Mind the Gap (33 page)

“Hattie,” Jazz whispered.

The girl took a step back, as though deciding whether or not to run away. Jazz slid off the wall and started toward her, leaving the others behind.

“Hattie!” she called.

Then Hattie was moving toward her as well. Laughing, they ran up to each other and embraced, spinning around.

“Jazz,” Hattie said. “Oh, Jazz, I missed you.”

They held each other at arm’s length then, and Jazz saw that Hattie’s nose had been broken and not healed properly and her smile was absent two teeth, all the remnants of the beating she had sustained that night in the tunnels.

“I love your hat,” Jazz said.

Hattie kissed her nose, then pulled her in for a tighter hug. “I heard whispers about this oracle in Regent’s Park. Got me thinking if the story was true, about this girl who could find anything in the city, maybe she could help me find you. I missed you so much.”

Playfully, Hattie pushed Jazz away. “But I never imagined she’d
be
you!”

Jazz faltered then, her smile fading. “I’m sorry, Hattie. I should’ve come to see you. But after what happened, I couldn’t go back down there. I don’t belong in the Underground anymore. No more hiding in the dark.”

Hattie nodded. “I know. That’s what Harry said. He told us you weren’t coming back. But I missed you.”

Jazz took the girl’s hands in hers. “I’ve missed you too.”

Harry had survived, though he was still recovering, broken bones healing. Jazz had sensed that, just as she had sensed that Leela and Marco were dead and that Bill had left the Palace, returning topside as Jazz had done.

“I’m sorry about the others, about Marco and Leela,” she said.

Hattie’s eyes glistened with tears, but she took a deep breath and nodded. “Me too. We gave ’em to the river, just like we did with Cadge. The coppers kept Stevie’s body, though. Never could find out what happened to it.”

Jazz knew. Stevie still had family, and they’d claimed his remains. Where he’d been buried, she couldn’t have said, for they lived beyond the outskirts of London and she did not feel anything out that far. Terence had gotten what he’d wished for; the city’s ghosts had been laid to rest. London could put the past behind it now and move into the future. Instead of crumbling into diminishing echoes of an ancient empire, it could embrace the new millennium and seek glories yet to come. But there had been a side effect that Terence had not foreseen. Perhaps even his father, who’d designed the apparatus, hadn’t fully understood his invention.

All the lingering bits of London’s magic were inside Jazz now; all its secrets had been fused with her. She knew the city in ways that nobody else ever could, every person, event, street, and shady corner. Every brick and garden. Jazz and London were irrevocably linked. With all of the wisdom of the city inside her, she would never be alone again, as long as she lived. And though it had occurred to her to wonder what would happen when she died, she’d decided that was beyond her control. Perhaps the city’s secrets would pass to someone else, and perhaps not. Somehow, she felt sure the wisdom and magic that the city had shed in order to survive—and which she had taken into herself—would endure long after she was gone.

“It’s all past now, Hattie,” Jazz said, smiling at her.

“I miss it, a little,” Hattie said.

The half dozen or so people who had gathered by the wall to see Jazz kept a respectful distance, though they watched her and Hattie with fascination. The girl fidgeted a bit, not liking the attention.

“You ever comin’ back down to see us?” Hattie asked.

Jazz tightened her grip on the girl’s hands. “I don’t think so. I’m glad Harry’s alive, but I don’t really want to see him, Hattie. Neither him nor Terence. I’ve changed—”

“I’ll say you have,” Hattie said, nodding toward the gathering.

Jazz laughed softly, a bit self-conscious.

“But I can still come to see
you
?” Hattie asked. “We can still be friends?”

Jazz smiled. “You can always come to see me. I can show you all my favorite parts of London. If you’d like that.”

“I’d like it very much,” Hattie said.

Together they walked back toward the wall, past the people who had come to the oracle to find the things they had lost or simply to find answers in a city full of questions.

In that, Jazz thought, they were really no different from anyone else.

about the authors

CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN’S novels include
The Lost Ones, The Myth Hunters, Wildwood Road, The Boys Are Back in Town, The Ferryman, Strangewood, Of Saints and Shadows,
and
The Borderkind.
Golden co-wrote the lavishly illustrated novel
Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire
with Mike Mignola, and they are currently scripting it as a feature film for New Regency. He has also written books for teens and young adults, including the thriller series
Body of Evidence,
honored by the New York Public Library and chosen as one of YALSA’s Best Books for Young Readers. Upcoming teen novels include
Poison Ink
for Delacorte,
Soulless
for MTV Books, and
The Secret Journeys of Jack London,
a collaboration with Tim Lebbon.

With Thomas E. Sniegoski, he is the co-author of the dark fantasy series
The Menagerie
as well as the young readers fantasy series
OutCast
and the comic book miniseries
Talent,
both of which were recently acquired by Universal Pictures. Golden and Sniegoski also wrote the upcoming comic book miniseries
The Sisterhood,
currently in development as a feature film. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. At present he is collaborating with Tim Lebbon on
The Map of Moments,
the second novel of
The Hidden Cities
. Please visit him at
www.christophergolden.com
.

TIM LEBBON lives in South Wales with his wife and two children. His books include the British Fantasy Award–winning
Dusk
and its sequel
Dawn, Fallen, Berserk, The Everlasting, Hellboy: Unnatural Selection,
and the
New York Times
bestseller
30 Days of Night
. Forthcoming books include the new fantasy novel
The Island, The Map of Moments
(with Christopher Golden), two YA novels making up
The Secret Journeys of Jack London
(in collaboration with Christopher Golden), the collection
Last Exit for the Lost
from Cemetery Dance Publications, and further books with Night Shade Books, Necessary Evil Press, and Humdrumming, among others. He has won three British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, a Shocker, and a Tombstone Award, and has been a finalist for International Horror Guild and World Fantasy awards. His novella
White
is soon to be a major Hollywood movie, and several other novels and novellas are currently in development in the USA and the UK. Find out more about Tim at his websites:
www.timlebbon.net
and
www.noreela.com
.

If you loved
Mind the Gap
, then you are in for a treat!

Because now Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon take us across an ocean, and to another hidden city: the storm-torn wreckage of New Orleans. There, in the months following Katrina, one man finds himself on a most unusual quest to save the life of the woman he loves.

So be sure not to miss:

THE MAP
OF
MOMENTS

A Novel of The Hidden Cities

by

Christopher Golden & Tim Lebbon

On sale spring 2009 from Bantam Books

Here is a special preview:

The Map of Moments
on sale spring 2009

In Max’s dream, Gabrielle still loves him. And she is still alive.

They’re in the attic of the wood-frame house on Landry Street, making love. Golden light streams in and makes her cinnamon Creole skin glisten, and Max’s heart catches in his throat as he moves inside her. She’s the kind of beautiful that clouds the minds of men, that makes even the most envious woman marvel. Yet she has a wild need in her eyes, as though a fire burns inside her and she believes he might be able to give her peace.

“Don’t ever stop,” she says, gazing up at him with copper eyes.

Stop what? Making love to her? Loving her? He’s known her only a handful of weeks, been intimate with her only this once, and already he realizes that he will never be able to stop. The spell she has cast over him is irrevocable.

Gabrielle shudders with pleasure, her breath hitching. She wears a tight tank top with lace straps, her socks, and nothing else. But the light shouldn’t be like this. It should be night, with the sounds of car engines and pounding music from the street below. Instead, there is no sound at all, save for her breathing. It’s like listening to a dead phone line—not just an absence of sound, but a vacuum.

Her fingers twine in his hair and she pulls him down. He loses himself in the hunger of her kiss, but the wrongness still troubles him. The attic is too clean, and somehow he notices this.

Floorboards creak and the attic is different now, impossibly huge. Posters hang on the walls—things he’d had in his office at Tulane University—and in the shadows of the eaves, figures loom. He knows these faces, the silent observers who watch him and Gabrielle. He recognizes some of his colleagues and students, Gabrielle’s grandmother and her cousin Michelle. And also two men from Roland’s Garage, the bar on Proyas Street where she’d taken him once; he’d been the only white face in the place. They watch him, now, but he feels no menace. Only sadness, as if they’ve come for a wake.

One figure remains in shadow. Max cannot see his face, which is all right, because he doesn’t want to. The shadow scares him.

He focuses on Gabrielle. Only on Gabrielle, shutting them all out. He wants to bring her joy, and he touches her face.

Only then does he feel the water beneath him.

Frantic, he glances around, and sees water flowing up through the spaces between the floorboards. He tries to ask where it’s all coming from, but when he opens his mouth, water spills in. Panic surges through him. He cannot breathe. The water fills the attic. The roof tumbles away, and Gabrielle slips into black waters and is gone.

And he wakes…

Max had a moment of dislocation, and then the hum of the passenger jet’s engines filled his ears, and he remembered.

“Jesus,” he whispered, forcing his eyes closed for another moment before opening them, surrendering to consciousness.

The obese woman in the seat beside him shifted, absorbing even more of the space he’d paid to occupy. It seemed she’d gotten larger since the plane departed Boston, but of course that had to be impossible.

Don’t be a prick
, he chided himself. Such thoughts were out of character for him on most days, but most days he wasn’t traveling to the funeral of the person responsible for both the greatest joy and the greatest pain he’d ever known.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be landing shortly. At this time, please turn off all electronic devices and return your tray tables and seatbacks to their upright position.”

Somehow Max managed to get his seat upright. He rested his head against the window frame and stared down at civilization below.

Did I ever really know you?
he thought. And though the question was meant for Gabrielle, it could easily have applied to the city of New Orleans as well. He’d barely scratched the surface during the semester he’d taught at Tulane, figuring he’d have years to explore the mystery of what had once been called the Big Easy. It had been a city of music and exoticism, a place of both excess and torpor. But Gabrielle had hurt him so badly that he’d fled home to Boston, taking a new position at Tufts University.

Still, she wasn’t entirely to blame. Yes, she’d told him that she loved him, and pulled him into her life and her bed with a fervent passion he had never before encountered. But Max was thirty-one years old when he met Gabrielle, and she only nineteen. He’d been her professor. He’d known the rules, and broken them with abandon.

No one had blamed him. Not after they’d met her. Even Anne Rutherford, his sixty-year-old department head, had understood—and that spoke of the power Gabrielle had. She left the world breathless.

Yet despite the way everyone who discovered the relationship seemed willing to give him a pass, Max blamed himself. He’d looked into those bright copper eyes and
seen
the love she felt for him, believed it wholeheartedly. When Gabrielle had told him that she’d dreamed of finding a man who would leave
her
breathless, and that she’d found him in Max, he’d believed her. When they’d made love that first time, in the attic on Landry Street, she’d wept and clung to him afterward, and wished them away to some place where no one else could ever reach them. And he had felt like the man all men wanted to be—the hero, the knight, the lover and champion.

Yet the one thing that he’d learned in his time in Louisiana was that New Orleans was a city of masks. Everyone wore one, and not just for Mardi Gras. Only the desperately poor were what they seemed to be. Otherwise, how else to explain the way the populace had so long ignored warnings of their beloved city’s vulnerability, or the libertine air of sexual and epicurean excess and jazz improvisation that fueled the tourist trade, while sixty percent of the city remained illiterate, and thousands lived in shotgun houses slapped together like papier-mâché? New Orleans had two faces—one of them a stew of cultures and languages, of poverty and success, of corruption and hope, all conspiring to forge a future; and the other, the mask it showed the world.

How could he have been fool enough not to see that Gabrielle also wore a mask?

Max had asked himself that question far too many times during his move back to Boston. He ought to have been settling in, enjoying the preparations for his new job and trying to get on with things. But he’d been too lost in that question to pay attention, wondering how he had fallen in love so fast, and so hard. Wondering how long it would be before it stopped hurting.

And then August had come, and with it, hurricane season.

Watching the television reports as Katrina moved into the Gulf of Mexico, he’d wondered why no one seemed terrified. Couldn’t they see the monster about to make landfall? But even as those questions rose in his mind, he understood. Some of the people in New Orleans would put their faith in God, others in luck, and others would simply chalk it up to fate. If the storm was meant to take them, it would. And some would just be stubborn; until someone called for a mandatory evacuation, they weren’t going anywhere, and maybe not even then. Someone would have to go and round them up, get them out of there.

For too many, no one ever came.

Far, far away, Max had sat in his little faculty apartment on the Tufts campus and watched the suffering and the dying begin, and the anguish of the aftermath.

He had little faith in the spiritual, but Max had felt a soul-deep certainty, in those initial few days, that Gabrielle had not survived Hurricane Katrina. Days turned to weeks, numbness turned to shock, and shock to mourning. Chaos had still not released its hold on the Gulf Coast, and it seemed order might never be restored.

On the 18th of October, just over seven weeks after the storm, Max’s phone rang. Without even realizing it, he had gotten into the habit of holding his breath when he glanced at the caller ID window. That night, the readout had said
unknown caller
, but what struck him was the area code. 504. Louisiana.

Max had picked up the phone. He’d hated himself for the hope in his voice when he said “Hello?”

“It’s Michelle Doucette.”

And he’d known. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

For a moment, the line went silent. Then, just as he’d begun to think they’d been disconnected, Michelle spoke again.

“I told her to get out of there, but she wouldn’t go. Said she couldn’t leave, that it was the only place she’d be safe. They were saying all the neighborhoods in the bowl would be flooded, but she just went up into that damn attic and wouldn’t come down. I told her she was crazy, Max, but you know Gaby. No talking to that girl.”

Michelle’s voice had broken then.

Max had listened to Michelle as she went on about evacuating to Houston, and how she’d called and tried to get the police or someone,
anyone
, to go by and check the house on Landry Street. Most of her family had left New Orleans, and of those who planned to return, none of them wanted anything to do with Gabrielle, dead or alive. Except for Michelle, Gabrielle’s family had written her off years before.

In late September, Michelle had reluctantly returned to New Orleans. She’d gone straight to that deserted house in Lakeview and found it uninhabitable—crumbling and contaminated. And in the attic, she’d found Gabrielle.

At last, when Max had heard enough, he’d finally spoken up.

“Why did you call me?”

It had brought her up short. “What?”

“After what happened. Why would you call me?”

Her nerves had to be frayed. She’d laughed, and the sound was full of hurt and anger. “Jesus, Max. I called you because I thought you’d want to know. Maybe she fucked with your head, but I figured you were the only one…”

Her words trailed off.

“The only one what?” Max had to ask.

“The only person in the world besides me who would cry for her.”

Max had wanted to tell Michelle that he’d done his share of crying for Gabrielle when the girl was alive. That it hadn’t helped then, and it wouldn’t help now. But he couldn’t get the words out.

Nearly three more weeks had passed, and now he found himself on this airplane, about to touch down. During the layover in Memphis, he’d nearly turned around, gotten on the next plane back north. Or he’d pretended to himself that he could. What a joke. He could no more turn around than he could snap his fingers and make the grief go away. Leaving the way he had, this chapter of his life had never reached completion.

Perhaps Gabrielle’s funeral might finally put an end to it.

He’d grieve, but he would not cry. Perhaps it was a good sign that he couldn’t shed any more tears for her. Or maybe it meant that he was dead inside.

The next morning, Michelle picked him up and they drove out of the Quarter, following Esplanade up through New Marigny. Their route took them mainly through areas that had remained above the floodwaters, and thus far he’d not encountered the level of devastation he’d seen in photographs and on television. He wondered if Michelle had been purposely sparing him that, or if she’d rather just avoid it herself.

When they reached Holt Cemetery, however, there was no way to avoid the reality of what had transpired in the city. Max had driven past it before, had seen the rows of tilted crosses and slate-thin headstones, but he’d never been inside the gates. In most of the Catholic world, All Saints’ Day just meant another trip to church. But in New Orleans, every first of November brought massive gatherings to the city’s cemeteries. People went there to leave flowers and notes and photographs, or just to remember.

As Michelle drove slowly along the narrow cemetery road, Max shuddered to think what All Saints’ Day had been like this year. Markers were scattered like broken teeth, many undoubtedly far away from the graves they were intended for, lying on brown, lifeless grass.

At the gravesite, Max fixed his tie and adjusted the cuffs of his jacket. Even in November, he felt too warm in the charcoal suit he only ever wore at weddings and funerals. Perhaps the New Orleans weather was to blame—humid and warm today—or perhaps he just felt out of place here. The jilted ex, much too old for the dead girl to begin with.

No longer able to fight its pull, he at last focused on the coffin that sat on the ground beside the open grave. It was a shabby metal box, but he suspected it was better than a lot of those interred at Holt would have. He stared at it, trying to imagine that Gabrielle lay inside, and could not.

His throat closed up, emotion flooding him. How could anyone not have loved her? How could he ever stop?

“Are you all right?” Michelle asked, appearing beside him.

Max flinched, then slowly nodded. “I will be.”

“You don’t look it.”

He smiled, keeping his voice to a whisper. His words weren’t meant for other ears. “I thought I was a fool, coming down here. What kind of guy travels this far for a girl who slept with someone else, you know? But I’m glad I came.”

Michelle touched his arm gently. “She was hard to understand.”

That was the understatement of the year. Max glanced at the other mourners. “I thought you said it’d be just us.”

“It is. Father Legohn’s congregation is mostly gone. The one with the nice shoes is the undertaker. The others are what’s left of the church, just here to help carry her, say a prayer, and put her in the ground.”

The truth of this hit Max hard. Despite the warning Michelle had given him, the idea that there was nobody left in New Orleans who cared enough to say good-bye to Gabrielle was bitter and ugly.

Except there was one other person, Max noticed now. A little white two-door coupe that looked forty years old had pulled up on the cemetery road. The man who stood by the car must have been thirty years older, with hair as white as his car and skin darker than his funeral suit.

When the funeral ended, the white-haired old man approached the graveside.

“You’re Max Corbett,” he said. His skin was so dark his hair looked like snow on top of tar. Of all the things Max might have expected to come out of his mouth, this wasn’t it.