The Tangled Bridge (53 page)

“Not long after I got stabbed my mother found me here,” Gaston said.

“Chloe.”

He nodded. “She ain't come to see me in person, no she didn't. Used her voodoo. I come to believe, the river magic only go so far here on earth. But down there, down in the briar patch, it really means something.”

“You saw her then?”

“No, ain't seen my mother in real life since 1927 or thereabouts. The thing that comes to see me is part witch, part devil, and something else.”

“The coldness.”

He nodded. “Seems like a terrible thing, but you can use that coldness to your advantage. Sometimes you got to do things you don't have the heart to do.”

“What happened when Chloe found you?”

“Well she put my sorry mess to work, that's all. My mother, as far back as I can recall, all she ever wanted was to get at them secrets. Pickin berries from the bramble, we used to call it. Trouble was, they's so many traps in there. It's a terrible place.”

She thought of the sylphs and the thornflies, the creature in that oily slick. The healing fissure had been an anomaly.

Gaston went on. “So my mother, she and I struck a deal. She'd leave my brother and sisters alone. All I had to do was anything she asked.”

Madeleine felt her throat going dry. She'd had her guesses but to hear Gaston say it, the full stark light of truth—it seemed unthinkable.

“So the life you knew essentially ended then, when you were stabbed?”

Gaston's voice grew very quiet. “In the old days they called them zombies. Always pictured some powder-faced ghoul. Something like what we pretended on the farm at All Hallows when we were children.”

He swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing in the predawn glow. “But that's what I am, a living voodoo zombie. Can't find my way to death. Just a slave. I use that cold wind whenever I need to blow any warmth from my soul, and then it's easier.”

“Why haven't you aged?”

“Same way you figured out the healing. Pickin berries from the briar. I kept it hidden for a long, long time. Thought sooner or later my mother would let me go, or she'd die. And then I'd pick up my life right where I left it. Same age and ever-thing. Ain't that foolish, now isn't it? Nothing's changed in over eighty years.

“She figured it out, though. Saw what I could do. Would've been right around the time you were a little girl. She made me use it on her. My mother, she's already good and old by then. In her eighties. So I stopped it. Stopped her ageing. She continued to keep her promise. Stayed away from my brother and sisters. Stayed away from their children.”

“But things have changed,” Madeleine said.

Gaston nodded. “I finally told her to go to hell. I'd long since given up picking up where I left off. I just wanted to lay down for my own eternal sleep. My brother and sisters are long gone to me now. She found Zenon and started using him instead. He's already trapped. So me, I just let her have him.”

“But then Zenon rebelled.”

“That's right. Which is why she turned up the heat on me again. Using you like bait just like she used my sisters and my brother all those years ago. She always wants at least one of us in her pot. Something's got to give. She'll either claim me back or take you or your little nephew baby boy. Me, I just can't be this anymore. I'd just as soon die.”

“Listen, you're not gonna die and she's not gonna take any of us back.”

Gaston's gaze had grown distant. “If I did, if I just curled up here in this ole tree, let myself go to hard dust like these old carvings, she'd just go after your little baby nephew. Or you. And she'd get one of you, yessir. Best you can do is say which one.”

“She's not getting Cooper. She caught me off guard this time, that's all. I can handle Chloe.”

He was just shaking his head. “We all thought that. What happens in that case, you don't cooperate to her satisfaction and then she goes after him, too. Both a y'all's lives get ruined.”

Madeleine closed her eyes, then opened them again. “We should rally together. Stop her once and for all.”

He gave a laugh through his teeth. “Like stoppin a river. What you need to know, honey, is if it comes to that, if there's a tough decision, you got to let the cool wind blow on ya some. It'll numb you up good. Things won't bother you.”

“Look, Chloe may not be surviving this at all. And she's got her hands full now with Zenon.”

Gaston nodded. “I never thought of trying to do what young Zenon's done. He's rallying them river devils—all of them, not just his own. Pretty much doing what my mother done. Only Zenon's workin from the inside. They listen to him, as much as they listened to my mother.”

Madeleine thought this over for a moment. “He spends all his time in the briar nowadays. I can imagine he's gotten to know it pretty well.”

Gaston snorted. “That boy still got a lot to learn if he think he know that world.”

He folded his arms and shifted position where he was leaning against the carvings. “After I got stabbed, after I wound up here, I got lost for a while. And I mean a long while. Years. Maybe even decades. Was in the briar. Armand led me into a place—very dark corner of the bramble. You can't see so well, not even with briar light. There's this … thing that lives in there. Sticky and weird-lookin, and he's covered in tar.”

“I've seen it.”

“You have? How in the Sam Hill did you get away?”

“Used another bramble berry, as you put it. I just escaped.”

He stared at her. “Well I wish I'd had that bramble berry. After my brother and sisters were safe, I let that tar devil grab me and drag me down to the bottom of the tar pit. Never been so terrified in all my life. Never known so much pain, neither, not even when I'd been stabbed. He got a hold of me, and I was gone, yessir.”

“Gone?”

“Lost in there. Oh, my mother still had her eye on me. Still got what she wanted out of me. That was the entire point. Don't think she realized she would have gotten a whole lot more without the damn tar devil. When I finally found my way outta the tar, I could walk along the thinnest branch like I was a lizard. Feet curled around it and whatnot. And a willow tree that I'd planted in a stump had already grown six foot tall.”

She looked out the opening toward the willow. Sixteen or twenty feet high now, at least.

He said, “Time been a confusing thing, though. Out here in the bayou one day runs into the next. And in the briar time don't make a straight line, it doesn't.”

“Or in the floating village? In Bayou Bouillon?”

He nodded. “Just when you goin in the back door to Bayou Bouillon, goin through this tree, that's where the whorl happens. Sometimes I go there and it's just an underwater ghost town. Big machinery ever-where for harvesting salt. Sometimes I go and the boardwalk ain't even half-built yet. It's from a time before I's born. But lots a times I go and I find my sister there. She's so dear to my heart, that Patrice.”

Madeleine sat up straighter. “Patrice. That's Jane.”

He nodded. “I ain't the only one who found my way back through the whorl. Far as I can tell, any of us briar folk can do it.”

Of all the strange things Gaston had explained, this was the hardest to grasp. “I don't understand. The floating village exists outside of time?”

“Honey, I don't understand it myself. All I know is, whenever I go back it's a different time. Mostly, I'll find it the way it was back then. Back when I knew it. Probably because that's when it was alive, if you can refer to a place as alive. I don't know if it's haunted or I am. But others have gone back, too. We get in and out through the whirlpool though it leads to different places depending on how we go through. It's the only way I've seen my sisters over the years. Anytime I get lonely…”

He stopped and licked his lips, his eyes wide and glazed. But he seemed to push away whatever emotion had swept over him and he gave Madeleine a smile.

“The most confusing thing is when you see yourself in there. A copy. Lord almighty. And I'll find my sister Patrice—first one I always look for—and in all honesty I can't talk to her. We made a deal, too. And that is, it's better we don't talk. Not to each other, not to anyone on another timeline. Change something in that place and it can change everything. Believe me. I've seen it. Entire lives cease to exist. Or babies're born that hadn't ought to be born. Sometimes I have to talk to my sister, like when you were dyin. I had to find her so she could help you. But for the most part we don't talk. It's enough just to be around her. Reminds me what I'm doing it all for.”

“Hence the necklaces.”

“Hence the necklaces. And it's the reason why we change our names. It ain't enough to know who you lookin at, it isn't. You want to know who and
when
you lookin at.”

He reached forward and pulled the click beetle carving from Madeleine's throat, snapping the leather strand. “You can't ever wear it again. You ever go back, you gotta wear something different.”

“May I at least keep it?”

He shrugged. “Just so long as you don't wear it. Though why you'd want to hang on to a thing like that I can't imagine.”

He made his
kee-hee-hee
laugh, and she smiled.

That's when they heard it.

Tick tick tick tock …

The bird call. Bo's bird call.

Madeleine scrambled to the opening of the tree and looked out. Gaston joined her. Dawn was just beginning to sweep over the
cyprière
and wisps were rising from the deepest stretch of water. There seemed to be a purple silhouette over by the shanty—so hard to trust her eyes in the darkness—but Madeleine could swear she saw a hulking shape beyond the web of fog. A boat, maybe. Maybe.

“Hello!” Madeleine called.

And all was silent. Even the birds were still.

“I don't see anything,” Gaston said next to her.

Madeleine tried again. “Ethan? Bo?”

This time, something was definitely moving out there. A muffled crash.

And then she heard his voice from across the water. Ethan's voice. “Madeleine!”

She drew in a sharp breath and bucked for the opening.

“Ethan!” she cried again.

And over the distance, Bo went
tick tick tick tick tick tock.

“Be careful!” Gaston said, grabbing her arm as she swung her leg over to the lower branch.

“Gaston! It's him! Come on, we gotta go!”

“You go on ahead, Honey.”

She paused, her heart hammering in her chest. “You're coming with me, aren't you?”

His expression was obscured in the shadows, and she couldn't define the emotion behind his tone. But he stayed there a long moment, his hand clutching her arm where he'd steadied her. There was a glint in his eyes. Just the faintest shine. Tears held in.

Finally, he said, “You sure about that boy of yours?”

“Completely.”

“The stain…”

“Gaston, please come with me. Things have changed. You don't need to go numb with that coldness, and you don't have to stay here. Not for Chloe or anyone else. You can start your life like you'd always hoped—maybe not picking up like a teenager, but you can have a new life.”

“Honey, nothing's changed. Nothing has changed.”

Ethan's voice calling again: “Madeleine! Where are you?”

A spotlight switched on from within the fog. It swept the shoreline and passed over near where they were.

Madeleine said, “Gaston, just try it. A few days or a week. You saved my life. I want you to come with me and meet my people.”

Gaston turned his back to her.

When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse. “No, dear. You go on now.”

“Gaston.”

Ethan called, “Madeleine!”

“I'm here!” she called back.

She could hear him talking to Bo. The spotlight shone again; this time it landed near where she was in the tree. She'd have to climb down for him to see her.

She stepped back through the tree opening. Gaston was sitting with his arms folded over himself and his neck bent. He said nothing, but she could hear him breathing in a ragged, hitching pattern.

She knelt down next to him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. He leaned into her. He seemed all at once that eternal boy who never grew up, and the wise great-uncle who'd witnessed nearly a century of life on this earth.

She kissed his tear-stained cheek. “Please, Gaston. I'm begging you.”

He took a deep breath, shuddering. And then another. The third breath went out clean.

He gave her a nudge and spoke in a clear, certain tone. “Come find me in the briar later. We'll talk. Now get on outta here before I go down into the drowning traps. Tide's out and it'll be hell on me.”

She squeezed his shoulder and turned away, heartsick, but she could no longer bridle her eagerness to get to Ethan.

She stepped through the opening again and worked her way down the tree.

“Madeleine, baby blue, I can't see anything!”

“I'm over here, Ethan!” she called. “I'm coming!”

But the light was already brighter. Colorless and soft. She was at the base of the tree and moving toward the water when she heard a splash.

She paused, eyes trained on the open water. “Jesus please us, he's hopped into the bayou.”

She went in, too, splashing steps and then a surge toward the sound of him. Ethan was a loud, lusty swimmer.

“Where are you?”

“I'm right here, baby.”

“I can see you!”

“I see you, too!”

They were surging toward each other with thrashing, fighting muscles, but their bodies moved in slow motion across the water. She wanted to run at him. To cry out.

She could see the boat now, too, a hulking craft that looked like the ghost of a pirate ship in the misting, gray-purple light.