Something More Than Night

by Tregillis, Ian

  Entropy had just decided to take five, which meant the fabric of mortal reality was unraveling. It was time to move. I enjoyed one last swig and followed the show outside.

  The sky was quiet. Back to the usual erratic flicker as pieces of aerospace debris hit the atmosphere. The celestial fireworks had run their course. Gabriel was gone.

  Good-bye, pal.

  Snow had fallen just long enough to put a chill on the evening. It felt like the air itself had knocked off for the night, leaving nothing between Earth and stars but the humans and me. The cold flooded my sinuses. I’d been floating on the lingering fumes of oak and fire, but one frigid breath doused the flames and packed my head with ice.

  The snow put a hush on everything, as though the city knew it for a portent of unknown significance. Long time since it was cold enough for snow in these parts.

  The hard boy zigzagged down the laneway. He slipped in the snow a couple of times. His frail followed just out of arm’s reach so that he didn’t pull her down with him. She was too graceful for that. But she didn’t leave him lying in the gutter. Some guys have all the luck.

  Tricky thing, tailing somebody through the laneways. Get too cozy and your birds will fly. Stay too far back and you’ll lose ’em in the tangle of doglegs, alcoves, and unlit stairwells. Shadows fill the lanes day and night. They’re part pedestrian arcade, part flea market, part bodega, part chophouse, part disco. The paths twist through arches and under canopies, meander through the tables of sidewalk brasseries, shrug past card tables laid with gray-market goods. It’s the kind of place where Indonesian businessmen in three-piece duds hock Australian knockoffs of Chinese tech to gullible tourists. The kind of place where freshly dead snakes dangle from hooks in a café window. The kind of place where a marble bank lobby throbs with music from the S&M club hidden behind antique teller windows. The kind of place where on a busy night you can’t take five steps without brushing against somebody. The kind of place where eye contact is a social contract. The kind of place where well-heeled suburbanites come to get a dose of gritty urbanism, thrilling at the glitter and desperation, buying trinkets or a skewer of vat-grown vegetables grilled over a trash fire just to have tangible proof of their excursion, then leaving at the first sight of a penitente weeping blood. The kind of place where you keep one hand on your wallet and the other free to wave off the hucksters. The kind of place where each breath varnishes the back of your throat with the oilyslick cloy of patchouli or the reek of fermented cabbage.

  And as I said, I was tight. Not at my best. But I managed to follow the pair toward the muted double ding of a tram stop. The couple headed in the general direction of the chimes. I stumbled after them.

  Back in the day, my errand would have been trivial. Could have done it from a distance. But I’d been down here a spell. I was rusty. And anyway I wasn’t sure how this was supposed to work. Wasn’t like I could ask around for advice. I could figure the basics on my own, but I didn’t like the math. Maybe I wasn’t as big a fan of the monkeys as Gabriel had been, but I didn’t wish them ill. All I knew was the only thing worse than doing this job would have been not doing it. So I winged it. Figured the smart money was on physical contact. How was I to know?

  I inched closer as the lane spilled into a more reputable thoroughfare. Here Gabriel’s debris had become a dirty slush beneath the tires of the traffic sliding past us. Cars like wheeled soap bubbles jockeyed for position around the accordion twists of serpentine electric trams. An elevated commuter train clattered overhead, ferrying a load of dead-eyes to third-shift jobs.

  My mark leaned heavily on his girlfriend when they crossed to the tram stop. But flametop managed to get him through the gauntlet without incident. I slipped once or twice getting myself to the center island. Blame it on the snow. I do. The dame shot another frown in my direction when I finally made it under the plastic canopy. Maybe she recognized me from earlier.

  Now, the thing about this part of town is that it’s a touristy area. And tourists will goggle at anything so long as it’s quaint. By “quaint” I mean that some of these interchanges are well over a century old. So the traffic lights at certain intersections—such as where the three of us shivered in the cold sea wind—are toggled by mechanical switches set by the tram conductors. Gotta hand it to human ingenuity. For something so primitive the system works well. Most of the time.

  Trams run less frequently at night. Which gave me time to plan my move.

  The lockbox controlling signals for trams coming in our direction stood on the far side of a five-way interchange about a hundred feet away. If I hadn’t been stuck down here so long maybe I could have done it better. Maybe things would have turned out differently. But I’d faded. Couldn’t flick the button. Not at that distance. All I had to go on was my glamour and my charming personality.

  I waited until the tram stopped at the light. Stepping out to open the box put the conductor’s line of sight in my general direction. That’s when I cranked up the glamour and gave him all I had. At that distance, and given my deterioration, the show wasn’t worth a wooden nickel. But it distracted him just enough to make him forget his purpose. He got back on the tram without pressing the button. Without paying attention to what he was doing.

  The cross-traffic had started moving again when the tram bulled through the intersection. Blaring horns shook my mark from his stupor. He and the twist gawked at the commotion.

  A line of cars idled alongside the tracks adjacent to our stop, waiting to turn across the tram lines and opposing traffic. Everyone drove slowly on account of Gabriel’s snowfall. Meaning the hackie trying to keep his fare on the road despite the slush was intent on the traffic and not the tram illegally crossing the intersection. Tram had nearly clipped the taxi before the conductor came to his senses. Brakes screeched. Too late. The hackie panicked, threw his cab into reverse. The tram crunched the taxi with a glancing blow. Slick pavement sent the car spinning over the tracks and into our island.

  The hard boy just watched it coming.

  It was beautiful. I was ready right then and there to pack it in and start making dough in pool halls. What a combination. There are home runs and there are grand slams, but in comparison this was an unassisted triple play on the first day of the season. A work of art. All I had to do was leap over and try to pull the mark aside. I’d fail to save him of course, but the physical contact would tag him just before he died. And the Choir would do the rest: pick him up, dust him off, pat him on the head, and plug the hole left by Gabby’s demise.

  So that was my plan. Not too shabby, right? I thought so, too. But it didn’t account for the flametop having the reflexes of a ferret jammed up on speed.

  “Martin!”

  She was up and yanking him out of harm’s way before I was halfway there. He planted face on the pavement. The taxi spun through the bench and knocked it skew-whiff across the tram stop. Missed him by a good two feet. The girl teetered at the edge of the platform, and nearly fell into the path of the sliding tram. But she caught herself, took a step back, and turned around.

  I tripped over her man and bowled straight into her.

  Physical contact.

  That CEO/dominatrix/red-carpet stride failed her. She lost her footing in the snow for the first and only time since I’d started watching the two of them.

  Over the years, I’d heard the occasional talk about how something seemed to unfold in slow motion. Always thought it was baloney. But it isn’t. Windmilling her arms in a desperate bid to keep her balance, she seemed to hover at the edge of the platform for a moment like a scrap of silk caught on the wind. But she wasn’t silk and she wasn’t a hummingbird. She went over backward, still flailing, still staring in surprise at me.

  Which is how I came to be looking straight into her eyes when she went beneath the tram.

  2

  MISTAKES WERE MADE, NOW LET’S MOVE ON

  Molly Pruett’s dying thought was disappointingly banal: Is that weird guy following us?

/>   But then she was tipping, tipping, tipping and stars overhead were shining, shining, shining—the strange lights in the sky had faded—and metal was screeching, screeching, screeching, and Martin was screaming, screaming, screaming while Molly’s body came apart.

  Cold. Sharp. Pressure. Pain.

  Followed by darkness. Followed by light. Light so bright it hurt. So bright it should have gone through her eyeballs and set her hair on fire. She flinched away.

  Time didn’t pass. It sidled away, sideways, crablike.

  She opened her eyes again. She lay on a canopy bed in the bedroom of a little girl.

  A sweet breeze from the open window fluttered the curtains and ruffles of fabric bulging from the closet door. Molly knew that scent. Orange blossoms, from the tree outside her bedroom window. Her favorite smell in the world. It smelled like contentment and warmth. It smelled like a life with everything as it should be.

  Molly looked again at the lacey mass holding the closet door ajar. It sparkled with sequins. She recognized the frills of a ballet tutu.

  As a child she’d liked dresses and frilly things, but hated dolls. She’d only ever had one doll, and it hadn’t lasted long. But there it sat on the dresser, its pinafore torn and gummy and mottled with silvery flakes. Molly had used transparent packing tape to wrap the doll in aluminum foil as a make-believe space suit. She made up better games than anybody else. Even Martin liked to play space war, but he always had to play the Chinese because he was older. Molly got stuck playing the losing side every time.

  The whites of the doll’s eyes gleamed a dull red the color of ink from a felt-tip pen. Her suit had been shredded by debris; her eyeballs had ruptured with explosive decompression. Such were the risks of war in Earth orbit.

  It was one of the few times their mother had ever raised her voice in the house. The ruined doll had been expensive. But Dad laughed. He’d chuckled about it for years afterward. It angered Mom because she felt he wasn’t supporting her. He felt she was overreacting. They argued about it, but not in front of the children. Never in front of the kids. So Molly had crept upstairs and crouched beside the closed bedroom door to eavesdrop on the secret negotiations of adults.

  Thus came Molly’s introduction to the f-word. There she was, already seven years old, which was more than old enough to know all the bad words. Martin was nine, and so of course he knew all about these things. Or so she thought. But this … this was something adults spoke only to each other, in private, in times of anger so acute it could only be whispered.

  This, Molly realized, was a Word of Power. It was awesome.

  She couldn’t remember what happened after that, but it didn’t matter. The damage had been done. In retrospect, it was amazing their parents had insulated them from that much for that long.

  Mom eventually threw the ruined doll in the trash because the sight of it upset her so greatly.

  Molly remembered it all. Then remembered still more.

  Wait, she thought. That doll went into the compactor over twenty years ago.

  Wind ruffled the curtains again. The high, clear ringing of glass bells played counterpoint to the susurration of wind through the orange tree. Dad’s wind chime. That was before Mom had lost her job and they’d had to move way up north to where it was actually cold in the winter and where they couldn’t grow an orange tree. She sniffed the air again. Still orange blossoms, but now there was something else. Something acrid, wrong. Tobacco?

  I was ten years old when we moved. She sat up, looked down. She wore footie pajamas. How do I fit in this bed? What’s happening to me?

  She glanced around the room. This is impossible, she thought. But it was all there. Things she’d forgotten decades ago. Things she couldn’t have remembered if she tried. The stuffed animals piled high against the dresser … the crayon marks on the wall … the toy chest …

  The man leaning in the door, smoking a cigarette.

  Snow dusted the shoulders of his trench coat; his old-timey hat dripped meltwater on the carpet. He’d been standing there for a while, shuffling his feet, because the carpet under his shoes was muddy. His eyes were too old for his face.

  He blew a smoke ring and raised his hat. “Good morning, angel. Rise and shine.”

  Molly flinched. The room changed.

  This was darker. More subdued. An adult’s bedroom. The susurration of wind through the orange blossoms became the buzz of traffic on the interstate a couple blocks away. She knew that if she got up and pushed the drapes aside she’d find the lights of downtown Minneapolis glinting back at her. She turned her head to the left. On a nightstand sat the alarm clock she’d dubbed Satan, and which she had gleefully crushed with a brick when she quit her godawful temp job at the warehouse. Molly rolled to her side beneath cool, smooth sheets that caressed her skin like silk. She realized she was naked. The other half of the bed lay empty yet warm. The covers had been pushed back, and the pillow still held the impression where somebody’s head had rested.

  She pulled the pillow to her face. It smelled of Ria. Ria who had dumped her after an epic argument on New Year’s Eve. But that was later. But this, this interlude in the old apartment, it was the happiest time of their relationship. She missed Ria.

  It felt so real. But so had her childhood bedroom. These weren’t memories. They were too vivid for that. These were random fragments of her life churned up like flotsam and jetsam on a violent surf.

  Oh holy shit, she thought. I’m going crazy. Was it a tumor? Something short-circuiting her brain? Had Martin slipped her something?

  She sniffed the pillow again. It still smelled like Ria. A long blond hair tickled her nose.

  A toilet flushed. Molly felt a little thrill. She sat up to watch Ria return to bed from the en suite bathroom.

  A stranger, a man, zipped his trousers and took a seat on the edge of the tub. He watched her through the adjoining doorway. He looked bored. A smoldering cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. Wisps of smoke curlicued past the tropical-fish shower curtain that Ria had disliked so much. Snowy meltwater had pooled into the cracks between the floor tiles.

  He noticed her open eyes. “Hey. You up yet?”

  Molly flinched again. “Ah, rats,” he said, and rolled his eyes just as—

  More memories. Melbourne. A freak snowfall. A traffic accident. A tram. Martin. A stranger. Falling.

  Australia. The funeral. Somebody died—

  “Look,” said a voice. “If you’re dead-set on reliving the entire thing, do me a favor. Either do it in order, or let me get a drink first. This jumping around is giving me a migraine. Keep it up and I’ll shoot my cookies on your high school prom.”

  I never went to prom, thought Molly.

  A pause, punctuated with a strong whiff of cigarette smoke. The voice said, “And warn me before we get to your first period. You’re on your own for that one.”

  Molly remembered. She’d fallen under a streetcar. Hadn’t she? In that case …

  Holy shit. There really is a God … a drinking, chain-smoking God.…

  “Am I crazy?” she whispered.

  “Nah. You’re not having an ing-bing, if that’s what’s got you worried. So relax. You’re dead, angel.”

  He flicked the cigarette aside. It sailed into the bedroom and fell smoldering to the hardwood floor. A faint sizzle launched a puff of smoke and a scent equal parts wood ash and varnish. Ria would have taken his head off for that. She’d spent weeks refurbishing those floors. In return their landlord had given them two months off the rent.

  The man sighed. He ran a hand under the brim of his hat, massaged his forehead. It was a snap-brim fedora, she realized. Very smart, that and the suit. She’d never seen anybody dressed like this. Only in old movies.

  “Well, I say dead,” he said, “but it’s more complicated than that. I guess it’s a decent start.”

  “I can’t be dead. We’re having a conversation.”

  “Uh-huh. Care to explain how it is you’re lying in bed in an
apartment building that burned down at the tail end of the last decade?”

  Molly remembered. She’d heard about the fire from friends who still lived in the neighborhood. It seemed appropriate that the happiest place she’d ever lived had been reduced to ashes. She and Ria hadn’t broken up yet, but their relationship was in free fall. All she said when Molly told her about the fire was, “My floors. Damn.”

  Molly took a second look at the trench-coat man. Those eyes … “Wait. I remember. The tram stop. You were there. You followed us. There was a taxi, I grabbed Martin—”

  “Yeah. Uh. About that.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Real sorry I knocked you under that train. But hey, what’s done is done. No point getting sore about it now. Bygones, right?”

  “You—”

  “Look, angel. I’m gonna level with you. I made a hash of things. Bad. Meant to tag your boyfriend but, well, things happen. It’s a bum rap, I know, but we’re stuck with one another.”

  Boyfriend? Oh. “Martin’s my brother.”

  “For real? Huh.” He shook his head. “Oh. I’m Bayliss, by the way.” He flicked the brim of his hat with his thumbnail. “How’s tricks?”

  “What?”

  Bayliss shook his head. Sighed. “Never mind. Point is, I need to get you on your feet and up to speed so that I can forget this day ever happened. You need me to show you the ropes before you gum up the works. So, like I said, we’re stuck with one another, angel.”

  Molly clamped her hands to her forehead, rubbed her temples. “This is insane. This can’t be real,” she muttered. “This is a dream. It must be.”

  But that strange infuriating man, Bayliss, hadn’t disappeared when she opened her eyes again. Instead, he was lighting another cigarette. “Not a dream. If so, we’d be sharing it, and I don’t dream about taking a leak in some strange bird’s apartment while she has a nervous breakdown in the next room. Trust me, it ain’t on my list.”