No one spoke at first. Madeline knew her questions must have already occurred to someone, but she waited just the same. It gave her a few extra moments to compose herself. She was trying to force herself beyond the moment, to see the yawning pit she knew was waiting in those shadows. There was a right and a wrong to everything, but somehow she knew the right and wrong to this particular moment diverged so completely that they made up the difference between heaven and hell.
And yet they blurred. Madeline wished Brian were there. He had always known. She hadn’t believed him, not always, but thinking back—which she’d done again and again and again with tears in her eyes—she had come to the conclusion that Brian had always known. Something in his being had told him when things were right, and when the balance had shifted. Something, the same thing, that had dragged him from her side to give his life willingly to God, had given him that gift. Madeline didn’t share it.
She had her mind, and she had her heart. Both had betrayed her again and again, but they were all she had with which to make up her mind.
“Maddy?” Wendell said.
She nodded. “I will come,” she said. “Tell them I will come. Not tonight. I will be at the church in the morning.”
She stepped back then, before either of the men could speak, and closed the door. The catch sounded with a click of finality. Madeline leaned against the inside of the door, sobbing softly.
In the shadows outside, Wendell stood for a moment longer, still turning the hat over and over in his hands. Thomas had closed his eyes as the door clicked shut.
The two turned away at the same moment and trudged out toward the gate and the road beyond. Beyond the shadows, eyes glittered in the light of the candles, deep within the canopy of the trees lining the road. As Wendell and Thomas made their way back toward the church, snuffing the candles, one by one, ritual steps in a pattern as old as time, the eyes slipped back into the shadows. There was no sound, and soon the darkness was complete.
In the small apartment behind the church, there was a fire burning, despite the early summer heat. Smoke curled up and out of the chimney and floated off into the night. There was no other light, but Reverend Payne’s silhouette could be made out plainly beyond the single window, if you were standing at the edge of the woods.
Payne shuffled a deck of cards slowly and stared into the flames. All around him, the austere memories, all that remained of Reverend Shane Forbes, cluttered the apartment in random disarray. All but the cards. Payne had found them on the mantel over the fireplace, in a carved cedar case, wrapped in silk. The Thoth deck, Aleister Crowley’s contribution to the Tarot. The numbers weren’t perfect. The symbols were often warped or rearranged. Payne ignored the faults, concentrating on the moment.
He flipped the cards deftly, cutting them and cutting again. With a smile, he tossed the deck into the wooden box without laying out a spread. That smile faded as the deck caught on the lip of the box, a single card popping free to flutter to the table top, upside down.
Payne stared. It was The Tower. The lightning bolt glimmered, catching in the sudden flare of the fireplace. Payne flipped the card upside down and rose, leaving it where it lay. He stepped to the window, staring up the mountain through the darkness. On the skyline, a single bolt of lightning flashed.
Thirteen
The rain had returned, pounding its own intricate rhythms against the walls and windows of Liz’s apartment building, counterpoint to the nervous slap of Dexter’s hands on his jeans, and the banister, and anything he could reach. He was like a human bolt of energy, waiting to explode. Being cooped up for so long was taking its toll on the young drummer, and the others gave him plenty of room. Caffeine, four walls, and no drums. Bad juju.
For the most part, each of them kept to their thoughts. Liz’s story had put an odd twist to things. Brandt was still a major focus, but now there were other considerations as well. What had seemed a localized phenomenon, drawing them in one by one, had spread out and broadened in scope. Others hung in the balance, people most of them had never met. Places they never in a million fucking years would have visited. Balance.
“There’s a pattern to it,” Dexter kept saying. “I can see it—almost. I can feel it throbbing in the back of my head. Don’t you feel it? How can you not feel it?”
The others nodded, not really listening. Dexter had been repeating the same thing, variations on a single theme, for days. They knew he was right, in some sense, but since that pattern didn’t seem willing to leap right out and slap them in the face, they concentrated on other things.
Shaver, whose fingers were healing nicely, had managed to trade his beat-up Mustang for a two-decades-old Chevy van. There was primer on each fender, and the bumper looked more like a rusty-chrome pretzel than anything that might protect the van in a crash, but it ran. The engine had been rebuilt a scant thirty thousand miles back, and it still burned more gas than oil. Shaver was loathe to part with the Mustang, but somehow, nothing that had mattered in the past carried the same weight.
The one thing they were all certain of was that they had to get out of the city. Friendly, California, one long-assed road trip away, was the target. They had pooled their resources, Shaver packing up what there was of his stuff that didn’t need fumigating and donating the rest to Goodwill, Synthia putting her few belongings in a small storage shed, paying for two months in advance, and moving in officially with Liz. They’d tossed their money in a hat and made a journey to Brandt’s apartment. After two solid hours of begging, arguing, and finally with Brandt pulling out his guitar and playing on the sidewalk outside her window, they’d convinced his landlady to let them go in and get as much of his stuff as they could carry. Brandt promised to return with the back rent, but he knew, and she saw in his eyes, that he would never return.
None of them would. Not as they were. Synthia was a nervous wreck. What had been a backdrop of unseeing, unemotional angels had become a restless, stalking mob. They watched her from street corners, peered out of windows and alleys, following as she and Brandt moved about the city. Nothing she could do removed the cold weight of their constant gaze from her shoulder blades. Synthia became Brandt’s shadow. She didn’t know if they were watching her or Brandt, but she wasn’t about to be alone long enough to find out.
In odd moments, they played. Shaver had finally drawn the first tentative notes from his guitar. He couldn’t really bear down, but he could hold chords and notes without screaming. Synthia had produced a tiny, pig-nose amp for her bass, adding a resonant quality to their private “jams” that the Fender itself could not have produced. The instrument was meant for the stage. Syn felt the tremble in the strings, sensed the deep, shivering sound that escaped when more power was applied. She closed her eyes and imagined that sound as she played.
Brandt had slipped to rhythm easily, releasing the faster notes, the chaos, and the abandon to Shaver. Pent up emotion burst from Shaver’s fingers in peals of magical notes, flurries and progressions he’d never dreamed of. The song drew it from him. The strings were liquid to his touch. The only thing missing was the drums. Dexter worked at it. He slapped his knees. He tapped pencils and spoons and whatever else he could find on the tables, but there was no room in the small apartment to set up the drum kit, and if they had, they all would have been evicted in moments. Another bit of tension to ripple down Dexter’s nerve endings.
The patterns emerged slowly. He sensed the motions, the quick flicks of wrist and snaps of his foot that would draw the sound from the drums. He could see it, all the notes and rhythms and harmony meshing, but he couldn’t feel it. Not yet. It slipped away as he reached out, and he ended up, each time, slapping at the table in frustration.
More than once, he’d risen, nearly toppling the coffee table and stalking away from the others, leaving the song to continue, or to peter off, depending on how they all reacted. No matter what they chose, Dexter ignored them. Nothing could console him. He would leave them alone, make his way to the kitchen, a
nd brew yet another pot of the diminishing supply of coffee. As the darkening liquid dripped through the filter, slowly, Dexter would arrange the coffee cups, one row, and then the next, forming a pyramid of empty china, rising, falling, and rising again, his deft fingers working the pattern.
By the time each pot had brewed, Dexter’s emotions were under control, but the periods between pots were shrinking.
All of them were restless.
Brandt and Synthia walked the streets each evening, searching for a street corner with enough of a crowd, or a bar with a small stage, anywhere he could play. Each time the pressure began to build, he released it. He no longer fought the images, or the pain. He sought them. He embraced them. Each time it was different. Synthia sat, and she listened, and yearned for her bass—for a four-track recording studio. For an end to the madness and the glaring, staring eyes that would not give her a moment of peace. The music drew her in and pushed her away. Small solace in a crumbling reality.
There was no sign of Wally. The angels gathered, their numbers increasing each time Synthia moved to the streets, but there were no answers forthcoming. Each night, crowds gathered. Brandt had produced an old hat, a weathered fedora so shapeless it was more an eyesore than a piece of head gear, and he kept it on the ground at his feet as he played.
The angels littered the streets and filled the seedy clubs. They milled in and around the crowds of the living, ignoring all but Brandt, and Synthia, as the notes spilled free from his guitar. Each of them heard a different song. Synthia saw it, watched them swaying in different directions, to different rhythms, entranced. When she saw them, when she rose and moved among them, she wondered. She heard Brandt play, felt the way the notes tugged at her heart, felt the harmonies rippling from his fingers. Did they not hear that? Did anyone hear it? Was what she heard played just for her, or did it only work for those already departed?
Brandt never said what he heard. Synthia saw the odd flicker of his eyes, the quivering of his lips as he played, and knew that he was seeing things, just as she was. She knew from his words that he was living pain, another’s pain, the pain of nations . . . the pain of those who would not rest. She stayed near his side, and when the hat began to overflow, when those who heard him play felt their own pain ripped free, or that of someone they’d lost, she collected their offerings. Brandt would go on and on, until his fingers could no longer press the strings tightly enough to form the notes, and as long as he played, someone listened.
Once or twice, he played for an audience of nothing but the shimmering angels, but it made no difference to him. Brandt wasn’t playing for an audience. He wasn’t even playing for the money, though it was part of why he let Synthia lead him to the streets each night. They were going to need some capital to get out of San Valencez, and none of the others was being very productive at the moment. Brandt played because if he didn’t, if he let it build up inside him, bits and pieces of his heart and mind melted away, flaking to dust and drifting on the breeze.
The night before they left the city, the others decided to tag along. It was early, not more than seven, but Brandt had broken out in a cold sweat, and Synthia, catching his pallor, had realized it was time. They had little to eat in the apartment. Pizza boxes littered tables and chairs; coffee cans lined the table in an even pyramid, each precisely the same distance from the next. The trash overflowed with whiskey bottles and beer cans and junk-food wrappers.
When they reached the street, they turned inward, toward the older part of the city. Brandt felt the tug of something, an image half-formed and hovering in the recesses of his mind. He walked, and they followed. Synthia kept her eyes glued to the sidewalk, ignoring the glaring eyes of those who watched. The others watched her out of the corner of their eyes, half-convinced she was crazy, half-frightened that she saw things they needed to see. Synthia remained silent, and they walked in a tight group.
Shaver had his own guitar case in hand, gripped tightly, as if it might escape. It had been too long since he could play. Now that his fingers were healed, he had trouble putting the instrument aside. They painted quite the picture, moving slowly down the dingy sidewalks, past empty alleys and abandoned warehouses. Only Brandt seemed unaware of the oddness of the moment. His gaze was fixed, focused on some point ahead of them. He didn’t see the stares of those they passed. He didn’t see Synthia turning, and staring at the angels that lined the roads.
He followed a trail. It wound through trees, tall trees, multi-colored and full of autumn. He saw a shadowy figure, stumbling ahead. A young girl, clothed only in a white gown. Her breath gasped from tortured lungs, and she glanced again and again over her shoulder. Watching. Not for him, never that, but something. Someone. Turning from Brandt, she staggered off through the trees, and he followed.
They went down a dark, abandoned street and turned into an alley as Brandt plowed ahead, nearly leaving them all behind in his sudden rush.
“Brandt!” Shaver called out. “Brandt, wait . . . where the fuck are you going?”
Nothing. Brandt either didn’t hear, or didn’t care. He stumbled into the alley, and they plunged in after him, swallowed suddenly in a wall of shadow.
The clearing was dark. Moonlight filtered in through the branches of tall, tall trees, but only in splintered shards of illumination. Nothing that could scatter the shadows. Brandt stopped dead in the center, glancing about himself carefully. There was no sign of the girl, but he saw—with an odd tilt of reality—that the others stood beside him. The bewilderment in Shaver’s eyes told him they were there. Really there, not standing at his side and wondering where the fuck he went.
From the shadows, childish laughter drifted across the clearing. Brandt stepped closer. He moved toward the trees lining the clearing on the far side from where they’d entered. Something was piled in a heap. Leaves? Branches? He moved closer, then staggered back and sank to his knees.
“No,” he said softly.
Synthia came up behind him, and he moved, trying to block her from that sight, trying to deny what lay before him. His heart ached, dragged inward and twisted like a rag being wrung free of water . . . blood . . . hope.
Synthia stopped at Brandt’s arm. Liz was at her side, Shaver and Dexter crowding in behind. All saw as one. Liz choked back a scream. Synthia turned away, her fist crammed tightly into her mouth and her teeth clamping down.
They were stacked three high, arms and legs protruding at odd angles. The bodies were entwined in an arcane rotting puzzle. Women. Half a dozen? Ten? More? It was impossible to tell. The arms, legs, and torsos were wrapped and stacked like a pile of firewood. Ordered and tight, like inventory on a hardware store shelf. Dexter’s hands slowed and then stopped. He turned to Shaver, wanting to speak, and unable to get the words past his lips.
Shaver didn’t see him. Shaver’s eyes were locked on the scene before them. His fingers were so tight around the handle of his guitar case that the knuckles went from white to pain-searing red and still he gripped tighter.
Synthia was the one who finally moved. She looked up. She didn’t see the bodies. She saw the angels. They were creeping closer, every moment closer. They watched Brandt, ignoring the bodies.
Synthia let her knee press into Brandt’s shoulder. Nothing. He kept his head down, as if he were praying. She glanced down, kneed him again, then harder.
“Damn it, Brandt,” she grated, “play.”
Still he didn’t move. Synthia watched a moment longer, then she got mad.
“Play, damn you,” she screeched, suddenly out of control. “For fuck’s sake play, Brandt! Jesus, why do you think you’re here?”
The child’s laughter pealed shrilly across the clearing, and Synthia turned. Nothing. Shadows flickered around the perimeter of the clearing. Mocking her attempts to pin them down.
“Boring, boring,” a voice called out softly. Peals of laughter rang from the trees.
Synthia whispered hoarsely, lashing out with her Doc-Martens-shod foot. Brandt grunted at the con
tact.
“Huh?” He glanced up. The bodies flickered on the periphery of his sight, and he focused. The guitar case was on the ground and open in a single fluid motion, and Brandt had the polished wood pressed tightly to his chest moments later. He stared at the bodies now, opening his mind. His fingers slid over the strings, not really playing yet, just preparing for the release, drawing it in like a deep breath.
Images flickered before him. He saw the bodies, and then he didn’t. What he did see was an intricate, turning dance. He saw limbs untwining, saw the human puzzle that had stolen his voice and his mind unwinding to bodies. Real bodies. Whole bodies.
They were all young women. Ten, maybe twenty of them, lining up in ranks. They were naked. Long hair, eerily consistent in length, height nearly the same in each case, complexion, even their eye color was consistent. They could have been sisters. Enough sisters to make parents insane.
Brandt dropped his gaze. It was a trap; the images were meant to distract him. It didn’t matter if they were all green dwarves from the fifth dimension. He was there for a reason. A release. He let his fingers slide to the strings. In the background, soft blues notes floated on the breeze. Billie Holiday. So soft he could barely make it out. His first instinct was to match the notes, to play in and around them, adding to their depth. He did not.
Another distraction. Another trap. He felt the women gathering around him. He knew they were whole now, and close. Very close to him. He was physical, they were not, and yet he smelled their perfume, and he felt the passage of air as they moved beside him. Brandt ignored it all. He leaned to the side, knowing that the hip he leaned on was Synthia’s, and that she saw them. He let his fingers rest silent for a moment, then shifted, pointedly ignoring the deep minor chords that echoed in his head and letting his nails slide across the strings, drawing a G Major from the strings with a flourish. He followed it quickly . . . A, D, G, and C. He didn’t play anything he had played before, but he dodged what was shoved in his face. Billie Holiday or not, he knew he couldn’t follow that trail. It led to death, something these women knew intimately. It led to madness, and he had come close enough to that, often enough, that he could sense it in the air.
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