Dancing On the Head of a Pin rc-2

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

“Hello,” he said, placing it to his ear.

  There was a long pause, and Remy was about to hang up on the call when he heard the unmistakable sound of labored breathing. He almost laughed, an obscene phone call at a time like this, but then the caller managed to speak.

  “Mr. Chandler,” it gasped, and he recognized the voice.

  “Karnighan?”

  “Come to Lexington, Mr. Chandler,” the old man wheezed, sounding as though he was teetering at death’s door.

  “Karnighan, I certainly will be coming to Lexington. You’ve got a lot of questions to answer, but right now…”

  “Come to Lexington, Remiel,” Karnighan interrupted, using Remy’s angelic name as if he’d known it all along. “It’s time you knew what is going on.”

  Mulvehill wasn’t picking up, so Remy left a message.

  “Hey, it’s me,” he started, leaning back against his parked car. He wanted to be sure to phrase what he had to say right. He didn’t want to frighten his friend, but how else could he explain that he might not survive the next few hours? “Listen, I’ve got a favor to ask.”

  Remy glanced back up the street toward Mass Avenue. Things looked as though they’d returned somewhat to normalcy. He was sure the multiple fire trucks and police cars and hazmat teams were still milling about upper Newbury Street. As he’d left the brownstone, he’d heard murmurings about some sort of weird gas leak.

  Whatever helps them make it through the night, he thought.

  “Things have gotten a bit intense,” he started to explain into the phone. “Not sure how much deeper I’m going to be sucked into this and I was wondering if you could… if need be… take care of stuff for me.”

  He felt a raw, painful surge of emotion that he was more than willing to blame on the residuals of the Hell leakage, but deep down Remy knew that it wasn’t the case. These were the emotions he’d suppressed—pushed down deep—since Madeline’s death. They bubbled to the surface now, hot… burning.

  Infuriating.

  It was a product of that damn humanity he’d worked so hard to achieve. All part of being human.

  “I know you’ve said you’re not good with dogs, but… if something should happen to me… would you take care of him… of Marlowe?”

  He thought about his animal friend, feeling guilty about how much the simple creature had had to endure over the past few months.

  “I’d really appreciate it if you would do that for me.” Remy paused, not knowing how to go on. He really didn’t have anything more to say.

  “Thanks, buddy,” he finally added. “Take care of yourself and… well, I hope to see you later.”

  He thought about telling Mulvehill how much his friendship had meant to him over the years, but decided that in the long run it wouldn’t have been worth the punishment. If he managed to survive what was ahead, and had left a message pretty much professing his love for the man, any moment spent afterward with the homicide cop would be unbearable, the teasing that he would have to endure more painful than the tortures of Hell.

  Why take a chance?

  He pocketed his phone and got into the car.

  “Everything all right?” Madach asked, staring straight ahead with unblinking eyes.

  “Had to put some stuff in order, just in case.”

  Remy slipped the key into the ignition and turned the engine over. Pulling out of the parking space, he drove down Comm Avenue, trying to get as far from the commotion surrounding Newbury Street as possible. He swung around the Public Garden, then past the Common and the State House, tempted to stop and see Marlowe one more time. But as usual, time was wasting. He picked up 93 by Haymarket and headed north out of the city. It was a roundabout route but it would eventually get them to Lexington and Karnighan’s mansion.

  They drove in silence, Remy lost in his thoughts, trying to recall every minute detail of the case, carefully picking through the information in search of something he might have overlooked.

  “What did you see back there?” Madach asked, his voice startling in the quiet of the car.

  Remy glanced briefly at the fallen angel, both hands upon the wheel as he drove up Route—in light traffic. “What do you mean, what did I see?”

  “Back when we were walking to Francis’ place,” Madach explained. “When Hell was leaking out onto the street. What did you experience?”

  Remy thought about how to answer the question. He finally just shrugged. “A lot of things I regret,” Remy stated, eyes fixed to the road. “Things I wish I could have done differently, but at the same time I know there really wasn’t much of a choice.”

  “Choice,” Madach repeated, laughing a bit sadly. “It was all about choice… and so many of us making the wrong one, y’know?”

  “But you had to have believed that what you were doing was right,” Remy added. “No matter how misguided, you were fighting for something you believed in.”

  The fallen angel laughed all the harder. “I don’t even remember anymore,” he said. “I was just overwhelmed with this sense of utter desperation.”

  Remy felt his stare, so intense that it was hot upon his cheek.

  “I was filled with hatred and sadness over what I had done,” Madach finished. “I still am. I should never have been released from Tartarus.”

  “But you were,” Remy said, taking note of the exit signs. “I can’t see many mistakes being made there.”

  “Yeah, I guess. And look how I repaid that faith,” he said, shaking his head in disgust.

  “Not the best of moves,” Remy added, flipping on his signal as he moved over to the right-hand lane to exit. “But maybe you’ll have a chance to redeem yourself tonight.”

  “Or maybe I’ll just make the wrong choice again.”

  They rode the remainder of the way in silence, a knot of apprehension forming solidly in the center of Remy’s belly as he drove through the gate of Karnighan’s home, and up to the house.

  Remy opened the car door, reaching down to release the latch that would open the trunk. Going around to the back of the car, he removed the duffel bag stuffed with weapons that they had taken from Francis’ home.

  “What are you bringing those for?” Madach asked.

  “Just in case.” Remy slammed the trunk closed and waited, looking around the property.

  “What’s wrong?” Madach asked, standing beside him.

  “Karnighan has dogs, but they don’t seem to be around.”

  “I let Dougie deal with them,” Madach said. “Guess he ground up some sleeping pills and put it in hamburger. I wanted them asleep before I even got out of the car.”

  Remy walked toward the front door, slipping the strap of the heavy bag over his shoulder. “I doubt they’re asleep now,” he said as he reached out to ring the doorbell, but then he noticed that the door was ajar.

  “Shit,” he hissed.

  He pressed his fingertips against the heavy wooden surface and pushed; the front door silently swung wide, exposing the empty foyer.

  The lights were on, but there wasn’t a sign of Karnighan.

  “After we dealt with the dogs, we got in through a side door in the garage out back that I had left open the day before. We knew that the old man wouldn’t be around because he specifically told the foreman that we shouldn’t work on Friday ’cause he’d be away on business. It was the perfect opportunity—the one Dougie and I’d been waiting for.”

  They stepped into the foyer and Remy closed the front door. Everything seemed pretty much the same as he remembered.

  “Doesn’t sound like you had to twist Dougie’s arm all that much to get him to help you,” Remy said, speaking in almost a whisper, gesturing for the fallen to follow him. He was tempted to call out Karnighan’s name but decided against it. No need to call attention to their arrival; the old man knew that they were coming.

  “We got in and went right to the room downstairs,” Madach continued. “Dougie wanted to have a run at the whole place, but I wouldn’t let him. We’d come for the we
apons, and that was it.”

  Madach swatted his arm, getting Remy’s attention.

  “That should count for something, don’t you think?” the fallen asked. “If I’da let him, Dougie would have ripped him off blind.”

  “You’d think,” Remy acknowledged as they passed through the room that was being painted the last time he’d been there. The job had been completed since then, the ceiling now a robin’s egg blue, the trim painted white. There was a baby grand piano in the corner, and a leather couch and sofa positioned around a long coffee table, its surface covered with large hardbound art books. It was like something out of a home design magazine, Remy observed as they passed through and approached the corridor that ended with the elevator.

  “We headed down in the elevator and I worked on the combination for a while,” Madach said.

  “Puzzles, right?” Remy asked. “You’re good at solving puzzles?”

  The fallen angel nodded. “You should see me with a Rubik’s Cube.”

  The aroma floated lightly in the air, and could easily have been lost amongst some of the other scents of the spacious home, but it snagged Remy’s attention, filling him immediately with dread.

  “Down here,” he said, taking a right at the top of the corridor, away from the elevator, following the smell down another hallway to Karnighan’s study.

  “Smell it?” Remy asked, approaching the study.

  Its doors were open wide, inviting them to enter.

  Madach bent his head back and sniffed at the air. “What am I supposed to be smelling? All I’m getting is new paint.”

  Remy had forgotten how much the fallen had lost from their original states of being; senses once so acute that they could smell the stink of sin had been dulled by their plummet from grace. They’d had so much taken from them, it was no wonder the Denizens had turned against the Lord God and all that He stood for.

  This is where he and Karnighan had shared coffee and talked about their business arrangement.

  It hadn’t smelled of blood then.

  The odor was nearly gagging in its intensity as Remy entered the room, and there was little doubt now as to what it was. He stopped, eyes darting around for the source. A lone reading lamp in the far corner of the room provided the only light and there Remy saw someone crouched upon the bare hardwood floor within a circle of blood.

  The man worked busily, painting with gore. The body of one of Karnighan’s guard dogs—Daisy—lay just outside the circle, her stomach slit open vertically, exposing her innards. The man dipped one of his hands within the dog’s stomach for more to paint with. The room was in disarray; the furniture and priceless Oriental rug had all been pushed away to the sides of the room, giving the mysterious figure room to work.

  “What’s going on?” Remy asked, his anger aroused. He’d liked Daisy quite a bit.

  The man, who was dressed in a long, oversized bathrobe, flinched at the sound of his voice.

  “Remiel,” the artist croaked, as if his throat was choked with dust. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  At first he was startled at the use of his angel name by this stranger. He watched as the kneeling man slowly turned himself around within the circle of blood. Then with the aid of a cane that Remy had not noticed lying on the ground beside him, he rose unsteadily.

  And he was a stranger no longer.

  “Karnighan?” Remy asked, not believing his eyes.

  The sight of the man was disturbing to say the least, nothing but paper-thin skin and bones, the heavy bathrobe threatening to swallow his entire skeletal form. It was like looking at an Egyptian mummy Remy had once seen at the Museum of Science, brought to life by some kind of dark, powerful magick. There was no way this mockery of a man should have been alive.

  But he was.

  The living cadaver nodded tremulously, leaning upon its cane. “Yes, for now,” Karnighan croaked, the sound of something wet and loose rattling somewhere in his throat. The figure swayed like a Halloween decoration in a cool October wind.

  “What’s happened to you?” Remy asked.

  Karnighan jerkily stepped closer, a crooked grin that might have been a smile but was more likely a grimace of pain on his cadaverous face threatening to tear the paper-thin skin. He looked down at his bloody work.

  “All part of the story that I need to share with you,” he said, leaning upon his cane to lower himself back down to the floor. “I’ll have to talk and work at the same time,” he wheezed. “I’m not sure how much time I still have… how much we all have, really.”

  He could still reach Daisy’s corpse, and stuck his fingers into the wound again.

  “What’s going on?” Remy asked as the old man added details to what Remy—on closer inspection—realized were sigils of angel magick.

  “They’re going to try and use the Pitiless to free him,” the living corpse said. The scent of death hung heavy in the air, and Remy wasn’t sure if it was the body of the dog or Karnighan himself.

  Though he’d hoped to be wrong, Remy’s suspicions were correct, and he felt the world drop away from beneath him. All the pain and suffering—the penance—it was all going to be for nothing.

  It’s going to start again.

  “Lucifer,” Karnighan spat, furiously working, his face mere inches from the floor.

  “They’re going to set the Morningstar free.”

  * * *

  “Why would the Nomads do that?” Remy asked the living skeleton kneeling beneath him.

  “The Nomads,” Karnighan repeated, stopping briefly, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps. “Is that who they are? The ones who managed to acquire the weapons?”

  Remy gave Madach a sidelong glance, then looked back to the old man. “In a roundabout way, yeah.”

  Madach came closer, no longer a figure in the background. “I stole them,” he confessed. “I was working in your home when I heard them… They… they called out to me… and with the help of a friend, I took them from your house.”

  Karnighan rose from his work, looking at the fallen through squinting eyes. “I was going to ask who you were, but I recognize you now.” He pointed at Madach with bloodstained fingers. “You painted in the den.” The old man nodded, knowing that he was right about where he’d seen the man before. “You say that they called to you?” he asked.

  Madach nodded. “I tried to ignore them, but it was impossible. I would’ve gone nuts if I hadn’t done something. It’s no excuse, but…”

  Karnighan returned to his work. “I’d say it was impossible. I thought I had silenced the weapons, voices cloaked their very presence in this house by all manner of angelic sorcery, but here you are confessing to the act.”

  The old man reached deep inside Daisy’s stomach, pulling something from the slaughtered animal. Squeezing the crimson moisture from it, he began to draw again.

  “Curious.”

  “What’s happened to you?” Remy asked again, still starving for answers.

  Karnighan dropped down closer to the floor to add some detail that seemed to be going around the inside of the circle. “It was a deal I made a long time ago,” he started to explain while he toiled. “They promised me a long, long life if I did what they asked of me, swore my allegiance to them, and performed the task they set before me.”

  “They?” Remy questioned, but the old man was on a roll.

  “It was on my deathbed in the summer of ’17. I’d made my living traveling from town to town with my collection of oddities; I’d traveled the four corners of the world in pursuit of the strange and bizarre. Anything that I imagined separating a country hick from his two bits was worth acquiring for my road show. It was a good life while it lasted, but I’d come to the end of the line. Cancer. On a road between Arkansas and Texas, I came to the painful realization that I wouldn’t make my next engagement, that the curtain was about to fall on Karnighan’s Traveling Show of Rarities and the Bizarre.”

  Karnighan paused, straightening slightly, the vertebrae in his ba
ck snapping and popping like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

  “I was afraid as I lay alone in the back of my wagon, surrounded by the objects that had been almost like family to me. And as the time of my inevitable demise came closer, I began to pray.”

  The old man laughed wetly and started to cough.

  The cough soon became worse and Remy moved closer to the circle and to the man within to see if he needed help, but Karnighan raised a spidery hand and waved him away.

  “I’d never had any religion. I was raised by the most resolute of atheists,” he gasped as he caught his breath. “But at that moment as I lay dying alone, I decided to give praying a chance, just in case there was somebody… something out there listening.”

  He chuckled again, but managed to keep from coughing.

  “There was, as I’m sure you already know, and they communicated with me by using one of the artifacts in my exhibit. I listened as they told me they were emissaries of Heaven, speaking through the mouth of the most moth-eaten of stuffed gorillas, explaining that they required the services of an earthly soul and had heard my pleas for continued life. They said I was exactly who they were looking for.”

  For a moment, Karnighan was clearly back in the past. He gazed out over the study as if he was seeing it all play out again.

  Again Remy asked who they were, but the old man either ignored the question or did not hear.

  “They wanted me to continue with my life as it had been, traveling the globe in search of objects of wonder, with one difference. I was to look for weapons, but not just any weapons—these weapons had been shaped from the stuff of Heaven, dangerous and powerful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. I was to find them, collect them and hold them in my possession; and as long as I did that, I would live, forgoing the passage of time.”

  Madach swallowed with a wet-sounding click, drawing attention to his presence there. “But when the Pitiless—the weapons of Heaven—were stolen, the years… the cancer came back for you.”

  Karnighan’s skull bobbed up and down on its stalk of a neck. “Now you can see why I was so desperate to get them back,” he said. “The longer they are out of my possession, the faster the hungry years claim what has long been denied them.”