Personal Darkness

by Lee, Tanith

  "You are her father," said Eric.

  It struck Nobbi Eric was agreeing, backing him up.

  "Too right," Nobbi said.

  He had broken out in sweat.

  The girl in green was still descending, but Tray was just standing there with the other woman.

  "Come on, love."

  "Oh, Dad," said Tray.

  He felt himself breathe again. It was the usual voice, the whine of protest and self-justification.

  "Come on, love. Your mom's worried."

  The girl in green came down the stairs, all the way. She walked toward Nobbi with a sheer paralyzing grace, so he had to look at her.

  God, her eyes—

  "What is it, love?" Nobbi said to Ruth, concerned for her, bewildered.

  He had always liked women.

  Her left hand flicked out and there was a flash, like the sun again through the windows.

  A spurt of scarlet burst upward and hit the pillars. It splashed over Ruth, into her hair and onto her white face. Beads of blood on her lashes, blinked away. Red tears.

  "Oh!" exclaimed the old woman with Tray. "Oh! Oh!"

  Nobbi was confused. He tried to look around. A violent hiccup tore out of him, and there was a terrific itching in his head. He scratched, and then the hall turned over.

  Nobbi lay on the floor with the blood gusting from the severed vein in his short, short neck. His eyes were open. He could say nothing.

  "Michael," Eric said.

  Michael ran to Nobbi and kneeled down. He pressed a wad of something white against the blood, but the white changed to red.

  "Daddy," said Tray.

  Ruth stood over Nobbi, the gold razor in her fingers.

  "Scarabae," said Ruth.

  Nobbi gazed up at the ceiling. He felt silly. He wished this had not happened. He felt sorry for the girl with the paint-pool eyes. Then he was in the car and it was sliding away downhill. The sensation was quite pleasant.

  He thought, Poor Marilyn.

  "Daddy!" screamed Tray. She screamed again. "I want my daddy."

  On the floor of the hall Nobbi's dead body with Michael kneeling there, and Ruth standing totally motionless.

  And above, Tray screaming and next rushing down. And then Tray tumbling into the blood. "Daddy! Daddy!"

  Eric and Miranda were statues.

  Tray lifted her head. "I want my daddy!"

  Sounds came out of her that human things cannot make, yet do.

  When the screaming sounded in the house, like a siren, Malach moved faster than Connor had ever seen occur. But Camillo cowered down, and, over by the trees, the idiot Lou-girl put her hands over her ears in her fake red hair.

  Cardiff scrambled up, and Pig and Rose and Whisper all tried to bolt toward the house.

  Connor planted himself on the slope above them, holding wide his arms, and Viv crouched at his feet, snarling.

  "No."

  They fell back, staring at each other.

  "But," said Rose.

  "No," Connor said. "And no. And no."

  One by one they sat down.

  The Lou-girl chased off into the oak trees.

  The first screams had stopped.

  Malach lifted Tray up off the corpse and turned her into his body. He held her as she resisted, and the touch of his hands made her give in. Then she hung against him a moment in silence.

  She said, "I want my lion."

  Miranda came and took Tray from Malach, and Tray explained, "My lion. He's my friend."

  Tray was covered in blood, as Ruth was covered in blood. The blood had covered them, however, differently. In any case, the blood was Tray's, had made her. Ruth had no right to it.

  As Miranda led Tray up the stairs again, softly, Malach looked at Ruth.

  "He threatened them," she said.

  "Who?"

  "That man."

  "No," Malach said. "You learned nothing."

  "Yes. The Scarabae. I killed for them."

  "You're filth," he said, "like some plague. I taught you nothing, you learned nothing."

  "Yes," she said. Her eyes came slowly back to life and fixed on him, swimming, startled. "Malach—he was an enemy—"

  "Only a fool. But you, with your gold claw. You."

  Above, miles high, Rachaela had come on to the top of the stairs, alone. Drawn by the screaming as if to some ancient rite. From a tower, she looked down and saw Malach standing, warrior in armor, priest in stone. And the child, Ruth, cringing there in her clothes of green and blood.

  "But," said Ruth, "he was—"

  "Nothing," said Malach.

  "Then—I was wrong. I was wrong."

  "It doesn't matter to me," he said.

  Rachaela thought: These words come out of vaults of time. Spoken over and over.

  "Malach," said Ruth.

  "Don't say my name," he answered. He turned to Eric. "Put her into some room or cellar. Where you had her before. Keep her there for three hundred years. Like Camillo. She can learn that way."

  "Malach," said Ruth. "Malach."

  "Not to you."

  "But I'm yours. I'm to go with you."

  "You're not mine. Go into the furnace. Burn up. Finish."

  Tray said, "Miranda, can I have a sweet?"

  "Yes, dear," said Miranda. "Lots and lots of sweets. Hold my hand."

  Then Eric must have gestured to Kei and to Michael, because they came together and took hold of Ruth in her blood.

  And they began to carry her, as if to her execution, up the other side of the stairs.

  They had incarcerated her before. When she killed. Then. That time, she was silent.

  Now Ruth screamed. Not like the other girl, not like a machine. These were raw cries, to which every pore of the body responded. The wails of sacked Troy and Jerusalem, the blinded shrieks of Hiroshima.

  Malach stood under the stairs, and listened.

  Rachaela saw him listen, his face like a shell in ice.

  And then they bore Ruth past her, and Rachaela reached out her hand— "Ruth—"

  And Ruth cried, "Malach—Malach—"

  Her screams went on, her cries, the repetition of his name. Up into the pinnacles of the house.

  "Dear God." Rachaela put her hands to her lips. She was torn open, as if Ruth had been born again out of her body. But Ruth now, finally, at last, was dead.

  CHAPTER 43

  HADES.

  Through the dark a monster had passed, sucking slowly at the moistureless black milk of the vaulted tunnels. It was vacuuming up the asbestos dust that clung to the walls and roof. Secret thing of night, no one must know the poison that pollinated the airs under the earth.

  Like the inside of a wine cask, a barrel, these passageways, the scattering coils of rails, like carelessly cast rope.

  The Underground by night.

  And now, after the monster had passed, the man came walking.

  Malach moved without a sound through the labyrinth of the tunnels. He took another branch, and the rumbling of the monster died away.

  Mice cheeped from their own city of holes and runnels.

  The aroma of this Hell was like that of an old chimney, soot and dirt and unreal atmosphere heated too high and inadequately cooled. In places were lights, in others not. Sometimes deep-throated breezes blew, odored with distant electricity, for somewhere a train had passed, some carrier between the closed stations.

  Malach's face, now lit, now lost. Impossible to read there anything, not even when thick, choked light began to shine back on him from the darkness.

  The clink of implements along the rails, like .trapped miners, tapping with their last strength, for rescue, which would never come.

  Malach moved down the tunnel and entered the light.

  A maintenance gang in gaudy dungarees, clicketing at the coils on the ground. Heads turned. A pallid Irish face with sad and smoky eyes, a black man closed on an anger which would never speak. Here they are, trapped in the mine of life, tapping. But who has come?
r />   "Hey, mate—"

  Another man nudged the speaker.

  They stood aside, to let him go by.

  The black man said: "Tea urn next platform. Don't go no further."

  As he passed, Malach raised his hand, and the black man clapped his own into it. It was a salute seldom shared with a white, but in this case, for some reason, permissible.

  When Malach had gone by, the black man found a note of money in his palm, stuck there like a butterfly wing.

  "Mary, Mother of God," said the Irishman.

  They stood, looking at the note.

  Out on the platform the half-orange-clad foreman in his vest, gaped at Malach passing down the line.

  "Here, you—"

  Malach paid no attention.

  The man at the urn shook his head. "Leave it, Eddie."

  Beyond the station, another stretch of the dark, and then more lights, and a group of women bundled in dungarees with silver faces gauzed in little breathing masks. One sang in a low and burning voice, "Every time we say good-bye—"

  The song was stilled. As the maintenance gang had done, the gang of women fluffers stared. They were the moths beneath the earth who brushed off the dense black powder of shed skin, webbed hair, the dregs of expiry, psychic shadow and decay, pumped daily out into these curved arteries. They were a lost tribe, living by night like vampires, in the coffins of the tube.

  "Darlin'," said one to Malach, "don't go on no further."

  "No, lovey," said another. "There's a dead 'un."

  "She means," said the singer, and her voice was honey, spoiled by rust, "the next station, it's closed."

  "Since the 1950s," said another, a fat woman.

  "Not tonight," said Malach.

  The women drew aside. "You ain't with that?"

  "No," Malach said.

  "Scum," said the woman who had not sung. "I'd do for 'em. But we can't do nothing."

  "You hear it," said the singer. "Far off."

  "Tonight," said Malach, "silence will come."

  They looked. The singer nodded. She sang, in a murmur, not like the sea but like some distant train moving over honey: "I die a little."

  Malach took her hand. He drew close to her, and put down his head until his forehead rested on her dusty hair. She smelled of trying to keep clean against great odds. Never had a man held her, touched her, as this one did. Never such a man. And never again.

  When he was gone, the one who did not sing, laughed. But then she stopped laughing.

  "Look."

  They looked at the note.

  "Toy-Town money," said one of them.

  "Must be."

  The dark had swallowed him, the turn toward the ghost station.

  "See what I found?" said the fat woman. She held up a man's leg. It was artificial. "I found a hand, Thursday," said another. The women drew back along the tunnel, towards the urn of tea.

  Down here they had always found things. Wine cellars and pits of plague. Skeletons. Once, a great dinosaur, removed in portions, stealthily, not to halt the work of excavation. And there had been banquets to prove the safety of the vaulted tunnels, candelabra gleaming and the chink of thin crystal goblets spangled with champagne.

  And now, the chink of a goblet, up ahead, and the glow of new light.

  The money had been the payment of passaging, coins for the ferryman.

  And crossing over the bone-dry Styx, hell within Hell.

  A reddish glare lit the closed station beyond the second tunnel, unveiling oddly the placards and the posters, half-transparent with age. Hovis, Ovaltine, Pears Soap, girls on bicycles and girls who swung from the moon. But they were phantoms now, forced to look on at changing times.

  A ring of red workmens' warning lanterns, and flung up on the walls, sparking, searing oxyacetylene torches, blasting in a primitive fever.

  On the platform they had formed the arena.

  Men in tailored garments with elegant hand-set sleeves, Italian shoes. Eight men. One with his hair held back in a ponytail by a clip of ivory. One with a coat of fur. The glint of a couple of gold-banded cigarettes. Champagne bottles in vacuum coolers, and shallow glasses. Over the ozone, chimney scent, the perfumes of rich men. Cologne and aftershave and hair oil. And over that again, already, a meaty throbbing smell.

  The two black dogs, barrel-shaped like the tunnels, spade-formed faces, all jaws, the muzzles off, tugging and growling. The men laughed at their eagerness.

  As they let them go, the man in the fur gave the nearer dog a sharp kick. It did not seem to notice as it belted forward.

  The first blood came in three seconds.

  Its odor went up like hot oil.

  The men shouted. They had laid their bets.

  The dogs ripped at each other, detached reluctantly and with difficulty.

  "G'on!"

  Another man, with greenish frogskin shoes, kicked the slower dog back into the center.

  The dogs rammed each other, the spade jaws trying to fasten into throats, shoulders. They rolled snarling and choking against the tilework and blood blotched the poster of the Ovaltine maiden.

  The man in fur slipped his hand inside his opened coat, into a pocket which parted obligingly. He was already hard as a rock. He breathed the gladiator stink of sweat and blood, the acidic peppery exudations of human adrenaline under Faberge.

  The last man at the platform's edge, standing away a little with his champagne, not liking to be splashed, saw something white below him on the line. He turned, and there was a newcomer there, standing under the platform, looking up, smiling.

  "You're late," said the man above. He took in the darkness and the long, long hair. He held down his hand. "Can you make it up?"

  The man with white hair took his hand, and putting hardly any pressure on it, leaped up onto the platform. An athlete. And doors not good enough for him. "Walk through the—" began the man, actually more interested in this arrival than the fight, which bored him. The white-haired man looked smiling into his face. No one else looked anywhere but at the two wrestling, bleeding dogs.

  Noises of bubbling snarling, and shouts, curses, reverberated around the station, chaos of sounds.

  Malach slammed his right fist into the man's body, into the spleen, which ruptured instantly. The man fell on the platform. No one saw.

  The man in fur registered Malach, as Malach came close beside him.

  "Pretty coat," Malach said.

  "Pedigree cat," said the man. "Bred for it. Cost you a fortune." He was a little breathless, rubbing away at himself inside his trousers, not taking his eyes off the rolling mass of black and blood and teeth.

  When Malach's hand come in, too, under the coat, friendly, against his side, he was startled but not displeased. He laughed under his breath, and then something unbelievable happened. He did not know—an incredible pulling, a dislocation and pain—pain—

  Blood smashed outward from the wrong direction.

  The other men, alerted after all, turned around.

  The fur man in his coat of creatures went tumbling backward, with a great red cage stuck out from his side. Improvisation of the Viking method, if they had known it, half a spread-eagle, the ribs wrenched out and bent backward—

  The sounds were different now.

  Only the fighting dogs, scraping and wringing the juices from each other, did not glance to see.

  The air had become an oven of roaring and blood.

  Two men had grabbed Malach. He was grinning. He fell backward, pulling them with him, and as they landed on the ground he was free again. His elbows went into their breastbones and the double snap echoed up off the walls. One tried to claw after him and Malach stamped down his face like a rotten cabbage.

  A small man was creeping off along the platform.

  They wanted to leave it to each other, to deal with him. So now one came at him with a Buck knife.

  "Here, let's be having you."

  Malach dived at him, and his head slammed in under the knife-man's
chin. The knife slashed, and cross-slashed over. But it was a reflex. Then the man was down, head angled impossibly, tangling Malach's legs. Malach stepped out of him, almost mincingly.

  The dogs were locked now, silent. A stream of blood ran from their bodies. Blood poured from Malach's body on the left side.

  The small man ran back behind him, swinging up what he had found, a sledgehammer.

  It caught Malach in the .back, a blow that should have cracked him in two.

  Malach bowed over, the breath going out of him in a low animal grunt, like the last noises the dogs had made.

  The small man let down the hammer, which was too big for him. He prepared to crow, to the other two, the man with elephant tusk holding back his thin tail of hair, the man with the frogskin shoes.

  But then Malach straightened up again, he came around like a damaged engine, slow and entirely terrible. His eyes were all white, and he reached out and smote the hammer man across the head. The stroke sent him flying, screaming, back off the platform, sheer across the rails, into the farther tunnel wall, and into the gentle body of the girl swinging from the moon, which silenced him. He dropped with a rattle on the line.

  The man with the ivory band held up his open palms. The other man whimpered.

  "Okay. Okay."

  "Not okay," said Malach. His face looked older than the skeletons they had once dug from the plague pit under the tunnels. But he smiled again a little, as if from courtesy.

  The two dogs were finished, or seemed to be. One had closed its teeth in the other's throat. Both had shut their eyes.

  The frogskin man started forward, and tripped over the dogs' bodies. He fell on them. And the dying dog turned its mutilated head and tore out his throat, suddenly and silently. He had no chance to cry.

  "You're terrific," said Ivory. "You're amazing."

  "Yes," said Malach.

  "But you'll let me go. You've had enough."

  "If you like," said Malach, "you can run a little way. The exercise will do you good."

  "You see," said Ivory, "even if your spine held up when that guy hit you, your ribs are caved in."

  "Are they?"

  "Look, here's the money from the fight." Ivory cast over a shower, not red or black now, but blue and brown. "Don't feel too great," said Ivory, "I expect."