Molly blinked. “Um. You lost me.”
“Nancy Drew?” Anne shrugged, shook her head. “Just something from old books. She was a girl detective.” The bridge of her nose crinkled above a soft smirk. “Like you.”
Molly laughed. Anne worked in a library. It showed. She read a great deal more than Molly did. Molly wondered if that would become a problem. She wondered if she’d have a chance to find out.
“Yeah, I guess so. Never thought about it that way.”
Not much of a detective, though. She was no closer to understanding the significance of Father Santorelli’s Plenary Indulgences. Visiting his rectory had proved a dead end. The diocese had already crated up his few belongings in preparation for the arrival of a new parish priest. Whether intentional or not—how high did the Earthly side of this go?—they’d left behind no hints about the PIs. All that remained of Santorelli’s work was a three-ring binder filled with printouts of his sermons. The later, newer entries looked like the diary of a madman: every bit of blank space, from the backs of the pages to the narrow margins on the printed sides, were filled with sketches similar to those in Anne’s dream journal. He’d lacked her talent, but the contents were unmistakable. Image after image of a being with four faces, golden wings, a flaming sword. Like Anne, Santorelli had been having visions of Gabriel, too. But his were of the Seraph prior to his murder.
Each pen stroke quivered with desperation. The sketches fairly vibrated with the tension of a tilted worldview. Molly could read in those unskilled renderings the reversal of a long, slow, sad acceptance of the temporal world’s boundaries. The existence of the divine, of the incorporeal realm, had long receded into the abstract realm of philosophy, as had the spiritual underpinnings of Santorelli’s pastoral work in the community. His faith had slipped away from him an inch at a time.
Until an angel revealed itself to him.
Unlike Molly, who still hadn’t revealed her true nature to Anne. It felt good to be regarded as a human woman again. Far better than it felt when the more responsible part of Molly wondered how long she could maintain the charade. Anne hadn’t yet asked her where she lived, but she would eventually. Wouldn’t that be an awkward conversation.
Sooner than later she’d have to come out to Anne. How in the world would she do that? Have I mentioned I’m not entirely human? Sure. Or maybe she could break the ice with some small talk first. Hey, you know that afterlife your folks are always going on about? Well, the joke’s on them.…
And the more she considered it, the more uncomfortable it became to frame this as a traditional question of coming out. This situation was so extreme that lumping it in with the human experience seemed dismissive of all the people who had ever endured the fear and anxiety of coming out to family and friends. Molly’s previous experience was no guide.
Still, for now, she was closeted, hiding her true nature. Pretending to be something she wasn’t. Lying about who and what she was because she feared how the people around her would greet the truth.
Would it be anger? Fear? Disgust? Would it be the end of this tentative relationship? The cold and cruel severance of their budding friendship? Or would Anne take the news in graceful stride as Dad had done?
It hurt to deny her true self. But a violent rejection would hurt even more. This was the first normal relationship, the first friendly interaction, Molly had enjoyed since dying. She wanted to pretend it could last. She wanted to experience life as it had been before Bayliss came along.
So she masqueraded as human, choosing to stay in the closet just a little bit longer. And hating herself for it. Hating her selfishness. Hating her cowardice.
Anne was staring at her. Molly shook her head. “No progress. But you helped me a ton the other day. Honest.”
“No joking?” Molly nodded. Anne said, “That’s nice. It makes me feel good.”
She concentrated on her food. With exaggerated care, she spun another noodle around the tines of her fork. With equally exaggerated nonchalance, Anne said, “I’m glad you called.”
“Me, too,” said Molly. Her voice squeaked. Her face felt hot. She looked away.
You’re not human, said her nosy bastard conscience. Anne is the victim of something vast and terrible. And you’re flirting with her like it’s no big deal. You scheming self-absorbed rat.
Molly cleared her throat, but the extra space didn’t make the words flow any more easily. “You probably should know that my last relationship ended badly.”
Anne chewed a mouthful of salad. Swallowed. “How badly?”
Ria’s a drooling vegetable now. Because I touched her.
Anne flinched from something she saw in Molly’s eyes. “I’m sorry. That was rude.”
“No, it wasn’t. I brought it up.” Molly fortified herself with a sip of wine. “Really badly. Terribly. I’m sort of still dealing with it.”
“Oh. I see.” Gently, silently, Anne set down her fork. “If I’ve misinterpreted this dinner—”
Shit. “Oh, no. No, no, no, that’s not what I meant. That came out wrong. I just meant, if I seem a little skittish or if I seem to be easing into this slowly, it’s not because of you, okay? I promise. It’s because I’m dealing with some crazy stuff going on in my life right now.” You lying-by-omission, conveniently understating bitch, she told herself. “But I really want to be here right now.” Well, at least that part is true.
She couldn’t read the look on Anne’s face. Molly realized what she’d said. “I mean, I don’t know, if there even is a ‘this.’ I’m not assuming there is.”
Anne’s cryptic expression resolved into a quirked eyebrow. The corner of her mouth followed suit a moment later. “Crazy stuff. Sure, I can see that. You’ve got that whole Nancy Drew thing going on.” She dipped a fingertip in her ice water, playfully flicked a few beads at Molly. “I’ll bet that’s a full-time job.”
“You have no idea.”
* * *
Molly sat at the end of the couch. She cradled her glass, taking care not to spill wine on the artistically distressed tobacco-colored upholstery. Anne placed the bottle on the coffee table and settled on the middle cushion with one leg curled beneath her. She draped an arm over the back of the couch, extending her free leg until her foot rested on the table. Relaxed and comfortable as a cat, she took a sip of wine. So did Molly, though her stomach churned with what felt like hundreds of butterflies.
The sketchbook lay atop a pile of magazines on the coffee table. Molly debated with herself for a moment, then asked, “Do you mind if I ask if you’re still having the dreams?”
“No. Yes.”
“That sucks.”
Anne shrugged, looking sad. “It is what it is.” She shook her head, as if flicking off a cobweb that had fallen in her hair. “You told me about your one brother. Any other siblings?”
The small talk came easily. It was even fun. They talked about family, movies, music, how Nancy Drew kindled Anne’s love of detective stories. Later, they kissed.
Later still, Anne dozed off with her head on Molly’s shoulder. Gently, carefully, Molly inched forward until she was off the couch, then eased Anne down until she lay on her side, breathing deeply. Molly took the blanket from the back of a chair and pulled it over Anne.
Anne whimpered. Her face twisted into a thick, slow frown. A flickering aura of alarm settled over her, the emotions sharp and sour as a razor-edged lemon. The air around her tasted of the Pleroma, like ozone and iron and stale starlight. She clenched her eyes. Her head rocked back and forth as though denying something inescapable.
“Shhh.” Molly knelt beside the couch. She pressed her lips to Anne’s forehead. “Shhh. No dreams tonight,” she whispered.
Anne’s breathing relaxed into a deep, even susurration. Her face relaxed. The air around her no longer coated the back of Molly’s throat with the taste of bile and tingle of hot metal.
Molly stood. “Back soon,” she whispered.
She tiptoed across the room to make it appear as tho
ugh she were heading for the bathroom, just in case Anne woke up at the wrong moment. Molly tossed a loop of memory around her thumb, stitched a passage to Chicago into the bathroom door frame, and stepped from Anne’s apartment into a moonless night intermittently brightened by meteor streaks of burning orbital debris. She hadn’t traveled far, less than one time zone; it was still late here. Late enough that most people should be asleep still. Dreaming, still. She came here because she wondered: was Anne the only PI recipient tormented by dreams of the Pleroma?
It seemed unlikely. And she was indeed dreaming of the Pleroma—if the sketches weren’t enough to convince Molly, the bitter ruffled edges of her sleep did it. Molly remembered how Bayliss had first appeared to her inside her own memories. Molly might have tried something similar with Anne to catch a glimpse of the roiling dreamscape that caused her to twitch and whimper in her sleep like a dog dreaming of squirrels. But unlike Bayliss, Molly wasn’t an obnoxious voyeuristic prick. She hoped.
Pacholczyk lived in a gated community with walls high enough to insulate those on the inside from the worst times on the outside, when the oceans died and the satellites burned. High enough to withstand roving bands of barbarians; surely there were more than a few of those at the gate when times were at their toughest. The houses here were larger than any two houses Molly’s family had ever owned, sprawling confections of brick, nanodiamond, and ivy. Pacholczyk’s house evoked the style of a seventeenth-century English manor house, though built to a (slightly) smaller scale. Molly wondered if he actually kept servants to maintain the jumbled monstrosity of cornices, oriel windows, and dripping gray stone. It was far too large for a single person; she bet half the rooms had been empty even before his divorce.
Molly rode the split-second flash of vaporized space junk through the stained-glass window of a Dutch gable. She landed on the second-floor landing of a dark and fusty house. Her arrival displaced stale still air, kicking up eddies of dust and radon. It fizzed in her lungs and tasted like moldy bread. But she had been, for a microsecond eternity while speaking with the Virtue, a luminous figure wrought of naught but thought: she no longer needed lungs, no longer needed to breathe. But if she stopped, she might forget to start again. It could prove the tip of the slippery slope to losing the connection to her human life. If that happened, might she forget Martin and Ria entirely before figuring out how to fix them? A scary thought. So Molly chose to endure the musty environment of an obnoxiously wealthy depressed divorcé rather than lose a piece of herself. If she were being honest with herself, she had to admit she also worried that she might slip up and forget to breathe in a situation where Anne might notice.
No snoring, no heavy breathing disturbed the air currents in Pacholczyk’s house. But for Molly’s sudden arrival, there were no stray air currents at all, nothing but the thermal noise of Brownian randomization. No drafts from the windows, no eddies from the fireplace flues. Just the aggrieved sloshing of molecules shoved aside by Molly’s appearance.
The floorboards didn’t creak under Molly’s feet. The deep pile of the runner along the landing betrayed no footsteps. Shadows fled from her, twirling around the balusters to hide from the faint glow emanating from Molly’s body. She crept through Pacholczyk’s house wreathed in her own tarnished halo, an intangible angel shining with invisible holy light.
She guessed, rightly, that the master bedroom would be upstairs. Pacholczyk slept in a four-poster bed with silk sheets. One side of the massive bed lay perfectly made, the pillow undented, ready for an occupant who would never return. A duvet in a froofy satin cover lay crumpled on the floor at the foot of the bed. Lingering evidence of the former wife? There was a framed photo on the bedside table, facing the bed such that Pacholczyk could fall asleep gazing at it if he lay on his side. Sentimental old goat. Too bad he was such a leg-humper at the office.
A crucifix hung on the wall over the headboard. Even in sleep his posture was pious, with hands clasped over his breast as though praying. Something glinted between Pacholczyk’s curled fingers; it took Molly a moment to realize he slept with rosary beads on his person.
Aside from the duvet, and the photo, the bedroom looked like the bedroom of a very wealthy bachelor who had always lived on his own. It was boring. Unremarkable. So, too, his sleep, which didn’t fill the room with the clicking aura of sweaty dread as Anne’s did. His dreams, if he had any, were benign. So calm was his untroubled subconscious mind that Molly struggled to sense anything from him.
Which is how she noticed he wasn’t breathing. The silence she’d noticed upon her arrival wasn’t the silence of an empty, shuttered house. It was the silence of a still heart. The reluctant silence of the dead.
Molly had never seen a dead body before, other than her own. And that she’d glimpsed only as meaty fragments scattered across thin snow. This was much cleaner. There was no blood, no viscera, no bones, no smell. Just a pale empty shell of a man losing its residual body heat. When Molly held out her hands, she could feel the fading whisper of infrared radiation coming from the sheets. Talis Pacholczyk had died earlier in the evening. And, from the look of things, in the middle of a peaceful sleep. If his heart gave out or he’d had a stroke, it had happened so fast he didn’t have time to wake up for a final gasp or a few seconds of terrified scrabbling at the pillows. Not outwardly, anyway. But Molly, who had been through death, knew that no matter how sudden, how surprising, how unexpected it came, there was plenty of room for fear in that final split second.
The drawers of the bedside table were empty. Pacholczyk didn’t keep a dream journal, or if he did, it wasn’t in the bedroom. There was, unsurprisingly, no sketchbook left behind to describe his dreams for the benefit of nosy angelic passersby at the scene of his death.
The adjoining en suite bathroom made the master bath in Molly’s old apartment look like a decrepit shit pit from the days before indoor plumbing. She’d never seen so many nozzles in a single shower. But the bathroom was equally lopsided as the bedroom. Beard stubble, soap scum, and a long smear of spilled toothpaste caked one sink. The porcelain in the other sink basin held nothing but a thin coat of dust. Orange plastic pill bottles cascaded to the marble tiles when Molly opened the medicine cabinet.
She glanced at a few labels. She didn’t recognize the names of the medications, but based on the pharmacist’s instructions Pacholczyk kept enough heavy-duty sleep medication handy to put half of Chicago into a coma. The vanity held still more pills. These she recognized by virtue of long experience wresting similar chemicals from Martin at one time or another. Amphetamines.
Molly looked at the dead man again. Looked at the rosary cupped to his chest.
First, he had tried to prevent himself from sleeping. When that didn’t work, he tried dosing himself so heavily that either he’d not dream at all, or not remember the dreams he did have. It worked. He’d never dream again.
He hadn’t embraced sleep in a posture of pious relaxation, she realized. He’d clutched the rosary for succor. Knowing what to listen for, she used her practice from the concert hall to pick out the fading whispers of slurred prayer that had trickled through the dying man’s lips as an overdose of medication dragged him into everlasting sleep. Pacholczyk had been terrified of the night, so much so that he died with the Lord’s Prayer on his lips. Whether it was accidental or not was beside the point: the dreams had driven him to kill himself. Asleep or awake, no mortal mind could glimpse the Pleroma and remain unchanged.
She wondered when he had received his Plenary Indulgence. Before Anne, or after her? Did Anne face a similar fate? Molly couldn’t say for certain that he’d suffered from dreams similar to Anne’s, but he’d been pretty damn frightened to fall asleep.
Molly slid a hand into her pocket, fingering memories from Gabriel’s special Plenary Indulgence recipients.
* * *
Thui Nguyen taught history at a community college about halfway between Pacholczyk’s place and Santorelli’s church. Months earlier, her husband had walked out on
her and their preteen sons. At first, she had wished him dead. Later, when the realization sank in that he wasn’t bound to return, she gave in to despair, doing and saying things she regretted. The Plenary Indulgence had been a chance at a fresh start.
But now she muttered in her sleep. Molly—invisible, intangible—watched the frantic fluttering of Nguyen’s eyelids, like a pair of moths trapped in a glass jar. Beneath the sheets and skin and bone, her heart beat a deafening tattoo. Her perspiration salted the close air of her bedroom with the tang of a primordial sea. Her bathroom closet was full of prescription sleep medication.
Molly kissed her on the forehead, as she’d done for Martin and Anne. “No dreams tonight,” she whispered.
Nguyen’s incoherent mumbling trailed away into light snoring. Her heart rate fell; she stopped sweating.
* * *
Moira Parks had attended the same church for over thirty years, and had missed only a handful of Sunday masses in all that time. Her memory fragment, of the evening she received her Indulgence, fairly radiated with cloyingly sincere piety. It made Molly’s teeth ache. It also made her feel a little bit ashamed that she had never believed in anything with conviction.
But the fragment itself made a paltry divining rod. Feeling and following the feeble tugs took much of Molly’s concentration. When she did, the fragment led her to a cemetery.
* * *
Robert Jemelik’s fragment was even more difficult to follow. It sent Molly up and down the shore of Lake Michigan, and across the waters, and under it, and wheeling through the nighttime sky.
He’d been cremated. His widow had spread his ashes in the lake, per the request in his suicide note.
* * *
Though it was so late at night as to be early morning when Molly tracked her down, Wendy Bavin was engaged in a screaming fight with her husband. Wasn’t hard to see why: she was more strung out than Martin. The pent-up weight of unrealized sleep lay so heavy upon the woman that it seemed a wonder the floor didn’t collapse under her.
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