Murder of Angels

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “But you’re trying to make me doubt her.”

  “I’m trying to make you think.”

  And then the thunder sound again, so loud that Niki can feel it passing through the ship, through the wood of her berth, through the fillings in her teeth.

  “There are factions,” Scarborough says, looking directly at her now and speaking deliberately, parceling out his words like he’s trying to ignore the thunder and what it means. “The Weaver isn’t the only one who wants to get rid of the Dragon, but she’s the only one cracked enough to actually try to fucking do it.”

  “Does that make her crazy, or does that make her brave?”

  “You got spirit, Vietnam. I gotta give you that. Look, like I said, it’s complicated. We’ve got this Madame Tirzah bitch and her ghouls over in Auber, right, and we’ve got the fucking red witches down in Nesmia and Sarvéynor, and then, like we need more troublemakers, we’ve got Esme and the Weaver. And it’s not just that the right hand doesn’t know what the left is up to. Most of the time, the right hand’s just sitting around hoping and praying the left hand makes a wrong move and winds up on the Dragon’s fuck-you-hard-right-now list, because every one of these bozos thinks they’re the ones with the solution, and everyone else can go straight to hell.”

  “But the Dragon wasn’t a problem before Spyder came?”

  “I said she changed him. I didn’t say he wasn’t already a problem. Esme told me that when the Weaver came across, the Dragon took something from her, from inside her head,” and Scarborough thumps himself smartly on the forehead. “Something that the Weaver believed, and it drove him insane, believing it, too.”

  And then the thunder again, and as it rolls away across and through the sea, one of Malim’s crew pulls open the trapdoor to the hold and shouts down at them.

  “The captain wants you both topside, and he don’t mean tomorrow.”

  Niki glances upwards, towards the anxious, commanding voice, and there’s clean white sunlight streaming in around the vague silhouette of the sailor’s head and shoulders, illuminating the rungs of the tall ladder leading down to the floor.

  “What the hell for?” Scarborough calls back.

  “That weren’t my business, and I ain’t gonna go making it that way,” and then the sailor’s gone again, but he’s left the trapdoor open, and Niki marvels at the light spilling into the squalid compartment with them.

  “Thank goodness,” she says, even though the light hurts her eyes. “I was beginning to think the night was never going to end.”

  Scarborough curses and spits on the floor again.

  “Grab your gear,” he tells her. “I got a feeling, whatever we’ve been hearing, it’s not a storm after all.”

  “What else could it be?”

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, but, as they say in the movies, you’ve got a lot to learn, kiddo,” and then he rubs his stubbled cheeks and smoothes back his stringy brown hair with both hands before helping her out of the berth. Niki slips her pack and boots on, no time to bother with the laces, and lets Scarborough lead her up the ladder and into the warm maritime sun.

  Daria sits alone on the hood of the rented Honda Accord, shiny new car the color of an eggplant, and watches the old house at the end of Cullom Street. Alex is still talking with the two Birmingham cops, the ones she begged him not to call, the ones he called anyway. They’ve been through the whole place, top to bottom, and didn’t find anything but graffiti on the walls, trash and a few empty crack vials on the floor, a corner in one of the bedrooms that someone had been using as a toilet. Nothing much at all in the basement. No one’s lived here for more than two years, they said, after a call to the owner, who said she was thinking about selling the dump and wanted to know if Daria was interested in buying it.

  Only if I could burn it to the fucking ground, she thinks again. Burn it down and sow the ground with salt and holy water. She imagines herself marking the scorched and smoldering ground with a cross of white stones laid end to end, muttering prayers to a god she has no faith in.

  One of the cops, a stocky, short woman with a mullet—and Daria clocked her right off—shakes Alex’s hand again and then turns and waves enthusiastically at Daria, who pretends to smile and waves back. She asked for an autograph, when they were done with the house, and Daria gave it to her, scribbled on the back of an Alagasco envelope the cop had retrieved from her squad car.

  “Just someone with nothing better to do, messing with your head,” the other cop told Alex, even though whoever it was had obviously been trying to fuck with her head, not Alex’s. All four of them standing out on the front porch because Daria wouldn’t go inside, before she signed the back of the gas bill and then said good-bye and went to sit on the hood of the Honda.

  “But how did she even know I was in the airport?” Daria asked him, the tall policeman with thick glasses and the beginnings of a pot belly, and he shrugged and shook his head.

  “Who knows. The goddamn internet, maybe. Maybe someone hacked the airline’s records and—”

  “That’s fucking ridiculous—” Daria began, but Alex was there to interrupt, there to say that they hadn’t thought of that and shut her up.

  She lights another cigarette and watches Alex watching the cops getting back into their car. She exhales, and her smoke hangs a moment in the late autumn air, withering smoke ghost slowly carried away by the cold breeze slipping silently between the tall trees. Daria shivers and pulls her leather jacket tighter, wishing that she had a coat, and as the police car pulls away from the house, Alex turns and walks towards her, crunching through the carpet of dead leaves.

  “They’re so full of shit,” she says and taps ash to the ground. “Do you think she’d still have wanted my autograph if she’d known I was fucking you?”

  “There’s nothing in there,” Alex replies. “Nothing. It was some sort of fucked-up prank, that’s all. You’re going to have to accept that.”

  “No one knew we were on that flight. No one knew I was sitting there across from that row of pay phones.”

  “Dar, you don’t know what people know, not these days. Not when you’re on bleedin’ MTV and in all those goddamn magazines, you don’t have any idea what people know.”

  Daria smokes her cigarette and stares at the house, trying not to remember the last time she was here and remembering it anyway. The night she and Mort and Theo came up here to find Niki, the night she went in there to bring Niki out. The white thing hanging head down from the ceiling of Spyder Baxter’s bedroom.

  “It might have been someone right there in the airport with us,” Alex says, and then he takes the cigarette away from her, drops it to the ground and crushes it out with the toe of his shoe. “There’s just no telling, not with something like this.”

  “You didn’t hear her voice,” Daria says, but she thinks she’s past trying to convince anyone of anything. After the plane and the hospital, the white bird and the ball bearing and the old coot at the gas station with his fossils and Senior El Camino the jackalope.

  “Daria, I’m sorry as hell about all this, but there’s no one in the house. We need to get you home. You’re sick, and we need to get you home—”

  “So I can deal with Niki.”

  “Yes, so you can deal with Niki, and a whole lot of other shite you been trying to avoid ever since I met you. I followed you here because I knew if I didn’t you’d never stop wishing you’d come.”

  Daria takes another cigarette from the pocket of her jacket and goes back to watching the house. “You followed me here,” she says, slipping the unlit Marlboro between her lips, “because you were scared to let me come alone.”

  “Fine, but now we’ve seen all there is to see, and it’s time for you to go home. I’ve got a room downtown for the night, and we can get a flight back—”

  “Do you think I killed Niki?” Daria asks, mumbling around the filter of the cigarette. Alex makes a disgusted, scoffing sound and kicks at the dead leaves.

  “No,
Dar, I don’t think you, or anyone else, killed Niki,” and it’s easy to hear how hard he’s working to stay calm, to be patient, to keep his voice down and steady. “Why do I even have to say this again? Niki was sick, and what happened to her wasn’t your fault.”

  “That’s what you think?”

  “That’s what I bloody well know. Now, let’s get back in the goddamn car. I’m freezing my balls off.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Alex. All the things I told you last night, the things I saw in there. You think I’m insane.”

  “Is that why you never told Niki’s shrink any of it?” he asks, and Daria glances at him and then back to the house. The front door’s closed now, but the window to the right of it is broken, one of the windows looking in on the bedroom where she found Niki all those years ago, kneeling before the white thing. The afternoon sun glints off jagged glass fangs, and the cops said that was probably one of the ways the bums and crackheads had been getting into the place. The same window that she broke, once upon a time, because the house wouldn’t let them out any other way. Not the same windowpane, but the same goddamn window.

  “It’s not good for you to be here, out in the cold like this,” Alex says.

  “It’s not good for anyone to be here,” Daria replies, the fingers of her left hand toying with the ball bearing through the lining of her leather jacket. The cloth, the steel beneath it, feels warm to the touch, but she knows that it’s just heat stolen from her own shivering body.

  “Come on,” Alex says. “Let’s go someplace warm. Let’s find some coffee.”

  You have to find it for me, Daria, Niki said to her on the plane, Niki’s ghost or her dream of Niki. You have to find it and bring it to the basement of Spyder’s house. Daria shuts her eyes, listening to the wind and the traffic down on Sixteenth, a few birds and a helicopter somewhere far away.

  I saw it, she thinks. I saw it all that night, what Spyder had become at the last and all the evil secrets bubbling up from the belly of this house. And again she imagines burning it, setting cleansing flames to dance beneath the limbs of these trees, the smell of smoke to tell her it was all finally over.

  “I fucking saw it,” she says, letting the Marlboro fall from her lips to lie in the dead brown leaves. “I saw everything, Alex, just exactly like Niki always said, more than Niki said. But I never admitted it. I thought if I ever admitted it, that would make it true,” and then she stops to wipe her dripping nose on the sleeve of her jacket and realizes that she’s crying.

  “But it was true anyway,” she whispers. “It was true all along, and that’s how I killed Niki.” And the long shadows falling in dark and crooked streaks across the front porch of the house draw irrefutable lines of confirmation—lines leading her from then all the way to now, from that night ten years ago to this moment, from ghosts to daylight, from nightmares into wakefulness—and she knows its face, this house, and it knows hers.

  “Dar, please, let’s get the fuck out of here,” Alex says, and, without another word, she slides off the hood and gets back into the car, because she doesn’t want the house to see her cry.

  This is someone else, not me, Niki thinks. Not, This is not happening or This is not real, because nothing in her life has ever felt half so real; all her doubt nested solidly in the infeasible reality of her place in this bright and undeniable moment: standing on the foredeck with Scarborough Pentecost and Malim and his first mate, a one-eared dwarf named Hobsen.

  Around them the sea has gone almost as still as glass, and the ropes and canvas above them hang slack in air so still that Niki could believe no wind has ever blown in this place. And the bowsprit, like a wooden giant’s finger, pointing up and out and at the heart of the maelstrom of light and thunder blocking their path. Niki keeps thinking it looks like a hurricane made from electricity instead of clouds, then turned on its side and half-submerged. A thousand feet across, she guesses, a thousand feet at least, and five hundred feet high. Its eye is the hard-candy color of a ruby, and at the edges of its counterclockwise rotation, the sea steams and bubbles and dead, boiled things swell and float to the surface.

  “See that muck there, missy?” Malim growls, and he glares down at Niki. “That’s a right proper demon, that is. That there’s my greed finally come callin’ for me.” And Niki wonders that he can see her, that he would bother to talk to her, because she isn’t here at all. She’s somewhere else, surely, only watching this, and in a minute or two more she’ll turn to Marvin and comment on the hokey special effects or ask him to change the channel, please. There must be something better on.

  “What is it?” Niki asks Scarborough, and he shakes his head.

  “Hell if I know. Maybe a portal,” he says.

  “Maybe a portal,” Malim sneers. “Did ye hear that, Hobsen? This one ’ere, he thinks maybe it’s a portal,” and then, to Scarborough, “You know damn well what that thing is, just the same as me. It’s the ’andiwork of the red witches, come to claim themselves a prize—” and Malim tugs hard at Niki’s left ear. She slaps his hand away, but even the pain in her earlobe seems disconnected, distant, like something she remembers having felt a long time ago. Dissociation, Dr. Dalby would have said, peering at her through his spectacles, or perhaps depersonalization, one of those rambling, clinical words he trotted out whenever he wanted to say that her mind was trying to fashion a safe place for her to hide and only getting her into deeper trouble.

  “I say we take the lifeboats and leave ’em here,” the dwarf says and nervously wrings his small, grimy hands. “There weren’t nothin’ in our contract with the fish augur ’bout facin’ down the Nesmidians, so I call it all null and void. If the red witches wants these two, fine, they can be my guest.”

  “I didn’t steal this ship just so’s a bunch of ’arlots and ’arpies could come along and wreck it,” Malim says, and then he kicks Hobsen. “If anyone’s going into a dinghy this day, it’ll be the prophet and her seasick companion ’ere, not me nor mine.”

  Above them, the sky is turning from chalk white to an unhealthy, milky yellow, and Niki feels the fine hairs on the back of her neck and arms stand on end.

  “The red witches don’t want your leaking rat-tub of a boat,” Scarborough says and scowls at Malim. “And they sure as hell don’t want you.”

  “What if it’s not the Nesmidians,” the dwarf whispers fearfully. “What if maybe it’s the Dragon hisself,” and Malim tells him to shut up and kicks him again, harder than before.

  “It only wants me,” Niki says quietly, certain that she’s right, and the detachment that’s been clouding her head since she first saw the spinning disc rising from the sea vanishes.

  Nicolan, we could sit here arguing reality all day long, Dr. Dalby tells her, speaking up from some afternoon that’s already over and done with, or some afternoon that comes after she finally finds her way back to San Francisco, or, she thinks, some afternoon that has never been and never will be. We could talk Descartes and Kant, metaphysics and epistemology, until bullfrogs grow wings and insects build rocket ships. But where’s that gonna get us?

  The ruby eye at the motionless center of the vortex begins to pulse, one red flare after the next in quick succession, the breathless space between pulses growing shorter and shorter, and Niki steps forward, so she’s sure that it sees her.

  “I’m right here,” she says, and the pulses stop as abruptly as they began.

  Try to think of it this way, Dr. Dalby suggests, as he digs about in the bowl of his pipe, dislodging ash with a small silver scoop. Imagine the universe is all of one essence, so that both consciousness and substance must be essentially identical.

  “Scarborough, I think you should all leave now,” Niki says, and she motions towards the stern with her bandaged hand. “And I think you should probably hurry.” In a heartbeat, the maelstrom has doubled in size and is beginning to turn clockwise.

  Idealism, dualism, materialism, materio-dualism, it’s all the same damn thing, in the end. These ideas are
only minor variations on the same eternal chord, the same psychic resonance in the void.

  “Go,” Scarborough tells Malim and the dwarf, and then he steps forward to stand beside Niki.

  “Wot’s this?” Malim grunts indignantly. “What about me money, eh? I entered into an ’onest covenant wiv that old whore Chattox, and I expect full remuneration—” but Hobsen is already dragging the smuggler away towards the stairs leading steeply down from the foredeck.

  “Do you know what’s happening?” Scarborough asks her, and Niki shakes her head.

  “Not exactly,” she says. “But I know that thing’s looking for me, and there’s no way to run from it. And I know you should go, because it isn’t looking for you.”

  “Sorry, Vietnam. But I made Esme a promise, and, unfortunately, I’m a man of my word. Most of the time.” He takes her good hand, his sweaty palm slick against hers, his fingers so strong, and she’s glad that whatever’s coming, she doesn’t have to face it alone.

  I’m here, she thinks and keeps her eyes on the center of the vortex. What are you waiting for?

  From the flickering, feathery edges of the maelstrom, lightning tendrils snake out across the water and crackle loudly through the masts and rigging.

  Are you real, Nicolan? Dr. Dalby asks her as he stuffs fresh cherry-scented tobacco into his pipe. Am I? Are all the things that Spyder showed you? Is any of this real? If you can answer that one question, to your own satisfaction, I think you’ll find all the courage that you’re ever going to need.

  “Hang on tight,” Niki says, and then the lightning sweeps down from the foremast, and they fall into the ruby eye of the storm.

  CHAPTER TEN

  At the Crossroads

  In the basement beneath the old house, the red witch sits on earth packed almost as solid as cement, dry clay gone the color of cayenne or weathered bricks, and she watches the thing growing from the low ceiling. She’s been watching it for hours, by the bobbing globe of blue-white light she summoned with a murmur, amazed and horrified at Theda’s determined metamorphosis. It started only a few minutes after Walter died, a few minutes after the red witch put a bullet in his head. She dragged his body, bump-bump-bump, down the wooden stairs and left it lying in a heap in the center of the basement floor, because she figured Theda might get hungry later on.