Angel of Darkness

by Charles de Lint

  Anna reached across the table and took her hand. “I know, Beth. And it makes sense. I just hate to see you feeling this way.”

  Beth looked for and managed to find a small smile. Anna gave her hand a squeeze, then reached for her coffee.

  “Anyway,” Beth said, “I wasn’t dreaming about. . . about that. But it was almost as bad. I was here in the house, but everything was broken down and decrepit. Like no one had lived here for years. I was lying in my bed in the dream. I woke there—in my bed. But it was, like, all moldy-smelling. The plaster was hanging down from the ceiling, the wallpaper curling back from the walls.”

  She noticed an odd expression on Anna’s face.

  “Anna?”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, then I heard something coming up the stairs, sort of dragging itself. I thought it was Walt—and I was ready to die. I heard him put his foot through a step, then it sounded like the banister gave way. There was this big crash.

  “I just lay there in my bed, skin crawling because it was so filthy, but I was too scared to move. I kept listening, hoping Walt had gone down with the banister, but then I heard him again, still coming up the stairs. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t move a muscle. It wasn’t until he was in the hall right by what was left of the door that I finally jumped up and hid in the closet.

  “I found an old blanket and covered myself with it, hoping he’d think I was just some pile of clothes or something, but I didn’t really think it was going to work. I crouched in there, hearing him come into the room. I knew he was going to get me any second. Then the floor in my room gave way. You should’ve heard the sound—the whole house shook when it fell.

  “Well, I just stayed there in the closet, hugging the wall, wrapped in my blanket from head to toe. He must’ve just gotten to the hallway in time because I could hear him on the stairs again. I waited until he’d gone outside, then I crept to the edge of the closet and looked downstairs through the hole where my floor had been. And then . . .”

  She gave Anna a quick smile.

  “It was the weirdest thing. Suddenly I wasn’t wearing my nightie anymore. I was dressed in this long, shimmery robe. My hair was down to here”—she touched her waist—”and I just knew that all I had to do was step out into the air and I’d be able to just fly away.”

  “Did . . .” Anna cleared her throat. “And did you?”

  Beth nodded. “It was wonderful . . . at first. I just floated around my room, then downstairs. The window in the dining room was broken, so I just drifted out of it into the night. Everywhere I looked, the city was dark, the houses broken-down. Then I heard a sound—like the wind, only it was more like voices. Not chanting—but sighing, maybe. Rhythmical. I started to get a real creepy feeling then. The city sort of faded away— you know the way that happens in dreams?—and I was zooming along this huge empty landscape. Everything was dead—trees, grass, whatever—for as far as I could see. And the music . . .

  “It was still there, but now I could hear it better and knew that it was made up of people crying. Sad people, hurt people, scared people. And everything around me felt like that. Like it was a place where those who’ve got no more hope end up or something. And I was still just zooming along, going nowhere fast, because everything looked the same.”

  A small shiver traveled up her spine as she remembered.

  “And then?” Anna asked.

  “Then I woke up.” She gave a nervous laugh. “Pretty weird stuff, don’t you think?” She looked up at Anna, startled by the very odd look on her friend’s face. “Anna?”

  “It’s not half as weird as you think,” Anna replied.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Beth, I dreamed about those same places last night. Our house, all a ruin. I woke up in my bed, and it was the same as yours—like something you’d find in a junkyard. I didn’t stay in the house, didn’t look around at all to see if anybody else was around. I just went outside to find the city, run-down and empty. I saw you—or I saw someone with blond hair in a filmy white gown—come floating out of the house.

  “I called after her but she wouldn’t stop. Maybe she didn’t hear me. So I started to run. I just kept running, and the city faded away around me, and then I found myself in the same wasteland that you just described to me.”

  “You . . . you’re just saying this, aren’t you?” Beth said nervously.

  “I swear I’m not making it up.”

  “You’re scaring me, Anna.”

  Anna reached out and caught her hand again. “I swear I’m not making it up. I wouldn’t do that to you, Beth.”

  “But then . . .” Something like a rock formed in the pit of Beth’s stomach. “What. . . what does it mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Anna said softly. She let go of Beth’s hand to rub her face—a habit both she and Jack shared when they were worried or thinking. “It doesn’t make any sense. How can two people—”

  Cathy chose that moment to come downstairs. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and all she was wearing was one of Anna’s oversize T-shirts.

  “Rats,” she said, coming into the kitchen. “He’s already gone.” She glanced at the two of them, sitting at the table. “Hey, chums—why so glum?”

  “We were talking about our dreams,” Anna began.

  “Dreams! Let me tell you about dreams. I had one of those after-the-bomb-drops kind of Armageddon dreams—you know, where the city’s all empty except for you, and you’re just wandering around looking for someone to talk to, thinking ‘Armageddon outa here,’ only there’s no place to be ‘geddon’ to?”

  Anna and Beth exchanged worried looks.

  “Will someone tell me what’s going on around here?”

  “I think you’d better sit down, Cathy,” Anna said.

  4

  THE BRIEFING ROOM was crowded by the time Ned and his partner arrived. Duchaine took a chair beside Gilles Ouellette, the staff sergeant from Arson. Representing the General Investigations section was their own staff sergeant, Andy Coe, and Inspector Fournier, who’d be handling the statements for the press. Also present were Detective Vicki Watson from the Sexual Assault/Child Abuse section; Dr. Barrett Kiers, the coroner on call last night when the report first came in; Constables Benoit Petrin and Lisa Lachance and Staff Sergeant Gord Ferris from the ID unit; and Superintendent of Staff Operations Jacques Mondoux.

  Fournier got up to speak as Ned and Grier took their chairs. Briefly and concisely he gave a general rundown on what they had so far, then asked for more detailed reports, starting with Dr. Kiers. Ned was already familiar with the results, having been present when Kiers conducted the autopsies. The only new piece of business was that with the name Jack had given Ned, they’d been able to obtain Janet Rowe’s dental records and make a positive ID of her body.

  Ned doodled on the pad in front of him as various postulations on how Baker’d bought it were raised and discarded, not really returning his attention to the proceedings again until Fournier called on Detective Watson from Sexual Assault/Child Abuse. She was a handsome woman in her late thirties, beginning to take on a mature look that probably would help her on the job, Ned thought, but she wasn’t quite there yet. She glanced at him as she began her report but didn’t return his smile. They’d worked together before Ned had been transferred to General Assignment and kept up a good working relationship since, so her snub surprised Ned. Then he remembered what Ernie’d been saying earlier: I get this feeling that no one wants to be around me this morning. . . .

  Watson’s section didn’t have a file on Baker—not even any rumors.

  “But that’s not really surprising,” she said, “when you consider the sheer volume of incidents that exist. What we actually get to investigate is only the tip of the iceberg. Even more so than rape victims, these kids take the guilt on themselves. They end up believing that it’s all their fault, and they hide what’s happened from everybody. This isn’t helped by the threats of what will happen—not so much to them
but to a parent, or a pet, or even a favorite cartoon character in the case of some of the very young victims—that the offenders level at them.

  “What’s surprising in this case is not so much what Baker had been up to but that we found out at all.”

  “Come on, Vicki,” Duchaine said. “The guy wasn’t just diddling kids, he was butchering them.”

  Watson nodded. “This is an extreme case, I’ll grant you that, but Baker’s motives boil down to the same thing that motivates them all—a need for power. These offenders do what they do to children only for the feeling of omnipotence that it gives them. What Baker did with the Rowe girl was a radical departure from most sexual offenders—raising the ratio of his power over his victim to insane levels—but it still grew out of his need to be the one in control.”

  “The guy was slime,” somebody muttered down the table.

  “I’ve checked with Youth Intervention,” Watson went on, “and Baker was clean there, although he was in their files. Runaways often gravitate to the music scene—clubs and the like— and it seems Baker’s recording studio was quite the hangout for more than just hopeful musicians. Lots of kids went there as well. There’s been no indication before this, however, that Baker was anything more than what he appeared to be: a philanthropic patron of the music scene who was willing to put his money where his mouth was. He’s actually on record as having brought in runaways. Youth Services have nothing but good to say of him—had, I should say.”

  “Is there any chance that whoever killed Baker was also responsible for the girl’s death?”

  The question came from the superintendent of staff operations, Jacques Mondoux, a gray-haired veteran of thirty-five years with the force. Typical brass worry, Ned thought. The street slime were capable of anything, but let’s bend over backward for Joe Citizen. The ID unit’s staff sergeant answered.

  “Not when you consider the very nature of the room we found her in,” Ferris said. “Obviously Baker had had it constructed expressly for the purpose to which he put it to use. There’s a section of wall that closes to make the room impossible to detect. It’s built farther back under the yard, so you’d have to actually know it existed before you could even go looking for it.”

  “What about prints?” Fournier asked.

  Ferris nodded. He was getting some gray hairs among the red, Ned noted. Christ, they were all getting old.

  “I was getting to that,” Ferris said. “We lifted dozens of latent prints from all over the house, but the only ones in that room were Baker’s and the girl’s.”

  Baker hadn’t disposed of her skin yet, Ned remembered. They’d found it in a green garbage bag under the metal table on which the corpse had been found. The ID unit had gotten the girl’s prints to make the match from the pads of her fingertips that were found in the bag’s gruesome contents.

  “So unless there was a third or fourth party wearing surgical gloves,” Fournier went on, “we have to assume the girl was Baker’s victim.”

  “His first?” the superintendent asked.

  “We’ve no way of telling that at this point,” Fournier said. “But from the setup of that room—the renovations were completed ten years ago, according to the building permits that were filed with City Hall—I’d have to say that I doubt she was his first. We’ve just started checking the grounds of the house this morning.”

  Ferris completed the ID unit’s report. Photographs and sketches of the crime scene, and lists of relevant evidence collected there, were passed around the table.

  “I don’t have to tell you,” Superintendent Mondoux said, “just how much the press is going to be all over us on this one. We need a quick solution. Inspector Fournier will continue to coordinate the investigation and make any necessary statements to the press. If anyone has any—”

  The phone by Fournier’s elbow rang just then, making more than one of them start. Watching Fournier’s face tighten as he took the call, Ned got a nervous flutter in the pit of his stomach.

  Somewhere, something bad was going down. . . .

  “You’re sure . . . ?” Fournier was saying. “Yes, but. . .” Confusion was apparent in his features, mixed with something that Ned couldn’t quite pinpoint. “No,” Fournier said before he rang off. “Don’t touch a thing. We’ll be right down.”

  He cradled the phone and looked down the table.

  “We’re wanted on the gun range,” he said.

  5

  SHEILA COFFEY LOOKED in on her husband at mid-morning to find Ron turning fretfully in their bed. She hesitated, wanting to go comfort him, but then quietly closed the bedroom door.

  Let him sleep, she thought as she moved down the hall to where the wash was waiting to be folded and put away in the linen closet. He hadn’t said much when he’d come in this morning —late off his shift, his features drawn—and that in itself had been unusual. From the subsequent news bulletins on W1310, which had come in between the goldie oldies that Gary Michaels was spinning, she’d learned more details of the last call that Ron had taken before he went off shift. She’d never heard of this Chad Baker before, but from what the announcer had to say during his newsbreaks, Baker had been completely twisted. And from the look of Ron when he’d come home last night, whatever he’d seen there had been very bad.

  “Get used to it,” her mother had warned her when Sheila and Ron first got engaged. “The life of a policeman’s wife isn’t an easy one . . .” her mother had begun, and then she’d proceeded to run through a list of divorce, failed marriage, and suicide statistics until Sheila had simply shut out the flow of her mother’s words.

  Sure there were problems. The shifts were hard to get used to. The worry about what Ron might have to confront in his work—there seemed to be more and more cops hurt on the job recently. The way she’d just drifted away from most of her old friends until the only people she saw much of anymore were the wives of other policemen. But what marriage didn’t have its share of problems? She loved Ron, and in the end that was all that counted. She loved him and he loved her.

  So what am I doing putting away the laundry when I could be giving him the comfort he needs right now? she asked herself.

  She let a stack of towels drop back into the laundry basket and stood up to stretch a kink out of her neck. Then she walked down the short hallway back to the bedroom, unbuttoning her blouse as she went. A warm feeling stirred in her stomach, but her smile faded as she opened the bedroom door.

  The bed was empty.

  “Ron?” she called.

  Her first thought was that he’d gone to the bathroom, but she’d been out in the hall and he couldn’t have come out of the bedroom without her seeing him. The only other way out of the room was through the window, and since their apartment was on the twelfth floor. . .

  “Ron?”

  Feeling a little silly, she crossed the room to the closet and looked in. Only their clothes were hanging there. No mysterious, disappearing husband.

  “Okay, Ron,” she said. “A joke’s a joke.”

  But he wasn’t under the bed, either. Nor anywhere in the apartment. Sometime in between her looking in on him ten minutes ago when he lay naked in their bed, sleeping restlessly, and now, he’d vanished. Only he couldn’t have come out of the bedroom, because she’d been right there in the hallway the whole time.

  She’d heard it said among their friends on the force that a cop’s wife developed a certain intuition. Right now there was something humming inside her like a taut wire, plucked and reverberating. She hesitated a few moments longer, then sat down on the bed, drew the phone toward her, and dialed Pat Nichols’s number.

  For a patrolman in Field Operations, Pat was the closest Ron had to a partner. Although the officers usually worked solo, when Ron was teamed up with another, it was with Pat that he patrolled in the two-man cruiser. She hoped to God Pat would know what to do. Somehow Ron had dressed and left the house without making a sound. He’d sneaked by her, passing within inches of her in the hallway, and she
’d never noticed. Why had he done it? Where had he gone?

  She listened to the phone ring on the other end and tried to keep her voice from trembling when the connection was finally made.

  6

  THERE WAS NO place Ron Coffey would rather have been than in his wife’s arms. Unfortunately he was miles away from her at the moment and didn’t seem to have much choice in the matter.

  He’d never had a dream like this before.

  It started with him thinking he was awake. A dull light came through the window, letting him believe that it was late in the afternoon and he’d slept through the day, but then the smell hit him. The room smelled like a sewer. He sat up to find himself lying naked on a moldering old mattress in the middle of a mound of trash. The stink came from the garbage. The smell of stale urine made him think of how the patrol car stank when they pulled in a wino. Mostly the walls were smeared with long streaks of old dried feces, but there was graffiti there as well, written in shit: STICK THE PIG’S WIFE; COP SOWS GIVE THE BEST HEAD.

  “Sheila . . . ?” he asked softly.

  There was no answer. Just the silence. Not even the hum of the fridge.

  He got off the mattress, but there was no place to stand that wasn’t covered with trash. He slid on something slimy and fell back onto the mattress. A few inches from his face, a dead rat stared back at him, ants crawling out of its ears and mouth. Bile came up Coffey’s throat and he turned away, heaving up the contents of his stomach on his hands and knees until there was nothing more to come up. The stink of fresh vomit cut across the room’s other odors.

  He lurched to his feet, spitting to try to get the taste out of his mouth. This room . . . ?

  The familiarity of it got to him. It was just like his apartment—like it would look if nobody’d lived in it for a few years and the place just went to the dogs. His gaze settled on the graffiti again. Sheila. The fuckers were talking about Sheila.

  He started out of the room, still a little unsteady, then looked down at himself. Jay-naked. What a picture. He checked the room again, training taking over after the initial shock of the situation. There was a heap of cloth on the floor of the closet. Rooting through it, he came up with a pair of jeans and a stained white shirt, missing all the buttons and one arm. The clothing smelled, but at this point Coffey wasn’t feeling particular. Everything smelled in here.