Murder of Angels

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I’m sorry, Niki. There’s no way we can afford to cancel another show.”

  Niki wipes citrus juice the color of rose petals from her lips with the back of her good hand and swallows. “It’s all right,” she says, smiling again, pretending she means it so maybe Daria will believe her. “I’m better now. I know you have responsibilities.”

  “I wouldn’t go if I didn’t have to.”

  And because she doesn’t know anything else to say, because her head hurts again and she’s tired of trying to remember the right things to say, because she doesn’t want to think about Daria leaving again, she looks away, holds the last slice of blood orange a few inches from her left eye and begins to sing “Strange Fruit” very quietly. Singing to herself and no one else except maybe the orange, singing to it the way that Siouxsie Sioux sang “Strange Fruit” more than the way Billie Holiday did.

  “Maybe I’ll go lie down in the living room,” Daria says and stands up from the table. “I’ll just lie down on the couch, and maybe we can talk about it later.”

  Niki stops singing and glances up at her. “I’m okay,” she says, in case Daria didn’t hear her the first time. “I’ll stay in here with Marvin. I’ll be here if you need me.”

  “We’ll both be fine,” Marvin adds, and Daria nods once, yeah, whatever sort of nod, takes her pack of cigarettes and her lighter and leaves the kitchen without another word.

  Niki pops the last wedge into her mouth and licks the drops of juice from the tips of her fingers. When she notices that Marvin’s watching her from his end of the table, she points at the overflowing ashtray, and he gets up, dumps it in the garbage, then sprays the smoky air with a can of Glade.

  “So what did she tell you?” Niki asks him, recalling their murmuring voices as she came down the stairs, the almost-whispers, almost-anger, and Marvin sets the can of air freshener on the table and takes his seat again.

  “She told me about Spyder and Danny. She told me how they died,” and for a moment Niki’s head is too full of adrenaline and her heart races, skips a beat or two, maybe, and she doesn’t look at him until it’s beating normally again and the dizzy, panicked feeling is starting to fade.

  “Well, it’s not a secret, is it? I would have told you, if you’d ever asked me.”

  “I didn’t know to ask, Niki. I didn’t have any idea.”

  “Did she tell you all of it?” Niki asks him, and now there’s a bright and razor-edged flutter deep in her belly, something wicked coiled down there that’s scary, but it’s better than the panic. Marvin stares back at her from his end of the table, and she can see that he’s trying hard to figure out what to say next, whether yes or no is the wrong answer this time. Tick-tock, clockwork gears behind his eyes, and she takes a tiny sip from her glass of water. “I didn’t think so,” she says. “No, she wouldn’t ever have done that.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean. She told me…” and he pauses, hesitates, looks towards the doorway like he’s hoping that Daria will reappear and get him out of this mess.

  “She told me Danny was a transsexual and that Spyder was schizophrenic. And she told me about Spyder’s father.”

  And the scary thing in the pit of Niki’s stomach coils itself a little tighter, the adrenaline and fear egging her on, pulling her back, leaving her to her own devices; she takes another drink of water, a big mouthful this time, watching Marvin over the rim of the glass as she drinks. When she’s done, the glass is almost empty, just a couple of melting ice cubes trapped at the bottom.

  “Did she tell you about the dead boy we left in Spyder’s basement? Or the thing that attacked Mort’s van? Did she tell you about the cocoon?”

  “No,” Marvin says calmly. “She didn’t,” and his eyes are fixed on hers, grade-school game, test of wills, and Who’s going to blink first? Niki asks herself. Who the hell’s going to blink first?

  “Did she tell you why she’s afraid to sleep with the lights off? Or why she’s afraid to sleep with them on?”

  Marvin shakes his head, folds his hands on the tabletop in front of him, and “Niki, if you want to talk to me,” he says, “I’ll listen to whatever you want to say. But you might as well stop trying to freak me out.”

  And the thing in her guts dissolves, undone by his patience, by the constant, undaunted tone of his voice, and she’s the one who blinks first, after all.

  “I wasn’t,” she says, and her mouth has gone so dry, wishing there were more ice water in her glass. “I wasn’t trying to freak you out.”

  The sound of sirens then, an ambulance racing along Steiner Street, leaving or approaching an emergency, a death or something close enough, and Niki stares at Marvin and listens until the sirens are too far away for her to hear anymore.

  “Somebody’s done for,” she whispers, softest, acid smile to bend the corners of her mouth, and Marvin puts both elbows on the table and rests his chin on his hands.

  “They didn’t want to let you come home this time, you know,” he says. “But Daria threatened to call your lawyer. They made her sign a release.”

  “That’s stupid. She should have let them keep me. Crazy people belong in hospitals, not running around loose in the real world, fucking up everyone else’s lives.”

  “Do you really think that, or are you just angry?”

  “I really think that and I’m angry,” Niki says, spitting the words at him, cobra-toothed girl spitting venom so maybe he’ll leave her alone. But he doesn’t.

  “Sometimes people have to find their own ways to get well, outside of hospitals.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck that, Marvin. Fuck that. If they’d kept Spyder—” but the cautious glimmer in his eyes makes her stop, triumphant glimmer so she knows he thinks he’s only helping, imagines he’s found some clever new trick to pry his way inside her. Just like Dr. Dalby, digging at all the soft places, and she tugs at the white gauze wrapped tightly around her hand until it hurts.

  “What were you going to say, Niki? If they’d kept Spyder, what?”

  “She didn’t have insurance,” Niki says, and pulls at the bandage again, pain so she won’t have to cry, pain to make her angrier. “She didn’t have a rich rock-star girlfriend to pay her therapy bills and hire some nosy asshole like you to keep his eye on her. All she had was me, Marvin. At the end, that’s all she had. Just me.”

  “And you screwed it up, right? Whatever happened, Spyder dying, that was all your fault.”

  “I think it’s none of your goddamned business.”

  “Then why are you telling me?”

  Niki grabs the water glass with her injured right hand, pulls it back over her shoulder, a fine and deadly missile aimed straight at Marvin’s head, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t even flinch. And so she’s sitting there like an idiot, steady trickle of cold water running down her arm and into the sleeve of her bathrobe; she drops the glass, lets it slip, useless, from her aching fingers, and it shatters loudly on the kitchen floor.

  From the living room, Daria shouting, Daria sounding confused and alarmed; “What was that? Is something wrong?” and “No,” Marvin shouts back. “I dropped a glass, that’s all.”

  And then, lowering his voice, “Why are you telling me, Niki, if it’s none of my goddamned business?” and she doesn’t answer, glances down at the slicing, crystal shards scattered across the tile floor, waiting there for her bare feet.

  “I’m sorry, Marvin.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry. You didn’t hurt anyone. It was just a glass.”

  “Yeah,” she says, even though she knows better, knows what it means when she comes that close to letting go, turning loose and making a hole for the violence and scalding red fury to spill through into the world. She nudges a piece of glass with one big toe, pushes it an inch or two across the floor, and then she looks up at Marvin again.

  “I grew up in New Orleans,” she says, and he nods his head because he knows that already, and she nods back at him. “Anne Rice and Marie Laveau, Dr. John, voodoo queens,
all that spooky shit. We used to get stoned and sneak into the cemeteries, hang out in Lafayette and St. Louis praying we’d see a ghost or a vampire. Just a glimpse would have been enough. We held séances and left flowers and bottles of wine. I even knew this one sick fuck used to sacrifice pigeons and rats to the Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones.”

  “So, did you?”

  “Did I what? Sacrifice rats to Cthulhu?”

  Marvin rolls his eyes, and for an instant, half an instant, there’s the slimmest, fleeting fissure in his calm, a glint of impatience, and that makes her feel a little bit better.

  “No. Did you ever see a ghost?”

  “We never saw bupkes, Marvin, unless we were tripping and so fucked up we imagined we were seeing things. But we all wanted it so bad, just that one tiny peek at something bigger and more terrible than our lives. Just a fucking peek, just so we’d know.

  “But we were wrong. That’s what I learned in Birmingham, what Spyder showed me—that it’s better not to look, not to see, better to believe that it’s all just a bunch of fairy stories and silly lies to scare children and there aren’t any ghosts at all or magic or monsters or nothing.”

  “What did you see, Niki?” Marvin asks her, not prying now, no nursemaid tricks, only asking because he wants to know. She gazes into his eyes for a moment and doesn’t say anything at all. His deep eyes so brown they may as well be black, her reflection looking back out from them, and she can tell he’s never seen anything he wasn’t meant to see.

  “Listen,” she says, whispering now, whispering so Daria won’t hear, and he leans towards her. “I have to go back. Back to Birmingham. We started something, and it isn’t over, so I have to go back and finish it. If I don’t, it’s going to destroy me, and then it’s going to destroy Daria.”

  “Oh,” he says and slumps back in his chair, rubs the palms of his hands together and glances nervously towards the clock hung on the wall above the refrigerator. And Niki doesn’t say anything else, sits silently, watching him watch the clock, and thinking about the last time she saw Spyder Baxter.

  Daria didn’t even decorate the house herself; a friend from another band’s boyfriend spending her money for her while she was off touring Europe and recording in LA, filling up the place with an incongruous heap of Victorian antiques and the sort of crap Douglas Coupland called “Japanese Minimalism.” So these rooms no more her than that painting above the bed, and she lies on a brocade-upholstered love seat in the living room and stares at a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph hanging on the wall across from her. Vulgarity for vulgarity’s sake, for the shallow sake of hipness, and she thinks about tossing the hideous thing out the window, and screw the chunk it must have taken out of her bank account.

  She closes her eyes, trying to relax, but her head’s buzzing from all the coffee and nicotine, a wasp nest built somewhere inside her skull, squirming red wasps and yellow jackets burrowing deep between honeycombed cerebral hemispheres. Her sour stomach is starting to cramp and she thinks about getting up, climbing the stairs, and in her overnight bag there’s a bottle of the pills her doctor gives her for what he promises her isn’t an ulcer. Daria’s still thinking about the pills, about how they don’t work as well as they used to, when she falls asleep to the sound of Niki and Marvin whispering to each other in the next room.

  And somewhere later, the simple, colorless nothing of unconsciousness bleeds imperceptibly into the ragged edges of an old, neglected dream, and she’s standing in the weedy yard in front of Spyder Baxter’s dilapidated house on the side of Red Mountain. The day after it snowed all night long, snow up to her ankles, and the lead-flat sky peeking down at her through barren pecan and oak branches. The day they found a dead and frozen girl lying in the middle of Cullom Street, the witchy little goth girl named Robin who’d slept with Spyder before Niki came along, and Daria wishes she’d thought to wear a warm hat because the wind is already making her ears ache.

  There isn’t time for this shit, she thinks, and if she doesn’t hurry she’ll miss her flight back east, will miss the Atlanta show, but the wind laughs at her, whips the fallen snow into swirling, pixie-drunk cyclones.

  All the time is here, the wind whispers, all the time you’ll ever need, and Daria looks up at the sky again, the clouds skimming low above the city like the glacier belly of Heaven coming down to grind the earth to dust. Absinthe lightning and thunder and the brittle sound of sunless, frozen worlds; the limbs above her head are trimmed with red icicles, guitar strings and loops of something that looks like wet white yarn, but isn’t.

  “She was afraid I would spin a web as pretty as hers,” the naked, green-haired girl standing on the front porch says, and Daria can see her skeleton outlined beneath withered, frostbite skin, blue and gray, gangrene black; a raw constellation of crimson and violet welts across her Auschwitz arms and face, running sores that weep pus and saccharine tears, and the girl looks over her shoulder, past all the junk crowding Spyder’s porch, and she points at an open window.

  “You saw, didn’t you?” she asks Daria, her voice hard and crack-shear fractured as the sky. “You saw her mercy.”

  And then a small, staccato sound like a dry twig snapping, wet bone breaking, snap, and she turns, but there are only the tall, sleeping trees and the snow-covered path leading back to the street. The air smells like cinnamon and ammonia now, and there are tracks, and Daria would rather not think about what could possibly leave tracks like that.

  “The rebel Watchers, exiled fathers of the Nephilim,” the girl says. “They have another name, but the sky would bleed if I ever said it aloud.”

  “I’m cold,” Daria says, because she is, shivers and hugs herself; around her, the trees are waking up, have begun to sway and creak and shake the nuisance snow from their bare branches.

  “You should have left her here,” the girl growls, and when Daria turns around again she isn’t on the porch anymore, is standing only a few feet away, instead, and tiny, milky, translucent spiders have begun to spill in wriggling clots from the empty sockets where her eyes should be. They gather on her hatchet cheeks, burrow into her hair, drip to the ground at her feet.

  “It doesn’t matter, though. He’ll have her anyway, sooner or later,” the dead girl says. “No one gets away. She has His mark and He guards all the passages, all the exits. Spyder knew that, even if she was too afraid to tell us. Even if she lied.”

  “You stay away from Niki,” Daria says, and she knows that it isn’t thunder she’s hearing at all, no, the drumbeat rustle of vast and spiteful wings above the trees, and she doesn’t look away from the grinning, spider-covered face. “Do you hear me? Stay the fuck away from her,” and the girl grins wider and holds out her hands. There’s a syringe and a small plastic bag of white powder in her palms, a rusted spoon, a guitar pick, and a length of rubber tubing.

  “I know your hell, too, Daria,” she says.

  The house laughs, coughs up sulfur dust and bad memories, and now someone’s calling Daria from someplace safe and very, very far away.

  “He loved you,” the dead girl says. “He would have died for you. He did, I think.”

  Then the wind rushes by and pulls the girl apart, steals her away in a spinning cloud of rot and baby spiders, and now Daria can see what’s waiting for her past the open window. The white, unfinished thing hanging head down from the bedroom ceiling, and when she opens her eyes, Niki is kneeling next to the love seat, tears streaking her cheeks and the bandage on her hand starting to unravel.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I tried. I tried to die and make it be over. I tried to keep them from finding you, too,” and part of Daria Parker’s head is still lost in the dream of snow and angel wings and smiling, zombie ghosts. She sits up slowly, dizzy, disoriented, and the nausea and pain in her stomach are worse than before she fell asleep.

  “No…it’s okay,” she says, mouth gone as dry as cracker crumbs, tongue like something she doesn’t quite remember how to use. “I was having a nightmare, that
’s all, Niki. Just a stupid, goddamn nightmare.” And she puts an arm around Niki’s waist, pulls her close and holds her while the dream begins to fade, and Niki sobs, and long, late-afternoon shadows fill the room.

  “No, it’s absolutely out of the question,” Daria says, and then her cell phone starts ringing again, and this time she turns it off instead of answering it. “Jesus, Niki, stop and think about this a minute. It’s crazy.”

  “Then it ought to be right up my alley.” Niki’s curled into the window seat, knees pulled up beneath her chin, and she pretends to watch Alamo Square while Daria fusses about with the tangle of clean and dirty clothes stuffed into her bulging overnight bag sitting at the foot of the bed.

  “That’s not what I meant and you fucking well know it.”

  “I know that’s why you never listen to me anymore. Anything you don’t want to hear, all you have to do is remind me I’m crazy, and that’s the end of it.”

  “Bullshit,” Daria mutters and bends over to pick up a pair of pale yellow panties that have escaped the bag and fallen to the floor. “But you’re not about to guilt-trip me into thinking that you going back to Birmingham is any kind of good idea, so you may as well stop trying.”

  Niki pushes her bangs out of her eyes and stares down at the park. There’s a child playing Frisbee with a big black dog and for a moment she thinks the dog has noticed her, that it’s staring up at her, and she looks away.

  “If I’m crazy, Daria, then what difference does it make? If it’s all in my head, I’m just as safe there as I am here.”

  “I said no, Niki, so how about let’s just drop it,” and somehow the yellow panties have gotten pushed under the edge of the bed, and Daria has to get down on her knees to retrieve them. Niki watches her instead of the dog and tries to think of something to say to get Daria’s attention, get her mind off the airplane and the band and Atlanta, because it’s already three o’clock and she’s running out of time.