It’s Not Grave Robbing

The LaFleur job had taken two weeks of planning, the Bagatelle Auction Heist, six months, but Guidry had the sense that Leo had been planning the Rackham Manor robbery since he was six. As a rule, Guidry was against grave robbing. Sure, on paper it was good business sense, the wronged parties are not in much of a position to chase you down and the police did not like hanging around in cemeteries to conduct their investigations. But even for someone like Guidry, who figured his soul was long doomed anyway, something about robbing the dead never sat right.

“It’s not really grave robbing,” Leo had said over drinks in the backroom of a bar on Bourbon Street. He struck a match and lit a cigarette. “It’s not buried with them anyway.”

It had been enough to get Guidry on board, after all, he was only the getaway driver. All of the actual robbery would be done by Leo and the other damned souls he had roped into this blag. That had been what Bonney, the Englishman had called it, a blag, those Brits and their funny words for everything. Bonney was their safe-cracker. He had spent a month pouring over every design schematic they could get on Rackham’s safe. Apparently there were precious few. Rackham had gotten his safe custom made, designed by a team of dozens of prominent smiths and tinkers. Bonney did his best to piece together a schematic based on their other work and his own professional sense of what went where. It was maybe the second easiest job after Guidry’s—he just had to crack a safe.

The really tough job fell on the wimple of Sister Molly. Sister Molly was a nun like Guidry was an ice man, which is to say, it had been her job once, and was now a polite euphemism for what she actually did. Sister Molly was their muscle. She was five foot nothing and built like a rat-snake, all slim and wiry. She was no pushover in a scrap, but in a straight fight she would have lost to the Mother Superior she had served under. But like Bonney’s safe-cracking, robbing Rackham Manor was far from a straight fight. Sister Molly was a back alley exorcist, the spiritual equivalent of a dogfighting Pitbull.

Rackham Manor had seen plenty of exorcists. Twenty years ago Rackham’s grandson had inherited the property. By then it was already a local legend. It sat on the edge of the bayou, right at the edge of town, with Spanish Moss growing over its boarded windows and gators sunning on the portico. Once upon a time it had been a luxurious retreat for a very particular type of city elite. They were men and women who plied the same trade as Rackham—criminals, the kind who got rich enough to be respectable. Local lore said that Rackham had lured them all to his house one night, wining and dining them in a lavish party in the mansion’s central ballroom. The whole guest list, being thieves and cutthroats, took their food and drink with caution. It was a poor scoundrel who trusted everything another thief handed them, especially a glass they had not seen poured. But the night had gone on and nobody had dropped dead of poison, so they kept drinking and eating and doing other things that were generally not done in polite society.

Everybody had a different theory on what happened next. Guidry’s grandfather, who had been a stable boy in a neighboring estate, said that it was the servants, finally sick of working for a depraved criminal and entertaining his friends, who slipped arsenic into the wine, only serving the deadly libation once the guests were already well into their cups. Others maintained it had been Rackham himself, in a daring bid to eliminate his business competitors—though that did little to explain why Rackham himself had been found dead as well, in a place of honor no less, slumped over the railing of the grand staircase, surveying his guests’ bodies strewn across the ballroom floor.

Whoever had done it, the first ghost stories had been told the moment the authorities carted off the bodies. Whispers ran through the crowds that watched the buggies carry off the city’s underworld, bringing them, presumably, to a less prestigious underworld than the one they had lorded over in life. The house sat empty for the next sixty years gathering dust and stories. Those with something to prove would go inside after the moon had risen and swear up and down that they had seen the all the revelers still drinking and fighting and—other things all across the ballroom, an eternal orgy of spectral violence. Others claimed to see Rackham himself through the windows, walking up and down the grand staircase. Smart folk did not even look at the house, much less go inside, but they still said they heard the sounds of Rackham’s last party on moonless nights.

“It’s not about number of spirits,” Sister Mary had said, digging through a trunk of charms and amulets in the back of Leo’s house. Every so often she tucked one into her wimple. “Most of them will just ignore you. The trouble with a house like that are gonna be the heavy hitters, the ones who got a reason for sticking around beyond not realizing they’re dead.”

Bonney had tipped back in his chair, fiddling with a padlock. “Oh, gimme me a break. This is all a load of bollocks. Ghost stories are good for getting the peelers off your scent, the old Scarecrow of Romney Marsh trick, but if we got anything to worry about in that house it’s gonna be the bloody snakes and gators and the bloody safe.” The lock popped open in his hands. “If you ask me we’re just getting conned out of our fair share.”

Leo walked around behind Bonney’s chair and rested both hands on the Brit’s shoulders. Guidry smirked over the top of his beer as Leo squeezed slightly.

“Seb,” he hissed and the Brit winced. “Have I ever steered you wrong? Have I ever hired someone who wasn’t absolutely essential? Do you feel you have ever been cheated out of your fair share?”

Bonney mollified. “No…no. I’m just saying, ghosts, hauntings, good thieves go mad because they get caught up in this kind of bollocks. It does the crew’s heads in.”

“That’s why we are preparing Seb.” Leo talked in a singsong way. His mother had been a dancehall songstress and it left a lilt in his voice. “Sister Mary, Guidry, you, and me, all part of the puzzle. Don’t let it get to you. Spirits ain’t nothing to fear. They’re like pit bosses, or bank security, bring the right tools, the right people, and we walk out with our money.”

Guidry had driven them to the house just after midnight on a moonless night. Sister Mary said that was important—waiting for a new moon. They had taken the long way around, backroads through the bayou—most of them half flooded, and come around the back of the house. Old mansions like this, with big wraparound porticos, the back looked almost just like the front. Guidry made sure to loop the truck around so he was ready to drive away when the others got out.

Sister Mary took little beaded bracelets out of a bag slung across her chest and placed one in each of their hands. Guidry turned it over, examining it by the faint light of Leo’s dark lantern. Each bead was a brilliant blue with a little white eye painted on it. Sister Mary took a fifth one and looped it over the rearview mirror like a rosary.

“Keep an eye on these. If the beads break, you run.”

Bonney rolled his eyes but slipped the bracelet on anyway. Leo had made sure they each knew every ghost story this house had produced. The hanging bride. The buried pirate. The weeping mother. He tracked them like alarms in a bank. Bonney was not a credulous man, but two weeks of ghost stories and a drive through a dark bayou made anyone more cautious than dismissive.

“These’ll protect us?” Guidry said, fixing his own around his wrist. It fit snug.

Sister Mary shook her head. “These are our canaries in the coal mine. They won’t go off unless you’re in danger, which brings me to my second point, trust the bracelet more than your eyes. You see something, you treat it like a snake, stay still, don’t spook it—”

“Don’t spook it?”

Sister Mary ignored the interruption. “The ones who can hurt you, who’ll set off the beads, those you won’t see coming.”

Guidry tried not to let it show how much her words got to him, but he gripped the wheel a bit tighter. Leo, Bonney, and Sister Mary got out of the truck. Bonney fixed his satchel of lockpicks across his chests, tightened the strap, and then put his jacket on over it and buttoned up. Leo had insisted, no loose straps, not billowing coats. Nothing that that could get snagged. Leo had heard the stories of the old gun slinger who visited the grave of his victim and died of a heart attack when something reached up and grabbed his coat. Sister Mary had traded her wimple for a tight black knit cap, identical to what Leo and Bonney wore. Guidry was not sure whether a real nun would be allowed to do that.

“Etienne,” Leo said, resting his hands on the sill of the open truck window. “You ready?”

Guidry took a long breath. “Oui.”

Leo nodded firmly and patted the side of the truck. “Counting on you.”

Leo, Bonney and Sister Mary started the long walk up to the house, cutting across the overgrown lawn and avoiding the twisting path to the back door. Guidry watched them go, counting the seconds. How long did it take them to get into the house at a walk? How long would it take them to get out at a run? Bonney kneeled at the door, his back to Guidry and the bayou. Four seconds and the door was open. Five more and the three of them disappeared inside. The timetable said twenty minutes inside. Guidry had driven the roads. His pépé ran moonshine on them. He knew the roads backwards and in the dark—and he made a point of never, ever, looking at the sides of the road as he drove.

Now he watched them, scanning for the jackknife curve that had blown up more good moonshiners than federal agents ever had. He found it, and took it slowly, not for safety, but to see little lip of dirt on the side. A girl stood there, in a tattered dress some sixty years out of date. She stuck her thumb out at the road. Guidry took a long breath in, held it, then let it out. He pulled over to the side of the road and rolled down his window.

“Need a lift?”

The girl started, like she had only just noticed Guidry was there, despite the awful racket his truck made. He glanced at the beaded bracelets on his wrist and his mirror—both still intact. The girl’s expression shifted to something softer. She nodded and walked around to the passenger side. Guidry leaned over the bench seat and unlocked the door.

“Thank you kindly sir. My home is just up the road. A little shack with a green door.”

“I know,” Guidry said. He watched for any sign she had heard him but got none. “But that’s not where we’re going.”

He pulled back onto the road and made a sharp turn back the way he had come. This time he made no effort to scan the sides of the road. He knew every twist and turn and drove them without headlights. This had to be timed just right—and if any police were waiting in the trees looking for moonshiners, he could not afford the delay of being searched.

The girl in the passenger seat looked troubled, but not as much as one would expect of someone traveling at racing speeds in the dark going the opposite direction they hoped to be.

“It’s the other way,” she said, her voice vacant.

“I know, but I ain’t taking you home. I’m taking you to see your brother.”

***

The job would not be half as hard if somebody would just shut that damn piano up. Bonney put tension on probing tool and felt around with the pick.

“It’s actually a harpsichord,” Sister Mary said, pacing a slow line back and forth behind him with a lit candle in her hand, which Bonney thought slightly defeated the purpose of the blackout lanterns in the first place.

Bonney rolled his eyes, though facing the safe nobody could see.

“Well it’s bloody annoying.”

The pia—harpsichord had started up as they made their way through the ballroom. It spooked Bonney more than he would ever admit, though he tried not to show it. His first thought had been that all of old Leo’s stories were true, that they really were robbing a haunted house and the vengeful spirits were playing mind games. He had taken a breath, steadied his nerves like he steadied his hands before going to work on a lock. That was crazy. It would be some tramp who had taken up in the house trying to scare them off. A place like this, even with the gators, had to be a good life for a tramp. Then they had passed the harpsichord and Bonney had seen the keys moving on their own, tapping out a dour march, a funeral march. His first instinct had been right and the world was mad now. He kept his mind on the safe, focusing as narrowly as he could on the job so he would not have to think about the rest of it.

The tumblers clicked as he rotated the dial. A rod of steel stuck out of a small hole drilled into the metal, just wide enough to keep the tension on the inner mechanism. This safe was a work of art, a beautiful puzzle that made no sense. Leo said three separate craftsman had contributed to the design, but Bonney saw the markers of at least half a dozen. He was here for the loot of course, but a part of him would have loved to take the safe home and study it.

“Making progress?” Sister Mary said, her tone airy. The candle flickered in the still air.

“You do your job, let me do mine.” He pressed his ear to the cool metal, adjusted his tension rod slightly, and gave the dial another quarter turn.

The sound of release—shifting metal and moving air, hit his ear. The tension rod went slack and the door opened without a creek. He felt Leo’s breath at his cheek as the old man leaned over his shoulder. Even Sister Mary stopped her pacing to come see.

Leo clapped him on the shoulder. “Ata’boy Seb.”

“Crickey O’Reilly,” Bonney blurted.

The inside of the safe shimmered with bricks of gold bullion. Rackham had owned shares in mines out west, and there was scuttlebutt in town that his father had been a pirate once upon a time. Gold was the best loot to find. Smelting made turning it into cash easy—the only downside was the weight.

Something nagged at the back of Bonney’s mind though. Something about the story did not add up. Rackham had a safe full of gold that was never recovered—just lying around when he and the rest of the overlords of the city died.

The damned harpsichord still churned out its tune and Bonney decided this could wait until they were out. He reached a hand in to grab the gold. Leo snatched at his wrist. For an old man he had a strong grip, and Bonney had delicate safecracker’s hands. He looked over his shoulder at the old man.

“Not yet Seb.”

“Quicker we’re into it the quicker we’re out of it,” Bonney said, fighting Leo’s grip just a bit.

“We’re not into it yet Seb. Sister Mary, are we ready?”

Sister Mary had stopped her pacing. Bonney noticed how dark her eye’s were without the light of the lantern, like doll’s eyes.

“One can never be ready for this, but we are prepared.”

Bonney made a face at that but nobody saw it. Leo’s eyes were on Sister Mary and Sister Mary’s eyes were on the opened safe. Leo gave Bonney’s wrist a little tug. He took the old man’s signal and stepped away. Maybe he thought the safe was booby trapped. Maybe Sister Mary was just here to check for explosives. Bonney was, after all, a precision safe cracker, not some dynamite happy smash and grab man. An extra expert might be smart.

The wiry woman stepped up to the safe. She rolled up her sleeves and the blue of the bracelet on her wrist sparkled in the lantern light. Bonney found himself holding his breath as she reached into the safe. The tips of her fingers brushed against the bullion.

The bracelet on her wrist snapped, beads clattering across the floor. At the same moment the bracelets on Bonney and Leo shattered as well. Dozens of little painted eyes rolled around the floor, starring in all directions.

“Run,” Sister Mary said.

Bonney remembered her warnings. Remembered all the ghost stories. Remembered the music which had finally stopped. Maybe it was all real. Maybe it was some incredible hoax, but he did not want to stay to find out. He had been on enough blags to know that when somebody shouted run the smart ones ran. The greedy ones ended up pinched by the coppers. There were no coppers in this place, but Bonney’s mind swirled with plenty of other things that could be waiting to pinch him.

He and Sister Mary were halfway through the grand ballroom by the time he realized Leo was not with them. Two thoughts flashed across his mind. The phrase no honor among thieves and the possibility that Leo had engineered this whole spook show to cut them out of the loot. Bonney skidded to a stop on the dusty marble floor and turned for the first time to look back. Sister Mary kept running.

***

The tools of the exorcist were many and varied. Sister Mary was not as protected by faith alone as she had once been, but plenty of cultures knew how to deal with ghosts and most of them agreed on good old salt. Sister Mary, a low down swamp rat first and a holy woman second, favored a shotgun. Luckily, the two were easily combined.

She passed Bonney just as he turned around. Don’t look back should have been part of her initial spiel. She reminded herself never to underestimate how curiosity could overrun survival instinct. The shotgun was in her hands as the shade bore down on him. She squeezed the trigger, blasting rock salt into its billowy folds. Bonney screamed high and shrill. The shade expanded like a cloud of steam in a gust of wind, spreading out to the far corners of the room.

A new sound joined Bonney’s fearful cry. Sister Mary grabbed his wrist and pulled. Worse things than some middling shade had been woken when she touched that gold. She tossed away the shotgun, letting it clatter across the dusty ballroom floor. It had one shot and the same method would not be useful against the next specter to come after them. The house had sent the pawns first.

“What was…that was…”

“Hush child,” Sister Mary said, pulling Bonney around a tight corner.

She had the house mapped out in her head. This hallway should lead into Rackham’s study—the place where he presided over his criminal enterprises, most likely the place where he planned the murder of his guests. It was a big interior room, with heavy doors and reinforced walls—build to hold off an army of police or angry crooks, whichever came for him first.

The doors swung open and Bonney nearly ran right through them before Sister Mary yanked him back. The pair of them looked down the shear back wall of the house, a three story drop straight into the bayou.

“But…but…we were on the ground…we were…”

“Yes, yes,” Sister Mary said, growing irritated with Bonney’s statements of the obvious.

A classic trick of powerful entities, especially ones with an intrinsic link to the location they inhabited. Folks like Bonney, unaccustomed to the supernatural tended to focus on the how of it. Sister Mary understood that the how was unimportant. Cause and effect was important. The cause was their attempting to escape through Rackham’s innermost sanctum, the effect was their being deposited far away.

She fished around in her bag and pulled out a rope and hook. The hook fit nicely over the wrought iron wall sconces beside the window, and a quick tug told her it was secure…give or take a wobble. But who has time to worry about a wobble.

“I hope your fingers are as nimble on the ropes as they were on the lock.”

Bonney was still blinking at the room, as though it might make sense if his fluttered his eyelids enough.

“What?”

“Climb second story man,” Sister Mary snapped.

It was enough to shock Bonney onto the rope. Sister Mary turned away from the window as he began his descent. She would have to trust him to make it down on his own. The door they had come through—or perhaps it was not the door they had come through but it was the door into this room at any rate—was buckling, swelling and receding like a great heaving chest. It was an old ghost’s trick, like the flashing lights of a bank alarm, it was more to scare intruders. Bark as opposed to bite. Sister Mary took a stripped holly branch out of her bag, treated with various oils and sharpened to a point at the end. In Norse mythology such a thing had felled a god. Mary doubted her replica would be as powerful as that.

The door continued to buckle. Sister Mary chanced a glance down. Bonney was just clearing the second floor. When she looked back at the door it had vanished completely, replaced by a black void that wavered in folds like a muslin screen. Sister Mary squared her shoulders. The blaring lights had failed and now they would be sending the dogs—metaphorical dogs she hoped. Ghost dogs were always such a hassle.

The black void exploded outward, swallowing the room in shadow. Sister Mary took a step back, arched her arm back and hurled the sharpened branch like a javelin. It disappeared into the void. The encroaching darkness paused and receded. Sister Mary took her chance. She leapt backwards as the darkness exploded out again, faster than before and with a definite angry aura that felt like fire against her skin.

As she fell out of the window she grabbed hold of the rope, it burned her hands, threatening to strip a layer of skin but that was the least of her worries. There were ointments for that sort of thing. What the darkness would do to her could not be soothed as easily. She slid down the rope, colliding with Bonney at the bottom. The pair of them hit the mud in a tangled heap. The walls of the house buckled like a great beast heaving a massive breath. The sharpened stick of holly shot out of the third floor opening, flipping end over end at fantastic speeds and landing, point down, in the much just a hair off from Sister Mary’s eye. She said something very un-nun-like. The two thieves untangled themselves and scurried away.

Twin pinpricks of light approached from the dark trees behind them. A roar like a firebomb shook the house.

***

Leo peeled himself off the floor. The room spun—literally spun around him, the walls turning, bending and stretching, while the floor stayed perfectly still. She shut his eyes, not out of fear, but just to keep from getting dizzy.

He had Rackham on the ropes.

“Come on out here you thieving, murdering, cheating…” he threw in a few more expletives before ending with “bastard.” The walls spun faster. “Haven’t you heard, you can’t take it with you. I’m here to take all your blood soaked gold. What are you going to do about it?”

The walls rippled, wooden planks rising and falling like feathers on a massive bird of prey. The room snapped into stillness. Leo spread his arms for balance. Then the voice came, not a human voice, made from air and flesh. This voice came from the house, came from the creaking of floorboards, the shattering of windows, the phantom keys of the damned harpsichord.

“Many have tried. All have died.”

“You including yourself in that? Poisoned trying to swindle all your filthy friends out of their loot.”

“A servant’s folly brought my end. But allowed me the power to fully ascend.”

“Rhyming son of a…” Leo muttered. “You call this ascendence? Trapped in your house, overrun with ghouls and gators. Your tricks are played out man. Everyone and their mother knows all the stories of the haunted Rackham manor. You’re like a bank that thinks it can’t be robbed, publishing your security system in the paper to taunt the thieves.”

“You think knowledge will be your salvation, but it has only led to your damnation.”

Leo checked his watch.

“Same goes pal.” He threw himself behind a divan just as the window exploded in a shower of stained glass.

Shards clattered against the hardwood floor and shattered against the walls. Light filled the room and a long note vied for dominance with the ringing in Leo’s ears. He stood up calmly and brushed the stray glass off his legs, checking for cuts or knicks like he had during the war. Guidry’s truck sat half in the house. It had taken out a good chunk of the wall along with the window.. One of the headlights had taken a support strut and shattered, leaving only one bulb to light up the room. The back of the truck hung out into the yard. Guidry peeled himself off the wheel, and the long sound of the horn cut out.

“Right on time Etienne.”

The Cajun blinked a couple of times and then opened the door and stumbled out of the truck. A truckle of blood ran along his hairline and down the side of his face. Leo looked to the passenger seat.

She shimmered in a pool of her own light, radiant like an altar candle.

“Leopold.”

Something long buried swelled inside Leo’s chest at her voice, at his name in her voice. Something he truly thought he would never hear again.

“Hello Leona,” he said, his voice cracking.

She blinked out in the truck and reappeared in front of it. The light of the headlamp shone right through her, picking up little motes of light like dust in the air.

“How we doing boss?”

“Just fine so far Etienne. You might wanna take a seat.”

Guidry gave a woozy thumbs up.

The house shuddered—planks of wood ruffling along the walls like the feathers of a furious bird of prey. Leo felt the shift in energy, the unseen eye of the house, of Rackham, shifting from him to Leona.

***

How many kind souls had tried to take her home? How many wicked souls had tried to take her somewhere else. After so long, who she had been had become less important than who she was—what she was. The specter of the hairpin turn. The light in the corner of your eye as you narrowly avoid a fallen tree. The shade hovering over you as your car plunged into the bayou. Her name had once been Leona. She remembered now.

She remembered who she was, where she was. The Mansion still stood, and Rackham’s spirit clung to it like rot on a corpse, festering. She looked at her brother, so much older now, older than she had ever been. She smiled at him. Tongues of flame flickered at the edge of her smile. Vengeance had returned to Rackham Manor.

***

The gold was heavy—the weight of new wealth. Guidry was spared from having to carry anything has he was still dazed from putting his truck through the window. Leo himself had backed it out of Rackham’s study as the flames ate up the house. He swore he heard a man screaming as the house crumbled to ash and cinders, and a woman laughing. Leo, Guidry, Bonney, and Sister Molly watched the house burn until there was nothing left.

“Never seen a fire just eat something up like that.” Bonney said.

Sister Mary sat on the back bumper of the truck and wiped sweat from her brow with the back of her hand.

“The power of the soul…oh fuck it. Ghosts are weird, they do what they want.” She dug one of the gold bars out of the bag and weighed it in her hand, smiling to herself.

Guidry stumbled over to old Leo and placed a hand on his shoulder.

“You got what you wanted out of this?”

The old man smiled, his face creasing in places it had never creased before. A gust of warm air blew past them, and the soft, gentle laugh of a lady.

“I think we did.”

***

Liam Espinoza-Zemlicka is a writer, teacher, and anthropologist from Southern California. He has been published in academic journals on the nature of race in fan spaces and the use of graphic novels as teaching tools. As an anthropologist, he has taught classes on language, religion, magic, and witchcraft. His fiction has previously been published in Grim and Gilded, and Uncharted Magazine where he was a winner of their 2023 Novel Excerpt Prize. As he routinely forgets to save a copy of this bio for submissions he has copy/pasted this from the last time he was published in Grim and Gilded and changed around a few things. He no longer minds if people notice, it's sort of a bit at this point.