Angels of Music

by Kim Newman

  She shuddered to remember how her aunts used to tut at little Katie’s silly notions. Now she’d turned into one of them. The old Reeds.

  Where did the Ill Fortune come in? For enemies of the Opera Ghost Agency, Kate trusted.

  ‘Ah, you are the Angels,’ said the maître d’. ‘I was told you would come.’

  Kate didn’t ask by whom.

  ‘It is a pleasure to meet you,’ said Olympia. ‘I hope we shall be the best of friends.’

  Gustave looked sideways at the doll. People heard or imagined things in her voice. Sometimes, what they wanted to hear. Sometimes, what they very much did not.

  The maître d’ stood aside to let Alraune pass. The others followed her. Irene didn’t crow at Gustave. It must be hard tack for her to be reduced to bobbing along in someone else’s wake.

  Kate looked at the Persian’s spot, heartsick that he wasn’t there.

  The proprietors had draped black cloth over the table and put a rope around it. A touching tribute to a loyal, long-serving customer. Of course, the café was forced by flood to close mere hours after making the gesture.

  The carpet had squelchy spots. The café smelled of damp and less pleasant things. As Gustave said, filth was a problem. Many Paris basements had drain-stoppers like large bath-plugs. When these were removed, rainwater was supposed to gurgle into the sewers. So unusually high was this flood that concierges who pulled up the stoppers were surprised by geysers of fouler water from below.

  The café was lit only by stubs of candles. Gas pressure was inconstant and the electricity had given out. The City of Light was guttering.

  At a far table, stranded waiters and waitresses played cards. They were quite tipsy – as, Kate realised, was the impeccable Gustave.

  He noticed her noticing.

  ‘All we have that’s drinkable is champagne,’ he explained. ‘If this goes on, we shall have to bathe in it.’

  Irene paused. Kate knew the American was considering champagne… then thinking better of it. This was not an Irish wake.

  The Angels sat at the Persian’s table – all around it, as if at a séance.

  Unorna’s department.

  Kate was no great believer in spiritualism, but the world turned out to be weirder than anyone let on when she was a girl. Another revelation she could thank Charles for. She’d willingly followed him off the well-lit path where rational explanations could always be found into the deep, dark woods where the boggarts lived. Working with Charles at the Diogenes Club and the Angels of Music had knocked doctrinaire scepticism out of her, but she wasn’t credulous. Ninety-nine ghosts out of a hundred were disinherited cousins wearing bed sheets or the wind whistling through knotholes. And most mediums were despicable charlatans preying on the grief-stricken.

  The Bohemian Angel wasn’t a medium.

  When Irene had called her a witch, Kate said Unorna was a magician.

  That was a polite term – it could mean demon-summoning wizardry or pick-a-card sleight of hand. Kate didn’t expect Unorna to produce doves from a top hat. Nevertheless, the queer-eyed, russet-tinged blonde had a flair for the dramatic. No question but that she knew some tricks.

  Gustave brought candles to the table, then left them alone.

  ‘The Persian wasn’t killed here,’ said Alraune. ‘He was in his rooms.’

  ‘No, but he lived here,’ replied Unorna. ‘More than anywhere else. This is where he was known. This is where he is remembered. It is the best place.’

  From her reticule, she produced a familiar astrakhan cap. She put it on the table.

  ‘Are you going to summon the Persian from Mohammedan paradise and grill him about his murder?’ asked Irene.

  Unorna shook her head. ‘It’s not about personalities, it’s about patterns. Traces in the aether, disturbances on the astral plane. Violent events disrupt the courses of fate. Time takes the wrong paths. I will open myself, become part of the pattern. And I shall see what is to be seen. Please don’t be alarmed at anything I do or say.’

  Kate looked around the table. Thi Minh intently studied Unorna. Mrs Eynsford Hill perfectly folded a stray napkin and made a pyramid of it in her place setting. Alraune’s large eyes grew larger. Olympia was at rest, head on one side like a sleeping dove. Irene resisted an itch to peep under the table, half-suspecting hidden pedals and trumpets squeezed between knees.

  Should they all hold hands? Evidently not.

  Unorna put her fingers to her temples and brushed her hair away from her face.

  She gazed upwards, mouth slightly open. A fiery third eye opened in her smooth forehead.

  ‘Blimey O’Reilly,’ exclaimed Mrs Eynsford Hill in purest Bow Bells cockney.

  ‘She said don’t be alarmed,’ said Irene, drolly.

  Kate saw the third eye was an illusion – a metal disc which caught the candlelight.

  Unorna murmured in a language Kate didn’t recognise. Nothing European.

  ‘What’s that again?’ said Irene. ‘The deeds to the mine are in an old tin box buried at the north corner of the south field?’

  ‘Hush,’ said Kate. ‘Give her a chance.’

  ‘I’ve seen this act before,’ said Irene. ‘In the travelling shows. Professor Marvel gabbles the ooga-booga and relays messages from his Indian spirit guide, Princess Rain-in-My-Face.’

  ‘That’s a remote copy of a copy,’ said Alraune. ‘Fakery, based on this truth.’

  Alraune respected Unorna. They had a connection. Alchemy, perhaps. Even in this group of unusual women, they were weird sisters.

  Unorna gave no sign of being offended by – or even having heard – the debate. Her eyes rolled up. Candle flames reflected in the exposed whites. The disc shone as if it were all-seeing.

  ‘Atlantis rises,’ said Unorna, in a clear voice. ‘Antinea is coming.’

  Her mouth gaped open and gallons of green water burst out, drenching the tablecloth.

  Some splashed into Kate’s lap. It was shockingly cold.

  Thi Minh leaped from her chair, knocking it over, and caught Unorna, who was limp as if boneless. Her eyes were open. The disc fell off and rolled away.

  She was breathing, but would not wake up.

  V

  THE ODIOUS GUSTAVE sent people over to help. Merry waiters elbowed Irene aside, eager to lay hands on the unconscious younger woman. After comical toing and froing, Unorna was hefted onto a dry chaise longue. Thi Minh, revealing fresh talents, became a perfect nurse. She fussed – turning tablecloths into sheets, tucking up the patient.

  Despite Unorna telling them not to be, Irene was alarmed. She was sure the witch hadn’t expected to cough up a fishpond and fall into a coma. Something had been done to her. It seemed a risk of ‘opening up’ spiritually was all sorts of trouble blowing in through unlocked doors.

  ‘Atlantis rises. Antinea is coming.’

  That had to mean something.

  ‘Atlantis, I’ve heard of,’ said Irene. ‘Lost continent… sunken civilisation… hard to find on the map… talked up by Plato, Bacon and Thomas More. But Antinea is a new one on me. Any ideas?’

  She looked to her fellow Angels.

  ‘Could she have been trying to say Fantômas?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Antinea… Fantômas,’ said Elizabeth, in Unorna’s voice. ‘Fantômas… Antinea. Hmmn, they both have ant in. Otherwise, the words are distinct. She would not be likely to think one and say the other.’

  ‘I have heard of Antinea,’ intoned Alraune. ‘Eternal Queen of Atlantis.’

  Irene wasn’t surprised at Alraune’s arcane erudition. The German girl had a whiff of witchiness herself. She didn’t seem the book-learning type, though.

  ‘Atlantis rises,’ said Elizabeth, still in Unorna’s voice. ‘Antinea is coming.’

  ‘Can you parrot everything you hear?’ Irene asked.

  She could see uses for such a talent – not all moral.

  ‘After a few hours, it flies out of my head,’ the English woman admitted.

  Elizab
eth shrugged in a cracked simulation of modesty. She could imitate perfectly, but was on rocky ground if improvising. Thanks to the Henry Higgins treatment, the poor sap was unconvincing as herself.

  Another mastermind worth kicking in the pants.

  ‘Some things you’d only need in your head for a few hours,’ Irene mused. ‘Account numbers… combinations to safes… pages of address books…’

  ‘…why we’re here and how much trouble we’re in,’ said Kate.

  Irene had let herself get distracted. It happened more and more. She’d be in the middle of practical, tiresome chores like plucking her eyebrows or hooking up her stays, when a thought would trundle along like a carriage drawn by black horses, with a handsome stranger inside and a mysterious coat of arms on the doors. She’d climb in and race off for hours, dreaming wildly impractical schemes for the sort of things she really didn’t do any more. Usually, her reveries involved men who were – in the real world – long since dead or confined to bath-chairs. Then, she’d snap out of it and find the tea gone cold or the bath overflowing.

  Trust Kate to jostle her out of it.

  Irene stood over Unorna, and considered the weird woman’s unlined face.

  Had Fantômas got to the Witch of Prague?

  Of the Angels present, Unorna was – Irene reluctantly admitted – the most formidable. All could do things, but she could know things. Knocking her off the board was a smart move.

  Especially if the rest of them did the headless chicken dance.

  ‘I don’t understand what she said,’ said Kate. ‘Atlantis isn’t known for rising, but for sinking. There might be a poetic parallel with flooded Paris, I suppose. Unorna definitely said “Atlantis rises”.’

  ‘Atlantis is important in Gnostic teachings,’ said Alraune.

  With Unorna taken poorly, the German girl became their resident mystic.

  ‘Atlantean rites are still practised. By those who would raise the ancient city and sink the modern world. Fantômas wishes ruination on everything.’

  ‘He isn’t a wizard,’ said Kate. ‘Anarchists use dynamite, surely? Much more reliable than black magic.’

  ‘And why Antinea?’ put in Irene.

  ‘There is a Lady Fantômas, or so she calls herself,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Maudie Beltham. I see her at Ascot. Fantômas throttled her dull husband for her and she’s hung gratefully on his arm ever since. She even dresses like him – in the tailcoat, stiff shirt, top hat and black mask. Maudie might want to be Queen of his Kingdom of Ruins.’

  ‘Notice how many of these death-to-all-rulers anarchists take titles like “Lord” and “Queen”?’ said Irene. ‘Jumped-up little sulks, the lot of ’em. Give me an honest crook any day. Snatches your poke but doesn’t lecture you about it.’

  ‘How are we to find Fantômas?’ asked Alraune.

  Kate laid a hand on Unorna’s brow.

  ‘I think he’ll find us… if, indeed, he’s who we’re playing tag with. Someone is a clever clogs, all right. Killing the Persian brought us together. From across Europe. Perhaps that was the plan all along. Not to get him but to get to us. Now we’re all in the same bowl. Anyone who could strike down the Witch of Prague can do the same to any of us.’

  Irene had a queasy feeling Kate Reed was on to something.

  She’d been right. The Irish journalist was the clever one.

  She hoped Kate had been right too. Irene would have to be slippery indeed to get out of this hale and whole.

  ‘Always think cheerful thoughts, Katie,’ she said.

  ‘Forewarned is… well, often useless, I admit. However, we’re scarcely the damsels of lore. We don’t get captured, kidnapped or killed so some knight errant can ride off on a quest with a personal grudge against the dragon.’

  ‘Knight errants,’ spat Irene. ‘Never my favourite toy soldiers.’

  Thi Minh made a face and claws like a fire-breathing dragon.

  A rattle came at the door. Gustave puffed up, ready to tell more lesser folks that the Café de la Paix wasn’t open to them.

  A blow was administered. The maître d’ staggered against a cake trolley.

  Why hadn’t Irene tried that?

  A stiff-backed old man in uniform barged into the café.

  Kate’s friend, General Asshole. No, he couldn’t really be called that.

  ‘Assolant,’ said Kate, making it sound even ruder.

  The soldier shifted the wet flap of his cape over one shoulder. He held a revolver.

  ‘This establishment is under martial law,’ he declared.

  Kate had been an Angel when the General had his run-in with the Opera Ghost Agency. Irene knew that story. Having knocked around high and low places all her life, she shouldn’t still be surprised by the depravity of well-connected people… but what she’d heard about the après-minuits at the Théâtre des Horreurs disgusted even her. In the years since the fall of the Légion d’Horreur, fresh generations of demented exquisites had sprung up. Those who fancied themselves fashionably decadent got hot and bothered imagining the fabled horrors the Angels had put a stop to. In their fevered minds, the après-minuits were magnificent rather than squalid, daring rather than cowardly. Some heartless entrepreneur would eventually revive the tradition and need to be shut down all over again. It would be motion pictures of murders now or wireless broadcasts from executions.

  Like an ageing rake who bores nephews by insisting the can-can girls of the gay nineties were more alluring than these shameless jazz trollops, Assolant was still around to whine that the old horrors were more horrible, more artistic, more titillating. Yes, and the songs of yesteryear were better than the discordant jungle trash which passed for music in this sad century. Even madmen get old and nostalgic.

  Gustave tried to get up but slipped on an éclair and fell again.

  Men marched into the café. Not the regular soldiers Assolant had led earlier.

  This mob weren’t like any soldiers Irene had ever seen. It took a few seconds to realise they were really men, and not some strange species of fish-reptile-insect demon. They wore tight black shiny rubber suits and face-masks with bulbous eye-windows. Tubes from scaly packs on their backs fed into their helmets. Their boot-toes flattened out into flippers. Even their gauntlets had webbing between the fingers.

  Irene remembered the stories of thieving frog-men operating during the flood. They left finny footprints.

  Was this the army of Atlantis? How had Assolant got a commission in that?

  The frog-men occupied the café. Gustave scuttled away like a kicked crab. Drunken waiters cowered at these apparitions.

  Some string was being played out.

  Had they jumped too soon on Alraune’s identification of their nemesis? Fantômas wasn’t a Chevalier de la Légion d’Horreur. Quite the reverse. The anarchist considered rich hypocrites fair game and had spent much of his career imaginatively slaughtering them. He was heir of the tradition of the capering satirist Guignol and, as Kate had said, an imitator of the Phantom of the Opera. So far as Irene knew, bizarre respect existed between the masked men. This wouldn’t be the first time crimes committed by respectable men were pinned on convenient outsiders. Further from civilisation even than plague-ridden Île du Diable, where Dreyfus had languished, was Île des Monstres, where France transported criminals deemed less than human. The ones they couldn’t guillotine because they weren’t sure beheading would work on them. That was where they’d send Fantômas, if they ever caught him… and Erik, if they fished him out of his sewer alive. Maybe Île des Monstres had women’s cells suitable for Angels with clipped wings.

  A fix was definitely in. Assolant was supposed to be in charge of measures against looting – but here he was leading the arch-looters. It must be some ghastly put-up job. A snake was swallowing its own tail and choking on it.

  The General strolled over to the Angels, spurs clinking. He was, as Irene might have guessed, not a tall man. Though an infantry officer, he liked to be on a horse as often as possible – so
he could look down on people. Civilians, women, Jews and other lesser breeds. The cold eye in the mutilated half of his face rolled as he noticed Unorna.

  Assolant gestured with his revolver.

  ‘There are strict edicts against looting,’ he said. ‘Posted all over the city.’

  The raiders – four of them, all tall and made taller by fin-topped helmets – crossed the café to back up the General. They moved deliberately, as if unused to being out of the water. Their packs were portable breathing apparatus, like that used by miners or firemen. Their masks rattled with exhalation. One frog-man bumped into a table, and made a show of knocking it over as if he’d meant to, battering it away with a powerful swipe. Like most masks, their headgear limited peripheral vision. Something worth remembering.

  Their side-arms were bulky compressed air pistols with arrowhead darts stuck out of the barrels. Spearguns. Axes and knives hung from toolbelts. One frog-man carried a staff tipped with three sharp prongs. Neptune’s trident.

  Close up, Irene was relieved that their eyes were plain men’s – though they seemed to bulge, magnified by the glass goggles.

  ‘You women are subject to immediate arrest,’ said Assolant.

  A tiny flicker of his good eye as he passed Kate gave him away.

  He knew who she was. He had expected to find her here.

  With regards to other Angels, he was doing a job – carrying out someone’s orders. With Kate, it was personal. She had been there when the Légion d’Horreur was smashed. If he couldn’t ventilate the Japanese Angel who’d ruined his face, he’d take it out on her Irish friend.

  ‘These, I suppose, are policemen?’ said Kate.

  Assolant hissed at her. The mug with the trident angled it at Kate’s stomach as if waiting for an order to charge.