Murder of Angels (38 page)

Daria takes another cigarette from the pocket of her jacket and goes back to watching the house. “You followed me here,” she says, slipping the unlit Marlboro between her lips, “because you were scared to let me come alone.”

“Fine, but now we’ve seen all there is to see, and it’s time for you to go home. I’ve got a room downtown for the night, and we can get a flight back—”

“Do you think I killed Niki?” Daria asks, mumbling around the filter of the cigarette. Alex makes a disgusted, scoffing sound and kicks at the dead leaves.

“No, Dar, I don’t think you, or anyone else, killed Niki,” and it’s easy to hear how hard he’s working to stay calm, to be patient, to keep his voice down and steady. “Why do I even have to say this again? Niki was sick, and what happened to her wasn’t your fault.”

“That’s what you think?”

“That’s what I bloody well
know
. Now, let’s get back in the goddamn car. I’m freezing my balls off.”

“I know what you’re thinking, Alex. All the things I told you last night, the things I saw in there. You think I’m insane.”

“Is that why you never told Niki’s shrink any of it?” he asks, and Daria glances at him and then back to the house. The front door’s closed now, but the window to the right of it is broken, one of the windows looking in on the bedroom where she found Niki all those years ago, kneeling before the white thing. The afternoon sun glints off jagged glass fangs, and the cops said that was probably one of the ways the bums and crackheads had been getting into the place. The same window that she broke, once upon a time, because the house wouldn’t let them out any other way. Not the same windowpane, but the same goddamn window.

“It’s not good for you to be here, out in the cold like this,” Alex says.

“It’s not good for anyone to be here,” Daria replies, the fingers of her left hand toying with the ball bearing through the lining of her leather jacket. The cloth, the steel beneath it, feels warm to the touch, but she knows that it’s just heat stolen from her own shivering body.

“Come on,” Alex says. “Let’s go someplace warm. Let’s find some coffee.”

You have to find it for me, Daria,
Niki said to her on the plane, Niki’s ghost or her dream of Niki.
You have to find it and bring it to the basement of Spyder’s house.
Daria shuts her eyes, listening to the wind and the traffic down on Sixteenth, a few birds and a helicopter somewhere far away.

I saw it,
she thinks.
I saw it all that night,
what Spyder had become at the last and all the evil secrets bubbling up from the belly of this house. And again she imagines burning it, setting cleansing flames to dance beneath the limbs of these trees, the smell of smoke to tell her it was all finally over.

“I fucking saw it,” she says, letting the Marlboro fall from her lips to lie in the dead brown leaves. “I saw everything, Alex, just exactly like Niki always said,
more
than Niki said. But I never admitted it. I thought if I ever admitted it, that would make it true,” and then she stops to wipe her dripping nose on the sleeve of her jacket and realizes that she’s crying.

“But it was true anyway,” she whispers. “It was true all along, and
that’s
how I killed Niki.” And the long shadows falling in dark and crooked streaks across the front porch of the house draw irrefutable lines of confirmation—lines leading her from then all the way to now, from that night ten years ago to this moment, from ghosts to daylight, from nightmares into wakefulness—and she knows its face, this house, and it knows hers.

“Dar, please, let’s get the fuck out of here,” Alex says, and, without another word, she slides off the hood and gets back into the car, because she doesn’t want the house to see her cry.

This is someone else, not me,
Niki thinks. Not,
This is not happening
or
This is not real,
because nothing in her life has ever felt half so real; all her doubt nested solidly in the infeasible reality of her
place
in this bright and undeniable moment: standing on the foredeck with Scarborough Pentecost and Malim and his first mate, a one-eared dwarf named Hobsen.

Around them the sea has gone almost as still as glass, and the ropes and canvas above them hang slack in air so still that Niki could believe no wind has ever blown in this place. And the bowsprit, like a wooden giant’s finger, pointing up and out and at the heart of the maelstrom of light and thunder blocking their path. Niki keeps thinking it looks like a hurricane made from electricity instead of clouds, then turned on its side and half-submerged. A thousand feet across, she guesses, a thousand feet at least, and five hundred feet high. Its eye is the hard-candy color of a ruby, and at the edges of its counterclockwise rotation, the sea steams and bubbles and dead, boiled things swell and float to the surface.

“See that muck there, missy?” Malim growls, and he glares down at Niki. “That’s a right proper demon, that is. That there’s my greed finally come callin’ for me.” And Niki wonders that he can see her, that he would bother to talk to her, because she isn’t here at all. She’s somewhere else, surely, only
watching
this, and in a minute or two more she’ll turn to Marvin and comment on the hokey special effects or ask him to change the channel, please. There must be something better on.

“What is it?” Niki asks Scarborough, and he shakes his head.

“Hell if I know. Maybe a portal,” he says.

“
Maybe
a portal,” Malim sneers. “Did ye hear that, Hobsen? This one ’ere, he thinks
maybe
it’s a portal,” and then, to Scarborough, “You know damn well what that thing is, just the same as me. It’s the ’andiwork of the red witches, come to claim themselves a prize—” and Malim tugs hard at Niki’s left ear. She slaps his hand away, but even the pain in her earlobe seems disconnected, distant, like something she remembers having felt a long time ago.
Dissociation,
Dr. Dalby would have said, peering at her through his spectacles, or perhaps
depersonalization,
one of those rambling, clinical words he trotted out whenever he wanted to say that her mind was trying to fashion a safe place for her to hide and only getting her into deeper trouble.

“I say we take the lifeboats and leave ’em here,” the dwarf says and nervously wrings his small, grimy hands. “There weren’t nothin’ in our contract with the fish augur ’bout facin’ down the Nesmidians, so I call it all null and void. If the red witches wants these two, fine, they can be my guest.”

“I didn’t steal this ship just so’s a bunch of ’arlots and ’arpies could come along and wreck it,” Malim says, and then he kicks Hobsen. “If anyone’s going into a dinghy this day, it’ll be the prophet and her seasick companion ’ere, not me nor mine.”

Above them, the sky is turning from chalk white to an unhealthy, milky yellow, and Niki feels the fine hairs on the back of her neck and arms stand on end.

“The red witches don’t want your leaking rat-tub of a boat,” Scarborough says and scowls at Malim. “And they sure as hell don’t want you.”

“What if it’s not the Nesmidians,” the dwarf whispers fearfully. “What if maybe it’s the Dragon hisself,” and Malim tells him to shut up and kicks him again, harder than before.

“It only wants me,” Niki says quietly, certain that she’s right, and the detachment that’s been clouding her head since she first saw the spinning disc rising from the sea vanishes.

Nicolan, we could sit here arguing reality all day long,
Dr. Dalby tells her, speaking up from some afternoon that’s already over and done with, or some afternoon that comes after she finally finds her way back to San Francisco, or, she thinks, some afternoon that has never been and never will be.
We could talk Descartes and Kant, metaphysics and epistemology, until bullfrogs grow wings and insects build rocket ships. But where’s that gonna get us?

The ruby eye at the motionless center of the vortex begins to pulse, one red flare after the next in quick succession, the breathless space between pulses growing shorter and shorter, and Niki steps forward, so she’s sure that it sees her.

“I’m right here,” she says, and the pulses stop as abruptly as they began.

Try to think of it this way,
Dr. Dalby suggests, as he digs about in the bowl of his pipe, dislodging ash with a small silver scoop.
Imagine the universe is all of one essence, so that both consciousness and substance must be essentially identical.

“Scarborough, I think you should all leave now,” Niki says, and she motions towards the stern with her bandaged hand. “And I think you should probably hurry.” In a heartbeat, the maelstrom has doubled in size and is beginning to turn clockwise.

Idealism, dualism, materialism, materio-dualism, it’s all the same damn thing, in the end. These ideas are only minor variations on the same eternal chord, the same psychic resonance in the void.

“Go,”
Scarborough tells Malim and the dwarf, and then he steps forward to stand beside Niki.

“Wot’s this?” Malim grunts indignantly. “What about me money, eh? I entered into an ’onest covenant wiv that old whore Chattox, and I expect
full
remuneration—” but Hobsen is already dragging the smuggler away towards the stairs leading steeply down from the foredeck.

“Do you know what’s happening?” Scarborough asks her, and Niki shakes her head.

“Not exactly,” she says. “But I know that thing’s looking for me, and there’s no way to run from it. And I know you should go, because it isn’t looking for you.”

“Sorry, Vietnam. But I made Esme a promise, and, unfortunately, I’m a man of my word. Most of the time.” He takes her good hand, his sweaty palm slick against hers, his fingers so strong, and she’s glad that whatever’s coming, she doesn’t have to face it alone.

I’m here,
she thinks and keeps her eyes on the center of the vortex.
What are you waiting for?

From the flickering, feathery edges of the maelstrom, lightning tendrils snake out across the water and crackle loudly through the masts and rigging.

Are you real, Nicolan?
Dr. Dalby asks her as he stuffs fresh cherry-scented tobacco into his pipe.
Am I? Are all the things that Spyder showed you? Is
any
of this real? If you can answer that one question, to your
own
satisfaction, I think you’ll find all the courage that you’re ever going to need.

“Hang on tight,” Niki says, and then the lightning sweeps down from the foremast, and they fall into the ruby eye of the storm.

I
n the basement beneath the old house, the red witch sits on earth packed almost as solid as cement, dry clay gone the color of cayenne or weathered bricks, and she watches the thing growing from the low ceiling. She’s been watching it for hours, by the bobbing globe of blue-white light she summoned with a murmur, amazed and horrified at Theda’s determined metamorphosis. It started only a few minutes after Walter died, a few minutes after the red witch put a bullet in his head. She dragged his body,
bump-bump-bump,
down the wooden stairs and left it lying in a heap in the center of the basement floor, because she figured Theda might get hungry later on.

Hours and hours watching the swollen, dripping thing, night and day and then night again, and she’s recited every prayer and blessing that she learned before she died and the towers on the banks of the Yärin were lost to her forever. Words and almost-words that were at least enough to hide them from the police that the Hierophant’s lover brought with her, and also enough to grant her the patience to wait. Because she knows that Daria Parker will return, and next time she’ll come alone.

The floorboards and sagging joists creak and pop from the increasing weight of the thing suspended in its black chrysalis, and Archer Day aims her pistol at it again. Staring down the barrel of the .38 and reminding herself that she
still
has choices, maybe not so many as she had the night before, but that’s the price of decision, the price of action. The ebony membrane holding the thing together shudders, and Archer puts as much pressure on the trigger as she dares. Only a
little
more, and the hammer would fall, and the gun would fire, and then the future would change again.

“Can you hear me in there, little girl?” she asks Theda, and the chrysalis shudders again, straining at hardened secretions and the countless riblike cremasters holding it in place. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” and she wonders if Theda knows that they brought her down here to murder her, that Walter took the bullet meant for the Weaver’s surrogate. The bullet inscribed with the secret names of two goddesses, the ravenous ladies of flame and ice, the bullet Archer anointed with melissa and arsenic and dandelions.

“What the hell’s this rotting world to me?” Archer whispers to herself as she lowers the gun again. “Let the Dragon have it
all,
” but she knows that she doesn’t sound half so confident as she did the night before. She doesn’t
feel
half so confident, either, and curses herself for being weak after all she’s seen, for falling to the temptations of the great red wolf, but also for ever having bought into the childish faith and suicidal altruism of the Sect in the first place.

The basement smells dry, like dust and cobwebs and the spores of a dozen different fungi, but Archer can’t smell the chrysalis, as if it has no scent.

“This was never
my
war, little girl. Four years ago, I was still a goddamn child. Of course, it had to be a child they sent, didn’t it? No one else would have gone through with such madness.”

The chrysalis skin ripples, and more of the green-black fluid leaks from the thumb-sized spiracles spaced unevenly along its sides, dripping to the dirt floor and onto Walter’s corpse.

“Oh, you
are
hungry aren’t you? I bet you’re starving to death in there, poor thing,” and Archer watches as the thick fluid slowly breaks down flesh and bone and cartilage, turning it into something soft, something gelatinous, something that the thing growing inside the chrysalis can use when the time comes.

“Soon, little girl,” Archer promises, looking away from the dead man to glance down at her wristwatch, the one she bought in Manhattan years ago, cheap watch from a Chinatown kiosk, gold hands gliding endlessly across a field of white. “Not much longer, and then I bet you’ll never be hungry again.”

She used her bare hands to trace a perfect circle an inch deep into the hard dirt below the chrysalis, a holding circle to enclose Walter’s body safely within its circumference and serve as the Hierophant’s focal point. All the numbers in her head to guide her raw and bleeding hands—mathematics, alchemy, geometry—and the forbidden language of the singing rocks along the Serpent’s Road slipping easily from her lips. All the things the fire-colored wolf has taught her in the dreams she spent so long trying not to acknowledge.

And now all she needs is the philtre, a single silver orb, and she might have been little more than a child when her blood spilled out hot across the temple floor, but she knows enough to scry that Daria Parker has the talisman, that she’s found it and has brought it here. A surrogate for a surrogate, obscene relay from one hand to another, the passing of the monstrous key that is all keys, heart key, soul key, key of Diamond and Lost Faith. The key that will throw open the door the Weaver left ajar.

The chrysalis shudders again, more violently than before, and the spines where Theda’s shoulder blades were begin to twitch and quiver in the musty basement air, humming softly like the mating call of some great insect.

“No, no, no. Not just yet,” Archer Day cautions the thing, and she raises the pistol again. The steel glints dully in the sizzling blue light she’s made.
Could I kill it if I tried?
she wonders.
Are there enough bullets in this gun, enough bullets in this
world,
to put down the abomination gestating in that black husk?

And then she shuts her eyes and tries to think of nothing but the Hierophant’s lover, sleeping somewhere in the city, sleeping with a man she loves more than the Hierophant, and the red witch searches until she finds a tiny breach along the outermost rim of Daria Parker’s uneasy dreams, and slides herself in. And for a time, she forgets about the flame-colored wolf and the dragon and the thing hanging from the basement ceiling.

Four miles away, northeast across autumn-silent streets and the creosote cross-tie and iron-rail stitchery of railroad tracks, Daria Parker sleeps on the sixth floor of the Tutwiler Hotel. Held tight in Alex Singer’s arms and surrounded by sturdy plaster and masonry laid and mortar set the better part of a century before, she dreams.

Her father, wounded, heartsick man who died of cancer years before, and he’s trying to explain to her why he and her mother could never work things out. Mistakes and transgressions, apologies for the divorce and the drama, the day he took his daughter and ran away to Mississippi. Daria listens disinterestedly (she’s heard it all before) while a waiter with tattoos and the spiraling, narwhal horns of an African antelope serves them hot tea and fresh-baked biscuits with apple jelly and melted butter. The morning sun through the cafe windows is warm, and the little tables are surrounded by terra-cotta pots of philodendrons and ferns.

“Charles Lindbergh once held a press conference here, you know,” the waiter says and winks at her, quoting the hotel brochure and interrupting her dead father. “And Tallulah Bankhead held parties here. The Jewel of Birmingham, that’s what they called the place—”

“Excuse me,” Daria says and frowns at the waiter, “but we’re trying to have a conversation.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” he snips, and she realizes that the chair across the table from her is empty.

“You have a telegram from a Miss Nicolan Ky,” the waiter continues, nonplussed by her father’s disappearance. The waiter has become a very large macaw, its feathers painted the deepest tropical reds and blues, and Daria can smell licorice on his breath. The bird holds out a silver tray, tarnished but ornate silver serving tray, and there’s nothing but a slip of yellow paper on it.

“It’s not
over
till it’s
over,
” the macaw squawks rudely, but when Daria reaches for the telegram it becomes the rusty ball bearing with N-I-K-I written on it. “Turn away no more, why wilt thou turn away?” says the macaw.

Daria takes the ball bearing from the platter and tries to remember how she got all the way from the hotel downtown to the house on Cullom Street. How day became night and she didn’t even notice, but the answer is obvious, and it comes to her on the cold wind blowing across the mountain.
Another dream, another goddamn, stinking dream.
Her whole life seems to have come to little else, a clamoring parade of nightmares strung together with twine and guitar string and baling wire, and she’s always waking in unfamiliar, unwelcoming rooms or the rumbling bellies of jet planes. Always waking to disorientation or loss, fear or pain, all those supposedly different things that are exactly the same, the slippery facets of a whole too vast and terrible to glimpse in a single moment. Even
this
dream, the one that binds them all in the gray-matter wrinkles of its infinite variations, even it permits only incomplete disclosure, stingy bits and pieces at a time, mean impressions, like blind men feeling their way around an elephant.

Daria Parker climbs the five cement steps to the porch, and then she stops, glancing back over her left shoulder at the dusky shapes moving quickly between the flickering, plywood trees, the long-legged, skittering beasts, Spyder’s defenders or prison guards, and maybe there’s no difference.

“Would you like the check now,” the macaw waiter asks, though she can’t see him anywhere, “or should I charge it to your room?”

She stands shivering on the long, cluttered porch, her hand wrapped tightly around the brass doorknob. She looks over her shoulder again, half expecting Mort and Theo in the driveway, waiting for her in the idling red Ford Econoline, Stiff Kitten’s junk-heap set of wheels, but there’s only the shoddy, back-lot trees, the narrow, boundless spaces left between them, and the matte-painting distance rising up to the cloudy charcoal edges of the November sky.

Is this the way it was? Did I really come up here alone? Did I already love her that much?

Have I ever loved her at all?

“I always loved your mother,” her father mumbles, his words like lead shot falling into a deep pool.

And she turns very slowly back towards the front door that’s no longer there, anticlockwise minute and hour hands of bone and corrosion sweeping her backwards, sweeping her back to the night before
that
night, and she’s standing in a freezing alley behind the dump where Keith Barry lived. This is the night of his wake, the night before she went to Spyder’s house to find Niki. Everyone else has gone, all the motley, drunken mourners, the sin-eaters, and left her to lock up. Daria hugs herself and notices the tall boy in a black Bauhaus T-shirt watching her from the other side of the alley, and she wonders how long he’s been standing there. One of Spyder’s gothedy loser friends, she thinks, someone she’s seen skulking around Dr. Jekyll’s, but if she’s ever known his name, she doesn’t remember it now.

“The dining room closes in five minutes,” the macaw announces, pointing one wing at a clock on the wall behind her, and then he becomes the ruby-eyed white bird from the plane, from the window ledge of her hospital room.

“Time is beside the point,” the white bird insists. “There is only
one
moment, which moves endlessly, and you stand there always.”

“What the hell do
you
want,” she barks at the boy in the Bauhaus shirt, ignoring the white bird and sounding at least as drunk as she is, sounding like a drunken old whore, and the boy looks nervously up and down the narrow alleyway before he crosses it to stand beside her.

“Do you have a
name
?” she asks, trying not to slur and failing and deciding that she really doesn’t care.

“Walter. My name’s Walter Ayers. I used to be a friend of Spyder Baxter’s.”

You’ll remember me, later on. You’ll remember the night I tried to warn you about Spyder, the night in Birmingham when I told you Niki was in danger.

“One moment,” the white bird says again, “that’s all,” and it stares up at her from the spotless linen table cloth. Margarine sun pours across its feathers, and its eyes sparkle resolutely. “That’s all any of us ever get.”

“Did Spyder send you?” she asks the bird, and it blinks and pecks at the scraps of her biscuit.

“I used to be a friend of Spyder Baxter’s,” the boy says again, like he thinks she didn’t hear him the first time, and Daria tries to forget about the white bird and her unanswered question.

“But you’re not anymore,” Daria says to the boy named Walter, “not her friend, I mean,” and she’s started walking, because it’s too cold to stand still any longer. He follows close behind, their footsteps loud in the long empty alleyway. The mute hulks of abandoned warehouses rise up around them, cinder block and brick and corrugated aluminum to brace the unreliable sky.

“Well, I think that’s what
she’d
say, if you asked her,” he replies, walking faster to catch up. “I’m pretty sure that’s what she’d say. She thinks that I had something to do with what happened to Robin.”

“You mean Spyder’s girlfriend?” Daria asks, and she stops, and the boy named Walter stops walking, too, and stands there trying not to let his teeth chatter.

“Yeah,” he says, “I mean Spyder’s girlfriend,” and then he looks back the way they’ve come, his anxious eyes trapped in an anxious, exhausted face.

“Well, did you?”

Walter doesn’t answer the question, just keeps staring back down the northside alley like he’s afraid they’re being followed.

See into the dark

Just follow your eyes

“Who was the girl that left with Spyder tonight?” he asks her, changing the subject. “The Japanese girl.”

“Her name’s Niki Ky, and she’s not Japanese. She’s Vietnamese, and she’s Spyder’s
new
girl. Haven’t you heard? She moved in with Spyder a couple of weeks ago.”