Something More Than Night

by Tregillis, Ian

  “She doesn’t belong in the Pleroma.”

  “There was no choice. We had to find a replacement for Gabriel.”

  “The talk is you fumbled that job down the sewer.”

  “Well, at least they got that part right. More or less. I was a little tight. But hey, lay off flametop. She’s all right.” I wasn’t so certain about that, but I tried to sound convincing. Full of surprises, that one, but I saw no point muddying the waters with Sam.

  “They say that when the Nephilim strike again, it’ll be you and your monkey feeling the noose.”

  “Oh yeah? What do they say about us after that?”

  “Nothing. The smart money,” it said, “isn’t on you and the human.”

  “That’s why I like you, Sam. When I’m feeling glum I can always trust you to feed me some sugar.”

  “You didn’t call me here to lie to you. You can do that to yourself for free.” It paused while Flo refilled its coffee. She worked the moon-eye treatment for all she was worth; deep inside Sam’s roiling darkness, lightning speared a microburst of downspiraling ash. She sighed and drifted away to check on the tomcat chewing face with a roundheels in the corner booth. It said, “The Pleroma is changing. It isn’t the place you remember.”

  The Powers orbit the periphery of the Pleroma, pacing the perimeter of our playground. There are those who say the Pleroma is holographic, and that anything known inside the joint can be read in the pattern of ontological wrinkles on the boundary. I don’t know if that’s the case, but I do know the Powers keep a closer ear to the ground than even the Thrones. Or, at any rate, they’re not full of spaghetti like the bulls. I’d known Sam a long time, always known it to have a solid line on the players and their angles.

  “Speaking of which, tell me what you know about the Nephilim.”

  “You’ve been out to see them, I assume?”

  “Yeah. Caught the show a few mornings back when Michael and Raphael decided to stop playing nice.”

  If it had had a mouth, Sam would have whistled through its teeth. “Harder to get rid of those things than a wart.”

  Again, you get the gist of it.

  “What does the smart money have to say about them? Why are they here?”

  “They’re waiting,” said Sam. “For what, nobody knows. But only a fool would bet they’re not connected to Gabriel and the rest of this mess.”

  “How am I the only bum to see the big picture here? Their purpose, if they even have one, is small potatoes compared to the real issue. Doesn’t anybody find it strange that after umpteen-billion years we suddenly discover a previously unknown topological property of the Pleroma?”

  Sam’s shrug sent tendrils of ash eddying through the diner. The salesman tried to cover his cup, but too late. He scowled at us. “Hey, watch it, bub.”

  “Ignore the sourpuss,” I said.

  Sam said, “Gabriel’s death changed the topology of the Pleroma. It swirled through all our Magisteria. A cold wind, Bayliss. A cold, cold wind. Who knows what detritus those deep currents dredged up?”

  I rubbed out my last pill. I wasn’t out of matches, though, so I struck one on my thumbnail. The flame burned down while I checked the room. Nobody seemed to be paying us any wise, so I asked, “Fine, then. What’s the word on Gabriel? And no baloney here. Don’t drag me into it.”

  “As to what happened? A few theories. Nothing concrete. Most folks don’t like to linger on it.”

  I remembered a silvery snowfall, remembered how the friction heat of conflicting Magisteria crumbled Gabby’s wings to ash. “I’ve never met anybody who punches in that weight class. Wouldn’t care to.”

  “Don’t pretend the Nephilim don’t top your list, too.”

  “Yeah, well. You can’t make a killing on the ponies if you don’t bet the long shot once in a while.”

  Sam took a long sip of its coffee, but declined when I offered the last drops from my flask. I treated myself.

  “When’s the last time you took a trip to Earth?” I asked.

  “That’s your playground,” said Sam. “Never understood how you could stand it down there.”

  “It ain’t so bad. You like this joint, don’t you?”

  Sam didn’t exactly say, in that rasp of burning sapphires, “I like a free meal.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  Since Sam hadn’t been down Earth-way in a millennium of Sundays, I took a minute to tell it about the penitentes. I described the surgically sculpted wounds, the dancing, the mortal attempts to evoke shorn wings and stigmata. I described the mugg I’d caught leaving the confessional right after somebody had rubbed Father Santorelli. Flo brought its order of toast. Sam chewed while I recited the headlines.

  I finished. “Any thoughts?”

  “On Earth as it is in Heaven,” it said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “My thoughts were running down the same tracks. Let me save you some time: they don’t lead anywhere.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Sam scribbled on its napkin with a feathery quill pen of lightning. “Funny, the stuff you can find if you keep your eyes peeled. Everybody has their dirty secrets.”

  Sam knew a few of mine, too, but I didn’t remind it. The note it slid down the counter stank of a forest fire. I took the napkin and squinted at the chicken scratches. Powers don’t have much in the way of penmanship; maybe it comes from being insubstantial all the time. I realized, after the nimbus of Saint Elmo’s fire faded, that Sam had scribbled down an address.

  “Thanks, Sam. You’re a champ.”

  “Anybody asks, you didn’t get that from me.”

  “Get what? I don’t know what this is.”

  I had to shout to get that last part out, because just then Sam erupted like Krakatoa. It became a roiling plume of ash and sulfurous fumes, inky blackness shot through with blazing talons of lightning. Thunder shook the diner. The fry cook’s radio fuzzed out and gave up the ghost. Flo dropped the coffeepot. It sent up a fountain of burned coffee when it shattered on the linoleum. She said something unladylike. So did I.

  The salesman said, “Hey, rummy, I think your pal there is choking.”

  I threw a plate of toast at him. “Shove off, grifter.”

  Over in the window booth, the sheik came up for air. He and his girl glanced at Sam, looked at each other, shrugged, and went back to necking. She was built for it, long and lean.

  To Sam, I said, “Maybe this is the wrong time to mention it, but if you’re having an ing-bing, you should know they took my medical license away.”

  If earlier Sam’s voice had been the rasp of burning sapphires, now those jewels were naught but plasma. It got the eruption under control just enough to rumble a stream of concepts so blue they hadn’t been heard since before the universe had begun to expand. From the torrent of prime numbers and indignation I picked out just enough to know what had it doing figure eights. Another Nephil had just manifested in the Pleroma. It had slipped right past the Powers’ patrols.

  “Where’s the fire, pal?” I reached for its arm, or what would have been an arm had it had one just then. But Sam disappeared with a thunderclap.

  Flo said, “What’s eating your friend?”

  “Case of the jitters. Too much coffee.”

  Flo sighed. “Rats. He looked like a swell tipper, too.”

  I guess I wasn’t dressed for that part.

  * * *

  Following the address took me down, down, down. I expected to find some dingy joint in the Pleroma, or some love nest tucked far from prying eyes in the ontological hinterlands. But Sam’s lead took me to Earth, and below it, thousands of furlongs beneath the Mohorovičić discontinuity. It was dark, and close, and streamers of mantle kept dripping onto my hat. The dry cleaners would charge extra to get the magnesium and silicon stains out; I should have brought an umbrella. Maybe a flashlight, too. Nights are full of shadow, I learned, three hundred miles beneath the surface of the Earth. It’s the kind of darkness you don’t see anymore, outside of solid rock and certai
n very dense molecular clouds. Not since we lit the fuses on those first fast firecracker stars. But the deeper I went, in search of Sam’s elusive address, the greater the concentration of heavy elements in the surrounding rocks, the greater the residual radioactivity, and the brighter the surroundings. Nuclear decay lent the neighborhood a cozy glow.

  I figured maybe Sam had given me a lead on some buried treasure. Compromising photos. A cask of ambrosia wine lost in a Phoenician shipwreck, dragged to the depths by a thirsty tentacled leviathan, and subsequently absorbed into a subduction zone. A shoebox full of shiny dimes. A shoebox full of tarnished dimes. I’m not particular in these matters. I forged ahead, looking forward to celebrating my not-so-ill-gotten gains with a San Francisco joy girl or two. The way I saw it, I owed myself a pretty little send-off before my luck caught up to me and the Nephilim took it upon themselves to rub out me and flametop.

  Such were my thoughts as I oozed, like soft candle wax, into a fissure shot through the heart of an olivine polymorph. I’d sunk deeper than I realized; most of the surrounding minerals were coming unstable, flowing and separating into their component compounds as plastic deformation stretched their crystals apart like taffy. The weight of the earth caused their lattices to buckle.

  So I’ll admit to a moment of surprise when I found the shelves. Somebody had embedded an austere Pleromatic overlay down in the upper mantle. It looked a bit like a bank vault lit with the greasy yellow light of thorium decay. At first I thought the shelves held human memory fragments—another illicit collection like the one I’d found in Gabby’s Magisterium. You would have thought so, too, if you’d sniffed the mortality coming off those things. But I’d never seen such a sedate collection. And when I ran my hands over the shelves no disjointed scenes of mayfly mortal life leapt to my senses. Inert, the lot of them. Colorless and dull as the world’s most closely guarded collection of lead bricks.

  And yet, alive. If I listened, I could just make out the hummingbird buzz of truncated mortality. The vault fairly thrummed with it. And I knew why.

  These were monkey splinters: pieces of penitentes.

  When those loonybirds went under the knife to add wounds and pinfeathers and dripping stigmata to their mortal bodies, somebody was also removing something from them. I wondered if the penitentes knew somebody had lopped off pieces of their souls, hollowed out secret hidey-holes in their pneuma. Maybe that was part of the attraction. I didn’t see it, myself, but it does take all kinds.

  I scratched my head, wondering who had done this, and why, and how. It takes a special kind of scalpel to carry out surgery like that. Not the sort of thing for which any old quack will do. They don’t teach this stuff in med school. Yet there were plenty of clinics where you could slap down some of the folding and limp out a few hours later lacerated with all the antiseptically sculpted metaphors for metaphysical angst your pain tolerance could handle. Somebody in the Choir had a busy little hobby. Why bother? Easier to collect stamps. Some people watch birds. I’d once known a Virtue who went around collecting the fading reverberations of cosmic strings. But pieces of mortal souls? Oh, brother.

  I plucked a fragment from a shelf. I rolled it between my fingers. It had all the gravity of dandelion fluff and all the pizzazz of a dead trombone player. Mortal souls are like that. Don’t let the poets tell you otherwise.

  Somewhere, deep inside me, there resided a fragment similar to this: the mortal epsilon. METATRON had crammed it there. We all had them, every member of the Choir. Ours were finer, smaller, and the product of a Trumpet rather than a dull metaphysical scalpel. Compared to METATRON’s handiwork this was spiritual butchery of the basest sort. But to what end? I’d managed to flick a fleck of glamour into Molly’s dying eyes to make her one of a kind, and I hadn’t needed to chop out part of her soul to do it.

  I stuck the fragment in my eye.

  And suddenly I wasn’t riding currents of plastic flow through the upper mantle any longer. I was on Earth, in a mortal body, wrapped in a cloud of sweat and sex and nihilistic desperation. We wore no shirt while we danced; humid, sticky air wafted across damp spots on our back. The seeping wounds in our shoulders throbbed with pain. Infrasound backbeats ruffled our matted pinfeathers. We weren’t alone on the dance floor. The woman gyrating against us had a surgically implanted eyelid in the center of her forehead, and it fluttered in time to the beat as though trapped in REM sleep. She was empty, too. Somebody had scooped a parcel from her soul, and so, too, from the souls of our fellow penitentes gamboling to old trip-hop samples of Gregorian chants. A collection of capering vessels, us, and none the wiser for it. The mind within the body I rode didn’t sense the shade peering through its eyes.

  We reached to pull the splinter from our eye. It meant grasping at our face with untrimmed nails, cuticles caked with black flecks of blood from the gashes in our palms. I flinched, and so did he. Together we stumbled through the crowd on the dance floor, herky-jerky marionette movements controlled by an epileptic puppeteer. We glimpsed an untended drink on the bar. My human host reached for it, splashed it into his eye—

  —And I was back in the Pleromatic vault beneath the surface of the Earth, the fragment dangling from my eyelashes. I swatted it aside, eager to get that dingus away from my face. It rolled across a shelf, still lacking in luster and vim. This entire vault was just a little bit bent. If there were such a thing, I’d have said it was just a little bit evil.

  What did the penitentes see in their deepest unguarded dreams? Did they dream of darkness and fire? Did they dream of eternal imprisonment in the depths of the earth?

  Were they beset by nightmares of hell?

  The psychic miasma of accidental voyeurism clung to me like the reek of an oversexed chain-smoking bonobo. I needed a shower. I needed quality time inside a steam cleaner.

  This vault begged deeper investigation. But I wasn’t keen on making another trek into the bowels of the Earth. So I worked down the aisles, scooping the penitentes’ soul fragments into my pockets. Only when the shelves were empty and my pockets full did I head for my Magisterium.

  I think I set a speed record.

  16

  DINNER, DREAMS, AND DEATH

  Molly rummaged through the kitchen cabinets of her Magisterium, searching for a clear memory of the bottle of excellent red wine she had shared with Ria on a Christmas Eve three or four years earlier. Memories and cracker crumbs accumulated on the counter and floor until she found a green glass bottle shaped like a wyvern, the label’s golden script luminous on an emerald-green label. Then she sprinted upstairs to brush her teeth. She checked her hair and face in the bathroom mirror while she brushed. There was a blemish on her temple; she imagined it healed, and it disappeared. She checked her nose for anything embarrassing, and contemplated her eyebrows, but decided against plucking. Next, she hurried into the bedroom and flickered through several outfits before the full-length mirror. She chose a denim jacket, changed her mind, changed the denim to leather, decided against a jacket at all, started to leave, decided she looked better in a jacket, and donned the leather again. She cupped her hands before her mouth, exhaled, tried to catch the scent of her own breath. It was toothpaste sweet. She checked the mirror again, inspecting her nose for clogged pores.

  And noticed the baleful cyclopean glare of Bayliss’s cigarette burn on the floorboards behind her.

  “Asshole,” she muttered. With the mental equivalent of a flicked wrist she wished the burn away, imagining a floor whole and unblemished.

  It didn’t budge. The burn persisted.

  Molly turned. The spot rippled in response to her frown, but didn’t shrink. She concentrated until the precursor of a piercing headache circled in the spot between her eyes like a dog tamping down a favorite rug.

  “To hell with it,” she said. “Later.”

  * * *

  Two doors flanked the entrance to a hardware store. The slip of paper taped above one mailbox read, ANNE MUELLER. The narrow door opened on a narrow staircase. A
steep climb took Molly to Anne’s door, but it took an extra minute of nervous fidgeting before she remembered how self-confidence felt.

  She knocked. The scents of spaghetti sauce, garlic bread, and vinegar wafted into the hallway when Anne opened the door. She shimmered within an aura of happy anxiety.

  “Hi,” she said, hummingbird quick. She looked down to hide a bashful blushing smile.

  “Hey,” said Molly. And fidgeted. Lost for words, she raised the wine bottle. “I brought…” The self-confidence left her. “Crap. Do you even drink wine?”

  Anne said, “Only on special occasions.” Smiling again, she ushered Molly inside.

  For somebody living in a lousy one-horse town, Anne had managed to find a cute apartment. The building must have been old: high ceilings, lots of exposed brick, wrought-iron bannisters along the spiral staircase and loft. The wooden floors still carried the scuff marks where, a century earlier, machinery had rumbled and shrieked twenty hours a day. Molly could still hear the residual echoes if she closed her eyes and concentrated. The kitchen had a central island under a metal ring covered with hooks for hanging pots and pans. Most of the hooks were empty.

  Anne followed her gaze. “It would be cooler if I owned more than two pots,” she admitted.

  “It’s very cool,” said Molly. She set the wine bottle on the island. “Thanks for letting me come over. Especially after I came off so bizarre the other day.”

  Anne blushed again. If she kept it up, soon her face would match the color of her ringlets. “We kind of got off on the wrong foot. I’m sorry I told you to fuck off.”

  “I deserved it,” said Molly. She clapped, rubbed her palms together. “So. What can I do to help?”

  “Keep me company while I toss a salad?”

  She did. It was easy.

  * * *

  Tearing apart a piece of garlic bread, her fingers shiny with butter, Anne asked, “So how’s the mystery of the stupid fat priest coming along, Nancy Drew?”