Angel of Darkness

by Charles de Lint

  ... stop hurting me...

  “Why now?” Grier said suddenly as they paused near the corner of Gladstone and Bank.

  They were a half mile or so from the station, just a couple of blocks down from the fire. They could see the blaze clearly now. Its glare lit up the dark column of smoke that rose from the burning building beside it.

  “What makes now so different?” Grier went on. “This fucking place looks like it’s been here forever. How come it took until now for everything to bust loose?”

  “It ties into Baker,” Ned replied. “Something he was doing— not just what he did to the girl—something more than that opened things up.”

  “The music,” Anna said.

  As they were approaching the fire it had been increasing in volume. Synthesized voices caught in a moment of agony, trapped into a music that echoed every pain, every hurt that men and women had visited upon each other. Now that they were stopped at the street corner, the music still continued to build.

  Anna thought about Jack, gone forever, drawn into that web of sound, and then vomited on Elgin Street, a burned ruin. She thought about Baker and what Ned had told her had been found in that secret room in his basement. How many times had she been down in his studio—just one wall away from that hidden room? Had there been victims trapped in its darkness, begging for any kind of release from their pain, while she leaned into a mike one room away, singing backup on somebody’s demo?

  She shuddered and took Ned’s left hand, gripping his fingers tightly.

  “How’re you holding up?” he asked her quietly.

  “I. . . I’m okay. I was thinking. Remember the first kid Jack lost?”

  Ned nodded. Jack had been hunting down a runaway, who’d later turned up as a floater in the river. It was the worst Jack had ever seen. Anna had called him and Ned had gone from bar to bar, looking for her brother until he’d finally found him drinking out his brains in a little dive out in Vanier.

  “I thought he was going to lose it all the way that time,” he said.

  “He almost did,” Anna said. “But then he realized that he had to go on. For all the ones he lost, there were going to be so many more that he still could help. If he’d quit then, they might’ve ended up just the same as that one.”

  “I remember,” Ned said.

  “That’s what’s keeping me going. Knowing that something we might do now could stop what happened to Jack from happening to anybody else.”

  Listening to them, Grier licked his lips nervously and looked up the street. “You really think we can make a difference?” he asked.

  He wasn’t about to fold on them. This was his job—weirder than fuck right now, but it was still his job. He was being paid by the city to look after its citizens, but it wasn’t just money that kept him and every other cop worth his badge on the job. It was the commitment. To help. To protect. Sure, you got tired. Or fed up. Or scared. But you went ahead and did your job all the same. Because you made a difference. Not always. But often enough.

  The only thing that could stop Grier dead in his tracks was if that changed. If he couldn’t make a difference anymore. No matter how small.

  “Every time we take a stand,” Ned said quietly, “we make a difference. Even if we go down trying.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  They looked from one to the other. Anna gave Ned’s hand another squeeze, then they set off up Bank Street toward the fire.

  She walked in the middle again, the two men flanking her on either side. The air was thick with the smell of the fire now. By the next block they could feel the heat being thrown off from the building. The glare hurt their eyes.

  “Jesus,” Grier murmured.

  They all felt the strangeness of staring at that huge, two-story building going up in flames. They’d almost gotten used to the emptiness of the city. But here, where the night should have been busy with fire fighters, flashing lights, crowds of bystanders looking for a quick thrill, the alienness seemed more pronounced.

  They moved closer. A half block away they had to stop because of the heat. A section of roof fell in, and they all started, moving back a couple of steps in unison. They kept a careful watch on the buildings around them, looking up and down the streets, but the fire kept drawing their gaze.

  Like moths to a flame, Anna thought. This is what they feel like. This is why there’re always people drawn to disasters. They weren’t necessarily ghoulish. It was a reminder that there, but for the grace of God . . .

  Grier turned away and made another quick sweep of the streets.

  “There’s no one around,” he said softly. “No sign of the perp, but I got a feeling.”

  Ned and Anna nodded. They did too. Whatever was responsible for the deaths, for this blaze, was very close. They continued to scan the buildings and streets. When movement finally came, none of them was prepared for its source.

  She came floating out of the flames, pale and ghostly. Her long, bleached hair streamed down her shoulders. Her robes shimmered in the heat. Her face drew their gazes like magnets. Her beauty stilled their breaths. For one long moment they all saw her in the same form—Jack’s angel, heartbreakingly lovely—but then her features changed and—

  Ned saw the bruised and battered face of the little girl he’d found going in on a routine domestic on his first year as a rookie.

  The parents had been beating on the kid for so long that her bruises had become her natural coloring. Broken nose. A busted arm that had never been properly set. Five fucking years old and her parents used her for a whipping post.

  He’d hit the father—had just started beating on him when his partner had pulled him off. Then he was all set to go after the mother. His partner had covered for him—the man had been resisting arrest, they told their sergeant. With the way the kid looked, Ned hadn’t been charged himself, but he never forgot that poor kid’s face. She never got off. The scars she had, physical as well as those you couldn’t see, were going to be with her forever.

  Seeing her face now, older but still recognizable on the shoulders of the angel, all that old frustration and empathy came rushing back so hard that his eyes teared and his chest hurt. Because in her eyes he saw that same dumb misery that had been there when he’d found her all those years ago. It was like nothing had changed.

  He wanted to have her father back in front of him again. Here, in this place. With no one to stop him as he finished the job on him, hitting the fucker until he was just as helpless as the poor kid he’d been beating on, and then hitting him some more. . . .

  But piggybacking that rage was a sense of shame. Because at the same time as the righteous anger filled him he was also remembering all the times he’d been on the giving end of misery. Nothing major—just all the minor hurt that people dumped on each other.

  Making fun of some nerd in high school.

  Standing up a date because she didn’t match up to some new flame—and being tactless enough to tell her so.

  Roughing up some longhair for being too lippy.

  Little things. But if you got it all your life, they added up to a lot of pain. . . . Ernie Grier saw the face of Wendy Kerr.

  She was a kid in his senior class in high school. A real looker. A little wild. She liked to hitchhike, and one time she caught the wrong ride and ended up dead in a ditch. Ernie was the one who found her, riding by on his ten-speed, catching a flash of color by the side of the road as he went by. He grabbed the brakes and turned around. When he saw her—the bruised face, the head hanging at an impossible angle, the nude body that awakened no lust in him because of its pathetic situation—he knelt in the dirt beside the road and threw up, dry heaving long after he’d lost the contents of his stomach.

  That was the moment when he realized he had to be a cop, to do what he could to stop this kind of thing. And if he couldn’t stop it, then he wanted to make sure the fuckers responsible got theirs.

  Wendy Kerr. She looked a little older, and the color of the angel’s hair w
asn’t the same as her own auburn ponytail, but he knew her all the same.

  He held the shotgun with whitening knuckles. Left hand tense on the slide handle, finger tightening on the trigger. If he’d had the fucker who’d hurt her in his sights right now . . .

  The anger had never died. It was as alive now as it had been then. But, like Ned, he knew shame too.

  Nobody was perfect. And he’d dumped on his share of people who hadn’t deserved it. . . .

  Anna felt the same guilt that her companions did. Faces rose in her mind’s eye—the faces of all those that she’d ever hurt in one way or another. Confronted by their accusing features, she was ashamed. But then the memories blurred. The angel’s features appeared for a moment, blurred again, became Beth. . . .

  Anna had first met Beth while doing volunteer work at a home for battered women, and she’d taken her under her wing, the way she always did with strays, with anyone who needed help. But there was something different about Beth right from the start. It wasn’t just that life had been so very hard on her— there were too many other women in exactly that same situation. It wasn’t that she felt more pity for Beth than for the other women in the home. It was that she could see that Beth could really be something special, but she needed more help than the home could give her to attain her potential.

  The women who ran the home were too overworked to be able to give her that extra attention. But Anna wasn’t. Especially because it wasn’t pity that drove her but a true sense of kinship with the lost soul that Beth had been at the time. A strange sense of déjà vu—they had been friends before, in other lives, and would be friends again. It was something she never could have explained clearly to anyone, and she’d never bothered to try. So she’d simply devoted her time to Beth.

  Sometimes Anna was tough on her. Sometimes she got so frustrated at the way Beth just let life hand her what scraps it would without question that she wanted to shake her friend silly. But more and more often, as good memories built up to at least ease, if not erase, the past, Beth’s potential began to shine through.

  But this . . . Beth’s features in that face. Beth floating from the flames in the angel’s body.

  The shock of recognition paralyzed Anna.

  Not Beth.

  It couldn’t have been Beth who killed all those men—

  (killed Jack!)

  —so brutally.

  I was the one in control there. I felt like nobody could hurt me— nobody could even touch me.

  Not you, Beth, Anna said. You didn’t kill Jack. Please tell me you didn’t. Jack never hurt you—he never hurt anyone. How . . . how could you do it?

  You don’t know what it’s like being me. Everybody always hitting on me, using me... .

  A bitter numbness spread through Anna. If she’d never taken Beth in, then Jack would still be alive.

  ... stop hurting me...

  I only wanted to help you.

  . . . stop hurting me. . .

  The music was still building—Baker’s music. His concerto dedicated to pain. To suffering.

  . . . stop hurting me . . .

  Anna could almost understand the need for Baker’s death. The suffering he had caused. But Jack . . .

  . . . stop hurting me. . .

  The anger that fell like a red cloud across Anna’s eyes was an alien thing to her. The need to take Ned’s revolver and empty it into the woman was as unfamiliar. But Anna’s hand twitched at her side, longing for the weapon all the same. Because when she thought of Jack . . . . . . stop hurting me . . .

  All she wanted to do was erase Beth from the face of the earth.

  It was then that the angel’s features began to change. The skin peeled away, fangs protruded, her nose disappeared, leaving a hole in the middle of that once perfect face. The mouth opened wide, jaws unhinging like a snake’s. Dozens of tongues writhed in that dark maw.

  No angel now, but a fury.

  The music rose to a crescendo. Anna could sense the men on either side of her tensing, raising their weapons. Her fingers continued to twitch, wanting a weapon of their own. But then she saw something else.

  Behind the creature’s monstrous features she saw a flicker of faces, going by so fast that there was barely time to make one out from the other. But she recognized them all the same.

  Victims.

  Battered women, abused children.

  They were faces she’d seen in photos in the newspaper, and in that home for battered women. Faces from the snapshots that Jack carried when he was on a case—the kids he was looking for.

  Victims.

  Their faces going by in a blur. So many of them.

  Hundreds.

  That wasn’t Beth, she realized. She could hear Jack’s voice, whispering under the whine of the music.

  This is where the victims wait to get even, Anna.

  This fury wasn’t just Beth. It was all of them. All of the hurt people that no one has time to help.

  The thing is, you bring your own pain in here with you, and it changes things too.

  The sound of the slide handles pumping shells into the firing chambers of the shotguns on either side of her was loud—even with the roar of the fire and the music.

  My pain is Jack’s death, Anna thought. I brought that with me here. Just like Ned and Ernie have brought their own pains. Their own injustices. Here we just want to get even. We want to act, to be strong. To have our own justice.

  Here it’s the weak that are strong. It’s their place to get back at everything that ever hurt them.

  But it’s not our place. If we bring our anger to it, our need for justice, we’re just calling that thing down on us.

  The creature floated away from the flames, moving toward them. On either side of her, Ned and Grier raised their weapons.

  “No!” Anna cried.

  She put out her hands, to the left and right, pushing the barrels of the shotguns away from their target.

  “Throw them away,” she said. “All your weapons—throw them away!”

  “Jesus Christ, Anna!” Ned cried. “What the fuck do you think you’re—”

  The creature had drifted closer. It was hard to look into the horror of its features and think of victims. Of not striking back. Oh, God, if she was wrong—

  (Jack!)

  She turned on Ned. “Do it, please God, just do it, do it!”

  Then she faced the creature and took a step closer to it. She held her hands out open in front of her and composed her features to show no anger, no fear. Her stomach churned. The music made her head ache with its ugly tones. She took a couple more steps.

  “Beth . . . ?” she said.

  “Anna!” Ned cried.

  “Trust me in this,” she called back to him without turning. “Please, Ned.”

  She moved closer still to the advancing creature.

  “I know you’re in there, Beth. It’s Anna. I want to help.”

  2

  THROUGH THE CREATURE’S eyes Beth could see her.

  Anna.

  Her best friend. Her only friend.

  What was she doing here?

  In the voices of the host that shared the fury’s body with her, she heard the answer. She came to die.

  The music moaned and wailed, a shrieking chorus.

  To die. . .to die...

  It bit at Beth’s thoughts, worrying and tearing at them like animals feeding on a kill. But seeing Anna freed Beth of her fear. The horror of Walt’s corpse fled. The power that the creature held over her drained away.

  She could be strong, she realized. In control. It required taking a stand and sticking to it. It was so simple. So impossible. It meant losing the promised comfort of the wasteland. The endless, peaceful flight. It meant going back to the real world and the possibility of finding herself in—

  (that dark place)

  —the role of a victim again.

  But everything had a price, didn’t it? Helping Anna meant losing the promise of peace. Retaining the promise
meant Anna had to die.

  There was no question which she had to choose.

  Anna never hurt anyone, she told the fury and its host.

  She came here with anger in her heart, the voices cried. They came with weapons with which they meant to hurt us.

  They . . . they’re just scared, Beth replied.

  The thought surprised her, but she realized it was true.

  They’re just like us, she said.

  Only the guilty are drawn to this midground, the voices told her.

  Only the guilty, the music echoed.

  So we visit them with justice, the voices said.

  The elemental force that was the fury said nothing, allowing the host to answer for it.

  But everyone’s got something to feel guilty about inside them, Beth said. That doesn’t mean they’re bad people. Look at them. You know they’re not evil. Don’t tell me you can’t see that.

  Through the creature’s eyes Beth watched Anna approach, hands held open before her. Behind her, the two men hesitated. She recognized Ned.

  He was the first to throw his shotgun off to the side. He drew his handgun and threw that away as well, then stood his ground, hands pulling open his jacket to show that he had no other weapons. Moments later the other man did the same.

  “Beth, please,” Anna was saying.

  She considers herself better than you, the voices said. She always set herself above you.

  No, Beth replied. All she ever wanted to do was help.

  The music whined, the host chorused a hundred pains, but still the fury remained silent.

  “I know it’s hard,” Anna said. “I know it hurts. I know about pain, Beth. Jack’s dead—don’t tell me I don’t know about pain.”

  Jack was dead?

  Beth felt sick. Had she been a part of his death too?

  “But being here doesn’t solve anything,” Anna went on. “You never like to hear this, but it’s true. Running away never solved anything. There’s good things in the world, too, Beth. Think of the times we’ve had—you and me. Think of what can be.”