Murder of Angels

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  But there are no trumpets in the sky, and the only wings are the wings of hungry night birds skimming low above the waves.

  2

  This plot of land a boneyard since sometime in 1849, Stonington Cemetery secure behind thick rock and mortar walls, behind wrought-iron pickets crowned with rusted fleur-de-lis. Tidy city of the dead, garden of the dead, marble headstone rows and manicured lawns, ancient maples and the sugar scent of rhododendrons, the great drooping hemlocks, and this is where they’ve come to wait for him. And ask any one of them why here, why this place in particular, and they would only shrug or look anxiously at the toes of their shoes. Where else would he ever find them? Where else would he ever know to look? Where else would ever be right?

  They’ve all heard things, or read cryptic posts to Internet newsgroups, or dreamed these gray memorials carved with dates and names and Bible passages. All these and none of the above, if the question were ever asked aloud. But it only matters that they’ve come, all of them, a dozen if there were just one more, and they sit together and apart, uneasy in one another’s company, suspicious and resentful and confused, because they all thought for certain they would be the only one, his message meant for them and them alone. Most have met before tonight, have shared sex or pain or hesitant snatches of conversation, a cigarette or suicidal love notes, stingy or extravagant fragments of themselves, even if they pretend now that they’re strangers. Velvet and torn fishnet, fingernails polished black or wounded shades of red, gaudy rings like vampire bats and ankhs and the delicate skulls of birds cast in silver.

  “Well, I don’t think he’s coming,” a girl in a raveling summer sweater and long skirt says, thrift-store crinoline skirt that rustles like dead leaves every time she moves. “I don’t think anyone’s coming.”

  “You don’t know that,” someone else replies, a boy hiding himself in shadows and long bangs that cover the left side of his face like a caul. “You can’t know that,” and he’s starting to sound angry or scared or something that’s just a little bit of both.

  “It’s a joke,” the pale boy sitting at his feet says. “Like Linus Van Pelt and the Great fucking Pumpkin,” and then no one says anything because now they’ve all heard the low, mechanical-animal growl of a car turning off Elm Road, tires rolling slowly through the open cemetery gates, and no one says another word. Eleven faces filled suddenly with expectation and dread, with furious desperation, and even breathing might be too much, a single sigh to shatter this crystal moment and wake whichever one is having this dream. This exquisite nightmare, Hell and Heaven caught in the twin will-o’-the-wisp brilliance of those headlights moving towards them between the trees and graves, parting the darkness as they come.

  “Jesus,” the girl in the sweater whispers, and all of them stand very still and wait for the car. It might only be the caretaker, or the cops, or a high school couple looking for someplace dark to make out.

  “It’s still not too late, is it? Not too late to run, I mean?” a girl in a black Rasputina T-shirt asks apprehensively, hopefully, asking loudly enough that they can all hear her. But it is, and she knows it. They all know it. It’s been too late for a long, long time, all their short lives or the moment their parents met, everything forever leading inescapably to now. And in a few more seconds the purple and rust-colored Lincoln comes to a stop and the driver’s-side door opens. The motor idling like a dying clockwork tiger and all the summer garden graveyard smells suddenly shoved aside to make room for its hot metal stink, burning oil and exhaust fumes. Their eyes shielded against the blinding headlights, twenty-two eyes squinting painfully through the glare. And when the tall man finally climbs out and stands beside his noisy car, he’s nothing that any of them expected. Something more and less, expectation turned cruelly back upon itself, and they have never imagined such an ordinary monster.

  “Which of you is Theda?” he asks, and the girl in the raveling sweater takes one small step towards him.

  “Then you called me,” he says to her.

  A restless murmur trickles through the group, then bright flecks of fear and jealousy like a sparking electrical current, and for a moment none of them notices the milk-skinned woman who has slipped out of the passenger side of the car and stands there watching him watching them all.

  “She’s the one,” the woman says. “She has the mark,” but the tall man doesn’t look at her, doesn’t take his eyes off the girl named Theda.

  “I didn’t think you would come,” she says, starting to cry and speaking so quietly that he has to move nearer to hear what she’s saying. “I swear to God, I thought it was all bullshit. I never thought you would really ever come.”

  “I never thought we’d find you,” he replies, his voice like a drowning man washed unexpectedly ashore, and his fingertips gently touch the space between her eyebrows, linger there a moment as though her skin were Braille-dimpled pages.

  “No,” the woman from the car says impatiently. “Not there. Look at her wrists,” and Theda is already pushing up the sleeves of her baggy sweater, raising both her arms so he can see the symbols carved into her flesh, the small, irregular crosses of pink-white scar tissue drawn against a pulsing canvas of veins and arteries.

  “The dreams—” she whispers, but he shakes his head and the expression on his face is more than enough to silence her.

  “I know. I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen everything,” he says, and that only makes her cry harder. “I stood at the edge of the pit and she brought me back. She led me across the outskirts of Hell, through the fire and back up to the World again.”

  Theda’s eyes are bright and wide, irises the color of unfinished emeralds to glimmer wet in the headlights, and she’s begun to tremble now; her hands so small in his, his calloused thumbs pressed tightly against her scars, the razor-blade tattoos, and “She was the most…the most beautiful thing…” he says, but then she’s sobbing too hard to say anything more. He smiles down at her, the faintest, guarded smile that is neither kind nor cruel.

  “Hush,” he says. “She doesn’t want us to cry. She hasn’t ever wanted us to cry.”

  “Well, what does she want, then?” a boy in silver-gray velvet and lips like city smog asks, and the man turns and stares at him for a moment without saying anything.

  “You just come across too goddamn much like a preacher to me, that’s all,” the boy mumbles, trying hard to sound like no one who’s ever needed a savior, someone who’s been kicked around enough he doesn’t dare rely on dreams or visions or pretty stories, nothing out there but himself so he’ll never be hurt or disappointed again. “You sound like you’re selling something,” he says, but takes a cautious step or two backwards, towards the sheltering night waiting just beyond the reach of the Lincoln’s headlights.

  And Theda and all the others hold their breath when the tall man raises his right hand, opens it so they can see the soft place where his palm should be, the impossible gyre of colors they’ve never seen before, the colors there are not even names for. It’s Archer’s trick, of course, Archer’s magic flowing through him, but it’s also what he needs them to see.

  “The only part of the treasure left was a stone,” he says, his thunder-and-firestorm voice spilling out loud across the cemetery, words he wishes were true seeping out of him hot and wild, and now the woman from the car is standing next to the man, an arm around his waist and one hand resting on the top of Theda’s head. Her white fingers twine themselves in the girl’s jet-black hair and the man hasn’t stopped talking, hasn’t taken his eyes off the boy in smoggy lipstick.

  “A stone full of God’s most beautiful and most terrible secrets. And they knew that they had been wrong and they couldn’t hide themselves or the stone forever. So they found a way to take it apart and put it back together again, inside themselves. But that still wasn’t enough, was it, child? Just ask Theda here. She’s seen them, His jackals, waiting for us in the dead of night, waiting in the shadows behind shadows.”

  The old wounds on Thed
a’s wrists have begun to bleed again, and the warm blood drips unnoticed onto the grass at her feet.

  “I am her fist and her tongue, child. She left me alive to remember what I’ve seen, to find all the whining, ungrateful little shits like you while there’s still time.”

  From the center of his palm, dead-heart center of the kaleidoscope gyre, one shining thread and the small white spider spinning silk from light and hurt and the tinfoil shreds of the man’s discarded soul. They all see it, this final proof against the rehearsed sneers and skepticism of their fallen, unbelieving age. The boy sinks to his knees, and in another moment the only thing left in the whole, wide world is the man’s booming voice, the swirl of color in his hand, the white spider dangling above Theda’s upturned face. And in the long, cicada-whisper hours left before dawn, he weaves them charms against the hungry day.

  3

  And three thousand miles away, the girl named Niki opens her eyes on darkness, blinking back shreds of nightmare mist, gradually remembering that there’s no one in the bed but her, slowly remembering why. She lies very still and stares at the high bedroom ceiling, letting what’s left of the dream seep through her like rainwater percolating down and down and down through pure and cleansing sands, settling finally in forgetful, merciful aquifers; “Daria?” she whispers once, even though she knows that no one will answer.

  She won’t be home for another two weeks, Niki. You know that. You know that perfectly well.

  In the dream, she was still so young and there was so much time that had yet to be lost to her, and Niki lay in the big bed in Spyder Baxter’s room and stared at the pale thing dangling, head down, from the ceiling.

  Way back there, way back then, Niki whispers in her lover’s ear, I want you to get help. I want you to tell your doctor what you told me. I want you to tell her about the body you hid in the fucking basement.

  Time to burn, to toss aside like candy-wrapper discards, time to slip between her fingers while she looked the other way. And Spyder Baxter, sad and crazy, fucked-up Lila Baxter with her bleached white hair and blue eyes and the cross carved into her forehead like damnation’s mark. Spyder to stand for all the past, every single failure, every single sacrifice, Spyder to take her sins away and drown in them.

  “Spyder?” Niki whispers, and the dark room in the big house on Steiner Street whispers nothing much back. Nothing much at all. A passing car. Muted city sounds leaking in. The clock on the bedside table clicking to itself like an insect metronome.

  The alarm clock is digital, Niki thinks, and the ticking abruptly stops. She shuts her eyes again, trying to remember the things her psychologist has taught her, all the telltale differences between dreams and reality, but all she can hear is Spyder and the sound of drywall straining beneath the weight of the pale, dangling thing, the thing that Spyder became.

  To save you, she said. To save you all.

  The chrysalis, its shining skin like a clot of iridescent cream, a whiteness washed with shifting, indecisive colors. The shape beneath its skin, familiar and entirely alien, breathing in and out, in and out, and Spyder mumbles something in her ear that Niki doesn’t understand.

  “What?” she asks. “What did you say?” but the chrysalis only swings and creaks and breathes.

  Niki opens her eyes again and not enough time has passed that the room is any lighter, still hours until dawn, sunrise that really makes no difference because her demons have never been shy about the sun. The clock is ticking again, and this time she doesn’t argue with it. There’s another sound, too, like thunder far off, or waves against a rocky beach, and she sits up and listens.

  “Schizophrenia can be managed,” her psychologist says, whispering from some secret nook or shadow. “You can live a normal life, Niki, if you’ll let me help you.”

  “You don’t know,” Spyder says, way back then, and the ticking clock, the thunder and the waves; Niki tries to hear her memories of Dr. Dalby’s voice instead, but he’s the least substantial phantom in the room.

  “I know now,” she whispers. “I do, Spyder. I know now.”

  Niki pushes back the blanket, the sheets, exposing her bare legs, and ten years earlier, she does the same thing, in that other bed, that other room. The chrysalis swings almost imperceptibly from its fleshy vinculum, making the ceiling sag with its weight. She knows that Daria’s somewhere in the house looking for her, not this house now, but that house then, the tumbledown house at the dead end of Cullom Street. Not San Francisco, but Birmingham, and in another moment the bedroom door will open and Daria will try to save her again.

  “You can’t help me,” Spyder mumbles in her ear. “Not here. Not now.”

  “That these…these events you’ve described left such a deep and horrifying impression upon you is completely understandable, Niki. You were only a kid, weren’t you? All those things you thought you saw—”

  “The whole world,” Spyder says, “the entire fucking universe, is held together with strings. I read that in a physics book. Strings in space and time, Niki, strings of energy and matter, light and darkness. And what I need to know, what I have to learn, is who the hell’s pulling those strings.”

  In a moment, the chrysalis, ripe and swollen, will begin to split and spill its wriggling contents across the floor.

  “Let me go,” Niki says, her voice sounding very loud in the empty bedroom in the big house that Daria Parker bought for her. “Let me forget and just be me again.”

  “You will not believe the things that you will see,” Spyder murmurs. “The things I will show you.”

  “I believe it already,” she replies, not taking her eyes off the chrysalis, Spyder wrapped up tight in that impossible, transforming second skin, and Daria’s calling Niki’s name now.

  Spyder kisses her cheek, and then she smiles her lost and secret smile, that smile that Niki fell in love with once upon a time. “The things that pull the strings,” she says. “You’ll see.”

  “I don’t want to see any more,” Niki replies. “I’ve seen enough already.”

  “We’ve barely scratched the surface,” Dr. Dalby assures her from the chair behind his wide desk.

  “I’ve seen all I ever want to see.”

  And then the bedroom door opens, here, not there, so it isn’t Daria, her hands and face streaked with burns from the air clogged with acid threads. Just Marvin in his purple paisley bathrobe, Marvin Gale who watches over her because Daria can’t afford real angels.

  “Are you okay, Niki?” he asks. “I thought I heard you talking—”

  “Just a nightmare,” she answers quickly, and she knows the look on his face, the doubtful scowl, even though it’s too dark to see his eyes.

  “You sure about that?”

  “A bad dream,” she says. “That’s all. I’m fine.”

  “Yeah, all right. You need anything before I go back to bed?” and she shakes her head no. “I’m fine,” she says again.

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yes, Marvin,” and he shrugs and rubs at his eyes with hands the color of roasted coffee beans. His black skin so dark that he’s little more than a silhouette against the light from the hall, and somehow his always being there for her only makes Niki miss Daria that much more.

  “I’m going back to sleep,” Niki says and lies down.

  “Sounds like a good idea,” Marvin mutters and stops rubbing his eyes. “You call me if you need me,” and then he’s gone. And she’s alone again. Alone still.

  Listening to the thunder.

  And the waves.

  The ticking clock and the ceiling beginning to crack under the weight of the twitching, dangling thing.

  Her heart and an airplane passing overhead.

  It’s almost daybreak before she’s finally asleep again, and if there are dreams this time, she won’t remember them.

  PART ONE

  Disintegration

  Buy the sky and sell the sky and lift your arms up to the sky And ask the sky and ask the sky…
>
  —R.E.M., “Fall on Me” (1986)

  Usually, in mythology, the hero wins his battle against the monster. But there are other hero myths in which the hero gives in to the monster. A familiar type is that of Jonah and the whale, in which the hero is swallowed by a sea monster that carries him on a night sea journey from west to east, thus symbolizing the supposed transit of the sun from sunset to dawn. The hero goes into darkness, which represents a kind of death.

  —Joseph L. Henderson, “Ancient Myths and Modern Man” (1968)

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dark in Day

  “Well, then what were you doing, Marvin?” Daria Parker asks and jabs him in the chest with an index finger. “I mean, Christ, what the fuck am I paying you for? You’re supposed to watch her.”

  “I have to sleep sometime,” he says, and that makes her want to hit him, slap his face and never mind how hard it will be to get a replacement, someone else to keep an eye on Niki for what Daria can afford to pay. But his exhausted, bloodshot eyes and the stubble on his gaunt cheeks are enough to stop her.

  “Can you get me a fucking drink? Can you at least do that much for me?” she growls, tamed and broken lion growl, burying the violence deep in words and not taking her eyes off Niki curled up small and naked on their bed, fetal Niki with her bandaged hand asleep beneath a framed print of John Everett Millais’ Ophelia. Beautiful, lost Ophelia, floating along with her bouquet and her face turned towards unmerciful Heaven. Her skirts filled with air and buoying her up, but she’ll sink soon enough, the very next moment after the artist is done with her. And right now irony is the last thing Daria needs.

  “It’s not even ten thirty,” Marvin says. “How about I get you some coffee, instead? Or there’s juice—”