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  CONTENTS

  * * *

  EPIGRAPH

  THE ATLAS OF HELL

  THE DIABOLIST

  SKULLPOCKET

  THE MAW

  THE VISIBLE FILTH

  THE BUTCHER’S TABLE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  For Mia

  Now you are standing at the very crossroads of your life; and all your roads lead to strange places.

  —Mike Mignola, Hellboy: The Third Wish

  The Atlas of Hell

  He didn’t even know he was dead. I had just shot this guy in the head and he’s still standing there giving me shit. Telling me what a big badass he works for, telling me I’m going to be sorry I was born. You know. Blood pouring out of his face. He can’t even see anymore, it’s in his goddamn eyes. So I look at the gun in my hand and I’m like, what the fuck, you know? Is this thing working or what? And I’m starting to think maybe this asshole is right, maybe I just stepped into something over my head. I mean, I feel a twinge of real fear. My hair is standing up like a cartoon. So I look at the dude and I say, ‘Lay down! You’re dead! I shot you!’ ”

  There’s a bourbon and ice sitting on the end table next to him. He takes a sip from it and puts it back down, placing it in its own wet ring. He’s very precise about it.

  I guess he just had to be told, because as soon as I say it? Boom. Drops like a fucking tree.

  I don’t know what he’s expecting from me here. My leg is jumping up and down with nerves. I can’t make it stop. I open my mouth to say something but a nervous laugh spills out instead.

  He looks at me incredulously and cocks his head. Patrick is a big guy; but not doughy, like me. There’s muscle packed beneath all that flesh. He looks like fists of meat sewn together and given a suit of clothes. “Why are you laughing?”

  “I don’t know. I thought it was supposed to be a funny story.”

  “No, you demented fuck. That’s not a funny story. What’s the matter with you?”

  It’s pushing midnight, and we’re sitting on a coffee-stained couch in a darkened corner of the grubby little bookstore I own in New Orleans, about a block off Magazine Street. My name is Jack Oleander. I keep a small studio apartment overhead, but when Patrick started banging on my door half an hour ago I took him down here instead. I don’t want him in my home. That he’s here at all is a very bad sign.

  My place is called Oleander Books. I sell used books, for the most part, and I serve a sparse clientele: mostly students and disaffected youth, their little hearts love-drunk on Kierkegaard or Salinger. That suits me just fine. Most of the books have been sitting on their shelves for years, and I feel like I’ve fostered a kind of relationship with them. A part of me is sorry whenever one of them leaves the nest.

  The bookstore doesn’t pay the bills, of course. The books and documents I sell in the back room take care of that. Few people know about the back room, but those who do pay quite well. Patrick’s boss, Eugene, is one of those people. We parted under strained circumstances a year or so ago. I was never supposed to see him again. Patrick’s presence here makes me afraid, and fear makes me reckless.

  “Well, if it’s not a funny story, then what kind of story is it? Because we’ve been drinking here for twenty minutes and you haven’t mentioned business even once. If you want to trade war stories, it’s going to have to wait for another time.”

  He gives me a sour look and picks up his glass, peering into it as he swirls the ice around. He’s always hated me, and I know that his presence here pleases him no more than it does me.

  “You don’t make it easy to be your friend,” he says.

  “I didn’t know we were friends.”

  The muscles in his jaw clench.

  “You’re wasting my time, Patrick. I know you’re just the heavy, so maybe you don’t understand this, but the work I do in the back room takes up a lot of energy. Sleep is valuable to me. You’ve sat on my couch and drunk my whiskey and burned away almost half an hour beating around the bush. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

  He has his work face on now, the one a lot of guys see just before the lights go out. That’s good; I want him in work mode. It makes him focus. The trick now is to keep him on the shy side of violence. You have to play these guys like marionettes. I got pretty good at it back in the day.

  “You want to watch that,” he says. “You want to watch that attitude.”

  I put my hands out, palms forward. “Hey,” I say.

  “I come to you in friendship. I come to you in respect.”

  That’s bullshit, but whatever. It’s time to settle him down. These macho types are such fragile little flowers. “Hey. I’m sorry. Really. I haven’t been sleeping much. I’m tired, and it makes me stupid.”

  “That’s a bad trait. So wake up and listen to me. I told you that story for two reasons. One, to stop you from saying dumb shit like you just did. Make you remember who you’re dealing with. I can see it didn’t work. I can see maybe I was being too subtle.”

  “Patrick, really. I—”

  “If you interrupt me again I will break your right hand. The second reason I told you that story is to let you know that I’ve seen some crazy things in my life, so when I say that what I’m about to tell you scares me shitless, maybe you’ll listen to what the fuck I’m saying.”

  He stops there, staring hard at me. After a couple seconds of this, I figure it’s okay to talk.

  “You have my full attention. Whatever this is you’re about to tell me, it’s from Eugene?”

  “You know this is from Eugene. Why else would I drag myself over here?”

  “Patrick, I wish you’d relax. I’m sorry I made you mad. You want another drink? Let me pour you another drink.”

  I can see the rage still coiling in his eyes, and I’m starting to think I pushed him too hard. I’m starting to wonder how fast I can run.

  But then he leans back onto the couch and a smile settles over his face. It doesn’t look natural there. “Jesus, you have a mouth. How does a guy like you get away with having a mouth like that?” He shakes the ice in his glass. “Yeah, go ahead. Pour me another one. Let’s smoke a peace pipe.”

  I pour us both some more. He slugs it back in one deep swallow and holds his glass out for another. I give it to him. He seems to be relaxing.

  “All right, okay. There’s this guy. Creepy little grifter named Tobias George. He’s one of those rats always crawling through the city, getting into shit, fucking up his own life, you don’t even notice these guys. You know how it is.”

  “I do.” I also know the name, but I don’t tell him that.

  “Only reason we know about him at all is because
sometimes he’ll run a little scheme of his own, kick a percentage back to Eugene, it’s all good. Well, one day this prick catches a case of ambition. He robs one of Eugene’s poker games, makes off with a lot of money. Suicidal. Who knows what got into the guy. Some big dream climbed up his butt and opened him like an umbrella. We go hunting for him, but he disappears. We get word he went farther south, disappeared into the bayou. Like, not to Port Fourchon or some shit, but literally on a goddamn boat into the swamp. Eugene is pissed, and you know how he is, he jumps and shouts for a few days, but eventually he says fuck it. We’re not gonna go wrestle alligators for him. After a while we just figured he died out there. You know.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “That he did not. We catch wind of him a few months later. He’s in a whole new ballgame. He’s selling artifacts pulled from Hell. And he’s making a lot of money doing it.”

  “It’s another scam,” I say, knowing full well that it isn’t.

  “It’s not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Don’t worry about it. We know.”

  “A guy stole money and ran. That sounds more like your thing than mine, Patrick.”

  “Yeah, don’t worry about that either. I got that part covered when the time comes. I won’t go into the details, ’cause they don’t matter, but what it comes down to is Eugene wants his own way into the game. Once this punk is put in the ground, he wants to keep this market alive. We happen to know Tobias has a book that tells him how to access this shit. An atlas. We want it, and we want to know how it works. And that’s your thing, Jack.”

  I feel something cold spill through my guts. “That’s not the deal we had.”

  “What can I tell you.”

  “No. I told . . .” My throat is dry. My leg is bouncing again. “Eugene told me we were through. He told me that. He’s breaking his promise.”

  “That mouth again.” Patrick finishes his drink and stands. “Come on. You can tell him that yourself, see how it goes over.”

  “Now? It’s the middle of the night!”

  “Don’t worry, you won’t be disturbing him. He don’t sleep too well lately.”

  ~ ~ ~

  I’ve lived here my whole life. Grew up just a regular fat-white-kid schlub, decent parents, a ready-made path to the gray fields of middle-class servitude. But I went off the rails at some point. I was seduced by old books. I wanted to live out my life in a fog of parchment dust and old glue. I apprenticed myself to a bookbinder, a gnarled old Cajun named Rene Aucoin, who it turned out was a fading necromancer who had a nice side business refurbishing old grimoires. I learned some things from him, which led to my tenure as a librarian at the Camouflaged Library at the Ursuline Academy. It was when Eugene and his crew stuck their noses in the business, leading to a bloody confrontation with a death cult obsessed with the Damocles Scroll, that I left the academy and began my career as a book thief. I worked for Eugene for five years before we had our falling-out. When I left, we both knew it was for good.

  Eugene has a bar in Midcity, far away from the T-shirt shops, the fetish dens and goth hangouts of the French Quarter, far away too from the more respectable veneer of the Central Business and Garden Districts. Midcity is a place where you can do what you want. Patrick drives me along Canal and parks out front. He leads me up the stairs and inside, where the blast of cold air is a relief from a heat that does not relent even at night. A jukebox is playing something stale, and four or five ghostlike figures nest at the bar. They do not turn around as we pass through. Patrick guides me downstairs, to Eugene’s office.

  Before I even reach the bottom of the stairs, Eugene starts talking to me.

  “Hey, fat boy! Here comes the fat boy!”

  No cover model himself, he comes around his desk with his arms outstretched, what’s left of his gray hair combed in long, spindly fingers over the expanse of his scalp. Drink has made a soft wreckage of his face. His chest is sunken in, like something inside has collapsed and he’s falling inward. He puts his hands on me in greeting, and I try not to flinch.

  “Look at you. Look at you. You look good, Jack.”

  “So do you, Eugene.”

  The office is clean and uncluttered. There’s a desk and a few padded chairs, a couch on the far wall underneath a huge Michalopoulos painting. Across from the desk is a minibar and a door that leads to the back alley. Mardi Gras masks are arranged behind his desk like a congress of spirits. Eugene is a New Orleans boy right down to his tapping toes, and he buys into every shabby lie the city ever told about itself.

  “I hear you got a girl now. What’s her name, Locky? Lick-me?”

  “Lakshmi.” This is already going badly. “Come on, Eugene. Let’s not go there.”

  “Listen to him now. Calling the shots. All independent, all grown up now. Patrick give you any trouble? Sometimes he gets carried away.”

  Patrick doesn’t blink. His role fulfilled, he’s become a tree.

  “No. No trouble at all. It was like old times.”

  “Hopefully, not too much like old times, huh?” He sits behind his desk, gestures for me to take a seat. Patrick pours a couple of drinks and hands one to each of us, then retreats behind me.

  “I guess I’m just trying to figure out what I’m doing here, Eugene. Someone’s not paying you. Isn’t that what you have guys like him for?”

  Eugene settles back, sips from his drink, and studies me. “Let’s not play coy, Jack. Okay? Don’t pretend you don’t already know about Tobias. Don’t insult my intelligence.”

  “I know about Tobias,” I say.

  “Tell me what you know.”

  I can’t get comfortable in my chair. I feel like there are chains around my chest. I make one last effort. “Eugene. We had a deal.”

  “Are you having trouble hearing me? Should I raise my voice?”

  “He started selling two months ago. He had a rock. It was about the size of a tennis ball, but it was as heavy as a television set. Everybody thought he was full of shit. They were laughing at him. It sold for a little bit of money, not much. But somebody out there liked what they saw. Word got around. He sold a two-inch piece of charred bone next. That went for a lot more.”

  “I bought that bone.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Shit.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “No, Eugene, of course I don’t.”

  “Don’t ‘of course’ me. I don’t know what you know and what you don’t. You’re a slimy piece of filth, Jack. You’re a human cockroach. I can’t trust you. So don’t get smart.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “He had the nerve to contact me directly. He wanted me to know what he was offering before he put it on the market. Give me first chance. Jack, it’s from my son. It’s part of a thighbone from my son.”

  I can’t seem to see straight. The blood has rushed to my head, and I feel dizzy. I clamp my hands on the armrests of the chair so I can feel something solid. “How . . . how do you know?”

  “There’s people for that. Don’t ask dumb questions. I am very much not in the mood for dumb questions.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your thing is books, so that’s why you’re here. We tracked him to this old shack in the bayou. You’re going to get the book.”

  I feel panic skitter through me. “You want me to go there?”

  “Patrick’s going with you.”

  “That’s not what I do, Eugene!”

  “Bullshit! You’re a thief. You do this all the time. Patrick there can barely read a People magazine without breaking a sweat. You’re going.”

  “Just have Patrick bring it back! You don’t need me for this.”

  Eugene stares at me.

  “Come on,” I say. “You gave me your word.”

  I don’t even see Patrick coming. His hand is on the back of my neck and he slams my face onto the desk hard enough to crack an ashtray underneath my cheekbone. My glass falls out of my hand and I hear the ic
e thump onto the carpet. He keeps me pinned to the desk. He wraps his free hand around my throat. I can’t breathe.

  Eugene leans in, his hands behind his back, like he’s examining something curious and mildly revolting. “Would you like to see him? Would you like to see my son?”

  I pat Patrick’s hand, a weirdly intimate gesture. I shake my head. I try to make words. My vision is starting to fry around the edges. Dark loops spool into the world.

  Finally, Eugene says, “Let him go.”

  Patrick releases me. I slide off the table and land hard, dragging the broken ashtray with me, covering myself in ash and spent cigarette butts. I roll onto my side, choking.

  Eugene puts his hand on my shoulder. “Hey, Jack, you okay? You all right down there? Get up. God damn, you’re a drama queen. Get the fuck up already.”

  It takes a few minutes. When I’m sitting up again, Patrick hands me a napkin to clean the blood off my face. I don’t look at him. There’s nothing I can do. No point in feeling a goddamn thing about it.

  “When do I leave?” I say.

  “What the hell,” Eugene says. “How about right now?”

  ~ ~ ~

  We experience dawn as a rising heat and a slow bleed of light through the cypress and the Spanish moss, riding in an airboat through the swamp a good thirty miles south of New Orleans. Patrick and I are up front while an old man more leather than flesh guides us along some unseeable path. Our progress stirs movement from the local fauna—snakes, turtles, muskrats—and I’m constantly jumping at some heavy splash. I imagine a score of alligators gliding beneath us, tracking our progress with yellow, saurian eyes. The airboat wheels around a copse of trees into a watery clearing, and I half expect to see a brontosaurus wading in the shallows.

  Instead I see a row of huge, bobbing purple flowers, each with a bleached human face in the center, mouths gaping and eyes palely blind. The sight of it shocks me into silence; our guide fixes his stare on the horizon, refusing to acknowledge anything unusual. Eyes perch along the tops of reeds; great kites of flesh stretch between tree limbs; one catches a light breeze from our passage and skates serenely through the air, coming at last to a gentle landing on the water, where it folds in on itself and sinks into the murk.