Murder of Angels

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Bird, do you know how far it is to the other side?” she asks, and before it can answer, “Almost eight and a half miles,” she says. “That’s how far it is. I can’t walk that far, I don’t care what’s chasing me.”

  “We don’t have to cross the whole bridge,” the bird replies. “We only have to go a little ways more. The Weaver will meet us above the water, at the last tower before the island.”

  “And she can stop the jackals?”

  “No. No one can stop the jackals. Not even the Dragon can stop them, once the hunt begins.”

  “Then what good is she?”

  “She’ll take you across and bear you safely to the Palisades. She’ll set you on the Serpent’s Road.”

  The Serpent’s Road, and now Niki remembers the things that Spyder said before sending her across the Dog’s Bridge. You’ll follow the road that Orc took, and Esau. You’ll follow the road beneath the lake, the Serpent’s Road, because He’s watching all the other ways.

  “The Weaver,” she says, and it’s so obvious, so obvious she should have seen it right from the start. “The Weaver is Spyder, isn’t she?”

  For an answer, the bird squawks something incoherent and takes to the air, flaps its wings and soon it’s wheeling far above Niki, circling the interstate. She shades her eyes, force of habit even though there’s no sun to burn them, and watches the bird.

  “I’m never going to see Daria again,” she whispers. “I’m lost now, truly lost, and I’m never going to see anyone ever again.” Except Spyder, she thinks, wishing that were the consolation it ought to be. Nearby, the jackals howl, and the bird stops circling and heads northeast towards the bay, its tiny shadow sweeping quickly along the wide, forsaken highway.

  It takes Niki the better part of an hour to walk the two miles from the off-ramp to the last tower before the shaley cliffs of Yerba Buena Island. Almost an hour, and the only sounds are the steady tattoo of her footsteps against the pavement of the bridge’s westbound upper tier and the occasional bellow and barking of the jackals, her own labored breathing and, from time to time, the white bird cries out overhead. Perhaps it’s trying to warn her that the jackals are closing in, but when she stops and looks back there’s never anything but the empty expanse of I-80 West leading towards the city. The bay stretches away on either side, bloodred and smooth as glass, not a wave or a ripple to break its mirror surface.

  The last tower before the island, and in the light from this alien sky, the steel beams seem to have been painted the color of pomegranates. Niki drops her backpack and sits down in the road, facing the entrance of the Yerba Beuna Tunnel. It might as well be the gates of Hell, “abandon all hope” spelled out by that black hole bored seventeen hundred feet through ancient metamorphic rocks. Maybe, she thinks, the jackals have circled round somehow, and now they’re watching her from the conspiring darkness of the tunnel. When they’ve finally had their fill, when they’ve glutted themselves on her fear and dread and confusion, they’ll come for her. She thinks about her meds, the prescription bottles tucked safely into her backpack, and wonders if a handful of Xanax would kill her quicker than the jackals.

  “I’m sorry this has to be so hard,” Spyder Baxter says, and when Niki looks over her left shoulder, Spyder’s standing right behind her. “I thought we’d have a little more time before they figured out what’s going on and came after you. I thought it would take them longer to break through.”

  “What is going on?” Niki asks her and gets up, turning to face the ghost of the girl with white dreadlocks and a cross carved into the flesh between her eyes. The mark her father gave her when she was only six years old, the mark so the angels he saw might forgive him and spare him the apocalypse of blood and fire that haunted his nightmares and waking dreams.

  “A war,” Spyder replies. “A war that was old a hundred billion years before there were men to fight on either side. A war that has scorched worlds beyond counting and stained the walls of Heaven.”

  “And what does this mean?” and Niki raises her aching, bandaged hand. “There’s something inside me, Spyder.”

  “I tried to keep you out of this. If there had been any other way, you wouldn’t be standing here now.”

  “But what is it? What the fuck’s it doing to me? And why does everyone keep calling me the Hierophant?”

  “A hierophant presides over certain ceremonies, and is a keeper of sacred mysteries.”

  “Yeah, I know what the word means. I don’t know why people—why talking birds and fucking bridge trolls—keep calling me one. I’m not a hierophant, Spyder. I’m just crazy Niki. I’m just a goddamned schizophrenic.”

  “No, Niki. You aren’t insane. You’ve never been insane. That’s the very first thing that you have to understand. I tried to tell you that before.”

  “Why am I so angry, Spyder?” Niki asks, and she bites her lower lip because she doesn’t want to start crying now. “I should be happy to see you, shouldn’t I? I wanted to see you for so long. After you died, I thought that was the end of the fucking world. So why can’t I believe that any of this shit is real?”

  “I can’t answer that question for you, Niki. Nobody can answer that question for you. That’s something you have to figure out for yourself.”

  “Fuck you,” Niki whispers, and wipes at her nose. “I don’t want to hear any more of this. I don’t want to see any more. I want to go home. I want to see Daria.”

  “I’m sorry. You can’t do that,” Spyder says and holds out a hand to Niki.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “You’ve been exiled by your world. It can’t take you back. The Dragon—”

  “Jesus, Spyder, there is no fucking dragon!”

  And then the jackals howl again, so loud they must be very near, their voices to set all the suspender cables humming, and the bridge trembles slightly beneath her feet.

  “Take my hand,” Spyder says. “They’re getting close. We’re almost out of time.”

  Niki looks past Spyder, and she can see something impossibly vast rushing towards them across the bridge, something without shape or the faintest trace of color, only a single-minded purpose to define it. The jackals howl, and the Bay Bridge shudders and sways like a thing of string and twigs.

  “The bird was telling you the truth, Niki. I can’t stand against them. Now take my hand.”

  “What do they want with me?” Niki asks and takes a small step backwards, glancing from the formless, rolling mass of the jackals to Spyder’s outstretched hand, then back to the jackals again. “I can’t hurt them. I can’t hurt anyone but myself.”

  “You can destroy them utterly,” Spyder replies, “and they know it.”

  “But the bird said nothing can stop them.”

  “I can’t force you to do this, Niki, and I can’t do it for you.”

  “I want to go home, Spyder. I want to wake up.”

  “You’re not dreaming, and you can’t go home.”

  Niki Ky mutters a half-remembered prayer to the Catholic god of her mother, then accepts Spyder’s hand, that milk-white palm, her skin as soft as silk, but she doesn’t take her eyes off the jackals. They’re no more than a hundred yards away now, a hundred yards at most, and the bridge is moving so much that she’s having trouble staying on her feet. The steel groans and creaks beneath them, and Niki imagines the upper level collapsing, pancaking, crashing down on the lower, eastbound tier.

  “It’s a long way,” Spyder says. “A lot farther than it looks.”

  “A long way to what?”

  “The water,” Spyder says, and she picks up Niki’s backpack with her free hand. “The water is our passage. The jackals can’t follow us that way. They’re things of earth.”

  “So all we need’s a firehose.”

  “No, Niki. It doesn’t work like that.”

  And Spyder leads her quickly to the edge of the heaving bridge, to the low concrete barriers, and tells her not to look at the jackals again. So Niki looks down at the bay instead,
the flat and motionless waters like a mirror, like a polished crimson gem.

  “I can’t swim very well,” Niki says.

  “You won’t have to swim, Niki. Trust me. You only have to fall.”

  “I’m going to die now, aren’t I?”

  “Everyone dies,” and Spyder smiles for her, smiling as the jackals’ paws hammer the bridge like artillery fire. “But it isn’t what you think. You’ll see.”

  And then she helps Niki over the concrete and squeezes her left hand tight as they step off into space, and gravity does

  the

  rest.

  Tumbling towards amethyst light.

  And the sound of falling water.

  “Don’t let go of my hand,” and then she realizes that Spyder already has, and she’s alone.

  Falling

  through

  a hole

  the bottom of

  forever.

  + ∞

  PART TWO

  Wars in Heaven

  Do you want to know that it doesn’t hurt me? Do you want to hear about the deal that I’m making?

  —Kate Bush, “The Hounds of Love” (1985)

  The day you died I lost my way. The day you died I lost my mind.

  —VNV Nation, “Forsaken” (1998)

  CHAPTER SIX

  Latitude and Longitude

  The lines that hold the universe together, this universe and all others, elsewhere, elsewhen, closed strings and open strings, loops to break or strings held forever open, and the tension sings unfathomable chords along the lines of inconceivable instruments. Symmetry and supersymmetry, wool and water, looking-glass insects, and the spacetime between a boson and its corresponding fermion.

  These things happen.

  These things happen.

  These things happen.

  And the mother Weaver at the blind soul of all creations dreams in her black-hole cocoon of trapped light and antimatter, her legs drawn up tight about the infinitely vast, infinitely small shield of her pulsing cephalothorax. Her spinnerets spew quantum particle lines, opened or closed strings, depending on the dream. Explosions to spray a new cosmos across the common void, and “In that direction,” the Cat said. The Weaver shivers in her sleep, twitches a fang, and stars die and are born in the gaseous furnaces of her vomit. All paths lead to her, and from her, beginnings and middles and ends, and the event horizons of her bottomless funnel webs leak only the finest, most distilled radiations.

  “I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

  “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

  “—so long as I get somewhere.”

  Eternal spiderweb’s dance of worldlines and world-sheets—adagio, pirouette, pas de deux, pas de trois, pas de quatre—and the particles that move through spacetime sweep out curves as strings will sweep out the invisible surfaces of worlds.

  These things happen. And these.

  And the Weaver in her hole opens one eye, sensing discord, shimmering disharmony as lines from here are drawn at last towards there, and for an instant two universes brush or grind or bleed, one against the other. She knows the great price of this contact and looks away.

  Oh, you wicked wicked little thing.

  But. These things happen.

  And in a moment (as she counts moments), the strings will sing true again, in the age between an angel’s heartbeats, and she has all the patience there will ever be. Patience drips like venom from her jaws.

  But the wrinkle does not pass unnoticed.

  At 2:38 A.M., a man crossing the Bay Bridge on his way to Alameda makes a 911 call from his cell phone. He describes a young Asian woman wearing a blue fur coat, standing at the edge of the bridge, staring down at the water. He tells the operator that he thinks she might be a jumper. When asked for his name, he hangs up, because the girl really isn’t his problem and there’s a nickel bag of pot and three tabs of ecstasy in his glove compartment. He turns up the radio, and his sleek yellow Jaguar roars eastward.

  At 2:40 A.M., a security camera in the California Academy of Sciences’ Hall of Insects records a bright flash and the sound of breaking glass. At 2:46, a guard finds three cases in the hall smashed and a fine gray powder covering the insect and arachnid specimens mounted inside. Days later, the gray powder will eventually be identified as a mixture of silica particles and industrial-grade graphite.

  At 2:43 A.M., three teenagers walking past Alamo Square along Hayes Street experience what they will later report as a “downpour” of living spiders from the cloudless night sky. The three are forced to take refuge on the porch of a house facing the park and watch as the spiders blanket the ground. The rain of spiders lasts until about three A.M., when it ends as suddenly as it began. Spiders also fall from the sky at the eastern end of Bush Street and at several locations on the campus of the University of San Francisco. The spiders on Bush Street are all found to be dead and frozen solid. In the following days, zoologists will identify three distinct species present in samples collected from the spider falls—Pityohyphantes costatus, Araniella displicata, and Tetragnatha laboriosa—all native to the San Francisco area. The next morning, great quantities of a sticky white substance similar to, but not chemically identical with, spider silk will be discovered blanketing several acres of John McLaren Park.

  Sometime before 2:45 A.M. a middle-aged woman named Eleanora Collins, living alone near Chinatown, awakens to a vision of five golden-winged angels standing around her bed. One of them smiles and speaks in a language she can’t understand and then they disappear, one by one, leaving behind the scent of ammonia and roasting meat. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Eleanora Collins was diagnosed as schizophrenic at the age of fourteen. Three weeks later, she will hang herself, leaving several apparent suicide notes written in a language no one can read.

  According to the captain’s log of the Japanese container ship Hirata-Gumo Maru, at precisely 2:57 A.M., as the vessel neared the Bay Bridge from the southeast, the captain and two crewmen watched from the compass deck as a “shallow, bowl-shaped depression with smooth sides” formed on the surface of the water directly ahead of them. The depression was estimated by Captain Takahashi to have been not less than twenty to thirty-five meters in diameter, and seemed to glow softly. Before orders could be given to reduce speed or alter course, all three sailors saw a body plummet from the bridge into the center of the depression, hitting the water without a splash. Within seconds, all evidence of the phenomenon vanished completely, and the Hirata-Gumo Maru passed beneath the bridge without further incident. Though the captain ordered a search for the body, no evidence of it was found. The duration of the anomaly was estimated to have been less than two minutes.

  Ninety-eight years and seven months earlier, Mr. J. P. Anthony is awakened at 5:05 A.M. in his room at the Ramona Hotel on Ellis Street. He lies very still, silently watching a flickering, transparent apparition he will later describe to newspaper reporters in both Los Angeles and the town of Pacific Grove as “a coolie girl standing at the window, having a conversation with a white pigeon.” He will be able to recall few details about the ghost, and almost nothing of what she said to the bird or what it said to her. He will clearly remember only one remark—“Not even the Dragon can stop them, once the hunt begins”—but will not remember which one of them said it, the girl or the bird. At 5:10, by the clock beside his bed, the ghost vanishes, and at 5:13 the city is hit by an earthquake that lifts the six-story Ramona Hotel off its foundations and collapses its roof. J. P. Anthony spends the rest of April 18, 1906, trying to escape the burning wreck of San Francisco on foot, one refugee among thousands, and, for a time, he will forget the strange sight immediately before the quake. In 1933, he describes the incident in a letter to Maurice Barbanell, editor of the spiritualist journal Psychic News. Barbanell will eventually connect Mr. Anthony’s experience with similar reports immediately before other San Francisco earthquakes, including the massive shocks felt on October 8, 1865.

  These thi
ngs happen.

  A few miles north of Lexington, Kentucky, at precisely 4:48 A.M. CST, a man driving a rusted purple Lincoln Continental with Illinois plates pulls off into the breakdown lane on I-65 South and stares through the windshield at the night sky above the interstate. He knows all the signs of Heaven, the secret tongue of stars and comets and meteors, and tonight he understands the things he sees happening above him. He wakes the woman sleeping in the front seat next to him, who calls herself Archer Day, and yes, she says, yes, she sees it, too.

  They don’t bother waking the girl sleeping in the backseat, the girl named Theda, the girl they found in Connecticut, because she still hasn’t seen enough to understand what the lights signify, the bobbing blue and white lights that are neither stars nor airplanes nor only the man’s exhausted, road-weary eyes. The man and the woman watch the lights for almost fifteen minutes, and when they finally vanish, he kisses her and wipes tears from her brown eyes. She makes notes in a leather-bound book she keeps beneath the front seat, and the man says a prayer before continuing their long drive.

  Dreaming in the wide backseat of the Lincoln, the girl who calls herself Theda, because, arranged another way, the letters spell “death,” remembers things that have happened and things that haven’t and things that still might happen.

  “You’ve always known,” the white woman at the foot of her bed whispers, and smiles. “You knew you weren’t like them. You were certain you were something more.”

  And yes, Theda tells her, she has always known these things, always, and she weeps, and tiny white spiders swarm across her bedspread, the crystal, snowflake spiders that have been dripping from the white woman’s dreadlocks. She lets them climb across her skin, burrowing into her hair, slipping inside her nostrils and down her throat, filling her with the white woman’s light.