Has The World Ended Yet?

by Peter Darbyshire

  Noir had simply walked out of the elevator and into Van Gogh’s condo like he belonged there. The walls were mostly windows, but where they weren’t Van Gogh had hung photos of city scenes: car accidents, faceless people running from someone or something, the windows of other people’s apartments, that sort of thing. The furniture was all red. Noir knew exactly what kind of person Van Gogh was before he went into the bedroom.

  Noir had surprised Van Gogh in the middle of fucking a sex doll. It was a cheap inflatable doll made of plastic, even though Van Gogh was clearly the type of person who could have afforded a more lifelike model. Its limbs were duct-taped to the bed frame and Van Gogh was pumping away when Noir walked into the room. Van Gogh looked over his shoulder at Noir but didn’t stop fucking the doll. Van Gogh had a tattoo of bat wings on his shoulder blades, or maybe they were devil wings. Noir wasn’t entirely sure and didn’t care.

  “I didn’t order anyone from the agency tonight,” Van Gogh said.

  “I’m from a different agency,” Noir said and took the knife out of his jacket pocket.

  “Ah, damn it, not a blade,” Van Gogh said. He rolled off the sex doll and reached for the bedside drawer, but Noir beat him to it, kicking it shut with one foot and trapping Van Gogh’s hand inside. He didn’t listen to anything Van Gogh screamed after that.

  He lay down on the bed when he was done, between the sex doll and what was left of Van Gogh. That was when the angel spoke to him.

  “That was messy,” the sex doll said in a voice that sounded like a woman who’d inhaled a bunch of helium.

  Noir reacted instinctively, rolling over and ramming the knife into the sex doll’s throat. There was a bang like a balloon popping and air hissed out of the doll. That didn’t stop her from turning her deflating head to look at Noir.

  “Oh, come on, what am I going to do to you?” she said. “I’m a sex doll. I’m still taped to the bed, for Christ’s sake.”

  Noir stood back up and looked around the room. He didn’t know what was going on. He’d been caught so off guard he’d left the knife in the doll’s throat. He wondered if maybe someone was watching the room through a spy camera and using the sex doll’s voice equipment to speak to him. But he didn’t know why someone would do that.

  “Take me home with you, Henrik,” the sex doll said. “Do that and maybe I’ll save your soul.”

  Noir stared at the doll. “How do you know my name?” he asked. For Henrik was his true name. Noir was the name he had given himself when he’d started in this line of work. It was a way of distancing himself from what he did for a living. Henrik wasn’t the sort of person who could kill other people. But someone named Noir? A man named Noir could kill someone slowly with a knife and not lose any sleep over it. That’s what he’d thought, anyway.

  Noir gave each of his victims code names for the same reasons. He named them all after artists. Van Gogh. O’Keefe. Caravaggio. Blake. And so on. It made what he did somehow more acceptable. Like the killings were works of art, something beautiful. You did what you had to in order to get the job done.

  Noir had never told anyone about the code names he used for victims or the name he used for himself. The Choir never even addressed him by name when they called. He was just a series of numbers: a phone number, a bank account number, a number of victims. Eleven so far.

  “Twelve successful hits and you quit,” the sex doll said, as if reading his mind. Because that was his plan. Twelve hits and then retire with the small fortune he’d saved. Twelve hits and it would be time to kill Noir and become someone else. Maybe even Henrik again.

  But nowhere in his plans had he ever accounted for a talking sex doll that knew his real name.

  Noir walked around the bed, examining the sex doll from different angles. It looked like a sex doll and nothing more, except for the fact that it turned its head to follow him around the room.

  “Who are you?” he asked. “And why are you talking to me?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” the sex doll said. “I’m an angel.”

  “No, that wasn’t immediately obvious.” Noir stopped on the other side of the bed.

  “You’d prefer a burning bush?”

  “I’m not really a religious man, so all of this is probably wasted on me.”

  “Nobody is religious until it’s too late,” the sex doll said. “Now, could you remove your knife from my throat and seal the wound with a piece of duct tape? Once all the air leaves this body, so do I. But my job here is not done yet.”

  “You’re nothing but air?” Noir asked.

  “It’s an angel thing,” the sex doll said. “It would take the rest of your life to explain and you probably still wouldn’t understand.”

  Noir thought it over but didn’t see that he had anything to lose if he did what the sex doll asked. So he tore a piece of duct tape from one of the doll’s wrists, then slid his knife out of the doll and quickly taped over the hole. The sex doll was a little softer now, but still usable, if that had been his inclination.

  “Now untie me and let’s get out of here before someone else shows up,” the sex doll said.

  “Who else would show up here?” Noir asked. Not for the first time, he had the sudden worry that he would arrive at a contract to discover he was the contract. That’s why in his plans he was twelve and out. He’d never even met the Choir, so how could he trust them?

  “I don’t think either of us would want to find out,” the sex doll said. Noir still didn’t know what was happening, but he decided to go along with things for the moment, mainly because he didn’t know what else to do. If he left the sex doll in Van Gogh’s place, he was potentially leaving a witness behind. So he cut the tape binding the doll to the bed frame and freed it. The sex doll tried to sit up but couldn’t quite manage. It raised itself a little, like it was doing a sit-up, then fell back down.

  “I don’t have the strength to move this body about,” the sex doll said. “You’ll have to carry me.”

  “What kind of angel are you that you can’t even move?”

  “I’m an angel that manifested in a blow-up doll. We don’t have a lot of say in these matters.”

  “I kind of expected angels to be more impressive.” He lifted the sex doll up by an arm, keeping it clear of the mess on the bed.

  “We move in mysterious ways and all that,” the sex doll said. “Now scrub the scene and let’s get out of here.”

  Noir took the sex doll into the main room and propped it on a chair near the elevator. He opened the backpack he’d left on the floor there and took out a spray bottle. He went back to the bedroom and sprayed it all over the remains of Van Gogh and the bedsheets. The chemicals in the bottle started breaking everything down immediately and dissolving any signs of Noir he may have left behind. He wiped down all the surfaces with a cloth. Finally, he used the same spray bottle on the floor, walking backward across the condo to clean away any traces of his footprints.

  “I would have just burned the whole place,” the sex doll said.

  “Draws too much attention, even if it is simpler,” Noir said.

  “Simple has nothing to do with it. It’s about sending a message. Angels are all about sending messages.”

  “Were you the one that hired me then?” Noir asked.

  “Angels do not work in the cheap currency of the mortal world,” the sex doll said.

  “Yet here you are in a blow-up doll.”

  “Even the angels must be punished for our sins.”

  Noir carried the sex doll into the elevator and they went down into the lobby, then walked out to the car, which was still where he had left it in the street. Noir didn’t worry about the cameras. The same man he had paid for the pass also took care of that. There was an economy for everything.

  Noir drove for a while in silence, wondering if he had imagined the whole thing with the sex doll. Maybe it was like the faces he saw. Maybe he had PTSD. He had killed eleven people now, after all. That was bound to do something to your mind.
r />   “Are we there yet?” the sex doll asked from the back seat, where he had laid it to keep it out of sight.

  “I thought angels were supposed to be all-seeing or all-knowing or something,” Noir said.

  “You’re thinking of God,” the sex doll said. “And Santa Claus.”

  Neither one of them said anything else for the rest of the trip home.

  Noir lived in a shipping container in the parking lot of an abandoned Home Depot. The parking lot was full of shipping containers like his. Some of the other residents had set up patios on the roofs of their shipping containers, or surrounded them with artificial grass and little white plastic fences, but Noir hadn’t done any of that. He didn’t even have a mat in front of the door cut in the side of the container. It wasn’t really a place he thought of as home.

  He parked in front and went inside, taking the sex doll with him. He locked the door behind them. It was a basic model container, so there were no windows. No one could see inside. He put the sex doll on the floor by his gun case, then changed his mind and moved it over to the little Ikea table against one wall, placing it on one of the chairs. He didn’t want it near his guns.

  “Is this where you live?” the sex doll asked, looking around slowly. “Or is this just where you take people to kill them?”

  “I don’t need anything special,” Noir said.

  “Clearly.”

  “You know what I’ve done but you don’t know where I live?” Noir asked.

  “Your life doesn’t matter enough to pay that much attention to it,” the sex doll said. “No human’s life matters that much.”

  “I’m not planning on staying long anyway.”

  “Your lives are pretty short. I don’t know how you can stand it.”

  “I meant I didn’t plan on staying long here,” Noir said.

  “That’s probably not a bad idea, given your line of work.”

  As strange as it was to be having a conversation with a talking sex doll, Noir found it even stranger to be talking to a partially deflated sex doll. He went over to his bag and took out the lighter he always kept in there in case he needed to burn the crime scene or the target. He went back to the doll and tore off the tape covering the hole in its neck.

  “What are you doing?” it cried. “I haven’t even passed judgment yet.” It batted at him with its balloon arms.

  Noir pinched the hole shut, then flicked the lighter on and held the flame against the plastic.

  “Son of a bitch, that hurts!” the sex doll cried. “Are you some sort of sadist as well as a killer?”

  “I thought you said you were an angel,” Noir said. He kept burning the plastic, until it melted together and sealed the hole.

  “I am at the mercy of the body I am trapped within. You see how you fare when you’re the one burning.”

  Noir dropped the lighter to the table and held the plastic together a moment longer, to make sure it wouldn’t come apart.

  “Motherfucker,” the sex doll said. “Don’t do that again.”

  Noir released the doll and the seal he’d made held. He blew on his fingers, which he just now realized he’d burned.

  “Such a strange vessel,” the sex doll said. “I wish I could have done that little trick with some of my other incarnations. It would have made my time spent on the earthly realm a little less unpleasant.”

  Noir searched the doll until he found the nozzle to reinflate it, which was on the back of its neck.

  “Let’s not make this weird,” the sex doll said.

  “I think it’s a little late for that,” Noir said between breaths into its neck. “So just how long do you plan on staying anyway?”

  “I have as much time as there is breath in this body. Once the last breath leaves, I am freed from this prison.”

  “So you’re just like the rest of us then.” Noir sealed the nozzle again and pushed it back into the doll. It started laughing and he thought maybe he’d tickled it somehow. Then he saw it was looking directly at the family photo on his Ikea bookshelf.

  “Oh my God,” it said. “Is that all you want?”

  He turned the chair so it faced the wall, and thankfully the sex doll didn’t keep looking over its shoulder at the photo. It just stared at the wall instead and shook its head.

  “You humans never cease to amaze me. Some of you dream up such miracles as nuclear bombs and black holes, but most of you never fantasize about anything more than reproducing. Look at me. I am a wonder of the modern world, a complex mix of chemicals and electronics and theories of psychology. I am a prime symbol of capitalism, of the marvels of the supply chain and economics. And all most of you can think about it is sticking your cock in me and moving it about until some primal trigger goes off. You yearn for the heavens but you’re too busy fucking your lives away to figure out how to reach them.”

  Noir went over to the photo and laid it face down, so the sex doll could no longer see the picture of him and the woman and the children. He went to the sink and began to wash the knife.

  “What’s this philosophy lesson going to cost me?” he asked. “Or is it a gift from those heavens I can’t reach?”

  “Nothing in this world is ever free,” the sex doll said. “Not even a simple thing like murder, as you well know.”

  Noir laid the knife down in the dish rack and turned to look at the sex doll again.

  “How do I know you’re real and I’m not just imagining you?” he asked.

  “You shall know us by our vengeance,” the sex doll said.

  “That sounds like kind of a rehearsed line. Like it’s what you say to everyone.”

  “Do you have a history of imagining sex dolls possessed by angels? Because if so, then yes, you may be crazy.”

  “I’m pretty sure you’re the first. What I meant is how do I know you’re a real angel?” Noir wasn’t a religious person given his occupation, but he figured if he was going to believe he was having a conversation with a talking sex doll, then he should probably consider the possibility it was telling the truth when it said it was an angel.

  “Well, I know your real name, which no one else knows,” the sex doll said.

  “It wouldn’t take an angel to figure that out,” Noir said.

  “And then there’s the fact that I know you’re about to get a call for your next contract, and I know who it will be.”

  Noir took his phone from his pocket. As soon as he held it in his hand, it began to vibrate with an incoming call. The Choir.

  “Hallelujah,” the sex doll said.

  Noir looked at the sex doll and then back at the phone. He hit the talk button.

  “I terminated the contract,” he said into the phone.

  “We expected no less,” the Choir said. It really was a choir of voices, men and women, dozens of them all speaking in unison. Maybe it was a group of people, maybe it was one person using some sort of voice app to disguise his or her identity. Noir had never known the truth. It didn’t matter. To Noir, the voices were just the Choir.

  “We have a new contract for you,” the Choir said. “Marked urgent.”

  “I’m not sure I’m ready for another contract,” Noir said, looking at the sex doll. “I may have some issues.”

  “The employer is only in town for a short time,” the Choir said. “The contract needs to be fulfilled before the employer leaves.”

  “What’s the contract?” Noir asked. Because maybe it was time to finish the twelfth job and get the hell out. He walked over to the gun case to check his inventory, even though he knew it off by heart. Old habits.

  “Priest named Roman at the Blessed Virgin Mary Church,” the Choir said. “Basic contract, no special requests.”

  “I’m en route,” Noir said and disconnected. He slid the phone back in his pocket and selected a Glock from the case. He didn’t bother grabbing any extra clips. It was a priest – how much trouble could he be? He turned around to find the sex doll had turned in its chair and was looking at him.

  “
Let’s get going before Roman closes the Blessed Mary and turns in for the night,” the sex doll said.

  No, Noir decided. Not the sex doll. The angel. If it knew what the Choir had said, if it knew his name, that was enough for him to believe.

  “Are you here for me?” he asked. After all he’d done, he probably deserved worse than an angel.

  The angel laughed. “I don’t care about you,” it said. “I’m here for the priest.”

  * * *

  NOIR PUT the angel in the front seat of the car when they drove to the church. He didn’t feel comfortable having it sitting behind him now that he thought it was actually an angel. He kept his gun in his lap, even though he didn’t know if it would do any good.

  “What you said earlier about saving my soul, did you mean it?” he asked as they travelled the deserted streets.

  “I said maybe,” the angel said. “Maybe I’d save your soul.”

  “You’re not really offering me much incentive to help you,” Noir said.

  “Look, saving souls isn’t really what I do,” the angel said. “That’s the job of other angels. But I can put in a good word if it means that much to you.”

  Noir shook his head but the angel didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe it just pretended not to notice. He glanced in the rear-view mirror to see if anyone was following them and then looked away when he caught sight of his reflection.

  “What about Heaven?” he said.

  “What about it?” the angel asked.

  “What’s it like? Is it anything like the stories?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been there.”

  “But you’re an angel.”

  “That’s like saying you should have been to Gotham City because you call yourself Noir,” the angel said. “Have you ever been to Gotham City?”

  “How do I know you’re an angel and not a devil?”

  The angel turned its head to look at the darkened buildings they passed. “There’s not much of a difference, to be honest.”

  Noir dropped his right hand to the gun and drove one-handed the rest of the way.

  “What did Roman do?” he asked. He didn’t normally care why his contracts had become contracts. But he didn’t normally have an angel along for the ride.