Murder of Angels (41 page)

All these empty, dusty rooms, without a single stick of furniture, devoid of life or even the trappings of life: a foyer and living room, the dining room and kitchen, a short hallway connecting the bathroom and two bedrooms, the one that had been Spyder’s when she lived alone, and the one that she and Niki shared after Niki had moved in. And the trapdoor concealing the basement stairs. For a long time, Daria has stood watching that varnished rectangle of pine, a brass handle bolted at one end, wondering what, if anything, is waiting for her down there.

She switches on the flashlight and plays it slowly across the trapdoor. There are handprints in the thick dust, and she supposes some of them must belong to the two cops. She finishes the bottle of Merlot and sets it on the floor near the wall. The wine has left a gentle, welcomed buzz inside her, and a scrap of courage, though she knows it’s only the smallest fraction of what she’ll need.

If anyone’s around,
she thinks,
they can hear me. If anyone’s here, they must know I’m here, too.

But she doesn’t call out, because she isn’t that brave, not half that drunk. She eyes the empty bottle, wishing she’d bought two.

When the bitch is ready for me, when she wants this game to end, the bitch can come find me,
and Daria goes to the smaller bedroom, the one that had been Spyder’s before Niki came to live with her, and she sits in a corner, facing the door. She switches off the flashlight, because she isn’t sure how long the batteries will last, and she’d rather not have to confront the basement without it. Outside, the sky is cloudy, so no moon through the bare windows, and only a little streetlight reaches her through the backyard gone wild and choked with kudzu vines.

She wonders if Alex is still asleep, or if he awoke, needing to take a piss, and found himself alone. If he found her note, and maybe he’s on his way right now, speeding through the deserted Birmingham streets in the rented Honda. She switches on the flashlight long enough to read her wristwatch and then switches it off again. Almost four
A.M
., and she’s starting to think the dream was only a dream, that the call in the airport was only a prank, and there’s no one named Archer Day. In a few hours, the sun will rise, and that will be the end of it, and she can go home.

Her ass is beginning to go to sleep, the floor’s so cold, so goddamned hard, and so she shifts her weight, lifting herself up with both hands just long enough to restore blood flow. A floorboard beneath her left hand pops loudly, and she almost loses her balance and topples over.

Outside, there’s a sound like a dog rooting about in the bushes, a dog snuffling along the edge of the house, and Daria sits very still listening to it and looking at the loose board and wondering why her heart is beating so fast. Something Niki told her on the way to Boulder, before they stopped talking about Spyder Baxter, something that she’d almost forgotten. That Spyder sealed off this room after Robin broke in to steal the dream catcher.

There were things in there,
Niki said,
secrets, parts of herself no one else was ever meant to see.

Outside, the snuffling sounds stop, and Daria hears something trotting away through the tall brown weeds.

She nailed sheets of plywood over the door and filled the cracks with epoxy. She didn’t ever want anyone going in that room again.

Daria pries away the loose board, tearing spiderweb veils and disturbing a large black beetle that makes an angry, clicking noise and races away across the floor. She turns on her flashlight again and shines it into the narrow space the slat concealed.

She even boarded up all the windows. And then she hung that fucking dream catcher on the door, like a warning,
and Daria remembers the way that Niki said “dream catcher,” like someone uttering the name of a devil or the single most potent word in a curse. And the beam of the flashlight shows her more spiderwebs and dust, another black beetle with sharp, pinching jaws, and the warped and mildewed wedge of an old spiral-bound notebook.

Parts of herself no one else was ever meant to see,
Daria thinks in Niki’s voice, as she takes the notebook from the hole in the floor. The cover’s in bad shape, but she can tell that there was once a picture of the Pink Panther printed on it. She lays it on the floor and opens it carefully, but a lot of the pages are stuck together, and mold and insects have eaten away most of whatever was once written there. A child’s handwriting, gray words printed neatly between blue lines, and at the top of the first page Daria can make out “My Stories by Lila Baxter” and in the upper right-hand corner, “August 7, 1976.”

“My God,” Daria whispers and slowly turns another page, imagining all the summers and winters this notebook has lain here in the darkness, how many years must have passed since the last time Spyder put it back into the hole and covered her hiding place with that loose board. Maybe not since she was a child, and Daria does the math in her head, trying to guess how old Spyder might have been in 1976. There’s page after page after page of her handwriting, the paper filled from top to bottom. Most of it’s too far gone to read, just bits and pieces of fairy tales, from what Daria can see, a hash of make-believe names, magical amulets and trolls and witches.

She turns another page, then has to set the flashlight down so she can tease it free from the page before it, and the two separate with a dry crackling and a puff of dust and mold spores. There’s very little writing on this page, but there’s a drawing made in colored pencils. Daria picks the flashlight up again, revealing a sketch of a beautiful, dark-skinned woman holding some sort of glowing sphere in her hands. On her shoulder is a white bird with scarlet eyes, and behind her are the forms of other women, all dressed in long red robes. Over it all, a fearsome dragon hovers, its bat-wings spread wide against a blazing sky. At the very bottom of the page is a single line of text:
The Hierophant Leading the Red Witches into Battle.

“Oh Jesus,” Daria whispers, “Jesus fucking Christ,” sudden understanding like fire behind her eyes, and she reaches into the pocket of her leather jacket, and her fingertips brush the ball bearing from the truck stop.

And then there are footsteps in the hallway, and when Daria looks up from the notebook, a lean and haggard woman is standing in the doorway, pointing a pistol at her. The woman’s face and clothes are streaked with dirt and what appears to be dried blood.

“The wheels do turn,” she says and smiles a weary, sleepy smile. “They sure as hell got that part right.”

N
iki bends over the globe, studying the sculpted forests and marshes and ancient battlegrounds, the hills and lakes, the varicose network of roads and rivers; rotating circles held within rotating circles, like the vision of Ezekiel. She’s counted the circles several times and is certain that there are only twelve, beginning at the Palisades and moving inward to the Dragon’s hub. And maybe twelve means something, something that she should understand, and if she
did,
then everything could go another way. But she doesn’t understand, if there’s even anything there beyond the random languages of this cosmos.

All the red witches have gone now, except Pikabo Kenzia. She wanted Scarborough sent away, because men are not permitted in the towers, but Niki insisted that he stay. “He stays, or I go
with
him,” she said, and Pikabo didn’t argue. “And I’ll need to ask him questions,” Niki added, “so you’ll have to let him speak.”

“Our rules are old,” Pikabo Kenzia protested. “They were handed down to us by the thralls of Dezyin before the first stones were laid at Yärin.”

“Is that thing there supposed to be Dezyin?” Niki asked her and pointed at the idol, and the red witch nodded her head. “Well, no disrespect, but unless Dezyin’s going to come to life and deal with this crap himself, Scarborough stays,
and
he gets to talk whenever I need him to. No, whenever he
feels
like it.”

And once again, Pikabo Kenzia relented, but Niki could see there was a limit to her ability to make concessions and perhaps it had been reached.

Niki traces the Serpent’s Road with the index finger of her good hand and tries not to notice the way the wound in her right has begun to throb again. The road starts at the edge of a line of steep, wooded hills not far from Nesmia Shar, but that would still leave nine bands she’d have to cross before reaching the hub.

“It would take you months,” Pikabo Kenzia said when Niki asked, “
if
the bridges were all with you. If they were against you, it might require years, and do not forget, Hierophant, the jackals are abroad, and the
angels,
who hold their reins. You’d never make it.”

Niki looks over at Scarborough, who’s sitting on the floor a few feet away. “What do you know about numbers?” she asks him.

“You mean like mathematics?”

“No, I mean like numerology.”

“A little. More than you might think.”

“Then impress me. Tell what twelve means.”

Scarborough frowns and makes a derisive, snorting noise. “Vietnam, the lady’s already told you, there’s only one way to get your ass from here to there quickly and in one piece. You’re grasping at straws—”

“Does twelve
mean
anything?”

Scarborough Pentecost shrugs and stares up at the strips of fabric suspended overhead. “Twelve means lots of things, in
our
world. It’s the zodiac, twelve signs on the house cusps. There are twelve members of the Dalai Lama’s council, and Jesus and Mithra both had twelve apostles. The Hebrews say there are twelve fruits growing on the Tree of Life and twelve gates into the Heavenly City. Herodotus wrote that there were twelve gods and goddesses on Olympus. Do you want me to keep going, or are you starting to get the picture? And anyway, you’ve got thirteen levels there, not twelve. You have to count the hub.”

“Then what does thirteen mean?”

But this time Scarborough only laughs at her and shakes his head.

“I have shown you the only way,” Pikabo Kenzia says firmly. “Soon, the Weaver will have discovered where you are, and once she arrives—”

“There
has
to be another way,” Niki mutters and goes back to the map, as if she could somehow close the distance between the third band and the hub by force of will alone. “I won’t accept that someone has to die to get me there. You’ve already killed one woman, to get me
here
.”

“There is no other way,” the red witch replies, “not in the time remaining. And if the Weaver finds you, if the portal is opened, the number of people who will die because of you is beyond reckoning.”

“Why don’t you just fucking
do
it?” Scarborough asks the red witch, but she doesn’t respond, stands glaring down at him, and the look on her face like she would kill him this very minute if she could. “You didn’t need her permission when you snatched us off that ship, so why the hell do you think you need it now?”

“Shut up, Scarborough,” Niki tells him, wishing she’d never insisted that he be allowed to speak, and then she walks around to the opposite side of the globe, turning her back on Pikabo Kenzia.

“Twelve,” she whispers. “Thirteen. Twelve and thirteen. There
has
to be something here that I’m missing.”

“Yeah,” Scarborough says, “the obvious.”

Pikabo Kenzia goes to Niki’s side and rests a hand on the shoulder of her blue fur coat. “We’re almost out of time, Hierophant. The Weaver
must
be very near.”

“What about twelve
and
thirteen,” Niki asks Scarborough, ignoring the red witch. “What do they mean
together
?”

“Twenty-five,” Scarborough replies unhelpfully.

“There’s no other way,” Pikabo Kenzia says again, and now she grasps Niki firmly by both shoulders and turns her away from the stone globe until they’re standing eye to eye. “We’re reaching the end, and we must accept the costs of taking the one option which has been left to us.”

“You
said
that it’s my choice,” Niki snarls and pulls free of the red witch’s grip, surprised at the woman’s strength. “That’s what you said. That it had to be
my
choice.”

“How you face the Dragon and the Weaver, that’s where your choice lies. Perhaps you misunderstood—”

“
No.
You will
not
force me to let some woman be sacrificed to this Dezyin bastard just so I get an express ticket to Hell. I’m not fucking worth another life.”

“No,” the red witch agrees, “you’re not.” There are thick blood-tears gathering at the corners of her eyes again, and Niki watches as the frustration drains swiftly from Pikabo Kenzia’s purple irises and realizes too late that what has replaced it is decision.

“You’re just gonna have to forgive me for this, Vietnam,” Scarborough says, and then his hand comes down hard across the base of her skull, and there’s an instant of pain, and then, for a while, only the unacknowledged peace of oblivion.

In some silly horror movie, Daria thinks, she might have fought Archer Day for the gun. Or they could have struggled on the basement stairs, and maybe Daria would have pushed her, or she might have fallen on her own. In a horror movie, she might not have handed over the ball bearing the first time the woman asked for it. And in a horror movie, Alex would be pulling into the weedy driveway at the end of Cullom Street with the police right behind him.

But she knows this isn’t a movie, and this time it isn’t a dream, either, and she stands in the unreal blue light filling the space below the house, the pistol’s barrel pressed to her spine, and watches as the wet and mewling thing tears itself free from the black cocoon on the ceiling.

“Daria Parker, meet Theda,” the woman says. “Theda,
this
is the Hierophant’s bitch-dyke whore, Miss Daria Parker, who came here—all the way from California—just to save the world. Hell, you know what? I bet Theda here has all your records,” and she pushes Daria nearer the circle drawn on the cellar floor.

“Where’s Niki?” she asks, trying not to look at what’s inside the circle.

“Oh, so far away from
here,
my lady,” Archer Day chuckles and jabs Daria in the ribs with the gun. Then she begins to sing in a high and hitching voice,
“‘Far, far away is my love of yesterday, She’s gone, gone, gone, gone, from me, from me—’”

“I fucking
gave
you what you wanted. I gave you what you fucking
asked
for.”

“Yeah, you did, and just look at how well that’s working out for you,” and then she starts singing again, an old Roy Orbison song that Niki used to ask Daria to play when she was still just doing bars and nightclubs.
Far, far away is my love of yesterday,
and something, or everything, about Archer Day’s voice makes her sorry that she ever believed Niki was insane.

“You’re not telling me because you don’t know.”

And Archer Day tangles her fingers in Daria’s short hair and jerks her head back sharply so that she’s staring directly into the eight, unblinking ebony eyes of the thing writhing on the ceiling. Daria feels cold metal behind her right ear, the pistol pressed to the soft flesh of her neck, and
Close your eyes,
she thinks.
Close your eyes so you won’t have to see it.

“Personally, I think poor Theda’s getting a lot more than she bargained for.”

“Is Niki dead?”

“Well, I know there’s at least one coroner in San Francisco that’ll swear to it. But then you people seem to have an awfully narrow view of life and death. Now, open your eyes.”

But Daria keeps them shut tight, too far past even the desire to simply survive, because she’d always have the memory of the black thing on the ceiling and the mess inside the circle. Because she’d never be able to forget the sound of this madwoman’s voice, and whatever Archer Day intends to do to her, Daria knows that she’s going to do it, regardless.

“I said to open your fucking eyes,
bitch
. Don’t you
want
to see this? Imagine, two universes touching across the void—”

“The man who called me in Atlanta,” Daria interrupts, wishing there were some way to shut out the sounds of it all, as well as the sights, “the man who wanted me to find Niki, so he wouldn’t have to hurt her—”

“—is dead. Plans changed, and he was never very flexible. Why won’t you open your eyes? You’re going to die, anyway.”

“I
know
that.”

“Then wouldn’t it be better to witness such wondrous events first—the birth of a goddess, the Dragon’s coming, the beginning of the end? A few marvels to keep you company through infinity?”

“Thanks,” Daria hisses between gritted teeth, “but I think I’ll pass,” and Archer Day curses and shoves her; she stumbles and falls hard near the edge of the circle.

“Don’t you
dare
fucking presume to judge me,” the woman snaps and pulls the trigger. Trapped inside the basement, the gunshot is earsplitting, thunder in a bottle, and the dirt floor a few inches from Daria’s left knee explodes. She begins scrambling backwards, away from the circle and the thing on the ceiling and the crazy woman with the gun.

“Daria Parker, you cannot begin to imagine the sacrifice, what this has cost me, what I’ve given up—”

There’s a sound then from the thing hanging above the circle, and even through the ringing in her ears the sound makes Daria think of a watermelon splitting slowly open, and suddenly the basement air smells like shit and ammonia. And now she looks, following an instinct stronger than the knowledge that she doesn’t
want
to see, some undeniable, primal twinge, and for this moment, she’s only a very small and frightened creature huddled in the trees while hungry reptilian giants stride past.

“My life, my calling,
everything
which I’d ever believed and held sacred, I let them take it
all
from me,” but now Archer Day and her gun seem far away, small concerns, at most, and there’s no room left in Daria for anything more terrible than the burst cocoon and what’s crawled out of it. It crouches over the puddle of meat and bone inside the circle and begins to feed.

“For
you,
I did that, so don’t you dare fucking judge me, whore!” and she pulls the trigger again. This time the bullet grazes Daria’s left shoulder before it buries itself deep in the basement wall.

She screams and covers her ears with both hands.

And the black thing stops eating and raises its head. Eight eyes deeper than the sea, more secret than eternity, watch her briefly before it turns towards Archer Day. What Daria sees in its face, all it has told her without uttering a single word, is enough to wipe away the faintest hope that she might somehow survive this, that she would ever
want
to survive this.

“That’s enough,” she whispers to herself or whatever’s listening, no more room left inside her for revelation or horror or the damning perspective that follows either. And she crawls to the basement wall and stops because there’s nowhere left to go.

“What the fuck are
you
looking at?” Archer Day asks the thing crouched inside the circle. “Isn’t this exactly what you wanted? Isn’t this Heaven, little girl?” and the ball bearing clutched in her left hand has begun to glow, a hot light like melting iron, light that might be red or orange, but everything’s the wrong color down here. There’s steam rising from her hand, but she doesn’t seem to notice, all her attention focused on the black thing staring out at her from the circle.

“You’re the
lucky
one, Theda. You’re the lucky, lucky little goth girl who went looking for transcendence, and now you’ve found it in spades, wouldn’t you say?”

I won’t see this,
Daria thinks.
I won’t look,
but her eyes are open wide, and she doesn’t turn away, doesn’t hide her face in the sanctuary of her own shadow.

Inside the circle, the black thing makes a strangled, gurgling sound, and the cat’s cradle of its jaws opens wide.