Angel of Darkness

by Charles de Lint

Would they care? Would their daughter’s death be a relief, or would it just give them something else to blame Janet for— dying with such notoriety that they would have no peace for weeks? Jack didn’t much care about that right now. All he could think of was Janet Rowe, alone in that basement.

  He made an effort not to think about it, turning his attention instead to the stereo where one of Anna’s musical discoveries was playing—an album by the East Texas singer Michelle Shocked. It had been recorded around a campfire at a folk festival, complete with the incessant chirping of crickets and the occasional rumble of an eighteen-wheeler going by. Shocked’s voice, backed only with an acoustic guitar and the ambient background sounds, gave the conversation in Anna’s living room the feel of a yarn-swapping session around a campfire. All that was needed was the smell of the wood smoke and some ghost stories to accompany the lurid story he’d already told.

  Ghost stories . . .

  He hadn’t said anything about the angel or her wasteland, but he thought he could still sense her eyes on him, prickling the skin at the nape of his neck. From time to time the room wavered slightly, but the flickering jump to the angel’s dead lands remained at bay. He rubbed his face—ever since that moment he’d first seen the angel coming out of Baker’s house he’d felt as though he had cobwebs clinging to his skin. Clogging up the workings of his mind.

  The image reminded him of a drugged-out pharmacist’s sketch on one of the late-night comedy shows a few years ago— the guy was always seeing giants bats or trying to wipe cobwebs from his face. Anna had the thing on videotape and it always made them laugh, but there didn’t seem anything funny about it now.

  “You look beat, Jack,” Anna said.

  “I feel a little out of it. Mind if I sleep over?”

  Cathy gave him a quick smile. “I’m staying over, too—do you want to share the guest room with me?”

  Jack was never quite sure what Cathy would do if he ever took her up on one of her invitations, but tonight wasn’t a time to find out.

  “I’ll be okay on the couch,” he said.

  Cathy’s lips made a moue, but he knew she wasn’t serious. “I was even going to call in sick tomorrow.”

  “You were going to call in sick, anyway,” Anna said, standing up. “It’s time we were all hitting the sack. I’ll get some bedding for you, Jack.”

  The Michelle Shocked album ended as the three women made their way upstairs. Jack took it from the turntable and returned it to its jacket, gazing a little bemusedly at the photo of the singer. She looked a little like a hardcore punk with her sleeveless T-shirt and her hair so short at the sides and back, sticking up in spikes on top. It made him wonder why Anna had never got one of these punky haircuts herself.

  “Pretty neat record, isn’t it?” Anna said.

  Jack turned to see her coming down the stairs, arms loaded with sheets, a blanket, and a fat puffy pillow.

  “It’s . . . interesting.”

  Anna laughed. “Coming from you, Jack, that’s almost a compliment.” She shooed him away as he went to help her make up the couch. “I just got it in the mail this morning. She’s a U.S. singer, but I had to order her album from England—go figure it.”

  She removed the back pillows from the couch, then made up the bed, quickly and neatly, without a wasted motion. It always amused Jack to see that his sister, who could be so spaced and funky, was such a little homemaker at the same time. After fluffing the pillow she sat down on the newly made bed to give him a long, considering look.

  “How are you feeling—really?” she asked.

  “Low,” Jack admitted. Outside the windows, he could feel the night pressing in closer. “I let her down, Anna. The poor kid. I . . .”

  (I’m going crazy. I’m seeing shit like you wouldn’t believe.)

  “You did your best, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah—but in this game it’s results that count. Not the points you scored on style.”

  He wanted to tell her about the angel, about that place she’d taken him to, the wasteland that both he and Ned had seen from the patrol car later, but he couldn’t find the words. Anna was the one in the family that had all the curiosity about things out of the norm. All he ever felt about that kind of thing was that it was crazy. Harmless crazy, some of it; right out wacko, the rest. He didn’t have the vocabulary to talk about it.

  “I wish you’d get into a line of work that didn’t leave you running on empty like this, Jack.”

  He shrugged. “When this kind of thing comes up, I just try to remember the times I did some good.”

  “Does it help?”

  “Not a whole hell of a lot.”

  Anna sighed. She looked like she wanted to get into it some more but then thought better of it. “Well, don’t sit up brooding about it all night,” she said finally. “Try to get some sleep.”

  Jack nodded. “Anna?” he added as his sister rose from the couch. She paused to look at him. “Ned asked me to tell you he’d be by tomorrow.”

  A tired look came into her eyes. Jack knew she was thinking of Baker—not so much feeling bad for him as sick at what he’d done.

  “I take it that it won’t be a social call,” she said.

  “Not this time,” Jack admitted. “But: that doesn’t mean the door’s closed on it.”

  “Don’t push, Jack. I like Ned. It’s just. . .”

  “A big part of what makes Ned click is his being a cop, Anna. If you like him—well, that’s part of what made him somebody you could like.”

  “It’s not just Ned. It’s thinking of him and me together. It’s his friends and my friends—they’re miles apart. I can’t see myself hanging out at Russell’s, just going to cop functions and stuff like that. And you know what he’s like around my friends.”

  A little like he was himself, Jack thought. “Cops don’t just hang out with each other,” he said.

  “No. But they don’t relax unless they’re with their own. I know, Jack. I’ve been around you and Ned long enough to know.” She rose from the couch, unwilling to continue what was just an old argument, anyway. There was never going to be a solution to it. “Get some sleep, Jack. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Jack stood up. “Thanks for your ear—and a place to lay my head.”

  “You just take care of yourself,” Anna said. “And I don’t mean just physically, either.”

  She gave him a good-night kiss, then went about shutting off lights. Jack waited until she’d gone up the stairs, then turned off the last light in the living room himself and sat down on the couch. He could sense the darkness watching him but shook off the feeling.

  What the Christ? he asked himself. I’m going to crawl into bed with my sister, maybe because I can’t sleep in the dark alone anymore? Maybe not. But there was always Cathy. . . .

  He shook that thought away as well.

  He lay down on top of the bed Anna had made for him on the couch, not bothering to undress yet. Hands behind his head, he listened to the three women get ready for bed upstairs. Footsteps in the hall. Faucets running in the bathroom. Toilet flushing. Bedsprings settling.

  Sleep seemed impossible. There were too many ghosts lying in wait for him to close his eyes and drift off—not to mention the angel.

  He drifted off all the same.

  When he woke, he wasn’t sure how long he’d been asleep. The silence that lay over the house was so complete that the small sounds he made sitting up seemed oddly magnified. He started to get undressed—who could sleep properly in their clothes?—and smiled, knowing that Cathy would be making an effort to get downstairs early enough tomorrow morning to catch him in his skivvies.

  The smile faded as the utter silence of his surroundings hit home. Where was the hum of the fridge? The annoying buzz of Anna’s old Molsen’s clock that came from something loose inside that neither of them had ever been able to track down? There was a smell in the air too. Moldy and a bit sour. Like being in a dump. He reached for the light, but nothing happened wh
en he worked the switch.

  Oh, shit.

  He stood up quickly. Gradually his eyes had been growing accustomed to the poor lighting. By now he could see enough to know that while this was still Anna’s living room, it wasn’t in the same state it had been when he’d drifted off. The couch he’d been lying on was a moldering ruin. The shadowed furniture that began to take shape was in the same, or worse, repair. Garbage crackled underfoot as he stepped away from the couch.

  Graffiti on the wall where Anna’s prized Kaleidoscope, by the Swiss-born Hey Frey, used to hang drew his gaze. The bright paper collage with its primal acrylic colors and funky designs, handmade with some machine stitchery, was crumpled in a corner—home to rodents, Jack assumed, when something rustled under it at his approach. The graffiti had been applied with bold, uneven strokes. It read, I ATE HER TITS-JODY GOT THE BRAINS and was signed KIRK. Beside the words was a crude drawing of a woman with Anna’s pageboy haircut.

  A dull rage started up in Jack’s chest as he stared at the scrawl.

  A dream, he told himself. It’s just a fucking dream. All you’ve got to do is wake up.

  Only what if it wasn’t a dream?

  What if he was really in that ruined city this time?

  Then he remembered an article in Omni on lucid dreaming that Anna had him read once. It said that the way you could test if you were dreaming or not was to read something, look away, then read it again. If you were dreaming, it’d change every time you looked back at it.

  He looked away.

  When he read the words again, they hadn’t changed.

  This is bullshit, he told himself. At any other time of his life he’d have had no trouble agreeing with that. But after the night he’d just had—the angel, the flickers of dislocation, that wasteland, and the ruined city . . . all so real. . . .

  He went up the stairs at a trot, slowing down when his foot went through a rotted-out step. He saved himself from a fall by grabbing the banister. Moments after he straightened, the banister toppled over with a crash to the ground floor. He tested each step after that, keeping close to the wall on the stairs, and then went down the hall.

  The bedrooms were all deserted. They stunk of urine and excrement, of dried blood. In Beth’s room he thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. A flash of something pale by her closet door. He started across the room, but a warning crack from the floor froze him, breath held in. Slowly he edged back to the door. Just before he reached it, the floor gave way in a thundering cloud of plaster dust.

  He jumped for the door as the floor fell away below his feet, catching hold of the doorjamb and dragging himself to the relative safety of the hallway. Plaster dust filled his lungs, making him cough. When he could stand again, he gave his clothes a perfunctory brushing but gave up as that set up new clouds of dust to trouble his lungs and throat.

  He leaned his head against the wall, staring back into Beth’s room. It all seemed so fucking real.

  His ears were still ringing from the falling of the floor, so it took him a while to notice the faint, familiar sound coming from outside the house. That music again.

  I’m dreaming.

  I’m asleep on Anna’s couch.

  At the same time he was here—wherever the hell “here” was. Listening to the music—if that arrhythmic, discordant sound could be called music—he decided to go with the flow of the dream. He’d just wake up when it was over.

  Back on the couch.

  And none of this would have happened.

  He was still careful making his way down the hall and out of the house. Outside, there was a different smell in the air. Metallic. Salty. He could taste it on his tongue. The music was louder. Above him, the sky was like that of the wasteland, a putrid smog, more yellow than gray. The houses leaned against each other, beaten and worn. Roofs had caved in on some. Huge holes gaped in the walls of others. The trees were all dead, their limbs bare. The grass on the lawns was dry underfoot.

  (just a dream—no problem)

  He saw movement down the street—a figure in diaphanous robes with long pale hair, drifting ghostlike toward the river. By the swing of her walk he knew it was a woman. The music seemed to follow her. It had to be the angel.

  He started after her, keeping to the grass so that the click of his shoes on the road wouldn’t warn her of his presence. She kept on, giving no sign of knowing that he was in pursuit, crossing Warrington Drive to the grass verge that ran along the river. At the riverbank she paused and Jack slowed down. He kept to the left side of Harvard, cutting from a lawn to the small park that took up the quadrangle formed by the last house, Bank Street, the river, and the corner where Harvard met Warrington.

  The music swelled, and now Jack could plainly hear the cries of pain and hurt that made up its tones. Synthesized voices blending into musical notes. He was halfway across the grass square when the figure turned.

  It wasn’t the angel.

  It was Janet Rowe, wearing her skin again. Staring at him. Waiting for him.

  (just a dream)

  There was a buzzing in the air, overriding the music that had begun to grow fainter. Jack stepped toward the girl. Her hair was longer than in the photo her parents had given him, her body fuller. She was older. But it was the same girl, no question about it. As he moved closer, he could see tubes and wires dangling from her head and arms.

  Fucker had the girl wired up for sound, he could hear Ned saying. He wanted to hear every noise she made while he skinned her.

  The music, composed of agonized voices.

  The recording studio in the basement.

  The buzzing sound was growing louder, the closer he approached.

  Jesus Christ, Jack thought. What the hell—

  (just a dream)

  —was going on here?

  Six paces away and she stopped. There was something wrong with her eyes, Jack saw. There was too much movement in the eye sockets. There was—

  With a sound like cloth tearing, the girl’s upper torso split open and a stream of insects came flying out. The buzzing drone had the volume of a jet taking off. Bile rose in Jack’s throat and he staggered back. The flies clouded the air, making it hard to see—

  (he didn’t want to see)

  —the girl’s body falling in on itself like a dropped coat. . . lying in the dead grass . . . a puddle of skin on a puddle of filmy cloth . . . the flies buzzing . . . the stink of decay in the air . . . the hair on top of the skin and cloth puddle like a discarded wig . . . the skin falling in just such a way that he could still make out a face lying there . . . flat. . . the darkness behind the eyeholes staring at him.

  Jack dropped to his knees and lost the contents of his stomach. The flies buzzed around him, hitting him in the face, rasping against his clothes. Frantically he brushed away at them, a scream building in his throat. Then the world tilted under his knees. Vertigo spilled him the rest of the way to the ground. And he lay staring up into a lit streetlight, the glare blinding him.

  “Uh . . . uh . . .”

  His throat worked convulsively as he turned over to look at where the remains of the girl had puddled on the grass. Nothing. No music in the air now, just the sound of the city. No flies. No smell but that of the green grass into which he pressed his face, colored by a slightly sour smell. He’d thrown up. He remembered that. But it had all been—

  (just a dream)

  —that’s all. He was going to be okay. He was—

  Slowly he sat up and looked around. Was it still going on? Christ, was he still dreaming?

  Because he wasn’t on the couch back at Anna’s. He was lying by the river, down from her house. Beside a pool of his own vomit. Then he looked down at his clothes. They were covered in plaster dust. He looked at his hands. They were dirty, as though he’d been scrabbling about in some broken-down old house.

  Oh, Jesus.

  He was really losing it.

  He got to his feet on weak legs and started slowly back to Anna’s house, th
en paused. He didn’t know if he could face going in there right now. He turned and headed up Warrington, pausing at the corner of Wendover where his pickup was parked. Looking down the street, he could see that the IDent van was still parked in front of Baker’s place. The barricades were still up, too, though the crowd they’d been holding back was long gone. A couple of police cruisers and the IDent van were all that remained to show that the investigation was still in progress.

  This is real, he thought. I’m not dreaming now. I was just sleepwalking—that’s how I got to be outside, away from the couch. That’s why I’m here, instead of—

  He touched the plaster dust on his clothes. Then where the hell did this come from?

  (losing it)

  He couldn’t think about it. He couldn’t clear his thoughts. He considered going back to Anna’s again, then dug in his pockets for the keys to his pickup. The Toyota started at the first crack. He let the engine warm up for a few moments, then slowly pulled away from the curb and headed for home.

  13

  WALT HAWKING AND his buddy, Ted, were sitting in Ted’s apartment in Vanier watching some porn flick called Firebox that Ted had picked up in the same place from which he’d boosted the TV and VCR. The broad on the screen right now was one of those punky types, her blond hair short at the back and sides like a guy’s, long and spiky on top. Her head was bobbing up and down in some greaseball’s crotch, and Walt wondered if the greaseball thought he had some guy giving him the old sixty-nine. ‘Course, with tits like hers, it’d be kind of hard to make that kind of a mistake. Now, if she was Walt’s, he’d never let her wear her hair like—

  “So you tracked her down, huh?” Ted asked.

  Walt blinked, his mind still on the woman in the flick. Then he made the connection.

  “Right where you said she’d be,” he said as he reached for his beer.

  “Toldja. There’s one thing I never forget, Walt, my man— and that’s a piece of ass. And your little wifey, she’s sure got some—”

  “Can it, okay?”

  “Hey, hey. Lighten up, why dontcha? What do ya think I’m gonna do—hump her or something?”