Resurrection Man (23 page)

His father hadn't worn a hat in years. Dante examined the hat, trying to place it. Oh—Pendleton's, he thought with relief. That explained things. Pendleton's snappy fedora, the one he'd clapped on his head as he left the ritzy hotel room. Funny I didn't notice it before, Dante thought. Could have used it when I was dowsing for Pendleton's past.

Something in Aunt Sophie's black wool coat ground into his hip. Blinking, he reached down into one of her pockets and brought up a handful of stones. Dante gazed stupidly at them. Why would Aunt Sophie have filled her pockets with stones? When he finally looked up, he found Jet watching him, dark eyes narrow and thoughtful.

Dante thought, This means something to him.

But nothing that wasn't sleep had a hold on Dante now. He put the rocks back where he had found them and stumbled up the stairs to bed. His head hit the pillow and he was falling.

Tumbling from consciousness to a deep and dreamless place, he passed himself, still trapped in Jewel's study.

The study was bare of butterflies this time. Jewel sat behind her desk, dressed in her white blouse and gray wool skirt. There were three other places to sit in her study: a comfortable brown armchair, a hard oak chair beside the escritoire, and a little pine stool in front of the grim doll's house. Dante started to sit in the armchair—

Murder!

—then stopped as dread wailed through him. His heart hammered and his mouth went dry. Very slowly he stood up again, and slowly he took a seat in the hard oak chair by the escritoire. It was implacable, but at least not webbed with horror. He looked at the sinister brown armchair and shuddered.

It's a test,
Jewel said.
I can tell a lot about a person from where he chooses to sit.

"Whether he's an angel."

Jewel shrugged.
And other things. There are angels who would sit in that chair, knowing what you know.

"Would you?"

I have my own chair,
Jewel said, throned in the high-back Victorian monster at her desk. Behind her, a tall bookcase rose high above her shadowed face.

"But if you were someone else. If you were a visitor, and felt all this as a visitor would feel it. Would you sit in the armchair, just to show off, or would you sit where I'm sitting, to project all your will and steel and determination? Or would you perch on the stool and play with the dolls?"

Seriously?

Dante nodded.

Seriously,
Jewel said,
I would do anything in my power to keep from ever coming in the door.

As Dante watched, a pair of jeweled wings, indescribably beautiful, fluttered at her throat. A butterfly crawled out from beneath her blouse.
I am a very deadly angel,
Jewel murmured. A second butterfly followed the first. Then a third tumbled from her graying hair and crawled down her shoulder.
You don't have any children, do you?
she said sharply.

"No," Dante whispered.

Jewel shook her head, and another butterfly fell out.
It's my one rule,
she said firmly.
Risk what you like on your own time, fine, but don't screw around with children's lives. I won't let an angel come down my stairs until I know he doesn't have children, usually; but today I'm so . . .
Her words trailed off; confusion filmed her eyes like cataracts.

"No kids," Dante whispered.

Slowly Jewel nodded, extending her arm.
Then give me your hand,
she murmured.
Give me your hand, and I'll press your fingers onto God.

Like Jet, Dante thought. Pressing his secrets on me. But he was too far in to back out now. He was trapped, and running out of time.

He held out his hand.

W
HEN IS DEATH NOT WITHIN OURSELVES? ...LIVING AND DEAD ARE THE SAME, AND SO ARE AWAKE AND ASLEEP, YOUNG AND OLD.
  —H
ERACLITUS

CHAPTER
TWELVE

Portrait

By some universal law, never formally codified but nonetheless immutable as gravity, every album must contain a picture of a pet.

My pet is a colony of rust. I keep it in a glass jar above the radiator; if properly watered, the heat aids its digestion. I used an old nail as a nurse log and stripped the paper from supermarket twist-ties to make saplings. Once each week I try to feed it something nice, a couple of staples if I'm feeling benevolent; a paper clip, coppery and difficult to digest, if my mood is harsh. On Father's Day I give it a thumbtack, and at Christmas it gets the lid from a tin can; each Thanksgiving I drop in a whole ball of steel wool.

I suppose there's a moral in rust, somewhere. Our bodies decay, attacked from the inside by our own free radicals. Our minds are crumbling too, as the magic rises. I read in the Sunday Times that the number of schizophrenics in the population has doubled in the last ten years, and is expected to double again in the next five. Rot is spreading out from the hearts of our great cities. We live in a world of slow corrosion, and we are all of us rusting from the inside out.

There's a moral in just about everything, if you care to look for it. I usually do—perhaps too often. Maybe it's enough to say I like my little colony. Even though it's not alive, it grows: an example to us all! It pleases my humor. And this picture is in color, for once, because rust is such a lovely shade of red.

*   *   *

Early next morning Sarah burst in on Dante with Jet hard on her heels. She flung the curtains wide, flooding Dante's room with pale autumn light.

Dante blinked. "Sis?" Still dreamy and confused, he was reassured by the ordinariness of his room and the day beyond his window.

Fragments of dream scuttled like cockroaches into the dark corners of his mind.

He was glad to be awake.

"This has to stop," Sarah hissed, her face white with strain and sleeplessness.

"It's not all Dante's fault," Jet said. "For once."

"You stay out of this!" Sarah cried. "You just want to find your soul or your father or whatever the hell it is you think you've lost. You don't give a damn what happens to the rest of us."

Dante struggled to sit up in bed. Good grief. He had slept in his clothes for the first time since he was twelve years old. His linen shirt was distressingly wrinkled and one of his cuff links had worked its way free. He rooted in the bedclothes until he found it. "What has to stop?"

"You! Whatever angel thing you're doing that's bringing up these ghosts!"

Dante rubbed his eyes, then ran a hand up over his satanic eyebrows and his balding forehead. "What angel thing is that, exactly?"

Jet cackled. "It seems you're a regular Pandora's box, Dante. Ever since we opened you up on Friday night, all sorts of ghastly things have come flying out."

A jolt of adrenaline washed through Dante's blood like ice water, leaving him painfully awake. "Pendleton's hat," he murmured. Jet looked at him, one black eyebrow quirking. "On a peg downstairs," Dante explained. "I saw it when we came in last night, but I was too tired to think straight. It must be more than thirty years old. Did anyone else see it?"

Jet was already out the door. He returned a few seconds later. "It's there all right. Hanging at the end, an expensive satin-lined fedora that was never there before."

"God. I hope Aunt Sophie doesn't see it," Sarah murmured. "Not on top of his ring."

"I think she already has," Dante murmured. Horror crept through him, remembering the pockets of her black wool coat, heavy with stones.

How close had Aunt Sophie come to walking under the river, to a dark place where her old wounds couldn't hurt her anymore?

That's how Pendleton had gone too, wasn't it? Threw himself in the river when he saw the diamondback butterfly on Jet's baby cheek and knew that he had lost the soul of his firstborn son in a game of cards.

Sarah dropped heavily onto Dante's bed. "You mean you didn't even know what you were doing with this angel stuff?"

Dante smiled weakly. "Big surprise, hunh?"

"Well, could we get you exorcised or analyzed or dry-cleaned or something? Because I'm being haunted now, and I'm not enjoying it very much."

Oh great, Dante thought. Another way to bring a little extra grief down on his family. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Not particularly," she said crisply. "What I want is to know what we're supposed to do next."

"There is one other ghost," Dante said carefully, trying to make sense of what was going on inside himself. Memories had been flooding back to him since the autopsy. But now, having taken the fateful step into Jewel's room, he was beginning to feel the future too, growing like a cancer inside the body of the present. "Jewel got inside me last night," he said, looking to Jet. "When we were in her rooms at the angels' club."

"Christ." Jet touched the butterfly on his cheek.

"Maybe I raised her ghost, like when I pulled Pendleton up inside myself. Jewel is inside me now. Not just when I concentrate, but all the time. Inside me like a parasite."

"Or a cyst."

Reluctantly Dante nodded. Maybe it was Jewel crouching in that pulpy white sac inside his abdomen: Jewel like a spider with her brood, waiting to hatch.

*   *   *

Jewel knelt beside him (under his skin, below the muscles of his stomach, inside the secret meat at his core) as together they looked at the doll's house. Gently, very gently, Jewel cracked the house open to show Dante to himself, curled up in the parlor at the foot of Grandfather Clock.

The memory cut into him like a scalpel, slicing cleanly through his skin, sinking in just above his third year.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Carpet smells: dust and ash from ancient cigarettes. The nap rough against his cheek.

Grandfather Clock divides time as well as space. Each tick shaves a second off your life. Tick. And one day, Mother will die. Tock. And Father will die. Tick. Aunt Sophie will die. Tock. Jet will die. Tick.

I will die.

Tock.

I will die.

Tick.

He was three years old. He slapped the carpet, and watched the dust motes dance in a bar of sunshine.

Death filled him up and overflowed him. He couldn't grasp it, only feel it overwhelm him, huge and vaporous and terrible.