Murder of Angels

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  After Niki has put on the clean, dry clothes laid out for her by Eponine Chattox—a pair of gray wool pants and a teal-green blouse and vest, a thick pair of wool socks, and her own boots, blue fur coat, and backpack—Scarborough Pentecost leads her quickly through the empty house, along the mustard hallway and past the thing that’s almost a grandfather clock, and then back down the spiral staircase to the fish augur’s chamber of nets and aquariums and pools of ink black seawater. Far overhead, cannon fire booms again and again, and the vaulted, liquid walls of the chamber ripple from the force of the blasts.

  “Are they going to destroy the city?” Niki asks, looking worriedly back at the iron staircase dimly illuminated by the candelabrum.

  “Certainly sounds that way, doesn’t it?”

  The next explosion seems much closer than any of those before it, and the concussion rattles the high shelves all around them. Several large jars tumble to the floor and burst, tainting the fish- and mold-scented air with the reek of alcohol.

  “Either those assholes are getting lucky,” Scarborough grimaces and steadies the nearest shelf, “or they’ve figured out where you are, Vietnam.”

  “I should be with Spyder,” Niki says.

  “That’s exactly the last place you should be.”

  And there’s another explosion, not so close as the last, but the candelabrum sways like a pendulum, throwing dizzying chartreuse shadows across the chamber.

  “That old conjure eel’s hocus-pocus can’t hold this place together for fucking ever,” Scarborough says. “One more good hit and we’ll be swimming with the fishies.”

  “If I tried to go back, to find my way to Spyder, would you stop me?” Niki asks and, for an answer, Scarborough grabs her roughly by the collar of her coat.

  “Listen here. Odds are we’ll both be dead in a little while, anyway, so why don’t you just shut up about the Weaver and do as you’re told.”

  “Let go of me,” Niki snarls, and Scarborough brusquely exchanges his hold on her collar for an even firmer grip around the wrist of her good hand. He hauls her stumbling and cursing forward, between the aisles of teetering shelves and falling books, a thousand rattling, sloshing jars of pickled sea things, the rows of stoppered vials and flasks filled with powders and potions, great pyramid stacks of oyster, ammonite, and nautilus shells. They pass the stone dais and Esme’s lectern, and then the next explosion throws them both to their hands and knees. The walls of the chamber bulge and roll as shelves collapse and come down, one after the next. The candelabrum groans under its own weight, a cacophony of creaking chains, rivets and welds strained beyond their limits, and finally tears free from the ceiling, plunging the chamber into near darkness.

  “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” Scarborough mutters to himself and coughs, as dust and the pungent, acrid stench of the contents of all the shattered jars and vials settles over them. “You dead over there, Vietnam?”

  “I don’t think so,” Niki replies, mumbling through her fingers, through the mask she’s made with her left hand, and then she starts coughing, too.

  “Look, we have to get out of here. I think that last one got the house.”

  Niki squints through the haze and the gloom, the dust and noxious fumes stinging her eyes, and tries to imagine where there might possibly be left to run.

  “What about Eponine?” she asks, and then Scarborough has her by the collar of her coat again and drags her to her feet.

  “Eponine Chattox isn’t my problem,” he says. “Right now, the only problem I’ve got is you,” and he leads Niki through, around, and over the wreckage of metal and glass and splintered wood that the cannons have made of the fish augur’s chamber. She glances up at the walls and ceiling, and even in the shifting half-light filtering down through the sea and up from the dying remains of the glowing things from the candelabrum, she can see that they’re contracting, and the sea is closing in around them.

  “It’s getting smaller,” she says.

  “What’s getting smaller?” Scarborough asks, pushing aside a heavy oak table obstructing their path, and she points at the ceiling.

  “Yeah, I was wondering when you were going to notice that.”

  “We’re going to drown down here, aren’t we?”

  “That depends on how well you can swim,” Scarborough replies, and Niki nods her head and thinks about what Spyder said back on the catwalk leading from the Palisades to the gates of Padnée, that there might be other worlds waiting just beneath this one, and she wonders how many times she’ll have to drown before she finds the bottom.

  “Please, Vietnam, tell me you can swim.”

  “It’s been a while. But that’s not the sort of thing you forget, is it?”

  “Let’s hope not,” Scarborough replies, and Niki can see that they’ve come to the edge of one of the open pools in the floor, not far from the shimmering, steadily advancing wall of the chamber. A large fishing net, studded with cork floats and steel hooks and lobster pots, has fallen across the pool, completely covering it. Scarborough curses, takes a long knife from his belt, and begins sawing at the heavy jute mesh.

  “You mean we’re going to try and swim out of here?” Niki asks him, incredulous, unable to look away from the vertical slab of ocean inching towards them like some sci-fi movie special effect, swallowing everything in its path.

  “That’s the general idea, unless you’ve got a better one you’re not sharing.”

  “But…Jesus, we must be at least a hundred feet down. There’s no way—”

  “Two hundred and thirty-three feet,” Scarborough says, correcting her as he slices cleanly through one thick, braided strand of the net and starts on another.

  “Then why don’t we just stand here and wait for that?” Niki asks and motions towards the chamber wall, no more than twenty or thirty yards away from them now and gathering speed. “Why even bother with the net?”

  “Because things ain’t always necessarily what they seem to be. It’s all just doors in a hallway.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” but this time he doesn’t answer her, just shakes his head and cuts through another strand of the net. Niki’s ears have begun to ache and ring, and she can feel the pressure pushing painfully at her eyes and temples as Esme’s bubble shrinks around them, compacting all the air trapped inside it. So maybe we won’t drown, after all, she thinks. Maybe we’ll be crushed flat before the water ever reaches us, before we even get our feet wet. And she can’t be certain, but she’s pretty sure that drowning would be preferable. She covers her ears with her hands and wants to close her eyes, too, wants to curl into a tight, fetal ball, leaving no weak spots for the air to force its way inside her. But Niki doesn’t move, and she doesn’t take her eyes off the towering, fluid wall of the chamber.

  “Scarborough, it’s coming. It’s coming now!”

  “Take a couple of deep breaths,” he says. “Deep, deep fucking breaths,” and he locks one arm tight about Niki’s waist, pulling her down and through the hole he’s hacked in the fishing net. The water that closes around her is so cold it instantly drives the air from her lungs, a sudden, silver rush across her trembling lips, as unseen icicle teeth stab her flesh and frost blooms sharp beneath her skin.

  And either she’s sinking to the bottom, or rising towards the surface, but there’s no way to tell which, down from up or up from down. In the cold and the dark, in the pain and the numbness waiting just behind the pain, it hardly seems to matter.

  There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea, there’s a hole in the bottom of the sea, there’s a hole, there’s a hole…

  Like the moment she and Spyder stepped off the bridge above the bay and there was nothing there to catch her.

  Dancing in the deepest oceans

  Twisting in the water

  Like the hollow place in her soul where Daria used to be, and all her days alone in the big house on Alamo Square, and Ophelia hung above her bed.

  She’s gone where the goblins go


  Below—below—below

  And Niki Ky lets go, letting go again, and it seems she’s always letting go; she opens her eyes on a blackness so absolute she’s sure the sight of it has blinded her forever, and she waits to die, or simply pierce the world hidden beneath this one.

  Hardly ten minutes from the motel on Fifth Avenue, south and east to the old house at the end of Cullom Street, but Walter had to down the better part of a pint of George Dickel and three Valium just to make the drive. Only ten minutes from there to there, but a ruined decade as well, and what seems like a century of nightmares.

  He keeps his eyes on the road—the white and yellow dividing lines, the stop signs and traffic lights and goose-necked sodium-arc streetlamps that remind him of the Martian invaders from The War of the Worlds—and he tries not to listen to Theda babbling in the backseat about Spyder Baxter and seraphim and fallen angels, or to the brooding silence wrapped about Archer Day like an invisible caul. His palms sweat on the steering wheel, slick skin against fake leather, as he steers the stolen Chevy through the angular maze of South Side streets—past the stark brick and concrete edifice of UAB, Eleventh Street South to Sixteenth Avenue South, and finally he’s turning onto Cullom, and the road rises up to meet the weathered limestone flanks of Red Mountain.

  And Walter realizes that Archer’s started mumbling something to herself in a language he doesn’t understand. He guesses it’s a prayer or incantation and hopes there’s someone, something, somewhere, listening to whatever the hell she’s saying.

  “Almost time,” Theda says, excited, eager, joyful, and Walter knows that she isn’t speaking to him, and she isn’t speaking to Archer, either. Lately, the girl spends most of her time talking to the spiders, the black widows and recluses and wolf spiders that grow in all the sticky, empty places inside her body. “We’re so close now, babies, we’re so very, very close,” she whispers to them.

  “Tell me, Theda,” Walter says and licks his dry lips, wishing he had the rest of the bottle of Dickel, “exactly what do you think you’ll see when we get there?”

  “She’ll be there,” Theda replies immediately, her voice become a jittery, bubbling tapestry of expectation and defiance. “The Weaver will be there, of course, to throw open the shuttered doors for us. And the benad hasche, Queen of Heaven, and Mordad, the Angel of Death, will stand beside her, and Shekinah will raise her flaming white sword, and the Grigori will rise from Hell to destroy the hunters of the Nephilim.”

  “Well, you just keep thinking those happy thoughts back there,” Walter tells her, slowing down now because there’s only a little way left to go, and he wants to make it last. The Chevrolet rolls through the blustery November night, past once-grand Victorian homes, their windows boarded up and roofs sagging with the weight of decay and neglect, flower gardens and front lawns lost to weeds and kudzu vines. He turns to Archer and nods towards the backseat.

  “Our prodigy has it all figured out,” he says, and a bead of sweat runs down his forehead into his left eye.

  Archer shuts her eyes for a moment, then opens them and “Every world has gods and angels and demons,” she says indifferently, staring vacantly out the window. “But their names mean nothing, Walter, nothing at all. Not if they cannot hear you, or have chosen not to listen. If their prophets are only fools and madmen.”

  “Which are we?”

  “Which do you think?” she asks and starts chanting again.

  And the truth is that he’s spent years trying not to think about it. The three of them might be traveling in the same car through the same night, heading together towards some semblance of the same end, their fates interlocked like jigsaw fragments, but he has no doubt that they each have their own private motivations. Theda’s worn right there on her sleeve, Archer’s held close to her chest despite the things she’s said and all that she’s promised him. And his own not much more than a wish to finish something he never meant to start.

  But I was the one who brought them the peyote, he thinks, and none of this would ever have happened without me. And that’s true, Walter at twenty-two, the candyman for Spyder’s fucked-up coterie of goths and outcasts, bringing them whatever he could score to win his way deeper and deeper into the group. A bag of weed, a few tabs of acid, a bottle of absinthe, a brick of hash, whatever came his way, but the peyote buttons had been something else, something special. Something that Robin had been wanting for a long, long time, and if she’d never gotten them, if he’d never given them to her, if he could take back that one simple exchange, the cash he handed over for a brown paper bag of dried cactus—change that one action and a different life would have been laid out before them all.

  Change that one thing and Robin might still be alive.

  “Did you love her?” Archer asked him once, not long after they met, at the end of a long night of sex and conversation.

  “Does anybody really fall in love at twenty-one?” he replied, and she looked at him like she had no idea what he was talking about.

  “In this place, you all seem determined to stay children forever,” she said, finally, and there was really no way he could disagree with that.

  And then the road ends, and there’s the house, waiting for him all this time, crouched beneath the limbs of the ancient live oaks and pecan trees, and Walter pulls to a stop at the edge of the driveway and shuts off the headlights.

  “That’s it?” Archer asks him, expectant and maybe disappointed, too, and he nods his head very slowly.

  “Fuck,” Theda whispers from the backseat. “It’s fucking beautiful,” and Walter wants to turn around and punch her in the face.

  “It’s just an ugly old house,” he says instead, loading the words with as much hatred and anger as he dares, enough so there’s no doubt in Theda’s mind how he feels about the place. “It’s an evil old house where terrible things have happened. There’s nothing beautiful about it, and there never fucking was.”

  “Maybe you’re not seeing the same house she is,” Archer suggests unhelpfully, and “Yeah,” Theda says. “Maybe you’re not seeing the same house at all.”

  “I’m seeing the only house there is to see,” he replies and cuts the motor. The Chevy sputters and in another second the night is silent, save the cold wind rattling the dry leaves in the trees. The house is in a lot better shape than he thought it would be, all but tumbledown the last time he was here, back when it was still just Spyder’s house, the November that Robin died. Someone’s painted it once or twice since then, and maybe there’s a new roof, too, though it looks as if nobody’s lived here in a while. All the windows are dark, and the wide front porch, which Spyder always kept heaped with all sorts of junk and garbage—a broken-down Norton motorcycle that she never could get running and an old washing machine, bits of bicycles and car parts and other rusting, unidentifiable machineries—is bare except for ankle-deep drifts of fallen leaves. It hardly looks worthy of the apocalypse brewing in its bowels.

  “Are we just gonna sit here or what?” Theda asks, and Archer sighs and laughs softly to herself.

  “There’s plenty of time,” she says. “Don’t be so eager for what you can’t avoid. It’s coming.”

  It’s coming, Walter thinks, and at least he knows that’s absolutely fucking true. This last night when the scraps of his life will finally burn themselves out and, one way or another, it’s coming, and that will be the end. The house, a squat and secret thing, bitter whitewashed walls and windows looking in on an insane soul, watches him, and he knows the house has been waiting for that end, as well. The white columns round the porch like the confining bars of a cell, or pine-lumber teeth sharpened by so much time and spite, and his end will also be the end of this rotten, cursed place.

  Are we ready to die? he asks the house. Are we ready to put it all to rest?

  Are we ready to dance?

  “Okay. Fuck this shit,” Theda grumbles, and then her door is open, and she’s climbing out of the car, letting in the clean, spicy smells of the fall night,
the fainter, sour undercurrent of disintegration. “You two can sit here all night long for all I care, but I didn’t come all the way from fucking Connecticut to just sit in the goddamn dark and look at it.”

  “Should I stop her?” Walter asks Archer and reaches for his door handle, but Theda’s already halfway to the porch.

  “No. Let her go. It won’t make any difference, and I’m tired of listening to her.”

  Walter takes a deep breath and lets it out very slowly, then leans back in his seat and stares at the ceiling of the car.

  “It’ll be over before you even know it,” Archer says.

  “And you really think this is going to work?”

  Archer glances at him, her eyes distant and unreadable, and then she turns back towards the house. “Without the surrogate on this side, the Weaver can’t effect the congruence. She has to stand on both sides of the gate simultaneously, which she can’t do, so she has to have Theda here to act as her contralateral proxy. If Theda dies—”

  “—the doors stay shut.”

  “Yes,” Archer says and takes out a cigarette, but doesn’t light it. “If Theda dies, the doors stay shut.”

  “And if we destroy the house, if we burn it to the ground, it won’t do Spyder any good to find another surrogate. You’re sure of that?”

  “This house is the Weaver’s nexus in your world. She can’t create another. She can only reenter from the place she exited.”

  “Because this is where her father fucking raped her.”

  “Because that’s the way it works. Walter, we’ve been over all this shit more times than I can remember,” Archer says, and she stares at the cigarette a moment and then slips it behind her right ear. “Nothing’s any different tonight than it was four years ago.”

  “Except we’re actually here. I’d almost rather put a bullet in my head than go back down to that fucking basement.”

  “It’ll be over before you even know it,” Archer says again and opens her door. “Now pull yourself together. We don’t know how much time we have. We don’t even know whether or not the Hierophant has the philtre. We may only get one shot at this.”