Murder of Angels

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “And Spyder tried to stop her?”

  “Yeah, she was afraid. But Robin went ahead and did it anyway. I don’t know exactly what happened. Spyder would never tell me. But it was something bad. They all freaked out, and she had to go down there after them, down there where her father had raped her when she was just a little kid.”

  “That would have been very traumatic for her.”

  Niki stared at him a second and then laughed again. “You think so?” she asked, and shook her head.

  “I’m sorry. It’s a professional hazard, I suppose, stating the obvious. Go on.”

  Her hands were trembling, even though she’d hardly gotten started, all the worst of it still unspoken, and she hugged the brocade pillow tighter. If Daria had come, she told herself, it wouldn’t be so hard, and I wouldn’t be so scared. But she knew that was a lie.

  “Spyder said Robin was into all sorts of occult crap. Wicca and séances and tarot cards. Peyote. Just about anything that came along, I think.”

  “Isn’t that a bit like what you told me about New Orleans, you and your friends and all the things you did in the old cemeteries? Your ceremonies to raise ghosts?”

  Niki shrugged. “No, I think Robin must have been a lot worse than we ever were. At least, that’s the way Spyder made her sound.”

  “When our myths fail us,” Dr. Dalby said thoughtfully, “or when we’re never given myths to start with—”

  “—we’re forced to invent them,” Niki finished for him.

  The old man nodded his head and smiled. “That’s what you were doing in New Orleans, and it sounds like that’s what Robin was doing in Spyder’s basement. But it can be very dangerous, creating myths. That’s one of the things that children should learn, but rarely ever do.”

  “I don’t know what happened down there,” Niki said again. “But afterwards, they started seeing things, awful things, or maybe they only thought they were seeing things. And then, what Spyder did to try to help, I’m pretty sure she only made it worse. She told them a story, just something she made up so they wouldn’t be so afraid of whatever was happening to them. She was scared she was going to lose them, and they were everything in the world to her. Her story was supposed to make them less afraid, but I think it also made them need her more.”

  “You think she did that on purpose? You think she was manipulating them, trying to control them?”

  Niki thought about that for a moment, and watched the fog outside the office window.

  “You don’t have to answer, if you’d rather not.”

  “I know,” she said, and then “Spyder was so afraid of being alone. I think that scared her more than anything.”

  “You’ve already told me she had no family, that her friends were all she had. And in a place like Alabama, someone like Spyder must have had a hard time finding friends. So that would have made it even more difficult for her, I’d imagine.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, she told them all this fucked-up story about how they were descended from angels. That there’d been a war in Heaven and there’d been some angels that had refused to take a side in the war. Instead, they’d stolen a stone from God, because they thought he couldn’t be trusted with it, and they hid it on the earth somewhere.”

  “Spyder didn’t make that story up, Nicolan,” Dr. Dalby said, and his eyes sparkled in the light from the lamp on his desk. “That’s quite an old story. The stone’s part of the tradition surrounding the Holy Grail. It’s been called the lapis exilis, and lapis lapsus ex illis stellis, the stone that came from the stars. Sometimes it’s actually considered a part of the grail.”

  “Spyder read a lot,” Niki said, still watching the fog.

  “What else did Spyder tell them?” he asked.

  “She said God sent other angels to find the ones who’d stolen the stone, to kill them and bring it back to him. And because they knew they’d be found sooner or later, the angels came up with a way to take the stone apart and put the pieces inside themselves. Then they mated with mortal men and women, and the stone was passed along, hidden inside the babies that were born. They thought God would never hurt innocent children to get it back.”

  “That’s the story of the Nephilim. At least, it’s based on the story of the Nephilim.”

  “That’s a goth band.”

  “Is it?” the psychologist asked her, and smiled. “Let me read you something,” and he got up and selected a black leather Bible from the tall bookshelf near his desk. He flipped through the onionskin pages for a moment, and “Here it is,” he said. “Genesis 6:4. ‘The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterwards—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.’”

  “Oh,” Niki sighed and reached for her water bottle. “I didn’t know Spyder ever read the Bible.”

  “There are many names for the Nephilim,” Dr. Dalby said and sat down again. “They turn up in both the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. They’re called the Emim, the Rephaim, the Gibborim, the Awwim. They’re supposed to have been giants. They were corrupt and corrupted mankind, and eventually God sent Gabriel to start a civil war to destroy them all.”

  “So, you think Spyder took those stories from the Bible and used them to make up her own story.”

  “That’s certainly what it sounds like. We call it syncretization, taking elements of older stories and putting them together in new ways, or combining them with other stories to make new and more useful myths.”

  Niki nodded, wondering if the psychologist actually believed anything himself, or only weighed religions and myths based on their utility. Outside, the fog swirled and made dim shapes that were there and then gone again, a mirage of silvery, ephemeral faces and bodies, and Niki looked away, looked at the clock, instead. She still had fifteen minutes until her time was up.

  “Syncretization can be a very healthy thing,” Dr. Dalby said. “It’s often a normal part of cultural evolution.”

  “Spyder told them they were descended from those angels. The ones who stole the stone, the Nephilim. She told them it was still there inside of them, and they were being hunted, but she could protect them. She made a dream catcher from strands of their hair and told them that the things hunting them would try to get to them through bad dreams, but the dream catcher would keep them safe. Now, does that sound healthy to you, Dr. Dalby?”

  The psychologist closed the Bible and shook his head, but didn’t say anything.

  “She told them that Robin had shown the angels where they were, during the peyote ceremony.”

  “Do you think she was trying to punish Robin, by telling them that?”

  “She loved Robin,” Niki said.

  “Even so, she must have been very angry. Sometimes, we’re much harder on people because we love them. You know that.”

  Niki stared at him and then looked at the floor.

  “Spyder told them they’d be safe,” she continued. “She hid the dream catcher inside an old aquarium full of black widows that she kept in her bedroom. One night, Byron and Robin tried to steal it. That’s how Robin died, that’s how…” but then the knot in her throat hurt too much to keep talking, and she covered her face with her hands so he wouldn’t see her cry.

  “Nicolan, you can stop now if you need to. You’ve said more than enough for one session. I’m very proud of you.”

  And so she sat weeping on the sofa, and the clock on his desk slowly ticked off the seconds, and outside the fog struggled against nature to make something solid of itself, something from almost nothing, something more than shifting, insubstantial mist.

  Around her, the city has begun to revolve, convulsing, turning itself inside out. Nothing here is even half solid anymore, nothing that she can’t see through at a glance, and Niki stands outside the hotel on Steuart Street and is afraid that she’s waited too long. Maybe if she hadn’t wasted so much time trying to reach the airport, or if she hadn’t gone into the restroom at the hospital, o
r lingered so long in the nightmare of Spyder’s house, fooled by the grinning shadow with yellow eyes. She understands now, but now may be too late. Overhead, the sky flashes a million shades of blue and black and gray and orange, a million days superimposed one upon the other, a million flickering skies, worlds beyond existence and imagining. There is no still point remaining anywhere, no eye to this storm. Niki fights the dizziness and nausea, the pain in her hand; she grits her teeth and leans against a small tree growing outside the hotel. But the tree keeps becoming other trees, and things that aren’t quite trees, and lampposts, and street signs, and stone pillars, and she thinks about sitting down on the sidewalk instead. If it’s too late, if she’s fucked it all up by dragging her feet, this is probably as good a place to die as any.

  And then the small white bird at her feet, the bird which hadn’t been there only a moment before, glares anxiously up at her with eyes like small red berries, and “You have to try,” it says. “You’re the Hierophant, and without you we’re all doomed. Without you, the Dragon—”

  “Shut up, bird,” Niki whispers, trying not to vomit as the sky strobes and the earth beneath her feet twists and lurches. “Fuck off and let me die in peace. I want this to end now. I want it to be finished.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” it squawks indignantly. “I can’t leave you.” The white bird flaps its wings and flutters in the indecisive air a few feet above Niki’s head. “The Weaver sent me to show you the way across. You can’t stay here, Niki Ky. This place is rejecting you. Can’t you feel it? It’s trying to push you out.”

  Niki shuts her eyes, but that only makes the dizziness worse, and she immediately opens them again.

  “You have to follow me now,” the bird says frantically.

  “Birds don’t fucking talk,” she tells it. “Even I know that,” and she looks longingly back at the hotel, the shiny brass poles supporting a fancy red awning, tall doors leading into the brightly lit lobby. Ten minutes ago, she was still upstairs in the room with Marvin. She’d awakened from the nowhere place to the gentle salt-and-pepper light of the television. He’d left it on, the sound off, and fallen asleep in the chair beside the window. Marvin was snoring very softly, and his head lolled forward, his chin almost touching his chest. Outside, the sky was a wild, auroral thing, brilliant seizures of night and day, day and night, stars and sun and moons she didn’t recognize. Niki got up, moving as quietly as she could, as quickly as she dared, praying to nothing in particular that she wouldn’t wake him. She slipped on her blue Muppet-fur coat and her boots, not bothering with the yellow laces. The laces could wait. Niki took her backpack and whatever was already stuffed inside it and didn’t leave a note because she was pretty sure there was nothing more to say that mattered.

  She left the door to the room standing open, afraid shutting it might make too much noise, and she didn’t want to have to argue with Marvin anymore, didn’t want him trying to stop her or following her.

  “The Weaver said that we have to go south,” the bird squawks. “She said we have to reach the bridge while there’s still time.”

  “Time for what, and who the hell’s the Weaver?” Niki moans, steadying herself as the tree becomes a flagpole. “Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about, bird?”

  “We have to hurry, Niki. We have to fly. Already, the jackals are hunting you. The worlds have grown thin here, and by now they’ll have found a way in.”

  “You’re not even a real bird, are you?”

  “The Weaver will be waiting at the bridge, but we have to go now.”

  “Why can’t she come here?” Niki asks, and the flagpole becomes a tree again, but its bark is soft and black, and she pulls her hands away.

  “The jackals are coming,” the bird squawks.

  “Then answer my question. Why can’t the Weaver come here? I’m sick, and I don’t think I can walk all the way to the goddamn bridge.”

  The white bird shrieks and dissolves into a spinning ball of gray-violet light. It throws sparks that twinkle and whirl madly about its equator.

  “See, I knew you weren’t a real bird.”

  And then there’s a thunderclap so loud that windows up and down Steuart Street shatter, and glass rains down to the blacktop and concrete. Niki screams and covers her ears as the sky turns a deep wine red and finally stops flickering.

  “That’s it,” the ball of light murmurs, and it doesn’t sound anything at all like the white bird did. “They’ve found the frequency. They’re coming.”

  From the east, the direction of the Embarcadero and the wharves lined up along the bay, there’s a sound like howling wolves, if wolves grew half as large as elephants, wolves so loud that Niki can hear them even through the ghost of the thunderclap still ringing in her ears.

  “The jackals,” she says and then looks south, towards the interstate and the bridge.

  “They run before the guard,” the light whispers and glows a little brighter. “Go now, Niki Ky. Go if you ever mean to, or you’ll die in this place, and two worlds will die with you.”

  “What if I just go back inside? What if I go back inside and wake Marvin—”

  “You are dead to this city,” the light replies. “You’d never find your way, and if you did, there would only be an empty room where you’d sit waiting alone for the jackals to sniff you out. It wouldn’t take them long.”

  The light fades into a white bird, its feathers washed the color of funeral carnations by the bloody sky.

  “Follow me, Hierophant. The Weaver is waiting.”

  Niki looks at the hotel one last time, at the dark window where Marvin sits asleep, and then she turns and follows the bird down the deserted black ribbon of Steuart towards the Bay Bridge and whatever’s waiting for her there.

  After the climb through the rubble of the Fremont off-ramp—over treacherous cement and asphalt boulders, broken roadway strata and rusted rebar teeth jutting crookedly from stone jaws—when she’s finally standing on the buckled, sagging remains of I-80, Niki stops and looks back the way they’ve come. She still can’t see the jackals, but she can hear them plainly enough, the terrible, frenzied noise of them searching for her through the ruins of San Francisco. Breathless and sore, she takes off the pack and sits down. Her heart is beating so hard, so fast, that it hurts, and she puts her good hand flat against her chest and tries to catch her breath.

  “What happened?” Niki gasps. “What’s happened to the city?”

  “Nothing has happened,” the white bird replies impatiently, lighting on the road beside her. “The city—your city—is still just the way you left it. But it has pushed you out.”

  Niki swallows, tasting bile. She’s afraid she’s going to puke and knows there isn’t time for getting sick.

  “Pushed me out where?”

  “Where or when,” the bird chirps, “is of no consequence. There’s no time to rest here. They’re not far behind us.”

  “If I don’t rest, I’m going to have a fucking heart attack. Then it won’t matter if they do catch me. I’ll be just as dead, either way.”

  “They have your scent in their nostrils, your taste on their tongues,” the bird frets and hops from one foot to the other. “I would not want to be in your shoes, Hierophant.”

  Niki gives the white bird the finger and then stares up at the red sky. There’s no way to tell whether it’s day or night, because there’s no sun or stars, just the flat crimson light that seems to come from everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. She’s never even dreamt a sky like this, so entirely empty, not even a scrap of cloud to break the endless, ruddy monotony of it.

  If I were wearing a watch, she wonders, would I know then? If I were wearing the watch Daria gave me…but maybe watches don’t work in this place. Maybe there’s not even time in this place.

  “There is always time,” the bird says, “of one sort or another. Even the Dragon is a prisoner of time.”

  “You can read my mind?” she asks, and the bird pecks at th
e asphalt, but doesn’t answer her.

  “If you don’t get moving,” it says a moment later, “you’ll die here. I hope you don’t expect me to die with you. I’m loyal to the Weaver, but I won’t die for some silly girl too stupid to run when the jackals are on her ass.”

  “Where are all the people?” she asks.

  The bird sighs and glares up at her.

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Do you think they’re dead? Maybe there was an earthquake, or an asteroid, or—”

  “Maybe there never were any people in this city,” the bird says.

  “Then who the hell built it?”

  The bird frowns at her and ruffles its feathers. “Maybe no one built it. Maybe it was always here. Maybe it’s only a dream or a fancy or a possibility. You have to stop thinking like someone who only lives in one world, Niki Ky, if you mean to ever come out the other side in one piece.”

  The jackals begin to howl again, calling zealously back and forth to one another, their voices bouncing off the walls of empty buildings like sonar off the walls of submarine canyons, signals in the dark, guiding them closer.

  “You’d think they’d be a little quieter,” Niki says, reaching for her backpack. “I wouldn’t be so hard to catch if I couldn’t hear them coming.”

  “They would live for the chase,” the bird says grimly, “if they were alive. They don’t have to be silent. Nothing has ever escaped them.”

  “You’re no end of cheer, you know that, bird?”

  “There’s no point in lying about the jackals, Niki.”

  She manages to get the backpack on again using only her left hand, and then she checks the bandages on her right. After the scramble up the collapsed off-ramp, they’re dirty and beginning to unravel a little, but there’s no sign of blood leaking through.

  “I’m not asking you to lie,” she says. “But I’m also pretty sure there are things I don’t need to know.”

  The jackals have stopped howling again, and once more there’s only the silence, the mute city pinned beneath that sprawling butcher sky, with not even an ocean breeze to spoil the desolate, unnatural calm.