Where Angels Fear to Tread

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  “Deryn?” a friendly voice called from somewhere behind her.

  She froze, her hand gripping the cool metal of the brass handle. She almost answered but managed to stop herself.

  “Deryn York, is that you out there?” the woman called out again. “Please, come join me in here.”

  Deryn had no idea why, but she did as the woman asked, letting go of the door and abandoning her chance for escape. She moved toward the left of the stairs, and down a short hallway to a small room—a sitting room—on the right. Slowly she entered to find an attractive, dark-haired woman sitting in the center of a high-backed love seat and pouring from a silver tea set.

  “There you are,” she said with a wide smile. “Would you care for some tea?”

  A low moan followed the woman’s question, and Deryn noticed a man slumped in a floral wingback chair at the other end of the love seat. He was dressed in a navy blue jogging suit, his complexion deathly pale. He seemed to be staring off into space, emitting groans from time to time.

  “Oh, pay no attention to him,” the woman said, waving with a bejeweled hand. “Come, sit beside me, and we’ll talk about your daughter.”

  “My daughter?” Deryn asked, not sure she had heard correctly. “Did you say my daughter?”

  “Yes, I most certainly did,” the woman said. “Come—sit—before I lose my patience.”

  Deryn entered the room, her footfalls muffled by the elaborate oriental rug that covered the floor.

  “What do you know about my daughter?” she demanded. “Who are you? Why was I . . . ?”

  The woman interrupted her, laughing melodically. “There will be plenty of time for questions,” she said, pouring tea into a china cup, which she placed on the table in front of the love seat. “We’ll have a bit of refreshment first, and then we’ll get down to business.”

  The woman smiled again, sipping from her own cup.

  Silently Deryn sat on the other end of the love seat, staring . . . waiting.

  “Do drink your tea,” the woman instructed.

  The man in the sweat suit shifted suddenly in his chair, bending forward to bury his head in his hands, softly screaming.

  The woman ignored him, turning slightly to stare at Deryn with a powerful intensity.

  And suddenly Deryn wanted her tea. She picked up her cup and took a sip, making a face as she set it back down on the saucer.

  “Sugar?” the woman asked, setting down her own cup and picking up the sugar bowl.

  “Who are you?” Deryn demanded.

  The woman placed the sugar bowl close to Deryn’s hand.

  “My name is Delilah,” she replied. “And your daughter has something that I want.”

  The man had begun to thrash, falling from the chair to the floor, his spastic movement nearly kicking over the coffee table.

  “Oh, come now, Mr. Poole,” Delilah scolded. “Have a little bit of control.”

  Deryn watched the man, feeling herself grow more and more afraid. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked.

  “Mr. Poole has a rather odd talent . . . an affliction really,” Delilah explained. “He can read the psychic impressions left upon things, telling where they’ve been and, with the right incentive, where they are.”

  She looked at the man who was still lying on his stomach at the foot of the chair. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Poole?”

  Poole remained silent, twitching as he lay there.

  “You said,” Deryn began, addressing Delilah, “you said my daughter has something you want?”

  Delilah nodded, and she picked up the silver teapot and refilled her own cup. “I wasn’t sure at first, but after my trip to Florida, I’m certain it’s she.”

  “Your trip to Florida?” Deryn asked. “Where . . .”

  “Never mind about that, Deryn,” Delilah said forcefully. “We have to find your little girl and get her back into your arms, don’t we?”

  Just the thought of holding Zoe made Deryn smile.

  “I—I would really love that, but . . .”

  Delilah held up one hand, bringing the teacup to her lips with the other. “No buts then,” she said, taking a sip and setting her cup down once more. “That is what we will do. And when we find her, you will have your daughter back, and I will have what I want.”

  Delilah smiled so wide that Deryn imagined it must have hurt.

  “What could she . . . What does Zoe have that you . . . ,” Deryn started to ask, curious how her six-year-old daughter could have something that this fine woman so desperately needed.

  “That is of no concern to you,” Delilah said. “I doubt she even knows she has it, and when we find her, I will take it, and she will be none the wiser.”

  Deryn thought of Remy Chandler again. He was helping her, but at this stage, she didn’t even know if he was still alive.

  But this woman—this Delilah—seemed to know how to find her little girl. “How?” Deryn asked desperately. “How are we going to find my baby?”

  Delilah was smiling again, but her smile quickly disappeared when she looked at Poole still lying upon the floor. “Get up now, Mr. Poole,” she commanded.

  Deryn felt a cold chill run up and down the length of her spine as Poole climbed to his knees with a grunt, staring with pleading eyes at the beautiful woman.

  “We’re going to find Ms. York’s little girl,” Delilah told him.

  And he started to sob. “I . . . I need . . . I need to rest before . . .”

  “There will be plenty of time for rest once the child is back in the custody of her mother,” Delilah scolded, turning her gaze toward Deryn.

  “Yes, please, Mr. Poole,” Deryn said. “Please find my little girl.”

  Poole met her eyes, his face damp with tears. “She doesn’t care about your child,” he said, his eyes glistening with emotion. “All she cares about is . . .”

  Delilah was a blur as she jumped up, yanked the man into the air by the front of his sweat suit, and slammed him back into the chair.

  “Don’t make me regret using your services, Mr. Poole,” she snarled, still holding him by the twisted fabric of his nylon top.

  “Kill me!” the man screamed. “Kill me now, you fucking bitch!”

  “I’ll do worse than that,” she said, giving him a violent shake before letting him go.

  Deryn sat silently, not sure exactly what was happening, but caring only about finding her little girl . . . finding her Zoe.

  Delilah turned to her, that smile again stretching her features.

  “Sorry about that,” she said with a polite chuckle. “Mr. Poole and I have been working quite closely for the last few days, and we’ve started to wear on each other’s nerves.”

  She held out her hand, and Deryn noticed how long and delicate her fingers were, and how sharp the scarlet nails seemed to be.

  “Come here, Deryn,” Delilah commanded.

  Immediately, Deryn stood, walking around the coffee table, to stand before Delilah.

  “Your hand, Mr. Poole,” Delilah ordered, and the man offered his trembling appendage. “Take it, Deryn York.”

  Deryn reached out, but skittishly pulled her hand back. “What is he going to do?” she asked.

  “He will read the psychic impressions left upon you by your lovely daughter,” Delilah explained. “A mother’s love for her child is a very powerful thing, and, hopefully, he will be able to follow those impressions through the ether to locate her present whereabouts.”

  Deryn hesitated, then grasped the man’s cold, clammy hand. “Will it hurt?”

  Mr. Poole began to laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

  “If you think I’ve got a table for you assholes, you’ve got another think coming,” the Asian man waiting inside the entrance to the China Lion said, slapping the menus in his hand against the side of his leg.

  Samson let out an enormous laugh, pushing past his daughter and son to embrace the little man.

  “Kenny, how the fuck are you, my little yellow brother?”

  Kenny hugged back. “Haven’t seen you in a while—I thought the food finally killed you.”

  “Not a fucking chance,” Samson sa
id, releasing the man.

  “Table for four?” Kenny asked, holding up four fingers.

  “Four it is,” the big man agreed.

  Remy still found it hard to believe the man was blind, but he guessed a life as long as Samson’s had allowed him time to adapt, and from watching Samson move and interact with his surroundings, he certainly had.

  He felt the hand of Marko, Samson’s son, upon his back, as they all followed Samson and Kenny to the back of the Market Street restaurant.

  “Hope I didn’t hurt you too bad when I decked you,” Marko said, walking beside him.

  Remy heard Carla, the blind man’s daughter, chuckle. For the briefest moment, in response to their lack of respect, he imagined reaching out with a hand bathed in the fires of Heaven and burning away the man’s face, before moving on to the girl.

  The Seraphim seemed to laugh from somewhere deep in the darkness of his being, but Remy ignored it.

  “I can take it,” he said instead, forcing a smile, while bringing a hand up to move his jaw from side to side.

  Marko laughed, slapping Remy on the back as they entered a private dining room. Kenny pulled out a chair for Samson, guiding him into it and handing him a menu. The restaurant owner then pulled out the other seats, Remy taking the one to the left of Samson, and dispersed the rest of his menus.

  “Any specials tonight, Ken?” Samson asked.

  “Yeah, you get no food poisoning,” the little man said as he briskly walked from the room.

  Samson liked that one, laughing until he started to choke and cough.

  Marko and Carla were looking at their menus. Remy had had no intention of eating, but the place did smell pretty good.

  A cute waitress with a less-than-stellar grasp of the English language filled their water glasses and took their drink orders. Samson and his kids ordered Tsingtao beer, and Remy chose a Seven and Seven.

  As they waited for their drinks, Remy decided he’d been patient long enough. Back at the Boys Club, he’d tried to get Samson to fill him in, but the big man had refused, saying he had to eat before he dropped dead.

  Their drinks arrived, and they put their dinner orders in. Soon after that, three servings of Chinese dumplings arrived, which were promptly pounced upon by the table’s residents.

  “So, do you think you might be able to tell me what’s going on now?” Remy asked finally, taking a sip of his drink. It tasted strongly of Seagram’s, just the way Mulvehill and he liked a Seven and Seven. Remy was sure that if the China Lion were more in the neighborhood, Steven would be a regular, but Lynn was a little too far even for excellent Seven and Sevens.

  Samson stabbed a dumpling with his fork, dipped it in the special soy sauce, and brought it to his mouth. The dark sauce dribbled from the corners of his mouth, down into his white beard.

  “We thought you might know some stuff that would be helpful to us,” the big man said, noisily chewing on the dumpling.

  “So I’m guessing your kids’ driving through the motel wall wasn’t an accident?”

  “I told them to follow you.” Samson shrugged.

  “And what’s this information I might have?” Remy asked. There was one dumpling left, and he stabbed it with his fork.

  “Methuselah thought you might have something,” Samson said. He wiped the sauce from his beard, then picked up his bottle of beer.

  “Methuselah?” Remy asked.

  “You were at his place the other night, asking about the mark.” Samson set his beer down and rubbed the back of one of his large hands.

  “Yeah, I was,” Remy said, breaking the dumpling in half with the side of his fork and popping the piece into his mouth. He chewed for a bit before continuing. “I was curious if anyone had ever seen something like it.”

  Marko and Carla chuckled as they sipped their Chinese beers.

  “All right, so I’m guessing you guys know something I don’t,” Remy said. “How about we all be big kids and share.”

  Their dinners arrived. Carla got the Szechuan chicken, and Marko had ordered some sort of spicy shrimp dish served inside a half of a pineapple. Samson’s dinner had something to do with duck and Paradise, and Remy relied on his old standby, General Tsao.

  They dug into their meals, Remy still waiting for his answers.

  “It’s her mark,” Samson finally said, feeding the crunchy fried skin of the duck into his mouth.

  “Excuse me?” Remy asked, his fork holding some of General Tsao’s chicken midway to his mouth.

  “The kiss marks,” Samson stated in explanation. “They’re her mark . . . Delilah’s.”

  Remy dropped his fork. With the inclusion of Samson in the puzzle, he should have known.

  “Really,” he said, taking another sip of his drink. “She’s still around too, is she?”

  “Oh, she’s around all right,” Samson said with a nod, reaching into his mouth to pick a piece of duck from his teeth. “I’ve been trying to kill that bitch for years.”

  He grabbed his beer and tipped it back, discovering with disgust that it was empty. “Hey, Kenny!” he bellowed toward the doorway. “Another round, you yellow bastard!”

  “You can all go fuck yourselves,” the owner replied.

  Samson got very serious, his large, sausage-sized fingers intertwining at his chin. “I was born to be the champion of the Israelites,” he said quietly. “To deliver my people from the tyranny of the Philistines. All I had to do was abstain from alcohol and not cut my hair.”

  The waitress returned with their drinks.

  “Guess that was supposed to prove I was totally dedicated to God,” the big man said as he brought the fresh beer to his lips. He drank nearly half of it before taking the bottle from his mouth again.

  “Making up for lost time,” he said, and then belched.

  The kids thought this was a riot.

  “I killed a lot of Philistines in my time,” he said, flexing and unflexing his gigantic hands. “And had a lot of women, but nothing compared to her.”

  “Here we go,” Marko said, rolling his eyes. “I’m going out for a smoke.” Carla said she would join him, and they both left the table.

  “Fucking kids,” Samson growled. “No sense of history.” He took another pull from his beer.

  “So I’m guessing the her that no other woman compared to is Delilah.”

  “And you’d be correct,” the big man agreed. “I fell in love with her on first sight. She was from a little village in the valley of Sorek. I was passing through there on the run from some Philistine jerkwads trying to make a name for themselves by taking me down.”

  He laughed, lifting his beer. “Yeah, good fucking luck with that.

  “I hadn’t planned on hanging around, but she had this certain quality. Once I was with her, I couldn’t imagine being without her.”

  Samson grew quiet. Remy could tell that the old man’s memory was still good enough to remember all the details, both the pleasant and the unpleasant.

  “I shared everything with her,” he said, still ashamed at how he’d been taken. “Told her about God’s mission for me, and how I could be stopped only one way.”

  “The hair?” Remy said.

  Samson nodded.

  “So, could you please explain to me what the fuck is up with that?” Marko asked as he and Carla returned to the table, stinking of cigarette smoke. “You cut your hair and lose your strength? I don’t get it.”

  “It’s a God thing,” Remy said. “I swear He comes up with the stuff off the top of His head.”

  “Exactly,” Samson said. “Those were His rules, and I was supposed to stick to them.”

  “But Delilah betrayed you,” Remy said sympathetically.

  The old man clutched his beer bottle in a tightening grip. “Oh yeah, she did that all right. It just goes to show how you never really know a person,” he said.

  He finished his second beer before coming up for air.

  “The Philistines had pulled her aside and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. Eleven hundred silver coins for the secret of my strength.”

  He shook his shaggy head, his white hair, in
a ponytail now, swinging back and forth. He felt for his fork and picked it up, then began to work on one of his duck legs.

  “She cut my hair while I was asleep, after a good schtuping—if you know what I mean.” He made a fist and brought it back and forth. Remy knew what he meant.

  “With the hair gone, my deal with God was canceled.”

  “God’s a dick,” Carla said, tipping back her beer.

  “He is pretty anal about His rules,” Remy said in a weak attempt at defending the All-Father.

  “The rest you probably know,” Samson said, feeding strips of duck meat into his mouth. “The Philistines captured me, blinded me, and used me as a slave to grind their grain.”

  Samson tore what remained of the leg from the duck carcass and brought it to his mouth.

  “I just bided my time, praying to God every moment I had, swearing to serve Him for as long as He wanted me. He must’ve seen that I still had some good years left, and He gave me a little gift. He let my hair grow back overnight.”

  “Dad fucked up those Philistines good,” Marko said, doing the fist bump with his sister.

  “I did at that,” the old man said wistfully. “Brought their whole friggin’ temple down around their pointy ears.”

  The kids raised their beer bottles in salute to their father.

  Remy finished his second drink, tipping the glass back so that some of the ice would fall into his mouth. “And what about Delilah?” he asked, crunching on the ice. “I’m pretty sure her story doesn’t end there.”

  The large man shook his head again. He dropped the duck leg bone down onto his plate, wiping his greasy hands on his napkin.

  “Not by a long shot,” Samson said. “She took off after I was captured, and nobody really knew what happened to her. Probably started a new identity elsewhere, but it didn’t change who she really was . . . and whom she betrayed.”

  Samson turned his blind eyes toward Remy.

  “She didn’t just betray me; she betrayed God.” He pointed toward the ceiling. “And you know He hates to be fucked with.”

  The cute waitress came into the room to clear the table. There wasn’t all that much remaining of the meals, but Marko asked for the leftovers.

  “God cursed her,” Samson said in a voice softer than usual. “Cursed her to live eternally, always knowing that what she had . . . always knowing that whatever she loved would die.”