Murder of Angels

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Hours and hours watching the swollen, dripping thing, night and day and then night again, and she’s recited every prayer and blessing that she learned before she died and the towers on the banks of the Yärin were lost to her forever. Words and almost-words that were at least enough to hide them from the police that the Hierophant’s lover brought with her, and also enough to grant her the patience to wait. Because she knows that Daria Parker will return, and next time she’ll come alone.

  The floorboards and sagging joists creak and pop from the increasing weight of the thing suspended in its black chrysalis, and Archer Day aims her pistol at it again. Staring down the barrel of the .38 and reminding herself that she still has choices, maybe not so many as she had the night before, but that’s the price of decision, the price of action. The ebony membrane holding the thing together shudders, and Archer puts as much pressure on the trigger as she dares. Only a little more, and the hammer would fall, and the gun would fire, and then the future would change again.

  “Can you hear me in there, little girl?” she asks Theda, and the chrysalis shudders again, straining at hardened secretions and the countless riblike cremasters holding it in place. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” and she wonders if Theda knows that they brought her down here to murder her, that Walter took the bullet meant for the Weaver’s surrogate. The bullet inscribed with the secret names of two goddesses, the ravenous ladies of flame and ice, the bullet Archer anointed with melissa and arsenic and dandelions.

  “What the hell’s this rotting world to me?” Archer whispers to herself as she lowers the gun again. “Let the Dragon have it all,” but she knows that she doesn’t sound half so confident as she did the night before. She doesn’t feel half so confident, either, and curses herself for being weak after all she’s seen, for falling to the temptations of the great red wolf, but also for ever having bought into the childish faith and suicidal altruism of the Sect in the first place.

  The basement smells dry, like dust and cobwebs and the spores of a dozen different fungi, but Archer can’t smell the chrysalis, as if it has no scent.

  “This was never my war, little girl. Four years ago, I was still a goddamn child. Of course, it had to be a child they sent, didn’t it? No one else would have gone through with such madness.”

  The chrysalis skin ripples, and more of the green-black fluid leaks from the thumb-sized spiracles spaced unevenly along its sides, dripping to the dirt floor and onto Walter’s corpse.

  “Oh, you are hungry aren’t you? I bet you’re starving to death in there, poor thing,” and Archer watches as the thick fluid slowly breaks down flesh and bone and cartilage, turning it into something soft, something gelatinous, something that the thing growing inside the chrysalis can use when the time comes.

  “Soon, little girl,” Archer promises, looking away from the dead man to glance down at her wristwatch, the one she bought in Manhattan years ago, cheap watch from a Chinatown kiosk, gold hands gliding endlessly across a field of white. “Not much longer, and then I bet you’ll never be hungry again.”

  She used her bare hands to trace a perfect circle an inch deep into the hard dirt below the chrysalis, a holding circle to enclose Walter’s body safely within its circumference and serve as the Hierophant’s focal point. All the numbers in her head to guide her raw and bleeding hands—mathematics, alchemy, geometry—and the forbidden language of the singing rocks along the Serpent’s Road slipping easily from her lips. All the things the fire-colored wolf has taught her in the dreams she spent so long trying not to acknowledge.

  And now all she needs is the philtre, a single silver orb, and she might have been little more than a child when her blood spilled out hot across the temple floor, but she knows enough to scry that Daria Parker has the talisman, that she’s found it and has brought it here. A surrogate for a surrogate, obscene relay from one hand to another, the passing of the monstrous key that is all keys, heart key, soul key, key of Diamond and Lost Faith. The key that will throw open the door the Weaver left ajar.

  The chrysalis shudders again, more violently than before, and the spines where Theda’s shoulder blades were begin to twitch and quiver in the musty basement air, humming softly like the mating call of some great insect.

  “No, no, no. Not just yet,” Archer Day cautions the thing, and she raises the pistol again. The steel glints dully in the sizzling blue light she’s made. Could I kill it if I tried? she wonders. Are there enough bullets in this gun, enough bullets in this world, to put down the abomination gestating in that black husk?

  And then she shuts her eyes and tries to think of nothing but the Hierophant’s lover, sleeping somewhere in the city, sleeping with a man she loves more than the Hierophant, and the red witch searches until she finds a tiny breach along the outermost rim of Daria Parker’s uneasy dreams, and slides herself in. And for a time, she forgets about the flame-colored wolf and the dragon and the thing hanging from the basement ceiling.

  Four miles away, northeast across autumn-silent streets and the creosote cross-tie and iron-rail stitchery of railroad tracks, Daria Parker sleeps on the sixth floor of the Tutwiler Hotel. Held tight in Alex Singer’s arms and surrounded by sturdy plaster and masonry laid and mortar set the better part of a century before, she dreams.

  Her father, wounded, heartsick man who died of cancer years before, and he’s trying to explain to her why he and her mother could never work things out. Mistakes and transgressions, apologies for the divorce and the drama, the day he took his daughter and ran away to Mississippi. Daria listens disinterestedly (she’s heard it all before) while a waiter with tattoos and the spiraling, narwhal horns of an African antelope serves them hot tea and fresh-baked biscuits with apple jelly and melted butter. The morning sun through the cafe windows is warm, and the little tables are surrounded by terra-cotta pots of philodendrons and ferns.

  “Charles Lindbergh once held a press conference here, you know,” the waiter says and winks at her, quoting the hotel brochure and interrupting her dead father. “And Tallulah Bankhead held parties here. The Jewel of Birmingham, that’s what they called the place—”

  “Excuse me,” Daria says and frowns at the waiter, “but we’re trying to have a conversation.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” he snips, and she realizes that the chair across the table from her is empty.

  “You have a telegram from a Miss Nicolan Ky,” the waiter continues, nonplussed by her father’s disappearance. The waiter has become a very large macaw, its feathers painted the deepest tropical reds and blues, and Daria can smell licorice on his breath. The bird holds out a silver tray, tarnished but ornate silver serving tray, and there’s nothing but a slip of yellow paper on it.

  “It’s not over till it’s over,” the macaw squawks rudely, but when Daria reaches for the telegram it becomes the rusty ball bearing with N-I-K-I written on it. “Turn away no more, why wilt thou turn away?” says the macaw.

  Daria takes the ball bearing from the platter and tries to remember how she got all the way from the hotel downtown to the house on Cullom Street. How day became night and she didn’t even notice, but the answer is obvious, and it comes to her on the cold wind blowing across the mountain. Another dream, another goddamn, stinking dream. Her whole life seems to have come to little else, a clamoring parade of nightmares strung together with twine and guitar string and baling wire, and she’s always waking in unfamiliar, unwelcoming rooms or the rumbling bellies of jet planes. Always waking to disorientation or loss, fear or pain, all those supposedly different things that are exactly the same, the slippery facets of a whole too vast and terrible to glimpse in a single moment. Even this dream, the one that binds them all in the gray-matter wrinkles of its infinite variations, even it permits only incomplete disclosure, stingy bits and pieces at a time, mean impressions, like blind men feeling their way around an elephant.

  Daria Parker climbs the five cement steps to the porch, and then she stops, glancing back over her left shoulder at the dusky sha
pes moving quickly between the flickering, plywood trees, the long-legged, skittering beasts, Spyder’s defenders or prison guards, and maybe there’s no difference.

  “Would you like the check now,” the macaw waiter asks, though she can’t see him anywhere, “or should I charge it to your room?”

  She stands shivering on the long, cluttered porch, her hand wrapped tightly around the brass doorknob. She looks over her shoulder again, half expecting Mort and Theo in the driveway, waiting for her in the idling red Ford Econoline, Stiff Kitten’s junk-heap set of wheels, but there’s only the shoddy, back-lot trees, the narrow, boundless spaces left between them, and the matte-painting distance rising up to the cloudy charcoal edges of the November sky.

  Is this the way it was? Did I really come up here alone? Did I already love her that much?

  Have I ever loved her at all?

  “I always loved your mother,” her father mumbles, his words like lead shot falling into a deep pool.

  And she turns very slowly back towards the front door that’s no longer there, anticlockwise minute and hour hands of bone and corrosion sweeping her backwards, sweeping her back to the night before that night, and she’s standing in a freezing alley behind the dump where Keith Barry lived. This is the night of his wake, the night before she went to Spyder’s house to find Niki. Everyone else has gone, all the motley, drunken mourners, the sin-eaters, and left her to lock up. Daria hugs herself and notices the tall boy in a black Bauhaus T-shirt watching her from the other side of the alley, and she wonders how long he’s been standing there. One of Spyder’s gothedy loser friends, she thinks, someone she’s seen skulking around Dr. Jekyll’s, but if she’s ever known his name, she doesn’t remember it now.

  “The dining room closes in five minutes,” the macaw announces, pointing one wing at a clock on the wall behind her, and then he becomes the ruby-eyed white bird from the plane, from the window ledge of her hospital room.

  “Time is beside the point,” the white bird insists. “There is only one moment, which moves endlessly, and you stand there always.”

  “What the hell do you want,” she barks at the boy in the Bauhaus shirt, ignoring the white bird and sounding at least as drunk as she is, sounding like a drunken old whore, and the boy looks nervously up and down the narrow alleyway before he crosses it to stand beside her.

  “Do you have a name?” she asks, trying not to slur and failing and deciding that she really doesn’t care.

  “Walter. My name’s Walter Ayers. I used to be a friend of Spyder Baxter’s.”

  You’ll remember me, later on. You’ll remember the night I tried to warn you about Spyder, the night in Birmingham when I told you Niki was in danger.

  “One moment,” the white bird says again, “that’s all,” and it stares up at her from the spotless linen table cloth. Margarine sun pours across its feathers, and its eyes sparkle resolutely. “That’s all any of us ever get.”

  “Did Spyder send you?” she asks the bird, and it blinks and pecks at the scraps of her biscuit.

  “I used to be a friend of Spyder Baxter’s,” the boy says again, like he thinks she didn’t hear him the first time, and Daria tries to forget about the white bird and her unanswered question.

  “But you’re not anymore,” Daria says to the boy named Walter, “not her friend, I mean,” and she’s started walking, because it’s too cold to stand still any longer. He follows close behind, their footsteps loud in the long empty alleyway. The mute hulks of abandoned warehouses rise up around them, cinder block and brick and corrugated aluminum to brace the unreliable sky.

  “Well, I think that’s what she’d say, if you asked her,” he replies, walking faster to catch up. “I’m pretty sure that’s what she’d say. She thinks that I had something to do with what happened to Robin.”

  “You mean Spyder’s girlfriend?” Daria asks, and she stops, and the boy named Walter stops walking, too, and stands there trying not to let his teeth chatter.

  “Yeah,” he says, “I mean Spyder’s girlfriend,” and then he looks back the way they’ve come, his anxious eyes trapped in an anxious, exhausted face.

  “Well, did you?”

  Walter doesn’t answer the question, just keeps staring back down the northside alley like he’s afraid they’re being followed.

  See into the dark

  Just follow your eyes

  “Who was the girl that left with Spyder tonight?” he asks her, changing the subject. “The Japanese girl.”

  “Her name’s Niki Ky, and she’s not Japanese. She’s Vietnamese, and she’s Spyder’s new girl. Haven’t you heard? She moved in with Spyder a couple of weeks ago.”

  It really doesn’t matter if you don’t believe or understand what I’m saying. You will. Niki’s on her way back to Cullom Street. She’s received the mark. You’ve seen it, on her hand. Niki Ky is becoming the Hierophant, and she’ll open the gates. She’ll unleash the Dragon.

  “Is she a friend of yours?” he asks, and “Yeah, she’s a friend of mine,” Daria replies.

  “Then you should know she’s in danger. Spyder’s not right.”

  “Spyder’s a goddamn basket case,” Daria says and starts walking again. “Spyder’s the fucking poster girl for schizos.”

  “No. I don’t mean because she’s crazy. I mean, she’s not right.”

  We have to be there to stop her. All of us have to be there to stop her. All the worlds are winding down. All the worlds are spinning to a stop. Find her, Daria, before the jackals do. Before I do. If I find her first, I have to kill her, and I’ve killed too many people already.

  “Spyder’s not right,” he says again, as if she’ll understand him if only he keeps repeating the words over and over. “If you care about your friend, you’ll keep her away from that house. Robin knew about Spyder. She tried to tell us, and now she’s dead.”

  “Yeah, well, now Niki’s dead, too, spooky boy, so I guess you’re a day late and a dollar short, and we’re both shit out of luck.”

  And then the moments and seconds are collapsing around her, playing-card houses and sand-castle dissolution, a sudden and furious implosion of time with her standing somewhere much too near ground zero. She sits on the hotel bed in Atlanta, holding her cell phone, and at the sunlit table with the white bird. She stands in the alley with Walter, and grips the brass knob to the front door of Spyder’s house.

  Only one moment…

  And she opens the door.

  And the house is full of light.

  Silver-white light draped in shimmering, Christmas garland strands and floating lazily on the bright air, lying in tangled drifts upon the floor. Daria shields her eyes, opens her mouth to call for Niki, or only to stand there slack-jawed and stupid at the sight. But then she hears the hurried, scuttling noises at her back, something big coming up the steps, coming fast, and there’s a crash as a piece of the porch trash tumbles over, and she doesn’t look, steps quickly across the threshold and slams the door shut behind her.

  And she stands very still, remembering how the threads burned her, stands listening as they settle gently across the floor and furniture, the sound of them like falling snow. And she also remembers finding the open hole leading down to the basement. Remembers the warmer air rising up from that pit and the incongruous scents: mold and earth, jasmine and the sweeter smell of rotting meat. And the imperfect blackness pooled at the foot of the stairs, the dim red-orange glow at the center of that pool, blood-orange glow, and there was laughter from the hole, insane and hateful laughter.

  “You don’t have to do this again,” the white bird informs her, preening itself now that it’s finished with the biscuit. “You saved Niki Ky that night. Some mistakes we only have to make once.”

  “Mistakes? You think it was a mistake, saving Niki?”

  “Did I say that?” the white bird squawks and peers suspiciously up at Daria, squinting its red eyes in the glare of the sun. “I don’t think that’s what I said at all. I think your head’s stuff
ed full of cotton, old woman.”

  “I just fucking heard you. You said, ‘Some mistakes we only have to make once.’”

  “Why would I have said a thing like that? The Hierophant is our savior. Without her, all is lost.”

  “Liar,” Daria hisses, and she turns from the bird to watch the traffic outside the cafe’s window. She wonders if Alex is ever coming down to breakfast, and if the cafe really closes in five minutes. If the white bird’s a liar, the macaw might have been lying, too.

  “We’re wasting time we don’t have to waste,” a woman says, and when Daria turns back to the table, the white bird is gone, and there’s a pale woman dressed in scarlet robes sitting across from her, sitting in her father’s chair. The woman is very young, younger than herself, probably younger even than Niki. Her hair is neither blond nor brown, some color in between that Daria can’t recall the word for, and her brown eyes are desperate, but not unkind, and seem to lead away somewhere safely beyond the borders of this dream.

  “While there’s still time, you have to listen to me, Daria Parker. I’m Archer Day. I called you at the airport—”

  “I came to the house.”

  “You brought policemen with you. That was stupid.”

  “What do you want?” Daria asks, and suddenly the dream doesn’t feel like a dream at all, as though the flowing, undecided fabric of her unconscious mind has congealed, and now she’s trapped here and will never be able to wake up again.

  “It’s not too late,” the woman says. “But this time you have to come alone. This time you come alone, or you never see Niki again.”

  Something taps on the cafe window, and Daria sees that it’s the white bird, stranded on the other side of the glass. Its beak is striking the windowpane so violently that there are tiny sparks.