bag to slip the latches on the jalousies, then ducked inside.
It didn't buy him much time, but enough to move through that house, and the next, cursing every time he fell over a chair or a table, knowing they could hear, they would follow. Thank God it was, on the whole, too dark for them to trace his foot tracks of garbage and muck. He came out a final window on Rue Bienville, and moved along the walls, his heart in his throat, toward the high stucco wall at the end of the street, behind which sulfurous yellow light flared like the glare of hell.
He heard them running behind him, the slop and suck of mud under their boots, and the slither and splosh as one of them fell. Four men, he saw, glancing back again, three of them with clubs, one with what looked like a rope. Bearded faces half-unseen under slouch hats, but their hands were white. He had half the length of the street on them now and was of a height to reach the top of the wall with his hands at a jump, dragging himself up and over.
The stench of the place was like liquid muck in his lungs, but at this point he cared nothing about that. The cemetery of St. Louis lay before him, a horror of gaping pits and standing water. The little white houses of marble and stucco and stone clustered beyond the darkness, like the huts in a village of the dead.
The dead lay along the wall, wrapped roughly in sheets of cheap osnaburg or canvas, the fabric moving with rats. January dropped down onto the piled corpses, send ing forth the rats in a shrieking horde, and fled, stumbling, sickened, across the pitted ooze and into the black-and-white jumble of shadow that was the tombs.
The disease isn't contagious, he told himself, slipping from tomb to tomb. He dodged behind one, then another, working his way through the dense-packed mazes. I've worked among the dying for three months now and I haven't contracted it yet.
He was gasping, shaking in every limb, nauseated with horror and disgust. Roaches the length of his finger crept through the cracks of marble boxes. A rat perched on the head of a bricked-up sepulcher marked DESLORMES; eating something, January couldn't see what. In a spot of open ground, water had worked and thrust arms and hands and legs and shards of coffin wood up through the earth, as if Bronze John's victims were trying to climb back out of the ground again, and the surfaces of the pools crept and shivered with feeding crawfish.
There were lights by the graveyard gate, and men moving around, slinging sheeted forms, or emaciated and livid bodies picked off the streets, into piles along the wall. Torches stuck in the ground added their grimy light to the glare of pots of burning hide and hair and gunpowder. The men swung around, startled, when January emerged from among the tombs.
"Where you come from, brother?" called out one, and the other grinned and said, "Hey, Joseph, look like we bury this one alive by mistake. We begs your pardon, sir." They bowed mockingly, cheerful themselves to be wielding the shovels instead of waiting for them.
But their leader, standing naked to the waist on the carload of corpses, like Bronze John himself with the torchlight reflected in his eyes, asked, "Where you come from, sir?"
"Over the wall." January gestured back behind him. "I was coming back from the Hospital. I was followed by a gang of white men with clubs."
"I seen them," said the man on the dead-cart. "Pickin' up the dead, I sometimes seen them. Three men, sometimes four, just shapes in the darkness, but they're carryin' clubs. Never stop me, though." And he smiled. "Can I take you somewheres, friend?"
January started to say, "Take me to the Rue Burgundy," but another thought came to his mind. He thought of his brother-in-law, asking him to look out for a friend's missing husband; of a woman in a ragged yellow dress, searching through the charity ward for her man. Of his niece and nephew saying,
"We packed 'em up..."
"Take me over to Rue St. Philippe, if you would." He had no stomach for moving about the dark streets of the French town alone.
The man on the dead-cart smiled again. "Hop right on," he said.
Chapter Ten
Eustace D?lier, being a moderately well off advocate of color, owned a snug little town house on Rue St.
Philippe, stuccoed