The Edge

ABOUT US
Who Are We?
About TEoP

STORY UNIVERSES
Rick Silva's Four Visitors 
Ivan Ewert's Solstice
Nick Bergeron's Mnemosyne 
Seanan McGuire's Sparrow Hill Road

Guest Quarters
Postcards

CONTACT US
Call for Submissions
Notification List
LiveJournal/Feedback
Contact

NOTE: These stories are
intended for a mature audience.

The Letter
A Guest Quarters story
By
Michael Jarrette-Kenny

To whom it may concern;

I have posted this to you in the firm knowledge that it will, in all probability, remain unread. My reasons for this belief are complex, but not as incomprehensible as they may seem at first. I will leave my explanations to the end, in the interests of clarity. You may ask yourself, quite rightly, what the point is of writing a letter that will never reach the addressee? I can only say that I write this not so much to provide you with a warning?such letters usually fail in this regard, only adding a little note of irony to the tragic inevitability of fate?as to satisfy some need in myself, some futile impulse to order the nonsensical events of my life.

Let me preface this by saying that I hate Bourbon Street. Not in the sentimental way that you hate something you might have once loved. My dislike of it is specific and does not extend beyond its boundaries, its frat brother camaraderie, its gaudy lights and peep shows. I'm not being puritanical by any means. There is a scent of damnation that clings to the skin of New Orleans and it is this oily residue of sin that attracts me most of all. Bourbon Street somehow upsets the delicate balance of colonial decadence and African voodoo. It is the cheap plastic Virgin Mary overlooking a black mass. The Disneyland at the gates of hell.

But it is Bourbon Street, more specifically Ye Old Absinthe house where you'll see her, if you look carefully. Seated as I was (and as I am now), next to the remains of the old fountain, the worn surface of the bar eroded into a crater by generations of spilled Worm wood liquor, her outline was invisible. Two feet more to the left. There that's much better. But I can't show you yet. Later on perhaps.

I had found my way there after a night of carousing with a few locals, among them a top hat-wearing tour guide who promised an unofficial tour later on that evening?though it seemed more likely that I would end up bleeding in an alleyway with an empty wallet. The other one was a displaced bartender from Brooklyn, who ran a clandestine drug store out of the back room of his establishment. It was his bar that was among my usual haunts, though sadly, the owner had lost his liquor license several days earlier after failing to bribe the proper authorities.

"You're a cancer...?"

I turned to my left but there was no one there. She had faked me out and was sitting on the other side of me.

"I've been called lot's of names but..."

She smiled at that. She had perfect white teeth, escaping between blood red lips. Her incisors had been filed to points, an affectation common enough among the goths that had been overflowing the quarter for decades, mostly college kids. There was nothing else common about her.

Her name was Lena and she had come to New Orleans because of a fire. "The 1895 fire to be exact," She said, resting her arm on my shoulder as if we were old friends.

"Astrology and fire. A unique combination." I replied.

"I don't really believe in astrology. Fire on the other hand..."

When she said the word 'fire' her eyes seemed to catch a spark off a flaring cigarette lighter, a preternatural incandescence.

"Fire is another matter entirely."

She was dressed as the quintessential boy toy. Torn fish nets and a leather bustier, short chestnut brown hair with a splash of blond. Perfectly proportioned but on a large scale, 5'10" or 11" I would guess. Too good looking to be a working girl. Even the strippers here looked as if they had been chewed up and spat out.

"What would you say if I told you I had been waiting for you?"

I didn't reply. The way she said it, that wide eyed innocent expression that didn't match the rest of her, the dull throb of the music and the liquor, all combined into that queer sort of epiphany that most people mistake for d? vu. We talked for a few minutes and she excused herself, starting unsteadily toward the lady?s room?though as far as I could tell, she had not been drinking. A weather beaten old shade who had stumbled in only a few moments earlier (I had met him my first day in town and he always appeared at the same hour each night) seated himself in her recently vacated seat. I knew that the look of expectation with which he followed the bartender would not leave his face, though he was destined not to be served, or even for that matter acknowledged.

"I would buy you a drink..." I started. He turned slightly in my direction never taking his eyes off the bottles.

"I know.... If you could drink one for me anyway?"

I ordered a scotch and water, sipping it slowly, the look of rapture transfiguring the old man's face making me feel vaguely uncomfortable.

"What can you tell me about the girl...?" I said.

He chuckled to himself.

"What's to tell? Her type's always around in one form or another."

"Her type?"

"Only started seeing her a couple weeks ago...around the time you started showin' up. She and a couple of male friends of hers; rolled a few drunks." He sighed as I finished my scotch, rising up from his seat, replacing his shapeless cap onto his balding pate.

Lena appeared out of the bathroom, saddling up to the bar with renewed vigor, as the old man tipped his hat, sauntering out into the mist shrouded night.

"Who was that?" She asked, slitting her eyes as if reappraising me.

For a moment I was unsure who she was talking about.

"What do you mean?"

"The old timer..."

She had seen him. I tried to contain my surprise, somehow managing to change the subject. She confirmed what the old man had told me, though of course deleting any objectionable activities she was involved in. She had only been in New Orleans for a few weeks and was staying in a youth hostel in the garden district. She suggested we go to my hotel room.

"But you barely know me." I said, laughing.

"I know you better than you think." She replied cryptically. I paid my tab, suggesting we adjourn to a quieter place up the street. As we started up the street I saw them, my bartender friend and the guide. Before they could see us I turned around ducking quickly into the hotel lobby, leaving a message with the desk clerk that I was not to be disturbed.

"Friends of yours?" She said as I fumbled with my room key.

"Sort of...No one I want to speak right now."

I turned on the hall light, bowing melodramatically as she entered.

"Are you rich or something?"

She strolled into each room in turn, running her hands along the imitation Louis XIV furniture, ducking out onto the balcony that overlooked Bourbon. I noticed the almost imperceptible gesture with which she signaled to the men who undoubtedly waited for her below. It occurred to me that I was being more reckless than usual in my pursuit of this girl. Yet, there was something more to it than the typical thrill of imminent disaster. The grim fascination she exercised over me was something quite different. Beneath the transparency of her motives rang a familiar harmony, one that promised a resolution to the discord that had brought me here.

"Well?" She glared at me like an impudent child.

"No I am not rich."

"Well if you?re not rich," she flashed me a mischievous smile, "what is it that you do?"

I shrugged not knowing what to say in those awkward moments. I couldn't really say I did much of anything, but that wouldn't satisfy her inquisitiveness.

"Not much of anything really."

"It must be nice. I mean not to have to do anything you don't want to," she said. An unreadable expression surfaced in her face, dissolving instantly into the party girl fa?e. We opened the bottle of complementary champagne, a frothy mess of foam spurting onto her chest as the cork popped.

"Shit." She looked up at me helplessly. "Would you be a doll?" She sent me into the bathroom to fetch her a towel while she poured the champagne, an excellent opportunity to slip me something. When I returned she was wearing one of my dress shirts. She handed me the flute of champagne.

"What shall we toast to?" I said, noting the faint ridge of brown pubic hair bordering the terminal edge of my dress shirt.

"To us of course."

I silently searched for some diversion when the door rang, right on cue.

"I thought you told them...?"

I feigned annoyance, excusing myself. She closed the partition as I answered the door; a confused servant glared at me from behind a cart of food.

"Room service."

"I'm afraid you have the wrong room." I said to him pouring the champagne into an empty crystal decanter on his cart, closing the door on his stunned face.

I returned to the bedroom, finding her reclining on the unmade bed.

"You drank your champagne without me." She pouted reaching over and refilling my glass.

I didn't answer. Instead I slipped my hand between the buttons of her shirt, her hand guiding mine between her legs.

***

She woke and dressed herself at a quarter to six. She hovered over me for several minutes, making sure that I was asleep and would not wake up at some inopportune moment in the near future. She fumbled around in the darkness of the room for several minutes, presumably in search of my wallet, not daring to turn on the light. Having discovered the object of her search, I watched her through half lidded eyes as she fumbled with the lock, emitting whispered curses until the satisfying click of the mechanism signaled her success. Lingering at the threshold of the door, she turned back again toward the bed, and though she thought me asleep, blew a kiss in my direction.

All told, she managed to extract fifteen hundred dollars from me, a small price to pay for admission into her inner sanctum. I waited fifteen minutes before following her out into the warm night, managing somehow to work my way through an impromptu parade of drunks that had coalesced in my path.

[A minor side note for the edification of the uninitiated. The dead are everywhere. They sit at your table, in the unoccupied chair that the waiter forgot to take away. They stand over your beds while you make love, matching their phantom caresses to your own. They hide your car keys in the toaster oven, and erase the hard drive of your computer. They snicker when you burn the pot roast, when your wife leaves you, when the bank forecloses on your house. They whisper in the ears of their favorites, (mostly the insane, and the derelict; those who have no preconceptions that would keep them from hearing), and love to cloud your telephone conversations with static and the hopeless chatter of their whispers. Most of all, they like to watch, they are the supreme voyeurs.

If someone or something interesting catches their eye, they will tune in regularly and bring their friends, especially when it involves acts of violence(it is not uncommon to find yourself in a crowded barroom after a fight, only to discover later that the room was for all intents and purposes empty). It is this tendency toward voyeurism that makes them so valuable. Information that no one in their right mind would disclose due to normal human self interest, (The location of vast sums of money, the identity of a criminal etc.) the dead will volunteer to a complete stranger. What's more, they pay attention, especially to the minutiae that the living have no patience for. Such are the habits of eternity.]

I had no trouble finding her apartment. A little mulatto girl playing on the trolley tracks, beneath the jaundiced light of a street lamp, led me right to her. She did not speak, answering all of my queries with nods or whimpers, her form riddled with wounds that I at first took for stigmata. As I took my leave of her I realized that she had no tongue.

Another, a matronly superintendent who kept complaining of a tenant that was surely long dead showed me the path to her door and even told me the location of her spare key. I stood at her door for several minutes, trying to decide what my next step should be. Most likely, she would not be very happy to see me at first. But if I had read her correctly, she was far from an experienced thief.

I snatched up the key from beneath the mat, taking a table at an eatery across the street. An hour later, just as I finished my third cup of coffee, I saw her leave the apartment. I paid the bill quickly crossing the street and letting myself into her apartment.

It was a squalid one bedroom, furnished with Salvation Army throwaways. With the exception of a few books and some hastily deposited underwear discarded in the corner of the bedroom, there were no personal effects, confirming her tale from the bar. She had not been here long. I picked up one of her books (an abused copy of Morte d' Arthur), pulling back my hand as a gigantic crawling thing, what the natives refer to as palmetto bugs but which everyone else call cockroaches, sputtered over my outstretched hand.

I slammed the book down on it repeatedly, opening another to distract my mind from the other living things that I might discover. It was a photography book. The page I had opened to displayed daguerreotypes of various antebellum mansions in the quarter, several of them, including to my surprise, the hotel in which I had been staying, having been destroyed in the 1895 fire she had professed so much interest in the night before.

I heard the door open and I closed the book, watching her unload a pile of groceries on the kitchen floor. She turned and froze as her eyes fell on me. "Let me explain..."

I shook my head. "You don't have to explain...a young girl, on her own in an unfamiliar city...you have to do what you can to get by."

"You didn't call the cops on me...?"

"The money doesn't matter....it's you I'm interested in. I have a proposition for you. Stay with me...at my hotel."

"Look, I don't know what impression you might have about last night...but, I did what I did of my own free will. I'm not a whore."

"I'm not trying to buy your favors." I pulled her into an embrace, planting a kiss on her cheek, working my way towards her mouth. We kissed hungrily as I lifted her up, depositing her on the counter top as she pulled her shirt over her head.

***

We moved her few possessions over to the hotel that morning and spent the rest of the day in bed. Over the next week we established a routine of sorts. As was my habit, during the day I roved the cemeteries, of which New Orleans provided several famous examples, far removed from the colorless uniformity that characterized the typical necropolis to the north. She preferred to spend the morning in bed. After two o'clock I would retrieve her from the hotel, not returning until the first rays of dawn.

Despite her influence (or because of it), I had not written a single line since my arrival. In the summer time heat I would lie in the St. Louis cemetery against the worn out stones of the mausoleums, begging the dead for inspiration. They did the best they could, given the circumstances. The resulting poems were inspired if somewhat patchwork in terms of style and tone, after all these were not the shades of great poets but of politicians and prostitutes, Voodoo queens and Used car salesmen.

Most could not remember much of their lives, recalling only scraps of verse that they had sung as children, old ballads they had heard in the distance while stumbling home drunk , haloed by the unforgiving morning sun. An English teacher, a ruthless disciplinarian in life, whispered lines from Shakespeare's sonnets, the Aeniad and with particular pride the Divine Comedy, in the original Florentine dialect, his voice hovering in the stagnant heat; the sound of air escaping from a punctured tire. One particular line caught my attention and I asked him to translate it. The shade flashed me a rather condescending smile and spoke,

"O living being gracious and divine who through darkened air have come to visit our souls that stained the world with blood, if he who rules the universe were friend to us then we should pray to him to give you peace, for you have pitied our atrocious state."

I grew weary of his pedantic tone and retired to the grave of a famous Madame, Mm. Louise DelPrete. Even in death, she exuded a warmth and exuberance conspicuously absent from her neighbors, as if she had died yesterday and not a century earlier.

"I know you," she whispered to me, her arms crossed below her tremendous breasts.

"I think you were before my time." I answered.

She raised a suspicious eyebrow and laughed. "Don't worry honey...I won't tell the little woman."

She asked me what I was scribbling. When I told her she started laughing uncontrollably.

"Write all the pretty words you want sir; but the way to a woman's heart is your wallet..." She paused, her eyes narrowing to slits... "Or between her legs." She added, subsiding back into the air.

***

At twilight I returned to the Hotel Saint Germain, crumpling up the results of my labors and hiding them in my back pocket.

"You?re early." She said. She was still in bed, an empty bottle of champagne leaning drunkenly, beside her on the night table. She stared at me through cloudy, sleep dimmed eyes, a blanket draped over her drooping shoulders. Stretching lazily, her hand lost its grip, allowing the blanket to fall soundlessly to the floor. She had a dancer?s legs, lithe and muscular, rising into well rounded, perfectly symmetrical buttocks. She cupped her breasts self consciously, as if trying to decide if one weighed more than the other. As she turned her back to me, her gaze preoccupied with her reflection in the bedroom mirror, I snuck up behind, placing my hands on her hips.

"Do you believe in predestination?" She asked looking back over her shoulder.

"As in...?"

"That we have free will."

"I think that is quite different..."I leaned over kissing her ear lobe.

"In what way?"

I couldn't tell if she was being serious or not. "Predestination refers to salvation...that some are predestined to be saved ...and others to be damned." I said letting my hands replace hers, my index finger trailing along the edge of her neck.

She turned into my embrace, staring up at me with large, humid eyes. "It is best when things are new..." She planted a gentle kiss on my unshaven neck. "The perfect love would be an eternal repetition, in which each lover would meet at the end as if for the first."

"They call it a one night stand," I said.

"That is sex, not love."

We spent the next hour and a half demonstrating to each other the nuances of our respective arguments. Afterwards as I began to dress a sudden change came over her.

"Where are you going?" She asked with a trace of fear in her voice.

I sighed pulling on my pants. "I have certain things that have to be taken care of."

She sat straight up in bed, a look of panic briefly surfacing, before she could conceal it. "Don't go." She said simply.

"What's wrong?" I bent down next to her holding her hand. For a moment it seemed strange that there should have ever been a time in which I had not known her.

"I have a very bad feeling...please. I know I'm being childish."

"Any other time I would indulge you but..." I didn't want to go into an elaborate explanation, fearing she would not understand. I had checked my bank account earlier in the day. Now was the time to begin replenishing the empty coffers.

"I will only be gone for a little while." I said kissing her on the forehead. She said nothing as I cautioned her to double bolt the door.

They were waiting for me outside. Before I could slip away they turned in my direction.

"I thought it might be a good time for that tour I promised you." The guide was drunk, as were several of his companions, a seedy looking kid of about nineteen with yellowed rotting teeth, whom he introduced as his prot?, and the kid's girlfriend, a painfully thin teenager with dyed black hair and an eyebrow piercing.

"Thank you but..." I started to say, and then changed my mind, thinking that perhaps I could benefit from the man's tour.

"We can start with your hotel," he said readjusting his hat so that it was now more lopsided then it had been before. He had us all cross the street so that it would be fully visible.

"Really, It's supposed to be haunted," I said innocently, knowing full well that not a single shade walked its corridors.

"It is a story as old as time itself...a tale of forbidden love and revenge."

His face underwent some sort of transformation, the black stage paint smeared around his bloodshot eyes lending his features a sort of mock intensity.

"Tell me." I feigned interest, watching the light go out in my room.

"It began with a woman...her real identity has been lost over the course of time but in the various tales that have come down to us her name has been recorded as Francesca. She was a music hall entertainer known for her beauty and the arresting quality of her voice; a voice that worked it's magic like a siren's song on the men of New Orleans, such that all who had the privilege of seeing her walked the streets in a daze for weeks afterward. She was married to a famous politician?a violent and jealous man who did not take kindly to his wife's theatrical life style. In 1894 she met a young writer; a minor poet whose name has been lost to the dusty corridors of history.

"They met in the hotel De Caina, as it was called in those days, carrying on their courtship in secret for fear that the husband would destroy them both. One day after they had made love beneath the stars the poet recorded his despair in a letter; a letter filled with such romantic sentiment that she dared to bring it with her when she knew in her heart it must be destroyed."

"What happened?" His cronies asked right on cue before their expressions returned to their former state of disinterest.

"What happened well...there are differences of opinion. In one case the husband found the letter, following her to her liaison with the young poet. Not knowing who the author was, he was obliged to wait before taking his revenge. Some say he caught them both and killed them as they lay in bed. Others that he could not wait and killed her without ever discovering the identity of her lover. The official story was that she burned to death waiting for him to arrive and that the young poet in a fit of despair, took his own life rather than live without her. In any case, the hotel was destroyed in the fire of 1895. It is only after it was rebuilt, over the course of the next decade that reports of supernatural activities began to surface. They say that she waits for her lover still...that once a year she returns and waits for her poet to arrive. Though he never comes."

The guide talked in this manner much of the night. I could tell the first story that he told had been improvised as the ones that followed were much more polished, memorized to the point where he had his pauses timed for maximum dramatic effect. Towards the end of each he would pace back and forth, gesticulating wildly. None of the dead appeared to corroborate his stories, save for an evil looking Creole woman whom I took to be Delphine Lalaurie, a monster who would have made Jeffrey Dahmer blush.

So far New Orleans, despite the variety of her dead, had offered me none of her hidden riches.

After each monologue we found our way to a different bar, picking up a new companion as we became progressively more drunk. Only when we reached the Saint Louis Cathedral as my companions and I began to howl the Kyrie Elieson at the top of our voices did I realize that I was alone. Even the guide, whose solidity I had never questioned, steadily subsided into the phantom like mist. I turned and started down an alleyway, stumbling past a mumbling shade in ecclesiastical garb working my way back towards the hotel.

When I arrived I knew that something was wrong. They cluttered the lobby and hallways, so much so that I could not tell the dead from the actual guests. When I entered the room I knew that I had been too late. The vestibule was engulfed in flame. I shielded my face with my arm, stumbling blindly forward, telling myself that it was not real though it felt real enough.

"Lena..."

I made out the bed through my tearing eyes, but I could not move myself forward, knowing what I would find.

She was in bed, her body positioned in such a way as to give the appearance of life, a doll like form meant to deceive the eye, but only at a distance. I held her for what seemed an eternity, as the flames consumed the contents of the room. At some point the heat became so intense that I stumbled out onto the balcony. Through the veil of my tears I imagined that I heard them applauding.

It is there, on the balcony that I awoke, the following morning, to the maid knocking at my door. Needless to say, she was not there, nor were there any traces of her presence. Hours later as I sat in the bar in which we had met, only then when I saw it, did I piece the whole thing together.

Directly across from the center of the bar it is posted, beside innumerable photos depicting the history of this place which I will never leave. She stares back at me from an old autographed publicity photo. The writing across the bottom is no longer legible.

The dead are as different in death as they were in life. Some are compelled to finish what they were unable to in their lifetime, others wander aimlessly in search of something that once was and will never be again. Suicides are always the same. They live out the circumstances of their death over and over again. Most are not even aware that they are dead.

I will leave this at my hotel with instructions that it be left among my messages. If my memory serves the desk clerk will hand it to me as I check my bags, on the day of my arrival. Its presence will be so disconcerting to me (after all, no one should know that I am in New Orleans, let alone the hotel where I am staying) that I will destroy it unread.

Beyond that I cannot speculate as to my immediate future, though the loaded .38 in my pocket gives me some indications. If I must die to touch her again then I will do what is necessary. That is, if I am not dead already. Very few have the consolation of knowing that no matter what misfortunes befall them they will be returned to that thing which they love.

Perhaps even poets have reasons to envy the damned.

END

Michael Jarrette-Kenny lives in Northern NJ with his wife and two cats. He has had had short stories featured at Burning Leaf, Aphelion, Stationaery and other online publications. He has recently completed a mainstream novel "The Silence" and is now at work on a second novel. 

Story by Michael Jarrette-Kenny, Copyright 2009
Image by Rory Clark, Stopped Motion Photography, Copyright 2009