Murder of Angels

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I guess we’re lucky no one’s living here,” he says.

  “It wouldn’t have made much difference. It wouldn’t have changed what we have to do, or where we have to be to get it done.”

  “I’m right behind you,” he says as she slips out of the Chevy and slams the door shut behind her. For a second or two, he’s alone in the car, alone with his ghosts and visions and that house trying to stare him down or inviting him in, and he wonders how it might go if he started the car again and simply drove away. Drove straight to the interstate and kept on driving until he was somewhere so far away that she’d never find him again. There’s nothing here that Archer can’t do on her own. She’s a big girl, after all, a big girl with secrets and powers he’ll never begin to grasp, and he’s nothing but a crazy man with a gun.

  Run like I ran the first time, he thinks, and Look where that got me.

  Just past the row of low, stunted shrubbery dividing the front yard from the street, Archer has stopped and is looking back at the car, looking straight back through the night and the windshield at Walter, her brown eyes poisoned arrows, and he knows his soul is naked to her. All his fears and doubts and second thoughts laid bare for her, as plain to see as the exposed and beating heart of a vivisection.

  “I’m coming,” he says, and she glares impatiently back at him with night-bird eyes, cat eyes, eyes much too intent for any human woman’s face.

  Walter checks the Beretta one last time, and the butterfly knife tucked into his boot, then takes the keys from the ignition and opens the driver’s-side door. The night washes over him like memories and old blood, cheap white wine and pot smoke, and he would swear the house is laughing now.

  “The sooner we get this over with, the better,” Archer says. “There’s no telling what she’s up to in there.”

  “Hey, you’re the one who said to let her go.”

  “That was almost five minutes ago. Stop stalling,” and so he follows her down the narrow, overgrown walkway that leads to the porch, between oleander bushes and honeysuckle vines, and he has to walk fast to keep up with her. He climbs the stairs, and they stand together on the porch, standing inside the maw of the house now, and stare at the open door.

  “She’s a precocious cunt, isn’t she,” Walter says, and waves the barrel of his gun at the brass doorknob swathed in spider silk, silk clogging the keyhole, and here he’s been planning to just break out a window.

  “She’ll be in the basement by now,” Archer says, and Walter catches the faintest hint of anxiety in her voice, not quite panic, but something that might become panic in just a few more minutes.

  “It’s right back here,” he says, stepping quickly past Archer and across the threshold, letting the house close around him before he can change his mind and run all the way back to the Chevy. But nothing happens, no haunted house clichés waiting for him in the tiny foyer, no disembodied, warning voices or wailing phantoms. Just an old house, a house made something monstrous by recollection and dread. It smells musty, shut away, and he wonders how long since anyone’s been inside.

  “The electric’s off,” Archer says, repeatedly flipping the switch on the wall at their left, the very same iron switch plate Walter remembers.

  “You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?” he asks and laughs, laughing from relief or nerves or both, not caring whether Archer thinks he’s laughing at her or not. He pulls a Maglite from his back pocket and shines it across the dusty floor. Theda’s footprints are easy to see, and the sticky, tangled trail of silk she’s left behind.

  “Goddamned stupid bitch,” Archer mutters.

  “Let’s just get this shit over with and haul ass out of here,” he says. “We can curse Theda later,” and Archer mumbles something unintelligible and starts chanting again. He leads her from one empty room to the next, living room to dining room to the short hall past the kitchen. All of it repainted, white walls and floral-print wallpaper that can’t be more than a couple of years old, and no hint whatsoever of the cluttered life Spyder Baxter once lived here.

  In the hallway, the trapdoor leading to the basement is standing open, and Walter plays the flashlight back and forth across the gaping hole. There are sturdy wooden steps leading down to the earthen cellar beneath the house, and those are new, too, sensible replacements for the treacherous, dry-rot planks that were there ten years before. There are thick strands of spider silk clinging to the trapdoor, and the Maglite catches the glinting, smooth body of a black widow before it scuttles away into a crack.

  “It’s just a house,” he says out loud. “Just an ugly, old house.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?” Archer asks and takes the flashlight from him, is already descending the narrow steps before he can reply or try to stop her.

  “Theda!” Archer calls out, her voice echoing beneath the floor, directly beneath Walter’s feet. “Where the fuck are you, you little bitch!”

  “Just an old house,” he says again, never mind what Archer might think, what Archer might know, and he starts down the stairs after her, following the bobbing white beam of the Maglite.

  And then there’s a gunshot, the sharp crack of Archer’s .38 Colt, and Walter misses the next step and almost falls the rest of the way to the basement floor, would have fallen if there hadn’t been a thick bundle of wires hanging from the underside of the floorboards, just a few inches above his head. But he comes down wrong on his right ankle, and there’s bright pain and a wet snap like a handful of green branches broken across someone’s knee, and he grits his teeth to keep from screaming. The Beretta slips from his fingers and clatters on the basement stairs.

  Another shot from Archer’s revolver, deafening in the close space, and Walter shuts his eyes and tries not to pass out or lose his balance. He can hear her talking somewhere not too far below, but it’s impossible to make out the words through the roar of the Colt still reverberating inside his skull.

  “Fuck,” he moans, and he’s leaning one shoulder against the hard-packed red-dirt wall now, just the wall and his left foot to hold him up, and slowly, he begins to lower himself into a sitting position on one of the steps.

  “It’s over,” Archer says, or might have said, her voice muted by the noise in his head and then she turns and shines the flashlight up into his eyes. He squints, trying to find her through the glare.

  “That wasn’t the plan,” he grunts and sits down; the wood squeaks loudly under him. “You know that wasn’t the fucking plan. I fucking told you to wait until we were both in the fucking basement, and then I’d be the one to do her. Christ…”

  “Their names mean nothing,” Archer says, and she lowers the Maglite just enough that he can make out the rough outlines of her face, pale skin and those dark and gimlet eyes, the dull gleam off the muzzle of her gun. “Nothing at all. Not if they can’t hear you, or have chosen not to listen. If their prophets are only fools and madmen.”

  Somewhere in the darkness below him, Theda giggles, and Walter swallows hard, swallowing so he won’t puke, and stares back at the red witch watching him from the bottom of the stairs. “So…which does that make me?” he asks her, and she smiles, a sad and secretive smile, and then she squeezes the trigger again.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Eighth Sphere

  When there is finally nothing else left for him to do, Marvin goes upstairs and sits alone on the big bed in Niki and Daria’s room. Nothing left to do, because all the necessary phone calls have been made, and all the necessary questions have been answered for policemen and relatives and friends, all the questions for now. He knows that there will be more later on. Reporters for the Chronicle and the Guardian, Rolling Stone and The Advocate, having failed to get their answers from Daria’s management or the record label, have all been politely told that she’s presently unavailable for comment and no, he has nothing to say himself. Which isn’t the truth, of course. After the long hours searching for Niki and then the trip to the morgue to identify her body, he has a lot t
o say, but they’re all words that will have to be saved for Daria and his therapist.

  The Peruvian lilies in the Dresden-blue vase on the table beside the bed have begun to wilt, most of the coral-colored petals gone limp and starting to curl in on themselves, the heads of the flowers drooping, and he thinks that he should have replaced them two days ago. Back in that lost world where he worried about wilting flowers and groceries and whether or not Niki had taken her medication. Back in that world, there were never wilting flowers in the big house on Alamo Square.

  Outside, the sun has set, and night lies heavy across the city; there’s no light in the bedroom but the yellow-orange streetlight getting in through the window facing Steiner Street, and occasionally the glare of headlights from a passing car.

  Marvin has taken down the Ophelia print from its hook above the bed, and now the heavy frame is leaning against the opposite wall. Millais’ Ophelia, her eyes and arms spread submissively towards an unwelcoming Heaven, the painting like a sick and self-fulfilling prophecy, and he almost threw it out the window half an hour ago, imagined it hitting the sidewalk in a violent crash of breaking glass and splintering wood, a perfectly empty act of exorcism, expurgation come much too late to save anyone at all. So he set it against the wall, instead, and covered it with a clean sheet from the linen closet down the hall. Tomorrow, he thinks, he’ll put it out for the garbage men to take away.

  There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that is for thoughts.

  The antiseptic and dead people stink of the morgue still lingering thick in Marvin’s sinuses, and there’s no point trying not to see her lying there. Niki’s broken body stretched out on a sliding, stainless-steel tray, the cold air spilling out of the refrigerated compartment set into a long wall of identical compartments. Neat rows of doors closed on other, waiting corpses, and nothing in the world could ever have prepared him for the sight of her. Not his fears nor the things that the white-coated coroner’s assistant had told him. Her mottled gray skin and battered face and the damage that the fish and crabs had done, the black holes that had been her eyes, the cruel slashes left by the hooked beaks of scavenging gulls.

  “But I just saw her, I mean, I saw her just last night,” he said, confused and horrified that this pathetic thing was really all that remained of Niki, that a human body could be reduced to such a wreck of rotting meat so quickly. He turned away then, because there was nothing else he needed to see, nothing else he needed to be sure of, and in a moment he would be crying again.

  “I’m very sorry,” the man in the white lab coat said calmly, his voice wrapped with enough detachment and practiced sympathy to show that he’d seen this bad before, much worse than this, and he couldn’t really afford to be very sorry every time.

  And then there were forms to sign, and there would have to be an autopsy, Marvin was told, because she was a suicide. Niki always said that she didn’t want an autopsy or embalming, that the thought of someone cutting up her dead body, draining all her blood and pumping her full of toxic chemicals was frightening and repulsive. But he didn’t argue. If she hadn’t wanted an autopsy, she shouldn’t have jumped off the goddamn Bay Bridge. After the morgue was finally done with him, Marvin answered questions for a homicide detective who gave him lukewarm coffee in a paper cup, coffee with sugar and nondairy creamer that he only sipped once and then set aside.

  Marvin stares for a few minutes at the sunflower-yellow sheet covering Ophelia, then turns his head and stares at the bedroom window. Daria should be here, he thinks for the hundredth or thousandth time that day. Daria should be here, because this is where Niki would want her to be.

  Because this is where Niki needed her to be.

  But Daria’s on her way to Alabama, chasing Niki’s ghosts.

  The darkness outside the window makes him nervous, the night or something the night signifies, and Marvin goes back to staring at the draped Millais.

  Her clothes spread wide, and mermaidlike awhile they bore her up…

  “I didn’t know it would be so bad,” Marvin told the homicide detective, sitting in a hard, plastic chair in a tiny, cluttered office that smelled of cigarette smoke and bad coffee, speaking through the exhaustion and fog settling in around his head. “I’ve never seen anyone who drowned before.”

  “She didn’t drown,” the detective said, drumming on his desk with the eraser end of a pencil. “She fell more than two hundred feet before she hit the water. Do you have any idea how hard water is on the other end of a fall like that? She might as well have hit concrete.”

  And no, Marvin said, it wasn’t anything he’d ever thought about before, nothing he’d ever had any reason to think about, and he wanted to ask the detective to please stop drumming with his pencil.

  “You watched after Miss Ky for a long time, didn’t you, Mr. Gale?”

  And it took Marvin a moment or two to realize that the cop was talking to him, because no one ever calls him Mr. Gale. “Yeah,” he replied, trying to remember just how long it had been since Daria had hired him. “A couple of years,” he said finally. “They’d just bought the house.”

  “And before Miss Ky, you were taking care of a girl named…” and the detective paused to read something from a file lying open in front of him.

  “Sylvia,” Marvin volunteered. “I was taking care of a girl named Sylvia Thayer.”

  “That’s right,” the detective said, leaning far back in his chair, watching Marvin from beneath his thin gray eyebrows. “Sylvia Thayer. She killed herself, too, didn’t she? Cut her throat with glass from a broken window.”

  “It was a broken mirror. Is it time for me to talk to my lawyer?” he asked, even though he didn’t have a lawyer to talk to.

  “No, I don’t think that will be necessary,” the detective said, “not yet, anyway,” and he leaned forward again. He smiled, nothing at all sincere in that smile, but at least he’d quit drumming the pencil against his desk. “I just try to keep an eye out for coincidences like that. Sometimes it’s all about noticing the coincidences.”

  Marvin thinks about going back downstairs and fixing himself a drink, gin or brandy or bourbon, something strong enough to put him down until morning, or at least until the next time the phone rings. Maybe, if he looks hard enough, he could find the same strength that Daria seems to find in a bottle. Maybe he could find enough strength to face the things he’ll have to do tomorrow.

  Maybe then he could stop thinking about Danny Boudreaux and Spyder Baxter and all the things that Niki told him about Birmingham. Maybe he could stop thinking about Sylvia Thayer and her wolves that no one else could see. And the spiders that fell from the sky to blanket Alamo Square while he was asleep in a hotel room on Steuart Street, while Niki was walking alone across the Bay Bridge, or as she fell, or after she hit the water like someone tumbling two hundred feet into a concrete wall.

  Instead, he lies down on the bed, the comforter that still smells like her, wishing there were any tears left in him, because crying would be better than nothing at all. And in just a little while, he’s asleep.

  “That’s right, birdeen,” the fat man in a tattered justau-corps and a crimson brocade vest says. “Let it all out,” and Niki obediently pukes up another gout of seawater and bile onto the listing deck of the little ship. She’s on her hands and knees, like someone bowing to the wide mizzen-sail fluttering in the night wind.

  “You’d think she done gone and swallowed the whole bless’d ocean,” the man laughs, and Scarborough Pentecost coughs and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. His ponytail has come down, and his hair hangs in wet tendrils about his face.

  “It’s not an easy trick,” he replies hoarsely. “Takes practice, and then it’s still not an easy trick.”

  “Ah now, drowning’s easy,” the man in the red vest says and pats Niki on the back. “The sea, she makes it easy. I think it flatters her, mostly.”

  And Niki spits and stares up at the fat man dressed lik
e a threadbare storybook pirate, lost in a tide of déjà vu so strong that she momentarily forgets about the pain in her throat and chest, until it passes, leaving her even more disoriented than before.

  “Who the hell are you?” she croaks, and the man gnaws a yellowed thumbnail for a moment before he answers her.

  “Me? Why, I’m the damn fool cabbagehead what ought to have better sense than to get hisself mixed up with the likes of you two, that’s who I am,” and he jabs himself in the chest with one finger.

  Niki looks uncertainly at Scarborough, and then she vomits again. When she’s done, she sits up on her knees, heels to ass, and “Did he just save our lives or something?” she asks.

  “You might say that,” Scarborough replies. “Esme paid him to be at the coordinates where the portal opened.”

  “Oh,” Niki says, though she really has no idea what Scarborough’s talking about. One moment they were in the fish augur’s collapsing chamber and then he was pulling her down into icy black water. And there’s nothing much after that, nothing but fading hints of dream, until she came to on the deck of the barque.

  “You can call me Malim, if you’re the sort what gotta go calling people by names,” the man in the red vest says. “I suppose it’s too much to be expectin’ a hierophant to be callin’ me Captain.”

  “He’s a smuggler,” Scarborough adds, and coughs again.

  “Ah, now. Listen, boy. Don’t make it sound like a shameful thing,” Malim says and frowns dramatically.

  “You mean the way you just said ‘hierophant’?” Niki asks.

  “Yeah, somethin’ like that,” Malim replies and scratches at the scraggly billy-goat beard perched on the end of his chin. He turns and looks towards the ship’s stern and a red-orange glow staining the horizon. “Some words, there just ain’t no way to get around the taint of ’em.”