The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons (Mammoth Books)

by Paula Guran

  The thing wearing Doug Bob’s head narrowed his eyes at me. There was a faint crinkling sound as the lids creased and broke.

  “Get over here, now.” His voice had the menace of a Sunday morning twister headed for a church, the power of a wall of water in the arroyo where kids played.

  I walked toward the Devil, feet stepping without my effort.

  There’s a place I can go, inside, when Uncle Reuben’s pushing into me, or he’s using the metal end of the belt, or Momma’s screaming through the thin walls of our trailer the way he can make her do. It’s like ice cream without the cone, like cotton candy without the stick. It’s like how I imagine Rachel MacIntire’s nipples, sweet and total, like my eyes and heart are in my lips and the world has gone dark around me.

  It’s the place where I love myself, deep inside my heart.

  I went there and listened to the little shuffling of my pulse in my ears.

  My feet walked on without me, but I couldn’t tell.

  Cissy’s knife spoke to me. The Devil must of put it in my hand.

  “We come again to Moriah,” it whispered in my heart. It had a voice like its metal blade, cold from the ground and old as time.

  “What do you want?” I asked. I must of spoke out loud, because Doug Bob’s burned mouth was twisting in screaming rage as he stabbed his golden finger down toward Pootie, naked at my feet next to the smoker. All I could hear was my pulse, and the voice of the knife.

  Deep inside my heart, the knife whispered again. “Do not lay a hand on the boy.”

  The golden voice from Doug Bob’s face was distant thunder in my ears. I felt his irritation, rage, frustration building where I had felt that cold absence.

  I tried again. “I don’t understand.”

  Doug Bob’s head bounced up and down, the duct tape coming loose. I saw pink ropy strings working to bind the burned head to his golden neck. He cocked back a fist, fixing to strike me a hard blow.

  I felt the knife straining across the years toward me. “You have a choice. The Enemy promises anything and everything for your help. I can give you nothing but the hope of an orderly world. You choose what happens now, and after.”

  I reckoned the Devil would run the world about like Uncle Reuben might. Doug Bob was already dead, and Pootie was next, and there wasn’t nobody else like them in my life, no matter what the Devil promised. I figured there was enough hurt to go around already and I knew how to take it into me.

  Another one of Uncle Reuben’s lessons.

  “Where you want this killing done?” I asked.

  The golden thunder in my ears paused for a moment, the tide of rage lapped back from the empty place where Doug Bob wasn’t. The fist dropped down.

  “Right here, right now,” whispered the knife. “Or it will be too late. Seven is being opened.”

  I stepped out of my inside place to find my eyes still open and Doug Bob’s blackened face inches from my nose. His teeth were burnt and cracked, and his breath reeked of flies and red meat. I smiled, opened my mouth to speak, but instead of words I swung Cissy’s knife right through the duct tape at the throat of Doug Bob’s head.

  He looked surprised.

  Doug Bob’s head flew off, bounced into the bushes. The golden body swayed, still on its two feet. I looked down at Pootie, the old knife cold in my hands.

  Then I heard buzzing, like thunder made of wires.

  * * *

  I don’t know if you ever ate a fly, accidental or not. They go down fighting, kind of tickle the throat, you get a funny feeling for a second, and then it’s all gone. Not very filling, neither.

  These flies came pouring out of the ragged neck of that golden body. They were big, the size of horseflies. All at once they were everywhere, and they came right at me. They came pushing at my eyes and my nose and my ears and flying right into my mouth, crawling down my throat. It was like stuffing yourself with raisins till you choke, except these raisins crawled and buzzed and bit at me.

  The worst was they got all over me, crowding into my butt crack and pushing on my asshole and wrapping around my balls like Uncle Reuben’s fingers right before he squeezed tight. My skin rippled, as if them flies crawled through my flesh.

  I jumped around, screaming and slapping at my skin. My gut heaved, but my throat was full of flies and it all met in a knot at the back of my mouth. I rolled to the ground, choking on the rippling mess I couldn’t spit out nor swallow back down. Through the flies I saw Doug Bob’s golden body falling in on itself, like a balloon that’s been popped. Then the choking took me off.

  I lied about the telescope. I don’t need one.

  Right after, while I was still mostly myself, I sent Pootie away with that old knife to find one of Doug Bob’s kin. They needed that knife, to make their sacrifices that would keep me shut away. I made Pootie seal me inside the bus with Doug Bob’s duct tape before he left.

  The bus is hot and dark, but I don’t really mind. There’s just me and the flies and a hot metal floor with rubber mats and huge stacks of old Bibles and hymnals that make it hard for me to move around.

  It’s okay, though, because I can watch the whole world from in here.

  I hate the flies, but they’re the only company I can keep. The taste grows on me.

  I know Pootie must of found someone to give that old knife to. I try the doors sometimes, but they hold firm. Somewhere one of Doug Bob’s brothers or uncles or cousins cuts goats the old way. Someday I’ll find him. I can see every heart except one, but there are too many to easily tell one from another.

  There’s only one place under God’s golden sun the Devil can’t see into, and that’s his own heart.

  I still have my quiet place. That’s where I hold my hope, and that’s where I go when I get too close to the goat cutter.

  Spirit Guides

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Despite what various historical markers state and the protagonist of Kris Rusch’s “Spirit Guides” thinks, historians still disagree on the original name of the “City of Angels”. On 2 August 1769, Father Juan Crespí, a Franciscan priest accompanying the first European land expedition through California, described a “beautiful river” in his journal. He dubbed the river Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles de la Porciúncula. [The second of August was a feast day celebrated at the tiny Italian chapel where St Francis of Assisi lived and founded the Franciscan order. Located on a porziuncola (Italian for a “very small portion of land”), a fresco of the Virgin Mary surrounded by angels was painted on the wall behind its altar – thus the chapel’s name: St Mary of the Angels at the Little Portion. In 1781, a settlement was established on the river. According to the first map of the area (1785) the village was named El Pueblo de la Reina de los Ángeles: “The Town of the Queen of the Angels”. The more unwieldy attribution El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Ángeles sobre el Río Porciúncula (or “The Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels on the River of the Little Portion”) and variants were, most likely, a later Franciscan historian’s effort to firmly acknowledge a connection to his order. The Porciuncula River is now called the Los Angeles River.

  * * *

  Los Angeles. City of the Angels.

  Kincaid walked down Hollywood Boulevard, his feet stepping on gum-coated stars. Cars whooshed past him, horns honking, tourists gawking. The line outside Graumann’s Chinese clutched purses against their sides, held windbreakers tightly over their arms. A hooker leaned against the barred display window of the corner drugstore, her make-up so thick it looked like a mask in the hot sun.

  The shooting had left him shaken. The crazy had opened up inside a nearby Burger Joint, slaughtering four customers and three teenaged kids behind the counter before three men, passing on the street, rushed inside and grabbed him. Half a dozen shots had gone wild, leaving fist-sized holes in the drywall, shattering picture frames, and making one perfect circle in the center of the cardboard model for a bacon-double cheeseburger.

  He’d arrived two minutes too late,
hearing the call on his police scanner on his way home, but unable to maneuver in traffic. Christ, some of those people who wouldn’t let him pass might have had relatives in that Burger Joint. Still and all, he had arrived first to find the killer trussed up in a chair, the men hovering around him, women clutching sobbing children, blood and bodies mixing with French fries on the unswept floor.

  A little girl, no more than three, had grabbed his sleeve and pointed at one of the bodies, long slender male and young, wearing a ’49ers T-shirt, ripped jeans and Adidas, face a bloody mass of tissue, and said, “Make him better,” in a whisper that broke Kincaid’s heart. He cuffed the suspect, roped off the area, took names of witnesses before the backup arrived. Three squads, fresh-faced uniformed officers, followed by the SWAT team, nearly five minutes too late, the forensic team and the ambulances not far behind.

  Kincaid had lit a cigarette with shaking fingers and said, “All yours,” before taking off into the sun-drenched crowded streets.

  He stopped outside the Roosevelt, and peered into the plate glass. His own tennis shoes were stained red, and a long brown streak of drying blood marked his Levis. The cigarette had burned to a coal between his nicotine-stained fingers, and he tossed it, stamping it out on the star of a celebrity whose name he didn’t recognize.

  Inside stood potted palms and faded glamour. Pictures of motion picture stars long dead lined the second-floor balcony. Within the last ten years, the hotel’s management had restored the Roosevelt to its twenties glory, when it had been the site for the first-ever Academy Award celebration. When he first came to LA, he spent a lot of time in the hotel, imagining the low-cut dresses, the clink of champagne flutes, the scattered applause as the nominees were announced. Searching for a kind of beauty that existed only in celluloid, a product of light and shadows and nothing more.

  El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula.

  The City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula.

  He knew nothing of the Angels of Porciuncula, did not know why Felipe de Neve in 1781 named the city after them. He suspected it was some kind of prophecy, but he didn’t know.

  They had been fallen angels.

  Of that he was sure.

  He sighed, wiped the sweat from his forehead with a grimy hand, then returned to his car, knowing that home and sleep would elude him for one more night.

  Lean and spare, Kincaid survived on cigarettes, coffee, chocolate and bourbon. Sometime in the last five years, he had allowed the LAPD to hire him, although he had no formal training. After a few odd run-ins and one overnight jail stay before it became clear that Kincaid wasn’t anywhere near the crime scene, Kincaid had met Davis, his boss. Davis had the flat gaze of a man who had seen too much, and he knew, from the records and the evidence before him, that Kincaid was too precious to lose. He made Kincaid a plain clothes detective and never assigned him a partner.

  Kincaid never told anyone what he did. Most of the cops he worked with never knew. All they cared about was that when Kincaid was on the job, suspects were found, cases were closed, and files were sealed. He worked quietly and he got results.

  They didn’t need him on this one. The perp was caught at the scene. All he had to do was write his report, then go home, toss the tennies in the trash, soak the Levi’s, and wait for another day.

  But it wasn’t that easy. He sat in his car, an olive green 1988 Olds with a fading pine-shaped air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror, long after his colleagues had left. His hands were still shaking, his nostrils still coated with the scent of blood and burgers, his ears dogged with the faint sobs of a pimply faced boy rocking over the body of a fallen co-worker. The images would stick, along with all of the others. His brain was reaching overload. Had been for a long time. But that little girl’s voice, the plea in her tone, had been more than he could bear.

  For twenty years, he had tried to escape, always ending up in a new town, with new problems. Shootings in Oklahoma parking lots, bombings in Upstate New York, murders in restaurants and shopping malls and suburban family pickups. The violence surrounded him, and he was trapped.

  Surely this time, they would let him get away.

  A hooker knocked on the window of his car. He thought he could smell the sweat and perfume through the rolled-up glass. Her cleavage was mottled, her cheap elastic top revealing the top edge of brown nipple.

  He shook his head, then turned the ignition and grabbed the gearshift on the column to take the car out of park. The Olds roared to life, and with it came the adrenaline rush, hormones tinged with panic. He pulled out of the parking space, past the hooker, down Hollywood Boulevard toward the first freeway intersection he could find.

  Kincaid would disappear from the LAPD as mysteriously as he had arrived. He stopped long enough to pick up his clothes, his credit cards and a hand-painted coffee mug a teenaged girl in Galveston had given him twenty years before, when she mistakenly thought he had saved her life.

  He merged into the continuous LA rush-hour traffic for the last time, radio off, clutching the wheel in white-knuckled tightness. He would go to Big Bear, up in the mountains, where there were no people, no crimes, nothing except himself and the wilderness.

  He drove away from the angels.

  Or so he hoped.

  Kincaid drove until he realized he was on the road to Las Vegas. He pulled the Olds over, put on his hazards and bowed his head, unwilling to go any further. But he knew, even if he didn’t drive there, he would wake up in Vegas, his car in the lot outside. It had happened before.

  He didn’t remember taking the wrong turn, but he wasn’t supposed to remember. They were just telling him that his work wasn’t done, the work they had forced him to do ever since he was a young boy.

  With a quick, vicious movement, he got out of the Olds and shook his fist at the star-filled desert sky. “I can’t take it anymore, do you hear me?”

  But no shape flew across the moon, no angel wings brushed his cheek, no reply filled his heart. He could turn around, but the roads he drove would only lead him back to Los Angeles, back to people, back to murders in which little girls stood in pools of blood. He knew what Los Angeles was like. Maybe they would allow him a few days rest in Vegas.

  Las Vegas, the fertile plains, originally founded in the late 1700s like LA, only the settlement didn’t become permanent until 1905 when the first lots were sold (and nearly flooded out five years later). He thought maybe the city’s youth and brashness would be a tonic, but even as he drove into town, he felt the blood beneath the surface. Despair and hopelessness had come to every place in America. Only here it mingled with the cajing-jing of slot machines and the smell of money.

  He wanted to stay in the MGM Grand, but the Olds wouldn’t drive through the lot. He settled on a cheap tumbledown hotel on the far side of the strip, complete with chenille bedspreads and rattling window air conditioners that dripped water on the thin brown indoor-outdoor carpet. There he slept in the protective dark of the blackout curtains, and dreamed:

  Angels floated above him, wings so long the tips brushed his face. As he watched, they tucked their wings around themselves and plummeted, eagle-like, to the ground below, banking when the concrete of a major superhighway rose in front of them. He was on the bed, watching, helpless, knowing that each time the long white tail feathers touched the earth, violence erupted somewhere it had never been before.

  He started awake, coughing the deep racking cough of a three-pack-a-day man. His tongue was thick and tasted of bad coffee and nicotine. He reached for the end table, clicking on the brown glass bubble lamp, then grabbed his lighter and a cigarette from the pack resting on top of the cut-glass ashtray. His hands were still shaking and the room was quiet except for his labored breathing. Only in the silence did he realize that his dream had been accompanied by the sound of the pimply faced boy, sobbing.

  It happened just before dawn. A woman’s scream, outside, cut off in mid-thrum, followed by a sickening thud a
nd footsteps. He had known it would happen the minute the car had refused to enter the Grand’s parking lot. And he had to respond, whether it was his choice or not.

  Kincaid paused long enough to pull on his pants, checking to make sure his wallet was in the back pocket. Then he grabbed his key and let himself out of the room.

  His window overlooked the pool, a liver-shaped thing built of blue tile in the late fifties. The management left the terrace lights on all night, and Kincaid used those to guide him across the interior courtyard. In the half-light, he saw another shape running toward the pool, a pear-shaped man dressed in the too-tight uniform of a national rent-a-cop service. The air smelled of chlorine and the desert heat was still heavy despite the early morning hour. Leaves and dead bugs floated in the water, and the surrounding patio furniture was so dirty it took a moment for Kincaid to realize it was supposed to be white.

  The rent-a-cop had already arrived on the scene, his pasty skin turning green as he looked down. Kincaid came up behind him, stopped, and stared.

  The body was crumpled behind the removable diving board. One look at her bloodstained face, swollen and braised neck, her chipped and broken fingernails and he knew.

  All of it.

  “I’d better call this in,” the rent-a-cop said, and Kincaid shook his head, knowing that if he were alone with the body, he would end up spending the next few days in a Las Vegas lock-up.

  “No, let me.” He went back to his room, packed his meager possessions and set them by the door. Then he called 911 and reported the murder, slipping on a shirt before going back outside.

  The rent-a-cop was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. The air smelled of vomit. Kincaid said nothing. Together they waited for the Nevada authorities to show: a skinny plain clothes detective whose eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep and his female partner, busty and official in regulation blue.