Page 1 of The Most Unusual Haunting of Edgar Lovejoy

Edgar

Beyond the beaded curtains of the Never Lounge was another world.

Light spangled every surface and caught in hazy shafts of perfumed smoke that plumed from the stage. Velvet-flocked walls, a cascade of velvet curtains, the velvet shred of a horn bellying low…the darkened club embraced Edgar before his eyes could adjust.

Someone called his name, and he blinked away the haze until he could pick out the familiar form of Helen Vang waving him over to the high-top table they were sharing with Veronica Deslonde and Greta Russakoff.

Empty glasses, bottles, and cigarette packets littered the tabletop, and they whooped a greeting as he joined them.

Edgar steeled himself for the discomfort of socializing and tried to smile.

Helen turned to Veronica and held out their hand. With a humph, Veronica pulled a bill from her cleavage and handed it to them.

“You just cost me ten bucks,” Veronica said, but she kissed his cheek with as much welcome as she always did, the delicious honey-smoke scent of her calming him.

“I never doubted you,” Helen crowed.

Greta snorted and whispered, “They changed their bet three minutes ago,” as she hugged him hello.

“I come to stuff,” Edgar grumbled. But he didn’t grumble too loudly, because it wasn’t true, strictly speaking.

Carys, Greta’s partner, approached with an armful of drinks. Her eyes widened when she saw him. “Oh wow,” she said, sliding the drinks onto the table. “You showed!”

But she elbowed Edgar teasingly, and he tried to relax.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Get you a drink?” Carys asked.

“No, thanks.”

“Edible?” Helen proffered an Altoids tin covered in glitter, and he waved it off.

“I’m good.”

As Edgar’s eyes adjusted to the dim light and his friends’ conversation picked back up around him, he began his habitual scan of the room.

The trick was to keep your gaze steady but unfocused, letting your eyes pick up on anything that unusual. The brain snagged on standout things more easily that way. Of course, at a queer burlesque show in New Orleans, there were standout things everywhere Edgar looked.

Lava lamps on the lip of the proscenium glowed with orange, pink, and violet globules that drifted, broke, and recombined in hypnotic pulsations; ostrich feathers riffled in the breeze of the overhead fans.

Performers slunk through the crowd, eyes and mouths exaggerated or erased, hair pomaded slick or piled high, rhinestones and sequins and glitter twinkling in the light, bootheels and tap heels and high heels click-clacking a chaotic rhythm that underlaid the music’s driving moan.

The atmosphere caressed every sense, and a tingle began in Edgar’s inner thighs and flushed through him.

It was seductive, but allowing himself to be seduced meant his guard would be down, so he shook it off and forced himself to breathe evenly as he resumed scanning the room, searching, as ever, for things that shouldn’t be there.

Creatures that shouldn’t be there. Because they shouldn’t exist at all.

What he usually caught first was a glimmer—light catching their nonforms differently than the living, because they weren’t made of the same corporeal stuff. But in the dark, he couldn’t depend on that.

If not a glimmer, then sometimes it was a mirage—the air between him and the entity wavy like the hottest days of August. But with the stage lights and dim houselights and the smoke and dust motes catching in both, right now he couldn’t depend on that either.

A familiar itch of panic sparked, and Edgar inhaled through his nose and exhaled slowly through his mouth, noting the glowing red exit signs as beacons of escape.

The conversation had moved to the new flavor that Helen, Veronica, and Greta were developing for Lagniappe Lemonade, the cocktail business they’d developed the year before.

Edgar worked for them part-time, delivering the bottles of artisanal hard lemonade made with New Orleans–grown lemons and herbs and sweetened with the honey from Veronica’s bees.

He’d quickly learned that Helen, Veronica, and Greta were as close as family, and—used to it from his own sister—he’d welcomed their sibling-esque meddling and prying with equanimity.

It was why he had come tonight. They invited him to things often.

Dancing, dinner parties, game nights. He rarely attended, citing his other job or a family obligation or—as often as it was believable from someone they teased for having no social life—other plans.

But he’d wanted to see the queer burlesque show that some of Helen’s friends were performing in.

The boldness of burlesque had always intrigued him.

Now that he was here though, he regretted it. Even as he tried to remain calm, the air became thick in his throat, and his ribs clutched at his heart.

“Bathroom,” Edgar mumbled and made his escape.

He wound through the crowd, careful not to brush up against anyone if he could help it. If there was one of them in the crowd and he touched it by mistake, ice would slide down his spine and twist his gut.

The bathroom was nearly as crowded as the club, but the second a stall opened up, Edgar sank down on the toilet seat and cradled his head in his hands.

He considered calling Allie and letting her calm him down, but he’d been trying not to do that as much anymore.

His sister had enough to take care of—like growing a whole person while she ran her own business.

He didn’t need to throw his panic attacks into the mix.

The thing about seeing ghosts was that there weren’t a whole lot of resources out there for dealing with it.

You couldn’t tell a therapist because they’d think you were crazy, couldn’t dial a hotline or hire an expert for advice because they didn’t have any, couldn’t pop a pill to make them disappear.

Edgar knew because he’d tried all those things and more over the years.

Absent these solutions, Edgar had developed his own tools for coping with his unique problem, hiding in bathroom stalls chief among them.

Edgar took slow, deep breaths, keeping his eyes open to avoid being startled.

Instead of calling Allie, he opened the video feed that he’d set up to check on the new kitten arrivals at the cat café where he worked. As he watched, his pounding heart slowed, and his breathing evened.

I hate this. I just wanted one night.

“You okay in there, dude?” a voice said. When no one else responded, Edgar cleared his throat in what he hoped was an affirmative noise. The bathroom door opened and closed again, leaving him in relative quiet.

“I hate this,” he whispered once he was alone. He opened the stall door, making sure to avoid the mirror—you never knew what might be reflected behind you—and left the bathroom to rejoin his friends.

At the table, Helen now had their arm slung around the waist of a fat red-haired guy with a glorious beard.

“But it takes place in four timelines, each one year apart,” they were saying as Edgar approached. “Oh, Edgar, good, this is Isak, my friend who’s performing in the second act. Cat café,” Helen said, pointing to Edgar.

“I need another cat,” Isak said, his eyes wide and sparkling. He screwed up his nose. “Not need , like, require for blood sacrifice or anything. Need like caaaats .” He drawled the word with the worshipful delight of a cat lover.

“There’s a form to fill out for adoption. Don’t write anything about blood sacrifice on it, and you’ll radically increase your chances of success,” Edgar said.

Belatedly, he remembered to smile, and then Isak laughed.

“Ha! I couldn’t tell if you were kidding.”

“Edgar’s never kidding,” Greta told Isak.

“Or,” Veronica proposed, “is he always kidding?”

Edgar cringed. “We open at nine,” he said. “I’m gonna grab some water. Get y’all something?”

Confirming that everyone had a full beverage, Edgar made his second escape. He didn’t have it in him to meet anyone else.

He ordered a sparkling water with lime from the preoccupied bartender and wedged himself between the bar and the wall so nothing could sneak up on him.

The wallpaper was an ornate pattern of orchids and foliage, blue-black flocking on an oxblood field.

Edgar traced a bloom with his fingertip, some areas of the velvet soft with age and dust, others brittle enough to crumble onto his fingertips.

“It’s a reproduction.”

Edgar startled back around.

“The wallpaper. It’s not the original. People ask sometimes.”

The person who’d spoken wore a smoking jacket in peacock colors, a vee of creamy skin just visible between the parting edges of the silk.

“Oh,” Edgar said intelligently, distracted by the stranger’s beauty. A curl of their light brown hair fell over one bright blue eye smudged with black eyeliner.

“The original was modeled after a Jean-Baptiste Réveillon in Paris, but this replaced it after a fire in the seventies.” The alluring stranger smiled. “I’m Jamie. I use they/them pronouns.”

“Hey. Edgar. He/him.” Flustered, Edgar dropped his gaze and blinked at the wallpaper. “Are you an interior designer?”

Jamie smiled, revealing prominent eyeteeth and charming dimples. “Nope. Just a casual wallpaper historian.”

Jamie’s nose crinkled, and Edgar was captivated.

“I perform here, so I’ve heard a lot of conversations about this place. You know, the tourists who are following online guides and tours and stuff? They come in here all the time wanting to see the original wallpaper because it was featured in this cult movie from the sixties.”

Edgar knew the type. “Um. Are you performing tonight?”

Jamie raised one dark eyebrow. “Mm-hmm. You sticking around?”

Heat kindled in Edgar’s gut at the idea of seeing stunning Jamie take off their clothes onstage, followed immediately by guilt.

Jamie’s eyebrow rose impossibly higher, like maybe they knew what he was thinking, and Edgar hesitated.

The thing about being able to see ghosts was the question it raised—that if ghosts existed, what other creatures considered mythical were real?

It was hard to dismiss the possibility of vampires, werewolves, aliens, or troublingly attractive strangers who might be able to read your thoughts.

“Can you read minds by any chance?” Edgar asked, then shook his head. “Just kidding. Yeah, I’m here with my friends.”

“Not generally, but I think I can read yours right now,” Jamie said.

Their voice was half flirtation, half amusement.

They put fingers to their temples and closed their eyes, in the pose of a performative fortune teller.

Their soft lashes fluttered in the dim light.

“You’re wondering if it’s weird to be talking to someone you’re about to see almost naked onstage.

Then that makes you picture me naked, and you feel bad about that.

But you realize I choose to do it, so you’re wondering if it’s shitty to feel awkward because that kind of implies that I don’t have agency. Am I close?”

Edgar blinked, narrowing his eyes to make sure there was no discernible glimmer or mirage in the air between them. He contemplated whether there was any socially acceptable way to touch Jamie and make sure they were real.

“Is that what everyone thinks?” he asked.

Jamie shook their head. “Most people stop at the picturing me naked part.”

The bartender finally slid Edgar’s drink across the bar to him.

“So, um.” But Edgar couldn’t think of anything to say.

Jamie gave him a small smile and gestured to his drink. “May I?”

Edgar handed it to them, holding his breath against the moment their fingers would touch. When they did, Edgar nearly let out a sigh of relief at the brush of warm, rough fingertips. A fine frisson ran through him, more delicate and complicated than the vertiginous slide of ice down his spine.

Jamie’s full lips lingered on the rim of the glass, and they signaled to the bartender, who poured them a whiskey.

They seemed utterly at ease. Edgar took a deep breath and squared his shoulders in an attempt to find a similar self-confidence but ended up nervously scanning the club again. When he refocused on Jamie, they were watching him curiously.

“So what is your act like?” Edgar finally managed.

Jamie threw back the whiskey, squeezed their eyes tight against the burn, and then grinned. “You’re just gonna have to stick around and find out, Edgar.”

They winked and disappeared into the crowd in a swish of silk and curls.

Edgar gaped. He supposed he had until the end of the show to come up with something more impressive to say.