The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons (Mammoth Books)

by Paula Guran

  “You know her?”

  “He brought her over one day, showin’ her off. She’s a headcase, man. You should know better.”

  “Will I be able to run?”

  Sam laughed. “Not hardly.”

  “Listen, Sam.” Eliot sat up, winced. “Chatterji’s lady. She’s in bad trouble, and I’m the only one who can help her. I have to be able to run, and I need something to keep me awake. I haven’t slept for a couple of days.”

  “I ain’t givin’ you pills, Eliot. You can stagger through your doper phase without my help.” Sam finished drying his hands and went to sit on a stool beside the window; beyond the window was a brick wall, and atop it a string of prayer flags snapped in the breeze.

  “I’m not after a supply, damn it! Just enough to keep me going tonight. This is important, Sam!”

  Sam scratched his neck. “What kind of trouble she in?”

  “I can’t tell you now,” said Eliot, knowing that Sam would laugh at the idea of something as metaphysically suspect as the Khaa. “But I will tomorrow. It’s not illegal. Come on, man! There’s got to be something you can give me.”

  “Oh, I can fix you up. I can make you feel like King Shit on Coronation Day.” Sam mulled it over. “Okay, Eliot. But you get your ass back here tomorrow and tell me what’s happenin’.” He gave a snort of amusement. “All I can say is it must be some strange damn trouble for you to be the only one who can save her.”

  After wiring Mr Chatterji, urging him to come home at once, Eliot returned to the house and unscrewed the hinges of the front door. He was not certain that Aimée would be able to control the house, to slam doors and make windows stick as she had with her house in New Hampshire, but he didn’t want to take any chances. As he lifted the door, and set it against the wall of the alcove, he was amazed by its lightness; he felt possessed of a giddy strength, capable of heaving the door up through the well of the courtyard and over the roofs. The cocktail of painkillers and speed was working wonders. His groin ached, but the ache was distant, far removed from the center of his consciousness, which was a fount of well-being. When he had finished with the door, he grabbed some fruit juice from the kitchen and went back to the alcove to wait.

  In mid-afternoon Michaela came downstairs. Eliot tried to talk to her, to convince her to leave, but she warned him to keep away and scuttled back to her room. Then, around five o’clock, the burning woman appeared, floating a few feet above the courtyard floor. The sun had withdrawn to the upper third of the well, and her fiery silhouette was inset into slate-blue shadow, the flames of her hair dancing about her head. Eliot, who had been hitting the painkillers heavily, was dazzled by her: had she been a hallucination, she would have made his All-Time Top Ten. But, even realizing that she was not, he was too drugged to relate to her as a threat. He snickered and shied a piece of broken pot at her. She shrank to an incandescent point, vanished, and that brought home to him his foolhardiness. He took more speed to counteract his euphoria, and did stretching exercises to loosen the kinks and to rid himself of the cramped sensation in his chest.

  Twilight blended the shadows in the courtyard, celebrants passed in the street, and he could hear distant drums and cymbals. He felt cut off from the city, the festival. Afraid. Not even the presence of the Khaa, half merged with the shadows along the wall, served to comfort him. Near dusk, Aimée Cousineau walked into the courtyard and stopped about twenty feet away, staring at him. He had no desire to laugh or throw things. At this distance he could see that her eyes had no whites or pupils or irises. They were dead black. One moment they seemed to be the bulging head of black screws threaded into her skull; the next they seemed to recede into blackness, into a cave beneath a mountain where something waited to teach the joys of hell to whoever wandered in. Eliot sidled closer to the door. But she turned, climbed the stairs to the second landing, and walked down Michaela’s hallway.

  Eliot’s waiting began in earnest.

  An hour passed. He paced between the door and the courtyard. His mouth was cottony; his joints felt brittle, held together by frail wires of speed and adrenaline. This was insane! All he had done was to put them in worse danger. Finally, he heard a door close upstairs. He backed into the street, bumping into two Newari girls who giggled and skipped away. Crowds of people were moving toward Durbar Square.

  “Eliot!”

  Michaela’s voice. He’d expected a hoarse demon voice, and when she walked into the alcove, her white scarf glowing palely against the dark air, he was surprised to see that she was unchanged. Her features held no trace of anything other than her usual listlessness.

  “I’m sorry I hurt you,” she said, walking toward him. “I know you didn’t do anything. I was just upset about last night.”

  Eliot continued to back away.

  “What’s wrong?” She stopped in the doorway.

  It might have been his imagination, the drugs, but Eliot could have sworn that her eyes were much darker than normal. He trotted off a dozen yards or so and stood looking at her.

  “Eliot!”

  It was a scream of rage and frustration, and he could scarcely believe the speed with which she darted toward him. He ran full tilt at first, leaping sideways to avoid collisions, veering past alarmed, dark-skinned faces, but after a couple of blocks, he found a more efficient rhythm and began to anticipate obstacles, to glide in and out of the crowd. Angry shouts were raised behind him. He glanced back. Michaela was closing the distance, beelining for him, knocking people sprawling with what seemed effortless blows. He ran harder. The crowd grew thicker, and he kept near the walls of the houses, where it was thinnest; but even there it was hard to maintain a good pace. Torches were waved in his face; young men – singing, their arms linked – posed barriers that slowed him further. He could no longer see Michaela, but he could see the wake of her passage. Fists shaking, heads jerking. The entire scene was starting to lose cohesiveness to Eliot. There were screams of torchlight, bright shards of deranged shouts, jostling waves of incense and ordure. He felt like the only solid chunk in a glittering soup that was being poured through a stone trough.

  At the edge of Durbar Square, he had a brief glimpse of a shadow standing by the massive gilt doors of Degutale Temple It was larger and a more anthracitic black than Mr Chatterji’s Khaa: one of the old ones, the powerful ones. The sight buoyed his confidence and restored his equilibrium. He had not misread the plan. But he knew that this was the most dangerous part. He had lost track of Michaela, and the crowd was sweeping him along; if she caught up to him now, he would not be able to run. Fighting for elbow room, struggling to keep his feet, he was borne into the temple complex. The pagoda roofs sloped up into darkness like strangely carved mountains, their peaks hidden by a moonless night; the cobbled paths were narrow, barely ten feet across, and the crowd was being squeezed along them, a lava flow of humanity. Torches bobbed everywhere, sending wild licks up the walls revealing scowling faces on the eaves. Atop its pedestal, the gilt statue of Hanuman – the monkey god – looked to be swaying. Clashing cymbals and arrhythmic drumming scattered Eliot’s heartbeat; the sinewy wail of oboes seemed to be graphing the fluctuations of his nerves.

  As he swept past Hanuman Dhoka Temple, he caught sight of the brass mask of White Bhairab shining over the heads of the crowd like the face of an evil clown. It was less than a hundred feet away, set in a huge niche in the temple wall and illuminated by light bulbs that hung down among strings of prayer flags. The crowd surged faster, knocking him this way and that, but he managed to spot two more Khaa in the doorway of Hanuman Dhoka. Both melted downward, vanishing, and Eliot’s hopes soared. They must have located Michaela, they must be attacking! By the time he had been carried to within a few yards of the mask, he was sure that he was safe. They must have finished her exorcism by now. The only problem left was to find her. That, he realized, had been the weak link in the plan. He’d been an idiot not to have foreseen it. Who knows what might happen if she were to fall in the midst of the crowd. Suddenl
y he was beneath the pipe that stuck out of the god’s mouth; the stream of rice beer arching from it looked translucent under the lights, and as it splashed his face (no fish), its coldness acted to wash away his veneer of chemical strength. He was dizzy, his groin throbbed. The great face, with its fierce fangs and goofy, startled eyes, appeared to be swelling and rocking back and forth. He took a deep breath. The thing to do would be to find a place next to a wall where he could wedge himself against the flow of the crowd, wait until it had thinned, and then search for her. He was about to do that very thing when two powerful hands gripped his elbows from behind.

  Unable to turn, he craned his neck and peered over his shoulder. Michaela smiled at him: a gloating “got-cha!” smile. Her eyes were dead-black ovals. She shaped his name with her mouth, her voice inaudible above the music and shouting, and she began to push him ahead of her, using him as a battering ram to forge a path through the crowd. To anyone watching, it might have appeared that he was running interference for her, but his feet were dangling just off the ground. Angry Newari yelled at him as he knocked them aside. He yelled too. No one noticed. Within seconds they had got clear into a side street, threading between groups of drunkards. People laughed at Eliot’s cries for help, and one guy imitated the funny loose-limbed way he was running.

  Michaela turned into a doorway, carried him down a dirt-floored corridor whose walls were carved into ornate screens; the dusky orange lamplight shining through the screens cast a lacework of shadow on the dirt. The corridor widened to a small courtyard, the age-darkened wood of its walls and doors inlaid with intricate mosaics of ivory. Michaela stopped and slammed him against a wall. He was stunned, but he recognized the place to be one of the old Buddhist temples that surrounded the square. Except for a life-sized statue of a golden cow, the courtyard was empty.

  “Eliot.” The way she said it, it was more of a curse than a name.

  He opened his mouth to scream, but she drew him into an embrace; her grip on his right elbow tightened, and her other hand squeezed the back of his neck, pinching off the scream.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I only want to kiss you.”

  Her breasts crushed into his chest, her pelvis ground against him in a mockery of passion, and inch by inch she forced his face down to hers. Her lips parted, and – oh, Christ Jesus! – Eliot writhed in her grasp, enlivened by a new horror. The inside of her mouth was as black as her eyes. She wanted him to kiss that blackness, the same she had kissed beneath the Eiger. He kicked and clawed with his free hand, but she was irresistible, her hands like iron. His elbow cracked, and brilliant pain shot through his arm. Something else was cracking in his neck. Yet none of that compared to what he felt as her tongue – a burning black poker – pushed between his lips. His chest was bursting with the need to scream, and everything was going dark. Thinking this was death, he experienced a peevish resentment that death was not – as he’d been led to believe – an end to pain, that it merely added a tickling sensation to all his other pain. Then the searing heat in his mouth diminished, and he thought that death must just have been a bit slower than usual.

  Several seconds passed before he realized that he was lying on the ground, several more before he noticed Michaela lying beside him, and – because darkness was tattering the edges of his vision – it was considerably longer before he distinguished the six undulating darknesses that had ringed Aimée Cousineau. They towered over her; their blackness gleamed like thick fur, and the air around them was awash with vibration. In her fluted white nightgown, her cameo face composed in an expression of calm, Aimée looked the antithesis of the vaguely male giants that were menacing her, delicate and finely worked in contrast to their crudity. Her eyes appeared to mirror their negative color. After a moment, a little wind kicked up, swirling about her. The undulations of the Khaa increased, becoming rhythmic, the movements of boneless dancers, and the wind subsided. Puzzled, she darted between two of them and took a defensive stance next to the golden cow; she lowered her head and stared up through her brows at the Khaa. They melted downward, rolled forward, sprang erect and hemmed her in against the statue. But the stare was doing its damage. Pieces of ivory and wood were splintering, flying off the walls toward the Khaa, and one of them was fading, a mist of black particles accumulating around its body; then, with a shrill noise that reminded Eliot of a jet passing overhead, it misted away.

  Five Khaa remained in the courtyard. Aimée smiled and turned her stare on another. Before the stare could take effect, however, the Khaa moved close, blocking Eliot’s view of her; and when they pulled back, it was Aimée who showed signs of damage. Rills of blackness were leading from her eyes, webbing her cheeks, making it look as if her face were cracking. Her nightgown caught fire, her hair began to leap. Flames danced on her fingertips, spread to her arms, her breast, and she assumed the form of the burning woman.

  As soon as the transformation was complete, she tried to shrink, to dwindle to her vanishing point, but, acting in unison, the Khaa extended their hands and touched her. There was that shriek of tortured metal, lapsing to a high-pitched hum, and to Eliot’s amazement, the Khaa were sucked inside her. It was a rapid process. The Khaa faded to a haze, to nothing, and veins of black marbled the burning woman’s fire; the blackness coalesced, forming into five tiny stick figures, a hieroglyphic design patterning her gown. With a fuming sound, she expanded again, regaining her normal dimensions, and the Khaa flowed back out, surrounding her. For an instant she stood motionless, dwarfed: a schoolgirl helpless amidst a circle of bullies. Then she clawed at the nearest of them. Though she had no features with which to express emotion, it seemed to Eliot there was desperation in her gesture, in the agitated leaping of her fiery hair. Unperturbed, the Khaa stretched out their enormous mitten hands, hands that spread like oil and enveloped her.

  The destruction of the burning woman, of Aimée Cousineau, lasted only a matter of seconds, but to Eliot it occurred within a bubble of slow time, a time during which he achieved a speculative distance. He wondered if – as the Khaa stole portions of her fire and secreted it within their bodies – they were removing disparate elements of her soul, if she consisted of psychologically distinct fragments: the girl who had wandered into the cave, the girl who had returned from it, the betrayed lover. Did she embody gradations of innocence and sinfulness, or was she a contaminated essence, an unfractionated evil? While still involved in this speculation – half a reaction to pain, half to the metallic shriek of her losing battle – he lost consciousness, and when he reopened his eyes, the courtyard was deserted. He could hear music and shouting from Durbar Square. The golden cow stared contentedly into nowhere.

  He had the idea that if he moved, he would further break all the broken things inside him, but he inched his left hand across the dirt and rested it on Michaela’s breast. It was rising and falling with a steady rhythm. That made him happy, and he kept his hand there, exulting in the hits of her life against his palm. Something shadowy above him. He strained to see it. One of the Khaa . . . No! It was Mr Chatterji’s Khaa. Opaquely black, scrap of fire glimmering in its hand. Compared to its big brothers, it had the look of a skinny, sorry mutt. Eliot felt camaraderie toward it.

  “Hey, Bongo,” he said weakly. “We won.”

  A tickling at the top of his head, a whining note, and he had an impression not of gratitude – as he might have expected – but of intense curiosity. The tickling stopped, and Eliot suddenly felt clear in his mind. Strange. He was passing out once again, his consciousness whirling, darkening, and yet he was calm and unafraid. A roar came from the direction of the square. Somebody – the luckiest somebody in the Katmandu Valley – had caught the fish. But as Eliot’s eyelids fluttered shut, as he had a last glimpse of the Khaa looming above them and felt the warm measure of Michaela’s heartbeat, he thought maybe that the crowd was cheering the wrong man.

  Three weeks after the night of White Bhairab, Ranjeesh Chatterji divested himself of all worldly possessions (includin
g the gift of a year’s free rent at his house to Eliot) and took up residence at Swayambhunath, where – according to Sam Chipley, who visited Eliot in the hospital – he was attempting to visualize the Avalokitesvara Buddha. It was then that Eliot understood the nature of his newfound clarity. Just as it had done long ago with the woman’s goiters, the Khaa had tried his habituation to meditation on for size, had not cared for it, and had sloughed it off in a handy repository: Ranjeesh Chatterji.

  It was such a delicious irony that Eliot had to restrain himself from telling Michaela when she visited that same afternoon; she had no memory of the Khaa, and news of it tended to unsettle her. But otherwise she had been healing right along with Eliot. All her listlessness had eroded over the weeks, her capacity for love was returning and was focused solely on Eliot. “I guess I needed someone to show me that I was worth an effort,” she told him. “I can’t stop trying to repay you.” She kissed him. “I can hardly wait till you come home.” She brought him books and candy and flowers; she sat with him each day until the nurse shooed her away. Yet being the center of her devotion disturbed him. He was still uncertain whether or not he loved her. Clarity, it seemed, made a man dangerously versatile, his conscience flexible and instituted a cautious approach to commitment. At least this was the substance of Eliot’s clarity. He didn’t want to rush into anything.

  When at last he did come home, he and Michaela made love beneath the starlit glory of Mr Chatterji’s skylight. Because of Eliot’s neck brace and cast, they had to manage the act with extreme care, but despite that, despite the ambivalence of his feelings, this time it was love they made. Afterward, lying with his good arm around her, he edged nearer to commitment. Whether or not he loved her, there was no way this part of things could be improved by any increment of emotion. Maybe he’d give it a try with her. If it didn’t work out, well, he was not going to be responsible for her mental health. She would have to learn to live without him.