Blood of Angels

by Marshall, Michael

  Nina had no idea what he was talking about. She was badly dehydrated, and concentrating was hard. It was especially hard if you were constantly vigilant for the possibility that he might underline some point by slipping a knife into your skin, or under a fingernail, or into one of your eyes. She had no intention of engaging with his world. She had spent many hours talking to the psychopathic, and if you had a thick wire screen between you it could be fascinating—though most of them wound up heading inexorably down similar tracks, damaged rolling stock shunted towards the same dark and bloody station. Stuck in childhood, believing theirs so much more meaningful than everybody else's. The mechanical tic of recalled injury and slight. Whirling round some momentous event like a rabid dog chained to a post, unable to understand that outside their own heads it was just a past moment of unremarkable time. Inside, the event beats like a psychic heart.

  He was quiet for a while longer and then she caught a scent of dry tobacco.

  'This is bad enough,' he said, but his voice said he was a man losing a battle. She heard the sound of a match being struck, and then the smell of a cigarette smoked. She didn't mind him doing that. It reminded her of Ward.

  Then he was a little closer, and she tensed. He seemed to hesitate, and then his hands were around the back of her head. A quick movement, and the blindfold was off.

  It took long seconds for her eyes to adjust, even though the light in the van was very muted. Out front she could see trees. Between them and her, a man. Not young. Big. Sad eyes. But his compassion was for himself, not her.

  She blinked and looked around the interior of the van. Sparse, no windows along the sides. A few thin rusty scratches across the inside of the door, short parallel lines. As if someone had once scraped it with their fingernails, while trying desperately to escape.

  Maybe even more than once.

  •••

  Slowly he started talking again, and though he had taken the blindfold off, he never looked anywhere near her eyes. You remembered the last, he said—and faltered a little, as he said it—but most of all you remembered your first. When zero became one. It's like your first beer, or lying beside a girl having done it for the first time—confused, excited, slightly let down: her seeming a little more grown up now, you feeling even younger and smaller than when the evening started. All those nights were anticipated, key battles in the campaign into the foreign hills of maturity. You're not sure where you're going, or why. You just are. Everybody else is too. Alcohol comes first. You come to realize adults drink stuff that you're not supposed to—and the occasional sip you score at home reveals it tastes strange. But that's sort of the point, you gather, and there's something grown-up and delicious about this: you drink this gloop even though it's not too nice? How sophisticated and unchildlike is that! Then suddenly someone at school will make the phylogenetic leap, acing you out by months. There will be quiet, jealous tales told about some party at the weekend, an older boy passing a six-pack around, a boy in your class drinking half of it, not puking, and then kissing a girl…

  The kissing part will not be true. Small boys always go one lie too far; big boys too, of course. But the rest of it will be, and the identity of the kid in question will not in the least surprise you.

  It will be the Forward-Thinking Boy.

  Every class has one. The one who always gets there first, who will forever have left his trash on your mountain top; the one on some fast-track to adulthood, his voice trailing in his wake.

  After he's broken the ice it suddenly seems conceivable for the rest of you, and comes the night when you and your buddies are outside a bar and one of them gets away without being carded and you're all suddenly holding these big cold glasses and it's completely different to being allowed a try at a warm bottle out in the garden last summer: and you take a mouthful and it's metallic and foamy and tastes like it might have leaked out of a machine but it's beer and you know—as you biliously work your way through a glass that will, in only a few years, disappear in a couple of unthinking swallows—that a box has been ticked.

  You have the first of your magic cards. You know the beer spell now.

  Overnight you become one of the guys who's had a beer, who chugs it like a fish all the time—Jeez: sometimes you worry you might be turning into a fuckin' juicer, you're drinking so much—though it still tastes soapy and sour, if you're honest, which you're not, because nobody else says anything and you don't want to sound like a pussy, especially now you've proved that you're not.

  By now the Forward-Thinking Boy you all want to be acknowledged by (and also slightly fear, and kind of hate) will have leapt whistling over further horizons. He'll regularly smell of cigarettes, or will have weaselled his hand up some pretty girl's shirt—and then, finally, he'll have done the thing. The Big One, the World Series of adolescence, the event that carves men from boys, takes the doers and takers and puts them in the VIP enclosure of adolescence: fenced off by experience, lustrous with action, immediately taller and cooler in a way you will never, ever feel, regardless of what you do in the rest of your life.

  But you do not understand that, not yet, and this is a time of credits which have to be earned. So you will try cigarettes one afternoon, and hate them, or not, little realizing this small difference will cost you tens of thousands of dollars, countless coffee breaks standing in the cold and rain with your fellow pariahs, and finally your life. And eventually, under one circumstance or another, your hand will cup the surprising warmth and softness of a breast, disbelievingly, as if you have been allowed against all odds to pet some small, bald, mythical creature, in its nest. You're not sure what to do next—there doesn't seem to be a self-evidently logical next step—but it's done. And finally you will screw, and it will be embarrassing, but it will be over quickly and you will be ejected out the other side into a land where there is little left to do, all but two of life's major boxes already ticked.

  Sooner or later you will start drawing new boxes for yourself, as a way to fill the time: and they may be sketchy and on show to all—big car, big house, big job—or small and intimately detailed and kept largely out of sight. The hand that draws those boxes will look like it's yours, but it will be much younger. It will be the hand that held the first cigarette, the hand placed on that first breast by a girl who was growing cold and bored and would have preferred you to be someone else. It is the hand that pulls the sheets up to your chin when you go to bed in your parents' house at the end of the night when you have first had sex; lying in bed as the planet turns, knowing the world is different now and wondering why it feels so much the same, whether you perhaps did something wrong, or not quite right — wondering why the idea of it felt so much more momentous than the actuality turned out to be.

  The hand is the key. When you look at someone's hand, look carefully and long, you see everything they are and have been and done. Hands are action. Hands are doing. When you take someone's hand you own them entire.

  Just as holding that first cigarette can be a life sentence, so can the other thing. You liked it well enough that first time, but felt you didn't really get to the bottom of it. That there must be more to be had, something that will bring the reality in line with the idea; that will align the world outside your head with the way it is inside.

  Most men will find ways of engaging on this quest which they can share, and their lives will follow their timeless course, still and forever in the wake of the Forward-Thinking Boy. For he will be the first to tick the penultimate box, too, that of getting a girl pregnant—thereafter putting aside forward-thinking things in return for the adult glees of earning a wage and putting up shelving and sitting alone on the back porch some evenings and drinking beer that now tastes much like water, as he stares out into the yard as if wondering what on earth the next day could be for.

  He'll often be first to return to the home plate, too, to leap over that final horizon unto death, but they never tell you that at school. Back then, first was always better: it's only later in li
fe you realize the value of idling further down the pack. And in some senses that boy never dies, even when he winds up drunk-tangled in the metal of his car down some country lane. He is immortal, the dark seed embedded deep inside: your endless opinion of yourself. He was the person who made you understand you were not exceptional and that you would never be first in any race that other people could know about. He is gone, but you will meet him again. He will be older then, and gaunt, but some day you will realize that many of the actions you believed had been yours had actually been his. He will always be that one step ahead, knowing you better than you know yourself. Pulling strings, guiding you down dark alleys, his hand drawing new and strange and awful boxes for you to tick.

  And when you have done his work and stand panting in the night, staring in a mirror that reflects a world from which you can never now escape, it will be his face you see looking back.

  •••

  His phone rang suddenly, stopping him in mid-sentence.

  He let it ring. He had done this once before, earlier in the day, or perhaps it had been the night—Nina hadn't been able to tell the difference between the two. Both were murky. The ringing had reminded her that her own phone might be somewhere in the van. Also that it was turned off, and she was tied up. Her phone was a dead end, but she had not forgotten about it.

  There was quiet for a few minutes.

  Then the phone rang again, and this time he answered. He listened for some time, and in the end said only 'Okay.'

  That was the end of the conversation.

  He lit another cigarette. Nina could tell immediately that there was a marked change in the ether.

  'Well, he's coming,' he said. He sounded different, hard once again. 'Talk of the devil. Forward-Thinking Boy himself is on his way. And so…I'm going to do this after all.'

  Nina tried to say something. Anything. Only gurgles made it past the gag. He quickly tied the blindfold back around her eyes, and everything was inky charcoal again.

  The van swayed as he got up and moved past her. She heard what sounded like a drawer being opened above her head. Other, quiet noises for a while, and then he moved back in front of her. There was a dry, rasping sound.

  It sounded like a Polaroid photo being taken.

  A clunk as something was put down. Then he was very close to her. He took her right arm in his hands and she could hear that he was breathing quickly and this did not make her feel very safe.

  Something was tied around her upper arm, tightly. She tried to kick, to jerk her body away. Then something shockingly sharp slid into the inside of her elbow. She went rigid, terrified.

  Still his breathing, shallow and fast.

  The sharp thing stayed in her for some time, several minutes, five, perhaps ten. Then it was pulled out again.

  He stayed motionless for a few moments, standing over her, as if this was his last chance to not do something. Then he moved away.

  Now what? What was he going to do now?

  She heard the sound of some pieces of equipment being taken from a cupboard. She could not tell if they were knives. A clank, a screwing sound, a brief wisp of something that smelled like gas. Then the sound of a match being struck, though this time it was not followed by the smell of a cigarette.

  She tried very hard to make her mind go away someplace else. To go back to the lake. To see its shiny black surface under a cloudy sky, to believe that if she could just wake up and turn her head, she would see Ward sitting next to her, a half-smile on his face, amused at the way she had cried out while she was dreaming.

  She couldn't get there. It was too far away.

  She had to remain here, to stay in the van with this man. She could not fail to understand what he was doing. She didn't even particularly mind the sound of her blood draining into a metallic-sounding receptacle, though the realization of how much he'd taken made her stomach turn. That was bearable.

  Far worse was the smell as it cooked.

  Chapter 27

  I had slept very badly. I tried hard to get some rest, because I didn't know any faster way of making it day again. Getting a room in the Holiday Inn was not difficult and I lay on a wide, flat bed and stared at the ceiling and willed it to shade away and let me float up into some place where my head did not ache with absence. It did not want to do so, and perhaps I didn't really want it to either. A period of unconsciousness could only make Nina seem further from me, time fading reality's colours like a wind blowing autumn leaves away. Some time after 2 a.m. I got up, took my phone out of my jacket, and tried her number again. There was still no answer, just the redirect to voicemail.

  In the small hours I must have stumbled into something close to sleep, because I spent time in places that were not Thornton. I stood for a while on the precarious balcony of Nina's house in Malibu, waiting for her to join me. She did not, and when I went inside I discovered the outside was connected instead to the interior of the house I grew up in as a child, hundreds of miles north of Los Angeles in Hunter's Rock. The house was cold and empty and damp patches of neglect had settled into the corners of the ceilings and some of the walls. One room had a bed in it, and a telephone on the bedside table, but the phone steadfastly remained silent. I waited there for a while, thinking that if nothing else my mother might call. Then for a time I walked through trees, not like the scrubby local woods but the deep endlessness of the forests around Sheffer. It had snowed recently and there were fleet shadows behind some of the tall and silent trunks, and these shadows had minds and knew my name: but it appeared none wanted to talk. They just watched, not unkindly, as I struggled deeper and deeper.

  Finally I was on the couch of an apartment I had lived in for a while in Seattle ten years before. Five storeys up, with a view over Elliot Bay, it was one of the most pleasant places I have lived. I spent my time there with a woman, the longest relationship I have ever managed. Most of the time this woman was businesslike, can-do, a scourge to the indolent and pessimistic. I had a nickname for her: Hope. Partly because she looked like the actress who played a character of that name in thirty something, but also because that's what she had. A hope, or confidence, that the world was a good and sensible place: that it was organized for the benefit of the right-minded and fair, and would always see them okay in the end.

  But every now and then something would crash a little inside. I would see her staring into space in a bar, or down at her hands, or not looking properly at the television. Her movements would become tighter and defensive, her eyes wide. I would ask her, when I noticed, if something was on her mind. She'd say there wasn't, and I'd go back to drinking beer or chuckling at Chandler or eating potato chips—the important stuff.

  But then a little later and apropos of nothing, she would ask: 'Will it be okay?'

  'Will what be okay?'

  'Everything,' she'd say, quietly, and I'm sure each time she was unaware we'd had this exchange before. 'Will everything be okay?'

  And I'd say that it would be, and hold her a while, and steer us back to the mundane—and usually in the morning I'd wake to hear her singing in the shower. She sang like a frog, but I was glad to hear it.

  We made it to ten months, then slowly spiralled apart. In the end things were not okay. Not for us, not in general.

  In this world, everything is never okay. But I'm glad I didn't know that then, and I'm glad I never told her.

  I woke at five thinking I heard someone in the bathroom of the suite. I half-fell off the bed, dragging myself towards the sound. But there was no one in there. Any singing I thought I'd heard must have come from some other room, or another time. I knew there was no point going back to bed so I stood under the shower for a while. The exchange of information in hotels is very efficient, and when I turned up at the hotel cafe well before opening time the people setting up there rapidly provided me with coffee. I probably did not thank them well enough. I was not yet ready to accept the solicitousness offered to the bereaved, and became monosyllabic in the face of kindness. I took my
cup of coffee through the lobby doors and stood outside.

  The parking lot was largely empty and looked like a winter sea, cold and grey and flat. As I stared across it, willing Nina to somehow appear, I knew that if I didn't find her then nothing would ever be okay again.

  And I knew also that time was running out.

  •••

  'You got her to talk once,' I said. 'Maybe you can do it again.'

  John shook his head. 'I don't think so.'

  I was still in the parking lot, where John had found me ten minutes before. I had drunk a good deal of coffee and smoked some cigarettes and felt a little more alive, though not necessarily in a good way. The morning was very crisp and cold and the temperature had fallen ten degrees overnight. If we'd chosen today to go digging in the woods we'd have needed pickaxes to break ground.

  'I don't see how it would help us,' he added. 'That woman didn't abduct Nina.'

  'Some guy told me once that investigations proceed by pushing in any direction you can, in the hope it will take you where you need to go. Oh, wait—that was you, right? Yesterday?'

  'Do you have any idea how annoying you are?'

  'People regularly try to kill me, so I guess that's a clue. John…'

  'Monroe's not going to let me interview her again.'

  'Why not? You got a confession out of her. Which is more than he or Reidel ever did. Or Nina, come to that.'

  'I didn't get anything out of her. She elected to tell me what may or may not be the truth, for bizarre reasons of her own. And then she stopped talking. You saw what happened next. I could spend another week with her and get nothing.'

  I turned away, frustrated. 'But what else do we do?'

  'Nina's probably not even in Thornton any more. Why would an abductor keep her in town?'

  'Because this is where he lives.'

  'Assuming it's a local crazy person, yes—but there's already someone in custody who's confessed to those killings, Ward. If this is related to the Straw Men instead then Nina's most likely miles away by now. You understand that, don't you?' He looked at me seriously, and visibly made the decision to broach a subject. 'You also need to prepare yourself for the idea that she could be…'