The Mammoth Book of Terror

PAT CADIGAN IS A two-time winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the author of fifteen books. Her fiction is included in many anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horrorand The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series, TheMammoth Booh of Vampire Stories by Women, Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Booh of Horror, The New English Library Book of Internet Stories, The Ex Files: New Stories About Old Flames, Disco 2000, Dying For It: Erotic Tales of Unearthly Love and A Whisper of Blood, and her short stories have been collected in Patterns.

Born in Schenectady, New York, and formerly a resident of Kansas, she now lives and works in North London.

“‘It Was the Heat’ was the first thing I wrote as a full-time professional writer,” Cadigan explains. “It was also my love letter to the city of New Orleans, which is one of the most gorgeous and inspiringly decadent (or decadendy inspiring) places I’ve ever visited.

“While almost all the locations are real, nothing like the events in the story ever happened to me in New Orleans; not even something as stultifyingly commonplace as a trashy fling in a cheap hotel room. However, on a wander through the French Quarter, it’s easy to imagine all kinds of things. And a little jambalaya helps to stir things up even more. Personally, I recommend it.”

IT WAS THE HEAT, the incredible heat that never lets up, never eases, never once gives you a break. Sweat till you die; bake till you drop; fry, broil, burn, baby, burn. How’d you like to live in a fever and never feel cool, never, never, never.

Women think they want men like that. They think they want someone to put the devil in their Miss Jones. Some of them even lie awake at night, alone, or next to a silent lump of husband or boyfriend or friendly stranger, thinking, Let me be completely consumed with fire. In the name of love.

Sure.

Right feeling, wrong name. Try again. And the thing is, they do. They try and try and try, and if they’re very, very unlucky, they find one of them.

I thought I had him right where I wanted him – between my legs. Listen, I didn’t always talk this way. That wasn’t me you saw storming the battlements during the Sexual Revolution. My ambition was liberated but I didn’t lose my head, or give it. It wasn’t me saying, Let them eat pie. Once I had a sense of propriety but I lost it with my inhibitions.

You think these things happen only in soap operas – the respectable, thirty-five-year-old wife and working mother goes away on a business trip with a suitcase full of navy blue suits and classy blouses with the bow at the neck and a briefcase crammed with paperwork. Product management is not a pretty sight. Sensible black pumps are a must for the run on the fast track and if your ambition is sufficiently liberated, black pumps can keep pace with perforated wing-tips, even outrun them.

But men know the secret. Especially businessmen. This is why management conferences are sometimes held in a place like New Orleans instead of the professional canyons of New York City or Chicago. Men know the secret and now I do, too. But I didn’t then, when I arrived in New Orleans with my luggage and my paperwork and my inhibitions, to be installed in the Bourbon Orleans Hotel in the French Quarter.

The room had all the charm of home – more, since I wouldn’t be cleaning it up. I hung the suits in the bathroom, ran the shower, called home, already feeling guilty. Yes, boys, Mommy’s at the hotel now and she has a long meeting to go to, let me talk to Daddy. Yes, dear, I’m fine. It was a long ride from the airport, good thing the corporation’s paying for this. The hotel is very nice, good thing the corporation’s paying for this, too. Yes, there’s a pool but I doubt I’ll have time to use it and anyway, I didn’t bring a suit. Not that kind of suit. This isn’t a pleasure trip, you know, I’m not on vacation. No. Yes. No. Kiss the boys for me. I love you, too.

If you want to be as conspicuous as possible, be a woman walking almost late into a meeting room full of men who are all gunning to be CEOs. Pick out the two or three other female faces and nod to them even though they’re complete strangers, and find a seat near them. Listen to the man at the front of the room say, Now that we’re all here, we can begin and know that every man is thinking that means you. Imagine what they are thinking, imagine what they are whispering to each other. Imagine that they know you can’t concentrate on the opening presentation because your mind is on your husband and children back home instead of the business at hand when the real reason you can’t concentrate is because you’re imagining they must all be thinking your mind is on your husband and children back home instead of the business at hand.

Do you know what they’re thinking about, really? They’re thinking about the French Quarter. Those who have been there before are thinking about jazz and booze in go-cups and bars where the women are totally nude, totally, and those who haven’t been there before are wondering if everything’s as wild as they say.

Finally the presentation ended and the discussion period following the presentation ended (the women had nothing to discuss so as not to be perceived as the ones delaying the after-hours jaunt into the French Quarter). Tomorrow, nine o’clock in the Hyatt, second floor meeting room. Don’t let’s be too hung over to make it, boys, ha, ha. Oh, and girls, too, of course, ha, ha.

The things you hear when you don’t have a crossbow.

Demure, I took a cab back to the Bourbon Orleans, intending to leave a wake-up call for 6:30, ignoring the streets already filling up. In early May, with Mardi Gras already a dim memory? Was there a big convention in town this week, I asked the cab driver.

No, ma’am, he told me (his accent- Creole or Cajun? I don’t know – made it more like ma’ahm.) De Quarter always be jumpin’, and de weather be so lovely.

This was lovely? I was soaked through my drip-dry white blouse and the suitcoat would start to smell if I didn’t take it off soon. My crisp, boardroom coiffure had gone limp and trickles of sweat were tracking leisurely along my scalp. Product management was meant to live in air conditioning (we call it climate control, as though we really could, but there is no controlling this climate).

At the last corner before the hotel, I saw him standing at the curb. Tightjeans, red shirt knotted above the navel to show off the washboard stomach. Definitely not executive material; executives are required to be doughy in that area and the area to the south of that was never delineated quite so definitely as it was in this man’s jeans.

Some sixth sense made him bend to see who was watching him from the back seat of the cab.

“Mamma, mamma!” he called and kissed the air between us. “You wanna go to a party?” He came over to the cab and motioned for me to roll the window all the way down. I slammed the lock down on the door and sat back, clutching my sensible black purse.

“C’mon, mamma!” He poked his fingers through the small opening of the window. “I be good to you!” The golden hair was honey from peroxide but the voice was honey from the comb. The light changed and he snatched his fingers away just in time.

“I’ll be waiting!” he shouted after me. I didn’t look back.

“What was all that about?” I asked the cab driver.

“Just a wild boy. Lotta wild boys in the Quarter, ma’am.” We pulled up next to the hotel and he smiled over his shoulder at me, his teeth just a few shades lighter than his coffeedis is wheahyou look. “You got a nice company sends you to the Quarter for doin’ business.”

I smiled back, overtipped him, and escaped into the hotel.

It wasn’t even a consideration, that first night. Wake-up call for six-thirty, just as I’d intended, to leave time for showering and breakfast, like the good wife and mother and executive I’d always been.

Beignets for breakfast. Carl had told me I must have beignets for breakfast if I were going to be New Orleans. He’d bought some beignet mix and tried to make some for me the week before I’d left. They’d come out too thick and heavy and only the kids had been able to eat them, liberally dusted with powdered sugar. If I found a good place for beignets, I would try to bring some home, I’d decided, for my lovely, tolerant, patient husband, who was now probably making thick, heavy pancakes for the boys. Nice of him to sacrifice some of his vacation time to be home with the boys while Mommy was out of town. Mommy had never gone out of town on business before. Daddy had, of course; several times. At those times, Mommy had never been able to take any time away from the office, though, so she could be with the boys while Daddy was out of town. Too much work to do; if you want to keep those sensible black pumps on the fast track, you can’t be putting your family before the work. Lots of women lose out that way, you know, Martha?

I knew.

No familiar faces in the restaurant, but I wasn’t looking for any. I moved my tray along the line, took a beignet and poured myself some of the famous Louisiana chicory coffee before I found a small table under a ceiling fan. No air-conditioning and it was already up in the eighties. I made a concession and took off my jacket. After a bite of the beignet, I made another and unbuttoned the top two buttons of my blouse. The pantyhose already felt sticky and uncomfortable. I had a perverse urge to slip off to the ladies’ room and take them off. Would anyone notice or care? That would leave me with nothing under the half-slip. Would anyone guess? There goes a lady executive with no pants on. In the heat, it was not unthinkable. No underwear at all was not unthinkable. Everything was binding. A woman in a gauzy caftan breezed past my table, glancing down at me with careless interest. Another out-of-towner, yes. You can tell – we’re the only ones not dressed for the weather.

“All right to sit here, ma’am?”

I looked up. He was holding a tray with one hand, already straddling the chair across from me, only waiting my permission to sink down and join me. Dark, curly hair, just a bit too long, darker eyes, smooth skin the color of over-creamed coffee. Tank top over jeans. He eased himself down and smiled. I must have said yes.

“All the other tables’re occupied or ain’t been bussed, ma’am. Hope you don’t mind, you a stranger here and all.” The smile was as slow and honeyed as the voice. They all talked in honey tones here. “Eatin’ you one of our nice beignets, I see. First breakfast in the Quarter, am I right?”

I used a knife and fork on the beignet. “I’m here on business.”

“You have a very striking face.”

I risked a glance up at him. “You’re very kind.” Thirty-five and up is striking, if the world is feeling kind.

“When your business is done, shall I see you in the Quarter?”

“I doubt it. My days are very long.” I finished the beignet quickly, gulped the coffee. He caught my arm as I got up. It was a jolt of heat, like being touched with an electric wand.

“I have a husband and three children!” Itwas the only thing I could think to say.

“You don’t want to forget your jacket.”

It hung limply on the back of my chair. I wanted to forget it badly, to have an excuse to go through the day of meetings and seminars in shirtsleeves. I put the tray down and slipped the jacket on. “Thank you.”

“Name is Andre, ma’am.” The dark eyes twinkled. “My heart will surely break if I don’t see you tonight in the Quarter.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“It’s too hot to be silly, ma’am.”

“Yes. It is,” I said stiffly. I looked for a place to take the tray.

“They take it away for you. You can just leave it here. Or you can stay and have another cup of coffee and talk to a lonely soul.” One finger plucked at the low scoop of the tank top. “I’d like that.”

“A cab driver warned me about wild boys,” I said, holding my purse carefully to my side.

“I doubt it. He may have told you but he didn’t warn you. And I ain’t a boy, ma’am.”

Sweat gathered in the hollow between my collarbones and spilled downward. He seemed to be watching the trickle disappear down into my blouse. Under the aroma of baking breads and pastries and coffee, I caught a scent of something else.

“Boys stand around on street corners, they shout rude remarks, they don’t know what a woman is.”

“That’s enough,” I snapped. “I don’t know why you picked me out for your morning’s amusement. Maybe because I’m from out of town. You wild boys get a kick out of annoying the tourists, is that it? If I see you again, I’ll call a cop.” I stalked out and pushed myself through the humidity to hail a cab. By the time I reached the Hyatt, I might as well not have showered.

“I’m skipping out on this afternoon’s session,” the woman whispered to me. Her badge said she was Frieda Fellowes, of Boston, Massachusetts. “I heard the speaker last year. He’s the biggest bore in the world. I’m going shopping. Care to join me?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I have to write up a report on this when I get home and I’d better be able to describe everything in detail.”

She looked at my badge. “You must work for a bunch of real hardasses up in Schenectady.” She leaned forward to whisper to the other woman sitting in the row ahead of us, who nodded eagerly.

They were both missing from the afternoon session. The speaker was the biggest bore in the world. The men had all conceded to shirtsleeves. Climate control failed halfway through the seminar and it broke up early, releasing us from the stuffiness of the meeting room into the thick air of the city. I stopped in the lobby bathroom and took off my pantyhose, rolled them into an untidy ball and stuffed them in my purse before getting a cab back to my own hotel.

One of the men from my firm phoned my room and invited me to join him and the guys for drinks and dinner. We met in a crowded little place called Messina’s, four male executives and me. It wasn’t until I excused myself and went to the closet-sized bathroom that I realized I’d put my light summer slacks on over nothing. A careless mistake, akin to starting off to the supermarket on Saturday morning in my bedroom slippers. Mommy’s got a lot on her mind. Martha, the No-Pants Executive. Guess what, dear, I went out to dinner in New Orleans with four men and forgot to wear panties. Well, women do reach their sexual peak at thirty-five, don’t they, honey?

The heat was making me crazy. No air-conditioning here, either, just fans, pushing the damp air around.

I rushed through the dinner of red beans and rice and hot sausage; someone ordered a round of beers and I gulped mine down to cool the sausage. No one spoke much. Martha’s here, better keep it low-key, guys. I decided to do them a favor and disappear after the meal. There wouldn’t be much chance of running into me at any of the nude bars, nothing to be embarrassed about. Thanks for tolerating my presence, fellas.

But they looked a little puzzled when I begged off anything further. The voice blew over to me as I reached the door, carried on a wave of humidity pushed by one of the fans: “Maybe she’s got a headache tonight.” General laughter.

Maybe all four of you together would be a disappointment, boys. Maybe none of you know what a woman is.

They didn’t look especially wild, either.

I had a drink by the pool instead of going right up to the hotel room. Carl would be coping with supper and homework and whatnot. Better to call later, after they were all settled down.

I finished the drink and ordered another. It came in a plastic cup, with apologies from the waiter. “Temporarily short on crystal tonight, ma’am. Caterin’ a private dinner here. Hope you don’t mind a go-cup this time.”

“A what?”

The man’s smile was bright. “Go-cup. You take it and walk around with it.”

“That’s allowed?”

“All over the Quarter, ma’am.” He moved on to another table.

So I walked through the lobby with it and out into the street, and no one stopped me.

Just down at the corner, barely half a block away, the streets were filling up again. Many of the streets seemed to be pedestrians only. I waded in, holding the go-cup. Just to look around. I couldn’t really come here and not look around.

“It’s supposed to be a whorehouse where the girls swung naked

on velvet swings.”

I turned away from the high window where the mannequin legs had been swinging in and out to look at the man who had spoken to me. He was a head taller than I was, long-haired, attractive in a rough way.

“Swung?” I said. “You mean they don’t any more?”

He smiled and took my elbow, positioning me in front of an

open doorway, pointed in. I looked; a woman was lying naked on her stomach under a mirror suspended overhead. Perspiration gleamed on her skin.

“Buffet?” I said. “All you can eat, a hundred dollars?”

The man threw back his head and laughed heartily. “New in the Quarter, aintcha?” Same honey in the voice. They caress you with their voices here, I thought, holding the crumpled go-cup tightly. It was a different one; I’d had another drink since I’d come out and it hadn’t seemed like a bad idea at all, another drink, the walking around, all of it. Not by myself, anyway.

Something brushed my hip. “You’ll let me buy you another, wontcha?” Dark hair, dark eyes; young. I remembered that for a long time.

Wild creatures in lurid long dresses catcalled screechily from a second floor balcony as we passed below on the street. My eyes were heavy with heat and alcohol but I kept walking. It was easy with him beside me, his arm around me and his hand resting on my hip.

Somewhere along the way, the streets grew much darker and the crowds disappeared. A few shadows in the larger darkness; I saw them leaning against street signs; we passed one close enough to smell a mixture of perfume and sweat and alcohol and something else.

“Didn’t nobody never tell you to come out alone at night in this part of the Quarter?” The question was amused, not reproving. They caress you with their voices down here, with their voices and the darkness and the heat, which gets higher as it gets darker. And when it gets hot enough, they melt and flow together and run all over you, more fluid than water.

What are you doing?

I’m walking into a dark hallway; I don’t know my footing, I’m glad there’s someone with me.

What are you doing?

I’m walking into a dark room to get out of the heat, but it’s no cooler here and I don’t really care after all.

What are you doing?

I’m overdressed for the season here; this isn’t Schenectady in the spring, it’s New Orleans, it’s the French Quarter.

What are you doing?

I’m hitting my sexual peak at thirty-five.

“What are you doing?”

Soft laughter. “Oh, honey, don’t you know?”

The Quarter was empty at dawn, maybe because it was raining. I found my way back to the Bourbon Orleans in the downpour anyway. It shut off as suddenly as a suburban lawn sprinkler just as I reached the front door of the hotel.

I fell into bed and slept the day away, no wake-up calls, and when I opened my eyes, the sun was going down and I remembered how to find him.

You’d think there would have been a better reason: my husband ignored me or my kids were monsters or my job was a dead-end or some variation on the mid-life crisis. It wasn’t any of those things. Well, the seminars were boring but nobody gets that bored. Or maybe they did and I’d just never heard about it.

It was the heat.

The heat gets inside you. Then you get a fever from the heat, and from fever you progress to delirium and from delirium into another state of being. Nothing is real in delirium. No, scratch that: everything is real in a different way. In delirium, everything floats, including time. Lighter than air, you slip away. Day breaks apart from night, leaves you with scraps of daylight. It’s all right – when it gets that hot, it’s too hot to see, too hot to bother looking. I remembered dark hair, dark eyes, but it was all dark now and in the dark, it was even hotter than in the daylight.

It was the heat. It never let up. It was the heat and the smell. I’ll never be able to describe that smell except to say that if it were a sound, it would have been round and mellow and sweet, just the way it tasted. As if he had no salt in his body at all. As if he had been distilled from the heat itself, and salt had just been left behind in the process.

It was the heat.

And then it started to get cool.

It started to cool down to the eighties during the last two days of the conference and I couldn’t find him. I made a half-hearted showing at one of the seminars after a two-day absence. They stared, all the men and the women, especially the one who had asked me to go shopping.

“I thoughtyou’d been kidnapped by white slavers,” she said to me during the break. “What happened? You don’t look like you feel so hot.”

“I feel very hot,” I said, helping myself to the watery lemonade punch the hotel had laid out on a table. With beignets. The sight of them turned my stomach and so did the punch. I put it down again. “I’ve been running a fever.”

She touched my face, frowning slightly. “You don’t feel feverish. In fact, you feel pretty cool. Clammy, even.”

“It’s the air-conditioning,” I said, drawing back. Her fingers were cold, too cold to tolerate. “The heat and the air-conditioning. It’s fucked me up.”

Her eyes widened.

“Messed me up, excuse me. I’ve been hanging around my kids too long.”

“Perhaps you should see a doctor. Or go home.”

“I’ve just got to get out of this air-conditioning,” I said, edging toward the door. She followed me, trying to object. “I’ll be fine as soon as I get out of this air-conditioning and back into the heat.”

“No, wait,” she called insistently. “You may be suffering from heat-stroke. I think that’s it- the clammy skin, the way you look—”

“It’s not heatstroke, I’m freezing in this goddam refrigerator. Just leave me the fuck alone and I’ll be fine!”

I fled, peeling off my jacket, tearing open the top of my blouse. I couldn’t go back, not to that awful air-conditioning. I would stay out where it was warm.

I lay in bed with the windows wide open and the covers pulled all the way up. One of the men from my company phoned; his voice sounded too casual when he pretended I had reassured him. Carl’s call only twenty minutes later was not a surprise. I’m fine, dear. You don’t sound fine. I am, though. Everyone is worried about you. Needlessly. I think I should come down there. No, stay where you are, I’ll be fine. No, I think I should come and get you. And I’m telling you to stay where you are. That does it, you sound weird, I’m getting the next flight out and your mother can stay with the boys. You stay where you are, goddamit, or I might not come home, is that clear?

Long silence.

Is someone there with you?

More silence.

I said, is someone there with you?

It’s just the heat. I’ll be fine, as soon as I warm up.

Sometime after that, I was sitting at a table in a very dark place that was almost warm enough. The old woman sitting across from me occasionally drank delicately from a bottle of beer and fanned herself, even though it was only almost warm.

“It’s such pleasure when it cool down like dis,” she said in her slow honeyvoice. Even the old ladies had honeyvoices here. “The heat be a beast.”

I smiled, thinking for a moment that she’d said bitch, not beast. “Yeah. It’s a bitch all right but I don’t like to be cold.”

“No? Where you from?”

“Schenectady. Cold climate.”

She grunted. “Well, the heat don’t be a bitch, it be a beast. He be a beast.”

“Who?”

“Him. The heat beast.” She chuckled a little. “My grandma woulda called him a loa. You know what dat is?”

“No.”

She eyed me before taking another sip of beer. “No. I don’t know whether that good or bad for you, girl. Could be deadly either way, someone who don’t like to be cold. What you doin’ over here anyway? Tourist Quarter three blocks thataway.”

“I’m looking for a friend. Haven’t been able to find him since it’s cooled down.”

“Grandma knew they never named all de loa. She said new ones would come when they found things be willin’ for ‘em. Or when they named by someone. Got nothin’ to do with the old religion any more. Bigger than the old religion. It’s all de world now.” The old woman thrust her face forward and squinted at me. “What friend you got over here? No outa-town white girl got a friend over here.”

“I do. And I’m not from out of town any more.”

“Get out.” But it wasn’t hostile, just amusement and condescension and a little disgust. “Go buy you some tourist juju and tell everybody you met a mamba in N’awlins. Be some candyass somewhere sell you a nice, fake love charm.”

“I’m not here for that,” I said, getting up. “I came for the heat.”

“Well, girl, it’s cooled down.” She finished her beer.

Sometime after that, in another place, I watched a man and a woman dancing together. There were only a few other people on the floor in front of the band. I couldn’t really make sense of the music, whether it was jazz or rock or whatever. It was just the man and the woman I was paying attention to. Something in their movements was familiar. I was thinking he would be called by the heat in them, but it was so damned cold in there, not even ninety degrees. The street was colder. I pulled the jacket tighter around myself and cupped my hands around the coffee mug. That famous Louisiana chicory coffee. Why couldn’t I get warm?

It grew colder later. There wasn’t a warm place in the Quarter, but people’s skins seemed to be burning. I could see the heat shimmers rising from their bodies. Maybe I was the only one without a fever now.

Carl was lying on the bed in my hotel room. He sat up as soon as I opened the door. The heat poured from him in waves and my first thought was to throw myself on him and take it, take it all, and leave him to freeze to death.

“Wait!” he shouted but I was already pounding down the hall to the stairs.

Early in the morning, it was an easy thing to run through the Quarter. The sun was already beating down but the light was thin, with little warmth. I couldn’t hear Carl chasing me, but I kept running, to the other side of the Quarter, where I had first gone into the shadows. Glimpse of an old woman’s face at a window; I remembered her, she remembered me. Her head nodded, two fingers beckoned. Behind her, a younger face watched in the shadows. The wrong face.

I came to a stop in the middle of an empty street and waited. I was getting colder; against my face, my fingers were like living icicles. It had to be only 88 or 89 degrees, but even if it got to ninety-five or above today, I wouldn’t be able to get warm.

He had it. He had taken it. Maybe I could get it back.

The air above the buildings shimmied, as if to taunt. Warmth, here, and here, and over here, what’s the matter with you, frigid or something?

Down at the corner, a police car appeared. Heat waves rippled up from it, and I ran.

“Hey.”

The man stood over me where I sat shivering at a corner table in the place that bragged it had traded slaves over a hundred years ago. He was the color of rich earth, slightly built with carefully waved black hair. Young face; the wrong face, again.

“You look like you in the market for a sweater.”

“Go away.” I lifted the coffee cup with shuddering hands. “A thousand sweaters couldn’t keep me warm now.”

“No, honey.” They caressed you with their voices down here. He took the seat across from me. “Not that kind of sweater. Sweater I mean’s a person, special kinda person. Who’d you meet in the Quarter? Good-lookin’ stud, right? Nice, wild boy, maybe not white but white enough for you?”

“Go away. I’m not like that.”

“You know what you like now, though. Cold. Very cold woman. Cold woman’s no good. Cold woman’ll take all the heat out of a man, leave him frozen dead.”

I didn’t answer.

“So you need a sweater. Maybe I know where you can find one.”

“Maybe you know where I can find him.”

The man laughed. “That’s what I’m sayin’, cold woman.” He took off his light, white suitcoat and tossed it at me. “Wrap up in that and come on.”

The fire in the hearth blazed, flames licking out at the darkness. Someone kept feeding it, keeping it burning for hours. I wasn’t sure who, or if it was only one person, or how long I sat in front of the fire, trying to get warm.

Sometime long after the man had brought me there, the old woman said, “Burnin’ all day now. Whole Quarter oughta feel the heat by now. Whole city.”

“He’ll feel it, sure enough.” The man’s voice. “He’ll feel it, come lookin’ for what’s burnin’.” A soft laugh. “Won’t he be surprised to see it’s his cold woman.”

“Look how the fire wants her.”

The flames danced. I could sit in the middle of them and maybe then I’d be warm.

“Where did he go?” The person who asked might have been me.

“Went to take a rest. Man sleeps after a bender, don’t you know. He oughta be ready for more by now.”

I reached out for the fire. A long tongue of flame licked around my arm; the heat felt so good.

“Look how the fire wants her.”

Soft laugh. “If it wants her, then it should have her. Go ahead, honey. Get in the fire.”

On hands and knees, I climbed up into the hearth, moving slowly, so as not to scatter the embers. Clothes burned away harmlessly.

To sit in fire is to sit among a glory of warm, silk ribbons touching everywhere at once. I could see the room now, the heavy drapes covering the windows, the dark faces, one old, one young, gleaming with sweat, watching me.

“You feel ’im?” someone asked. “Is he comin’?”

“He’s comin’, don’t worry about that.” The man who had brought me smiled at me. I felt a tiny bit of perspiration gather at the back of my neck. Warmer; getting warmer now.

I began to see him; he was forming in the darkness, coming together, pulled in by the heat. Dark-eyed, dark-haired, young, the way he had been. He was there before the hearth and the look on that young face as he peered into the flames was hunger.

The fire leaped for him; I leaped for him and we saw what it was we really had. No young man; no man.

The heat be a beast.

Beast. Not really a loa, something else; I knew that, somehow. Sometimes it looks like a man and sometimes it looks like hot honey in the darkness.

What are you doing?

I’m taking darkness by the eyes, by the mouth, by the throat.

What are you doing?

I’m burning alive.

What are you doing?

I’m burning the heat beast and I have it just where I want it. All the heat anyone ever felt, fire and body heat, fever, delirium. Delirium has eyes; I push them in with my thumbs. Delirium has a mouth; I fill it with my fist. Delirium has a throat; I tear it out. Sparks fly like an explosion of tiny stars and the beast spreads its limbs in surrender, exposing its white-hot core. I bend my head to it and the taste is sweet, no salt in his body at all.

What are you doing?

Oh, honey, don’t you know?

I took it back.

In the hotel room, I stripped off the shabby dress the old woman had given me and threw it in the trashcan. I was packing when Carl came back.

He wanted to talk; I didn’t. Later he called the police and told them everything was all right, he’d found me and I was coming home with him. I was sure they didn’t care. Things like that must have happened in the Quarter all the time.

In the ladies’ room at the airport, the attendant sidled up to me as I was bent over the sink splashing cold water on my face and asked if I were all right.

“It’s just the heat,” I said.

“Then best you go home to a cold climate,” she said. “You do better in a cold climate from now on.”

I raised my head to look at her reflection in the spotted mirror. I wanted to ask her if she had a brother who also waved his hair. I wanted to ask her why he would bother with a cold woman, why he would care.

She put both hands high on her chest, protectively. “The beast sleeps in cold. You tend him now. Maybe you keep him asleep for good.”

“And if I don’t?”

She pursed her lips. “Then you gotta problem.”

In summer, I keep the air-conditioning turned up high at my office, at home. In the winter, the kids complain the house is too cold and Carl grumbles a little, even though we save so much in heating bills. I tuck the boys in with extra blankets every night and kiss their foreheads, and later in our bed, Carl curls up close, murmuring how my skin is always so warm.

It’s just the heat.