Angel of Darkness

by Charles de Lint

  “They’re right near the studio.”

  “At the studio, I’d say.”

  “Well, I still think we should go over and—”

  Cathy broke off when they saw Beth standing there at the far end of the hall. Anna’s quick smile didn’t quite hide the worry in her eyes.

  “Hello, Beth!” she called cheerily. “Are you all right?”

  Even after an obviously tipsy night on the town Anna’s first concern was for her. It was something that was hard for Beth to accept, but gratifying to know at the same time. She wasn’t alone anymore.

  “I’m fine,” she said quickly. At least now I am. All it took was Anna’s presence to turn the house from a place of possible threat into a cozy home. “Did you have fun?”

  “Not as much fun as Janice,” Anna said.

  “Who’s being escorted home—”

  “By a dreamboat in a jean jacket.”

  The two started to giggle.

  “What’s going on out there?” Cathy asked.

  Beth joined them by the door. “I don’t know. It was like that when Alan dropped me off.”

  “Shall we go see what’s going on?” Cathy said.

  Anna moved back out onto the porch. “Oh, I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

  Out on the porch now herself, Beth looked down the street and saw more lights on in the various houses than there ever were at this time of night. The warning flashers of the police cars and ambulance, reflecting from the street corner and above the roof of the buildings across the street, gave the impression that there was a fairground back there, hidden from view.

  (Where the rides bring only despair and pain. . . . )

  As she suppressed a shiver she caught Anna looking at her.

  Anna gave her another quick smile, then turned to Cathy. “I thought you said you wanted a coffee.”

  “I do, I do.”

  “I’ll go put the kettle on,” Beth offered.

  The other two stayed on the porch for a few moments longer, looking at the lights, before they closed the door on the night’s excitement and followed Beth into the kitchen.

  9

  NED WASN’T SURE exactly what Jack was seeing—if it was the same dead landscape that his own eyes were telling him lay outside the cruiser—but he knew Jack had to be seeing something. Something weird . . .

  “I had a bad feeling,” Jack said softly, not looking at Ned. His gaze was fixed on whatever he saw beyond the windows. “I was just standing there, looking at Baker’s house, when this . . . thing came drifting out of the wall.”

  “Thing?”

  “It was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, Ned.” There was an odd note that Ned couldn’t recognize in Jack’s voice. “An angel. Just floating out the side of the house, her hair streaming behind her. And when she looked at me . . .” Jack’s gaze left the wasteland beyond the patrol car to settle on Ned’s face. “I heard a kind of sound. It was like music . . . a kind of music I’ve never heard before.”

  Ned swallowed thickly. As Jack spoke of the music he thought he could hear it too. But it wasn’t a sound that could come from any instruments that he knew. It sounded more like people crying—or screaming. Softly. The music was their pain. . . .

  “What. . . what’re you seeing, Jack?”

  Jack looked away again, out past the windows. Ned followed his gaze. There were dust devils stirring out in the dead lands. They caught the spinning light thrown from the cruiser’s warning flashers, strobing in and out of view whenever the light hit them.

  “Jack?”

  “I . . . “

  Flicker.

  The street was back. But empty. Theirs was the only vehicle on its deserted length. The houses were dark, falling in on themselves. There was a buzzing in the air, like bees or flies caught against glass. Ned thought he saw a flutter of movement at the far end of the empty street. A figure dodging out of sight.

  Flicker.

  The sudden return of the real world—flashing lights, headlights burning into their eyes—left them both half blinded. Ned looked away from the numbing brightness. He turned to Jack.

  “A dead place,” Jack said. “That’s what I saw. First a wasteland, then this street, but it was dead. The houses empty . . .” Ned knew that the confusion he was seeing in Jack’s eyes was no different from what he was feeling himself. “It’s not possible,” Jack went on. “I know that, Ned. But I still saw it.”

  Ned took a steadying breath. The beginnings of a headache tapped behind his temples.

  “Fumes,” he said. “There’s some kind of fumes in the air, a gas leak or something coming out of that basement. It’s making us see things.”

  “Things that real?”

  “Christ, Jack. What do I know? The equipment in Baker’s studio was mostly slag when we got down there. Maybe he had some kind of dope that got burned up with it. Stuff got into the air . . .”

  Jack nodded in slow agreement. “But I still can’t shake the sense that somewhere that place is real.”

  Ned didn’t want to let that thought take root in his own mind, but he knew exactly what Jack meant. He’d never done any dope stronger than a couple of hits of hashish himself—and that was only to see what it was like. He’d never touched hallucinogens. Maybe what they had both just experienced was what the dope heads got every time they got happy. Ned didn’t want to know about it.

  “I’ve got to go tell the others to be careful—even outside the house,” he said. “Maybe we should even clear the area. There’s no telling how far those fumes are spreading.”

  “I don’t think it’s that simple,” Jack said.

  “I’ve still got to make the effort.”

  Jack caught Ned’s arm as he started to leave the patrol car. “Careful how you tell them,” he said.

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean? Jack, if you know something that you’re not telling me, you’d better just—”

  “Will you think about it for a minute? Look out there. You see anybody else affected?”

  “Ernie and Benny Dwyer felt something in the basement.”

  “Will you look?”

  At the urgency in Jack’s voice Ned did just that. Outside, it looked like business as usual. A major crime investigation. Uniforms and plainclothes. ID unit getting their gear out of their van. Medics and coroner standing around the ambulance. A red fire chief’s car pulling up. Two TV crews—CJOH had joined the CBC now—filming the proceedings. It all looked so normal that Ned was wondering what the hell he’d even thought he’d seen himself. But then he remembered, not just the weirdness inside the basement but out here. Both he and Jack wired into the same hallucination.

  “I’ll just warn them,” Ned said, “without getting specific.” He glanced back at Jack. “Why don’t you get yourself out of here? We can get your statement tomorrow.”

  “Sure.”

  “Think you can drive yourself?”

  “I’ll stay with Anna.”

  “Think you’ll be able to—”

  “I can make it that far, Ned.” He cracked a weak smile. “But thanks for the thought.”

  Ned nodded. “You might tell Anna I’ll be talking to her tomorrow. About Baker.”

  “Sure.”

  Ned got out of the patrol car, stopping long enough to let Jack out of the back—there were no interior handles on the doors in the rear of the cruiser—then headed over to where Ernie was making his report to the inspector. Ernie’s right hand was wrapped in white gauze now, but there was a small pink stain in the middle of the white where the blood was still seeping through. Ned was sure that the cut was going to need stitches. He glanced back at where he’d left Jack by the cruiser and saw that Jack had started off down the short block to Warrington.

  “Who was that?” Inspector Fournier asked when Ned joined the two men by the ambulance.

  Fournier was a stocky Frenchman who at first glance gave the impression that he was almost as wide as he was tall. But there was no fl
ab on that weight, never mind Fournier’s desk job. Ned had worked out with him in the weight room back at the station often enough to be assured of that.

  “Jack Keller,” Ned replied. “He called it in. He’s a bit shook up, so I sent him over to his sister’s. We’ll get his statement tomorrow.”

  Fournier nodded. “He was a good man—used to be your partner, didn’t he?”

  “Up until he quit.”

  “What’s his connection with this?”

  “He was tracking down a runaway and the trail led him here. I think the kid he’s looking for is the girl we found . . . downstairs.” An image of the skinned corpse rose up in Ned’s mind. He forced it out of his thoughts before the flickering took him away again. “Did Ernie fill you in on what we found in the basement?”

  “What little he knew.”

  “So he told you that there might be some kind of a problem with fumes down there?”

  Fournier glanced at his watch. “The masks should be arriving anytime now.”

  “Good.” Ned turned to his partner. “How’re you feeling, Ernie? You look a little punchy. You want we should get a uniform to run you over to the General and get that hand sewn up?”

  “I’m okay,” Grier said. “It looks worse than it is. Medic said it won’t even need stitches.”

  Another blue-and-white van arrived just then, stilling further conversation.

  “That’ll be the masks,” Fournier said.

  Ned nodded. “So let’s get this show on the road.”

  10

  JACK’S LEGS FELT shaky as he walked down Wendover to Warrington. Instead of turning right toward Anna’s he crossed the street, shoes clicking on the pavement. Then the grass verge on the far side swallowed the sound. He stood and looked at the slow-moving waters of the Rideau River. His headache was worse. He thought about what he thought he’d seen coming out of Baker’s house, then that long moment in the patrol car when the wasteland returned—only this time Ned had seen it too.

  Christ, he was losing it. Came with the territory, he supposed. So many cops lost it. He’d turned in his badge, but the work he did was the same. Playing the cop, Ned never tired of telling him. Looking for the lost. It was hard to tell who was more screwed up. Sometimes the parents of the kids he was looking for seemed more lost than the kids themselves. Sometimes he felt like he, himself, was just—

  Flicker.

  The flashing lights behind him disappeared. Billings Bridge Shopping Centre, across the river, went dead. The buildings were still there, but they were dark now, with gaps in the long structure where parts of it had fallen in on itself. All the lights in its acres of parking lot were blacked out as though there’d been a power failure. His gaze was dragged to the river. Swollen white corpses drifted by in its brown waters. They spun slowly in the current, puffy features turning toward him, the white flesh of their faces swelling to make dark holes where their eyes should be.

  A faint music reached his ears, coming to him as from a great distance. He recognized the sound. It made his skin crawl.

  Janet Rowe.

  He was hardly surprised to see her body drift by, not quite so swollen, a faintly accusing look on her face.

  (Why didn’t you help me?)

  Then the white skin was stripped away and the waters bore her freshly skinned body slowly downstream. He took a step toward the riverbank—

  Flicker.

  Lights blossomed across the river in the shopping center’s parking lot. His shadow was thrown onto the dark water by the flashing lights of the patrol cars behind him.

  He rubbed at his face and turned away, steering his feet toward Anna’s house. There were lights on when he arrived. He heard the sound of her stereo spilling out of an open window as he came up the walk. It sounded like k.d. lang—the cowpunk singer from the Prairies who claimed to be a reincarnation of Patsy Cline—but he didn’t recognize the song. Maybe she had a new album out. He leaned on the doorbell, too beat to dig out his key.

  The door opened the eight inches that the security chain would allow it to show him his sister’s face through the crack.

  “Jack!” she cried delightedly.

  The door closed. He could hear her fiddling with the chain. On the stereo, k.d. lang started a new song. Behind him, the night was lit up by the streetlights and the cast-off red flashes of the cruisers one street over. But he could feel the darkness closing in on him all the same. Dead eyes in swollen faces searching for him. He concentrated on keeping the flickering appearance of that wasteland at bay.

  The door swung open to its full width. “Hi, Jack,” his sister said. “What’s shaking?”

  Anna’s face was so buoyant—she was always so full of the sheer joy of living—that it made him want to weep. He wanted to pull her against him, to feel the life in her chest beat against his own. Instead he stood numbly on the porch, staring at her. It was like there was a wall rising up between them.

  “Jack . . . ?” Anna said, her voice faltering. “Are you all right?”

  “I need a place to lie down,” he said.

  She looked past him to where the police lights stabbed the sky behind her neighbors’ houses across the street. Her hand was light but comfortingly firm on his arm as she pulled him inside.

  11

  “YOU’D NEED A flamethrower to do that kind of damage,” Detective Sergeant Louis Duchaine said, looking down at what they supposed was Baker’s body.

  Duchaine worked Arson. He was a thin, wiry man wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a windbreaker. Unshaven and still slightly disheveled, he looked like he’d come to the crime scene straight from his bed, which he had.

  He hunched down beside the corpse to peer closer, careful not to touch anything. There was still skin on the back of its skull, singed hair attached to it. Gray matter oozed from the eye sockets and from between the maxilla and mandible bones.

  “Cooked his fucking brains,” Duchaine added as he stood up.

  Officers in gas masks from the ID unit had tested the air and found it clean, but Ned had still experienced one flicker of dislocation coming back into the room. The wasteland. Here for a moment, then gone again. He hadn’t bothered to say anything about it this time. Had to be in his head.

  (Sure. And that was why Jack had seen it too.)

  His partner had left after a couple of minutes—to keep out of the way, he told Ned—but Ned marked the haunted look in Grier’s eyes before he went back upstairs. Dwyer and the other uniforms first on the scene hadn’t come down at all. But then, it wasn’t their job to.

  Strangest of all, Ned thought, was how Hardass Boucher— always in the thick of the bloodiest investigation—had stayed outside as well. Normally he’d be down here getting into everybody’s way.

  “So what are you saying?” Ned asked Duchaine. “Somebody came down here and offed him with a flamethrower? Is that what caused the rest of this damage?”

  Duchaine shook his head. “That,” he said, indicating the destroyed equipment, “just burned itself out. Overloaded circuits or something. We’ll know more after we sift through it.”

  “Could it have blown up in the guy’s face?”

  “Maybe. But it’s not likely. The wounds are too focused. See, it’s just the front of his head and the one hand—that’ll be a defense wound. I’d guess he raised the hand just before whatever hit him did the job. If that equipment blew on him, he’d be a mess all over. Chest, shoulders . . . If he was standing, his whole torso. Probably even his legs. No, he got hit by a concentrated, focused blast. Problem is”—Duchaine turned slowly around the crowded control room—”you can’t aim a flamethrower that narrowly. There’d have to be more fire damage. On the walls. Or the equipment.”

  “Lovely.”

  “You got yourself a real freak show here,” Duchaine said. “What you need is Sherlock Holmes, Ned.”

  Ned gave him a weak smile. “I’d call in the fucking Pope if I thought it’d help.”

  He followed Duchaine up the stairs to make hi
s report to the inspector, leaving the murder scene to the men from the ID unit and the coroner.

  12

  “I STILL CAN’T believe it,” Cathy said. “Chad Baker.” She sat on one end of the couch, knees pulled up to her chest, toying with her long red hair. Her eyes sparkled with the look of someone coming across a particularly juicy bit of gossip in People magazine. Jack almost expected her to come out with the clichéd “He was always such a quiet guy—kept to himself, you know?”

  “They haven’t made any positive IDs yet,” he warned. “Sure, but it’s still his house. I really can’t believe it.” “Oh, I don’t know,” Anna said. “Sometimes he’d get a look in his eyes that’d give me the creeps.”

  She was sitting in the middle of the couch, plainly unhappy. Part of that, Jack knew, had to do with the fact that she didn’t like knowing she’d been associating with someone capable of what the police had found in Baker’s basement. Jack could tell that she was worrying about him, too—he was too close to his sister not to know sibling concern when he saw it. If he looked half as bad as he felt, she had something to worry about.

  Beside Anna, on the other end of the couch from Cathy, Beth had withdrawn into herself, her already pale skin washed out and drawn tight across her features. Jack wished there was some way he could have spared her having to hear all of this, but both Cathy and Anna had insisted on knowing what all the excitement on Wendover was about. Beth didn’t need to hear about this kind of thing right now—not when she was just coming out of herself. By the time Anna realized what it was doing to her, it was already too late.

  “Have . . . have you told the girl’s parents yet?” Beth asked in her soft voice.

  Jack shook his head. “I’ll hold off on that until I’m sure that it was . . . that she’s the one Ned found in there. Depending on how things go, they’ll probably tell her folks first, anyway.”