that Aunt Sungila’s neck was bare. She always wears a mojo hand with a trick to prevent me from digging in her head. I’d read her if I could. The Sungila who shooed me out of her house was not the real Sungila.

  Aunt Sungila, confident in my Gift and concerned that idle hands might lead me to mischief, helped me get a job working for the Harbor Patrol. They needed someone to read the influx of dead immigrants and refugees. And Laverne Archer, the Head Reader, is married to the preacher at Aunt Sungila’s church. Giving me a job was a compromise for not having to let me into church.

  As I walk to work, I think about the few things I’ve wondered about Aunt Sungila. First, she’s often gone over night. Second, it’s not the first time I’ve seen a Sungila I didn’t believe to be the real Sungila, even though she gives off an inner psychic impression of Sungila. Third, Sungila looks the same as she does in photos taken before I was born, before the world split open. She hasn’t aged in thirty years at least, and I have no idea how old she is. The worry fades some. Whatever posed as Sungila back at the house probably got me out of there for my own good. That’s all I need to know for now. I’m used to not knowing much about Aunt Sungila, and probably better off not knowing.

  A few years ago I used my gift at the poker table. Now I use it to inspect ships for haints, hags, and plat-eyes (incorrectly called zombies up North.) On occasion, I read breathing passengers, and Aunt Sungila has me read her clients when she can’t figure out what’s going on with them. Rather, I read the ones who will let me. At the Harbor Patrol, the breathing are the least of our worries, though. The dead
come, with alarming frequency, to settle old scores, open old wounds, or to engage in their tricky side and mess with folks. Some angry and nasty old things, now nastier and angrier than when they first came here, creep the streets of Charleston, hellbent on breaking down what the living try to hold together as the world crumbles. The silence of these past few weeks gives no comfort.

  Despite the abundance of dead in the city, most believe that Charleston won’t fall anytime soon. Everyone and everything loves to gamble apparently. We have plenty of gambling establishments to keep the peace, and enough Conjurers to protect the living and banish the unruly dead. New Orleans thrives for similar reasons. Demons, ghosts, nameless horrors from Hell all play cards, and will set aside their mission to destroy the world if they can sit at a table and throw a few chips in the pot. All the breathing of Charleston, Gifted or otherwise, hold the world together with gambling, magic, and an uneasy acceptance that they share the town with the dead.

  I arrive to work disheveled and wrinkled, even under my suit. I am a shameful sight. I sulk to my desk and look over the list of today’s arrivals. Nothing much. A passenger ship from Jamaica, likely full of duppies and breathing refugees from a hurricane that tore up Kingston last week.

  ‘You’re late, Ivy, and inappropriately dressed.’ Laverne Archer, the Head Reader, snaps as she walks in. She’s late, too, but it’s probably unwise to mention it.

  ‘Yes, I know, Laverne.’ I answer. ‘My Aunt didn’t return home last night from church and I stayed up waiting for her.’

  ‘Really? And did she beat you for asking too many questions about her whereabouts?’ Laverne reaches for my face where Weed’s rifle met my head. I draw back. I read that she found out I was late by ‘practicing’ on the receptionist. Laverne’s not very good at reading, not particularly smart, but she’s sneaky. She needs to touch people to even read the surface of someone’s mind. She’s honest enough to know I’m a better Reader than she is, so I interview most of the arrivals, even the live ones, while Laverne files, bosses me around, and gossips about me to the other people in the office.

  ‘Oh, that. No.’ I catch and hold her gaze, and float the impression that something terrible has happened and I’m not ready to talk, but I’m probably easy to read if caught off guard. ‘That’s not important. It’ll go away in a few days.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ she replies. She’ll try to grab my arm in a couple of hours, I’m certain, and leave a greasy fried chicken hand print on my jacket. I wish I liked Laverne Archer. I wish we could be friends, since she’s the only other Reader I see on a regular basis, even if she’s not a good one. I wish she’d share some gossip with me, or invite me to her weekly bridge game and share the recipe for her chocolate cake that she brings to the Harbor Patrol office on people’s birthdays.

  After two hours of searching for busywork, not a single vessel drops her anchor and releases her passengers. The radios are still down from the hurricane, and the shipping lanes have been off for the past week. The Harbor Master pops in at some point, and even he is unconcerned. I spend a while in the ladies’ room in front of the mirror, fretting about the angry bruise on my head from Lieutenant Weed’s rifle butt. I know I’ll see Frank soon, and against my better judgment, I’d like to look my best. Then again, Frank’s man inflicted it. I feel foolish.

  At noon, I ask Laverne with some reluctance if she wants to get some lunch at the farmer’s market. She eagerly agrees, until I look her dead in the eye and say, ‘I ain’t telling you nothing, and if you so much as flick a mosquito off my shoulder, I’ll put a picture in that busy head of yours so horrific, you won’t sleep for a month. And you know they say I lived in Hell. It might be true. I’ve seen things only the damned see.’

  Laverne glares at me, but agrees to find lunch without calling my bluff. I can’t plant anything in anyone’s head, and she probably knows that. Maybe she wants to know something else.

  ‘People would probably like you more, Ivy, if you didn’t follow up your politeness with ugliness,’ she says in a falsely friendly tone.

  As we walk down the boardwalk, Laverne greets nearly every person we pass. She asks about one woman’s baby who’s been sick. She inquires about people she hasn’t seen at church lately. A few folks politely, uncomfortably greet me. One man tells Laverne that he’ll reveal some auspicious and important news when she’s not busy. I read him quickly. He got a dog. Several people think ‘why’s Laverne with her’? Or ‘Miss Sungila should just stop pushing her niece on fine people like Laverne Archer.’

  As we sit in the park across from the harbor, Laverne says quietly, ‘I saw your auntie leave church with Opal Teal last night. I was late today because Magpie Williams stopped me on my way to work and told me Opal didn’t come home last night. What did Miss Sungila say when she came home?’

  ‘She threw me out of the house.’ I want to tell her all of it, the way I would if we were friends, about the Horsemen, and how a Sungila who wasn’t quite Sungila put an ice pack on my head and shooed me out the door, but as I’m about to start in on the whole story, Laverne’s eyes widen and she looks past me, out to the docks.

  ‘Oh,’ she gasps. She snaps back to my face in terror. We feel it at the same time. A thousand or more single eyes fix on us. I turn around. Plat-eyes. Row upon row of plat-eyes drag themselves out of the ocean. Plat-eyes shuffle down the cobblestone streets. Plat-eyes stuff food into their gaping maws as cart merchants abandon their wares.

  The alarms sound, warning the breathing folks of Charleston of the invasion of plat-eyes. Before the world started to crumble, parents told their children to stay out of the swamps and other bad, dark places, lest the plat-eyes make a meal of them. Plat-eyes, decomposed bodies of people or animals with one single eye that hangs out of a dead socket by a bloody sinew, never appeared anywhere other than in stories, and never appeared in droves as platoons of the Devil. They are hard to kill, impossible to read because they don’t think in readable ways, and exist solely to eat the breathing and flatten cities.

  I stand enthralled as the plat-eye horde shifts from random mayhem to form organized rows of one-eyed monsters that march towards us. Laverne looks at me with vicious anger. ‘Did you invite some friends from Hell, Ivy Greene?’ She yells.

  ‘Shh!’ Laverne, not particularly smart, calls me by my full name. All the plat-eyes swing around and look at us. At me, really. No one moves, but Laverne continues. She grabs my arms, holds and reads, and shoves me to the ground.

  ‘You’re nothing but trouble, Ivy. And you know, no one likes you because you think you’re better than we are, not because of some rumor that you probably started about being the Devil’s girlfriend. The Devil’s got girlfriends in every city left. He’s a dog, you know. Being his girlfriend is nothing to be proud of. It’s nothing special. And you know what else? I wish we could be friends, too, Ivy Greene, but I would hate to get my greasy fried chicken fingers on your pristine Hell’s Whore suit and ruin it!’ A plat-eye puts its bony hand on her shoulder and she runs away screaming.

  At that, a few of the plat-eyes chuckle. It sounds more like dry beans in a can than laughter. I don’t look at them. I keep my eyes on the ground, hoping they’ll forget about me in my humiliation, and go back to terrorizing until I can gather my wits and run home. Or somewhere else. Their chuckling and moaning grows louder. They’re multiplying, coming in from the ocean and the swamps. I count to twenty to give my courage time to show up. Instead, a white doeskin gloved hand reaches down to help me to my feet.

  It’s Frank. I stand unaided.

  Now the Devil, if nothing else good about him exists, is a vision of beauty. His skin is as black as espresso (his favorite drink), with malachite green eyes, soft hands with long manicured pianist’s fingers, a wide pearly toothed smile. He’s almost too pretty and boyish. He sports a carefully trimmed and pointed goatee with flecks of steel gray. He keeps his cloven hooves well-trimmed and filed. Excessively proud of his obviously devilish features, his horns shine and a black silk b
ow adorns his tail. Pride is one of his favorite sins, vanity comes in a close second. I came to appreciate the care he took not to gouge my eyes when we kissed. The tail I never got used to, but I assumed there would have been something else unsettling, like poor table manners or a former lover’s name tattooed on his forearm that I could never abide if he were a man. When we were together, he kept his hair short and slicked back with a peculiar smelling pomade he claimed was just olive oil, vetiver, and sandalwood, but I also pick up undertones of lemongrass and rotten bananas.

  Today he wears a crimson suit, impeccably tailored, a crisp white shirt I suspect is woven lotus. He wears a black rose boutonniere with a spray of Baby’s Breath. If you stand close enough to the flowers, you can hear babies gasping for air, even over the blaring alarm. He’s barehooved. His hair is long and curly, and he wears it neatly tied in a ponytail of four well-oiled coils. I smell the pomade. He hasn’t changed much. His goatee is a bit grayer, which seems odd given that he’s the Devil, a fallen angel, immortal. I assume he’s trying a new look or making a statement. Frank runs a bare hand over the bruise.

  ‘You’re looking out of sorts, my lady,’ he says in a soft baritone.

  ‘I’ve been better,’ I reply. I look around. The plat-eyes now stare at us as the breathing folks of Charleston flood the streets. They head for the shelters designated for supernatural attacks: churches and gambling halls, so they can get right with God, or make deals with the Devil’s representatives. ‘What’s this all about, Frank?’

  Frank offers me his arm. ‘I’ve just missed you. Let’s walk.’

  I gesture angrily at the plat-eyes, who stand at attention behind us in endless rows that span to the harbor. Frank sighs. ‘Don’t worry, Ivy. Once we finish our business, depending on what you do, they’ll either eat Charleston or go back to Hell.’ He offers me his arm again. I walk without taking it.