Something More Than Night

by Tregillis, Ian

  I should have known. Lousy Virtues. Can’t keep their noses out of other people’s business.

  She continued, “Call me crazy, but after a while I just can’t help but notice a pattern. And I just can’t help but wonder what other surprises await me.” She crunched another ice cube down to its component molecules.

  “You know, you’ve got a killer case of selective memory, doll. The way I remember it, you were so wrapped up in your own issues that you barely heard two things I said when I tried to give you a rundown on the Pleroma.”

  “That’s because I had just died, you shit!”

  “Don’t get all philosophical on me. So what if you had? You really think you’d have taken it all in if I’d laid out all the cards at once? You’ve been a drip since day one. You meet everything I say with weeps, frowns, and melodrama. Toss in a fainting spell and you could be gunning for a studio contract.”

  “Screw you, too.”

  “Yeah, well, I was working on that, until you showed up and scotched the whole evening.”

  Flametop ate more ice. She chomped the crystals down to molecules, the molecules down to atoms. She exhaled twinned jets of hydrogen and oxygen. I wondered if she was aware of what she was doing. Good thing I hadn’t lit any candles for Violet.

  “You’ve known all along that this mess was so much more than a single impossible murder. This is a schism, isn’t it? A fight over something much larger than one dead angel.” Molly jumped to her feet. Her halo returned, the glow soft and gentle as a solar flare. She grabbed my shoulders and flung me against the wall. The impact knocked down a painting. “When pressed, you basically came out and admitted you were acting under orders from one of these factions when you roped me into this! So don’t feed me some bullshit line that you don’t know any more than I do!”

  This was my least favorite topic. The weight of it bowed my shoulders, forced me to the floor. I crumpled. Dead angels are heavier than broken promises.

  “Look at me!” I said. “Look! You’ve seen Cherubim and Virtues and even yourself. What am I compared to all that? I’m the lowest of the low. I’m a shabby, two-bit nickel-grabbing twerp with no choice but to draw as little water as possible so that nobody decides to step on me. You? You’ve got a future. But I’m stuck in the margins. That’s all I’ll ever be, a cheap chiseler. And there are things out there greater and more mysterious than the best of us. So yeah, I did what I was told. What choice did I have?”

  I hefted the bottle, drowned my tonsils. Stewed to the gills was old Bayliss; his tears smelled like above-average rye. My face burned with shame and embarrassment. The tears flared into sizzling flamedrops as they trickled down my face. I looked up at Molly through a smoldering veil of weak flames, like a mummer-show Cherub.

  “How do you flip God the bird?” I asked. “What if it notices?”

  * * *

  By the time I banished the weeps and returned to my senses, my dignity had fled and so had flametop. The bottle was emptier than a hobo’s money clip, the air dark as my prospects. Smoke wisps curlicued from blackened spots where my burning tears had fallen on the carpet.

  My hat had been draped over the doorknob. The note tucked in the band had been scratched out on the back of a room service menu with a dying ballpoint.

  Gone to find the source of the Indulgences. Try to verify connection with the Nephilim. This is our chance. Don’t fuck it up.

  It wasn’t signed. It didn’t have to be. I’d know that inspirational tone anywhere. She really missed her calling. I’d heard the angel of compassion was looking for an intern.

  The melted-plastic stink of smoldering synthetic fibers was giving me a headache. Or maybe it was riffing on a drumbeat the last fumes of rye had set to echoing inside my skull. What a combo they had going. All they needed was a xylophone player and they’d be ready for the club circuit.

  I made it to my feet with the grudging help of a chair and the wall. When I was reasonably sure the room wasn’t about to pull a dipsy-doodle on me, I shuffled to the bathroom, filled the sink with cold tap water, and dipped my face. The water steamed. I nudged the bed to cover the burns in the floor. Then I grabbed my hat, planted it on my crown at a rakish angle, and headed back to my Magisterium.

  The door showed no sign of disturbance. Ditto the kitchen, and the coffee can. The penitente soul fragments were just where I’d left them. Good thing, because what Molly told me had the gears turning. I lit my pipe, cleared away the pieces with a swipe of my arm, and emptied the can on the chessboard. I reimagined the electric dipole moment of methyl groups in the caffeine—my house, my rules—which made it a snap to separate the coffee grounds from the soul fragments: I ran a comb through my hair and used static electricity to pull out the coffee. Soon I had two piles on the chessboard. One the scorched color of French roast; the other leaden gray.

  My reasoning started with the Nephilim and snaked backward through the thicket like this: Those goons were remnants of the Plenary Indulgence recipients that Gabriel had been lamping. But the PIs were tainted, such that death transformed those monkeys into immutable topological defects in the Pleroma. That was a pretty trick; whoever worked this racket carried some mean medicine in their pocket. Father Santorelli was the bagman, dishing out the special Indulgences to lucky members of the faith. Gabby must have known this, or suspected some of it, because he’d been watching Santorelli, too. Gabby’s interest in the Indulgences, plus his stewardship of the Jericho Trumpet, eventually got him pinked. Meanwhile somebody—The same somebody? Or was this a different faction?—had started clipping out little hidey-holes in the souls of the penitentes down on Earth. So when a well-meaning dope blundered into the middle of this flop and started sniffing around, somebody took a quick jaunt down from the Pleroma to hitch a ride inside a penitente and silence the priest.

  Why go to all that trouble? I had a hunch. The only members of the Choir with recent practice mingling with the monkeys were me and flametop. News would spread quickly if angels started appearing on Earth again, meddling in human affairs. Would it tip off the opposing faction? Would it rouse METATRON? Better to hitch a ride and avoid the risk.

  Gabby had been watching Molly, too. Still didn’t know how she fit into all this. But she was right about one thing. The connection between the Nephilim and the Plenary Indulgences was our big break. Meanwhile, whoever ran the penitentes was in this past the mud on their necks. That made it past time I took a closer look at those loons. So I pinched a soul from the top of the pile, stuck it in my eye, and—

  —found ourselves sitting with head bowed at a dinner table laid with potato casserole and cans of soda, mumbling along as our family said grace. Our shoulders ached so severely that simply raising a fork to our mouth was agony. The big guy at the end of the table, let’s call him Dad, noticed it, and laid in to us.

  “That’s what you get for joining up with those freaks,” he said. “Bet they didn’t even sterilize properly. You’ll get tetanus or worse, and I’ll have to take a second mortgage on the house we already can’t afford just to put your body back the way God made it in the first place. It would serve you right if they had to amputate both your arms.” He washed down the bile with a swig of beer. His breath smelled of potatoes and cigarettes.

  The woman across from him, let’s call her Mom, frowned. “Not at the dinner table. You promised.”

  And then he called her a stupid bitch and told her to shut her fucking mouth, because it was her goddamned fault their worthless son had turned out such a retard. Our eyes brimmed with tears, but we fought them to a standstill. We wouldn’t cry. Not at the table. We reached up with as much nonchalance as any seventeen-year-old had ever mustered to scratch an imaginary itch under our eye—

  —and flicked the soul fragment into the empty coffee can. I sighed. It was going to be a long afternoon. I picked another fragment—

  —and found ourselves under a tangle of naked, sweaty bodies, doing something very personal to somebody we didn’t know while somebod
y else was in the same situation with us. Every pulse of our heart sent lightning crackling through our veins, sent pharmaceutical gold streaming across the blood-brain barrier to fill our synapses with a champagne fizz hyperawareness of the orgiastic coupling of counterfeit fallen angels all around us. This was dangerous and careless and we didn’t care. We saw smoke, and dancers, and so many of our fellow penitentes twined together, wounds and stigmata naked to the world. A tickle on our lip; we spat away a bloody pinfeather. A man beside us shook out long hair, stippling our face with sweat. Salt stung our eyes—

  I flicked that fragment into the can. I paused for a draw on my dying pipe before queuing up number three—

  A metal collar clamped around our neck, another around our waist, two more around our forearms. The cold surgical table made gooseflesh of our naked chest. This impromptu clinic wasn’t listed and it wouldn’t exist tomorrow. All we could see were floor tiles with a drain in the center, and a corner of the room where two walls of mirror-bright nanodiamond came together. Through a fringe of eyelashes we caught vague reflections of the others, an unlicensed surgeon and our sponsor. Her reassuring touch pumped warmth into the small of our back.

  “It doesn’t hurt at all,” she whispered. We sought her face in the reflections, sought more reassuring lies, sought to impress her with a confident wink. But we couldn’t see her face because, just for an instant, it was obscured by starlight flickering in the burnished diamond. We blinked, looked again, but then the laser scalpel was unzipping my flesh and we were too busy trying not to scream because penitentes eschewed anesthetic. We bit our tongue. Tears ran freely—

  Who was that? Had she seen me? Had she looked into her poor sap’s eyes and realized the passenger seat wasn’t empty? My pipe had smoldered out. I left it alone.

  Fragment number four found us attending Mass. Fragment five found us weeping, sitting on a toilet seat, staring at a pregnancy test. Fragment six landed us in the middle of a sales meeting; we spent half the time pretending to pay attention and the other half reminiscing about the previous night. Our coworkers didn’t know of our life outside of work because we hid our wounds under bland business attire. Secretly, we sneered at them.

  Fragment seven put us in another club, this one lit by twisting vapor trails of luminous mist. We stood at a bar, ordering a drink. Our fellow penitentes wiggled on the dance floor, bodies and rhythms twinned by the mirror behind the bar. A sister penitente leaned backward on a stool, resting her head atop the bar, mouth agape; others held her steady while the bartender mixed a drink right in her kisser. Cute trick. One of the surrounding penitentes squeezed his stigmatic palm to dribble sterile blood into the mix. “Communion Wine,” we called this drink. The bartender handed him a swizzle stick: a short piece of green plastic molded into the shape of a pirate’s cutlass. But in the mirror it became a sword blazing with the fires of Creation.

  We gasped. He paused in his fiery stirring to look up. We ran a hand over our eyes—

  Close one, that. I paused to empty and repack the pipe after that one. It took several mouthfuls of sweet, cherry-flavored smoke until I could no longer hear the receding whistle of the bullet that had just parted my hair. I wasn’t the only member of the Choir taking a ride in the hollowed-out monkeys. Bits and pieces of Pleromatic overlay followed us like pieces of a tenacious dream that refused to dissipate upon the arrival of morning. It came through stronger on the high rollers, manifesting as glimpses of ancient starlight and flaming swords and who knew what else. Resolving to keep my own weak-tea glamour on a tighter leash, I went back to work.

  Around and around the world, variations on a theme: snatches of family life, snatches of work life, snatches of club life, snatches of love and hate and hunger and sorrow, woven throughout with cuckoo pseudoangelic malarkey. Here and there, but glimpsed only in the corner of the eye, my fellow penitentes sprouted wings of brass, and third eyes, and scorpion tails. I wondered if my hosts could see them, too. I figured they could, and that they attributed this to burgeoning religious epiphany. In striving to emulate us, to emulate their warped and limited misconceptions of us, they became us. Or so they believed. The poor saps didn’t know they were possessed. What a bunch of suckers.

  Such were my thoughts as I eased into my next host, who was crammed between two bulky penitentes in the backseat of a car. Two more penitentes rode up front, including the driver. We were somewhere in the Midwest, entering a one-horse town where half the storefronts had been boarded over. Our companions in that cozy little clown car had the windows rolled down. We caught a whiff of river water. It seemed familiar, this place, but I couldn’t place it. This was our first visit, as Bayliss or penitent loon. The jane in the front passenger seat was speaking to the driver. We eavesdropped.

  “… the library first. If she isn’t there, we’ll go to the apartment.” With that, she flicked one dainty bleeding palm toward the hardware store sliding past on our right. Nice manicure.

  Something hard dug into our ribs. We shifted. So did the loogans to our left and right. Which is how we came to realize they were rodded; it was the bulge of a shoulder rig poking us. Odd, that. This was a first. None of my other encounters with the penitentes had involved iron.

  I took in more scenery, tried to draw a bead on how I knew this place. That got me nowhere fast. Sunlight glinted from the storefront windows of a café that used to be something else. We glanced quickly to left and right, inspecting the loogans from the corners of our eyes while the light distracted our conscious mind. When viewed through a Pleromatic veil, the faces of the muggs to either side of me were obscured by flickering sheets of flame. No wonder we were crammed like sardines; those hard boys had wings grand enough to scrape dust from the moon.

  That’s when I realized how I knew this burg.

  I had to warn flametop. We reached for our eye—

  —but somebody grabbed our wrist.

  “Going somewhere, Bayliss?”

  The jane in front leaned over the back of her seat, leering at us through the ghostly flickering image of an eagle’s face. Her grip was stronger than the metal shackles in the impromptu surgical clinic. She clucked her tongue. It works better in a human mouth, though; her beak turned the clucking into the hollow clacking of cheap castanets.

  “Who’s Bayliss?” my host asked. But then he glimpsed the things riding inside his fellow carpoolers and fell silent. A warm wet stain spread through our trousers.

  “We did warn you,” said the woman with the angel inside her. I wondered if that was Uriel’s hand on the reins, but didn’t have a chance to find out. The loogan on my right reached for his shoulder rig. We tried to block him, but the human I wore had all the reflexes of a coma patient. We managed to get an elbow in his face before he could bring the heater to bear. But all that squirming kept leftie free to show some initiative. We heard the creak of leather and tried to duck. There was little room to swing a sap in that car, but damned if leftie didn’t gave it his all. He swung like a pennant race hung in the balance.

  The cosh came down on the back of our head. My host’s human skull did its best impression of Humpty Dumpty. I figure that made me the yolk. I landed in darkness, and it wasn’t over easy.

  18

  THIS ISN’T COVERED IN THE ENCHIRIDION

  Noontime sunlight shone on the river. A gusty wind carved ripples into the water; the ripples chopped the sunlight into glints and flashes like an old-fashioned disco ball. The flickering light tumbled up the valley to the bluff-top picnic tables behind the library. One flash contained an angel. The angel carried a picnic basket.

  Molly shed her halo to emerge from behind the boxelder tree. She’d scouted the spot from inside. To a person gazing through the library windows, it would appear as though Molly had just walked around the building. She’d tried to find a balance between outright lying and giving Anne the vague impression that she was staying in another town down the road. Already the evasions and vague answers wore thin. But the longer she lied, the more f
rightening it became to step out of the closet regarding her true nature. The danger of rejection seemed so much greater, so much more painful. Anne wasn’t a violent person, but she could hurt Molly just as much.

  Like the past several, Molly had spent part of the previous night keeping an eye on Martin. Immediately after her first visit he had struck out from his apartment in search of another fix. She transmuted that, too. It was a waste of money Martin couldn’t afford. Even with Molly’s share, the money he inherited from their mother wouldn’t last long. But if she could just keep his mind and body clear a bit longer, just a few more days, he’d be well enough to take up his old job delivering pizza. That would be a start.

  Ria—well, her body—lay in a hospital bed in a much better part of Minneapolis. Her family had money. Not wealth, but more than Molly’s folks had ever had. As on the past several nights, after whispering Martin into clean, dreamless, nontoxic sleep, and after making the rounds to do the same with the PI recipients, she paced Ria’s ward like a insubstantial revenant, listening. If not for the hum and beep and click of the machines quietly keeping her body alive, Ria might have been an honored stateswoman lying in repose. She shouldn’t have looked so peaceful: no turbulent subconscious churned within her mind, no dreams haunted her lifeless brain. It hurt worse than anything. Worse even than what METATRON had done. Molly hadn’t yet gathered the strength to approach any closer than the ward itself. Each time she tried to approach Ria’s bed, to sit by her side and take her hand, Molly bounced from an impenetrable bubble of shame and guilt. It was hardest when Ria’s parents came to visit. Molly fled the tears because they made the guilt so heavy it threatened to suffocate her, but told herself she withdrew to respect familial privacy. Molly wondered if her lies and evasions sounded as hollow to Anne as they did to herself. She had tamed the dreams of the Indulgence recipients; she had fought Martin’s addiction to a stalemate; she hadn’t done jack shit to help Ria. She was afraid to try. It was easier to hate herself than risk making it worse.