Murder of Angels (24 page)

“We shouldn’t linger here. Shake a leg,” and Spyder starts walking again.

There can’t be much more than a couple hundred yards or so remaining between them and the tall rope and bamboo gates where the catwalk finally ends and the village begins, but Niki’s so tired she thinks it may as well be a mile, and her bandaged hand aches so badly it’s starting to make her dizzy and sick to her stomach. She glances back up at the walls, steep, uneven barricades fashioned from the skeletons of leviathans, wire and wood and sea-monster bone rising into the mist, the uppermost reaches almost entirely obscured by the fog.
Is everything in this place built out of fucking bones?
she thinks, and then realizes that Spyder’s getting ahead of her and she runs to catch up, her footsteps echoing hollowly from the shadowed spaces beneath the punky gray boards.

Strings are drawn tight, or hang loose.

And clocks tick the spent moments away—third wheels, center wheels, brass pendulum shafts—as atoms trapped in the blazing hearts of stars decay, and suns spit prominences to arch forty thousand miles above photospheric hells.

In her trapdoor, black-hole nursery, nestled at the rotten heart of every universe, every bubble frozen in the forever-expanding matrix of chaotic eternal inflation, the Weaver spins in her uneasy sleep, casting new lines of space and time across the void. She dies and is reborn from her own restless thoughts. A trillion eggs hatch, and her daughters cloud the heavens.

Or drift down from night skies to swarm across rooftops and city parks.

Her heart beats, and
this
line is severed, or
that
line is secured.

A life is saved. A life is lost. Scales balance themselves or fall forever to one side or the other.

Twenty miles north of Birmingham, Alabama, a man who drives a rusty purple Lincoln Continental and knows how one world
might
end, sticks to the back roads and county highways, just in case. The ginger-haired woman sitting next to him chews a stick of spearmint gum and says her prayers to forgotten, jealous gods.

And at 10:37
A.M
., a graduate student from Berkeley, searching for clams and mussel shells along a narrow stretch of beach below Treasure Island Road, pauses to admire the view of the Bay Bridge silhouetted against the cloudless morning sky. He spots something dark stranded among the rocks at the water’s edge and thinks it’s probably a dead sea lion, until he gets closer and can see the Asian girl’s battered face, her skin gone blue and gray as slate, her hair like matted strands of kelp half buried in the sand. Her eyes are open wide, though they’re as perfectly empty as the eyes of any dead thing. At first, he can only stand and stare at her, horror and awe become one and the same, beauty and revulsion, peace and death and the sound of hungry gulls wheeling overhead. After five or ten minutes, the noise of a passing helicopter brings him back to himself and he drags her nude and broken body to higher ground so maybe the tide won’t carry it out into the bay again, then he scrambles up the crumbling cliffs to call the police.

A cell phone rings. And then another. And another.

News travels fast, and bad news travels faster still.

There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.

A syringe, a stethoscope, and electrocardiograph displays in a white room that smells of loss and antiseptic.

These things happen.

And then…

I’
m going to fall forever,
Daria thinks.
I’m never going to hit the water,
but then she does, and it’s like hitting a brick wall. Not what she expected, but then few things ever are, and at least the pain only lasts an instant, less than an instant, as the cold waters of the bay close mercifully around her shattered bones and bruised flesh, accepting her, promising that there’s nothing left to fear. Nothing ahead that’s half so terrible as all the trials laid out behind her; she wants to believe that more than she’s ever wanted to believe anything.

And she’s certain this is real, because no one ever dies in dreams. If it were only a dream, she thinks, she’d have awakened in that final, irredeemable second before the long fall ended. That’s what she’s always heard, and she’s never died in a dream. No one dies in dreams.

In another moment, you will not even feel the cold,
the ocean whispers, as the southbound currents wrap kelp-slick tendrils about her broken legs and pull her down and down and down. Drawing her towards the black and silty bottom, away from the comfortless oyster light of the moon shining so bright that she can still see it through the shimmering, retreating surface of the bay. The light at the end of the tunnel, near-death or afterlife cliché, but she has no use for light anymore, and she’s grateful that soon the moon and the sun and all light will be lost to her forever.

Was it like this for you?
she asks, and the shadows swarming thick through the water around her sigh and murmur a thousand conflicting answers. So she takes her pick, choosing at random because she can’t imagine that choices still matter.
No,
Niki whispers.
It’s different for everyone.

Daria stares up at the rippling moon growing small, hardly a decent saucer now when a moment ago it was a dinner plate, and she tries hard to remember if she’s sinking or rising, if she’s getting farther from the moon or it’s getting farther away from her.
That doesn’t matter, either,
the bay reassures her.
Don’t even think about it,
and so she doesn’t. She can see the inky cloud of blood leading back the way she’s come, a blood road back to the moon, but Daria knows the bay will take care of that, as well, and soon there will be no evidence whatsoever of her passage.

A loose school of surfperch sweep hurriedly past, their mirror scales flashing the moonlight because they have no light of their own, and Daria knows exactly how that feels. Never any light but what she stole, never her own soul for a lantern, but only for cloudy days and shuttered rooms, closets and nights without stars.

That girl in Florida,
the moon calls down to her with its silken, accusing voice.
Old Becky What’s-her-name. You think that’s the way
she
felt? You think that’s what she heard when she listened to your songs?
And then it begins to whistle the melody of “Seldom Seen.”

You leave me alone,
Daria calls back at the moon.
I’m going down to Niki. It’s not my problem anymore.

The moon stops whistling, and
Ohhh,
it purrs, pretending to sound surprised.
Was it ever? Weren’t you the lady that couldn’t be bothered?

Don’t start listening to that old whore,
the bay whispers.
She steals her light, too, just the same as you and those fish.

And the water presses in on her, something that would hurt if she could still feel pain, an unfelt agony of pressure stacking up above, pounds and anamnesis per square inch, and maybe it will finally crush her so flat that the moon won’t be able to see her, and she won’t have to listen to it, won’t have to think about all the questions she’s never known the answers to. There’s a final rush of air from her deflating lungs, and she watches indifferently as the bubbles rise (or fall) like the bells of escaping jellyfish.

You can’t follow me,
Niki says, her voice drifting up from some place so deep and black that Daria has never even dared imagine it, some endless, muddy plain where there’s only night that runs on forever in all directions. A silent wilderness of fins and spines and the stinging tentacles of blind things, the rotting steel and wooden husks of drowned ships, and countless suicide ghosts mired in the ooze and labyrinths of their own condemning thoughts.

You can’t stop me,
Daria tells her.

It’s all a dream, Daria. It’s only a bad dream.

And now there’s something floating towards her, a paler scrap of night dividing itself from the greater darkness, and at first she thinks it’s only a curious seal or maybe, if she’s very lucky, a shark come along to finish what she’s started. But then she can make out Niki’s face, the empty sockets that were her eyes before the hungry jaws of fish, her hair like seaweed strands swaying gently about her gray and swollen cheeks.

Not what you think,
Niki mumbles, her clay-blue lips and a flat gleam of beach-glass teeth; where her tongue should be there are only the nervous coils of a tiny octopus nestled in her mouth.
You can’t find me here. I didn’t mean for you to follow.
Then the tattered girl holds out her right hand, and the ball bearing glimmers faintly in her ruined palm.

I’ll never find it,
Daria thinks.
Not after ten years. I’ll never find it again.

Not if you don’t try,
the octopus in Niki’s mouth replies, and then her body comes apart like sugar in a cup of tea, dissolving back into the night and the bay, and Daria is alone again. She tries to remember a prayer she knew ages and ages ago, when she was a child and still thought someone might be listening, but suddenly her memories seem as insubstantial as the vision of Niki, and the fleeting, slippery words remain always just beyond her reach.

And the moon is growing larger again.

And has turned the color of a drowned girl’s skin.

Daria opens her eyes and blinks at the warm late afternoon sunlight pouring in through the hospital room’s window, a pale yellow-orange wash across the rumpled white sheets of her bed. The window frames a western sky that is broad and turning brilliant sunset shades of violet and apricot. And the dream is right there behind her, still close enough that she thinks it might continue if she’d only shut her eyes again and let it. Right there, so at least she’s spared any sudden, startling disappointments when she remembers exactly where she is, and what’s happened to Niki, and why Alex is sitting here watching her and trying too hard not to look worried.

“Hey you,” he says, and there’s the faintest suggestion of a smile to warp the corners of his mouth, but the smile gives up and becomes something else.

“Fuck,” Daria whispers, and turns away from the window and Alex Singer and the setting sun.

“Would you like some water?”

“Unless you’ve got vodka,” she replies, and licks at her chapped lips, her throat so dry it hurts, and she lies still and listens to the sound of him pouring water from a plastic pitcher into a paper cup.

“I talked to Marvin again,” he says. “He rang, just before you woke up,” and Alex holds the cup to her lips and supports her head. She only drinks a little, because it’s warm and tastes like chlorine, then pushes his hand away, and he sets the cup down next to the blue pitcher on the table beside the bed. He presses one hand against her forehead like someone checking to see if she has a fever.

“I don’t want to start crying again,” she says.

“I know, love. I know you don’t.”

“I
told
her I was coming, didn’t I? I fucking told her I was on my way,” and Daria stares at the IV tube rising from the soft inside of her left elbow, a couple of strips of tape to hide the needle, to hold it in place, and she lets her eyes follow the tube up to the bag of clear fluid suspended from a metal hook beside the bed. “When are they going to stop pumping me full of that shit?” she asks Alex, and nods at the IV bag.

“I don’t know. You were awfully dehydrated.”

“Alex, you were sitting right there. You heard me tell her I was coming home. I know you heard me.”

“Yeah,” he says, “I did. I heard everything you said,” and then he moves his hand from Daria’s forehead to her right cheek. His skin feels cool and dry and familiar, his rough fingers to remind her of so many things at once, things that didn’t die with Niki, and she turns away from the IV bag and looks up into his gray eyes, instead. Those eyes the first part of Alex Singer that she fell in love with, even before his music, eyes like smoke and steel, and she knows that she’s going to start crying again, and there’s nothing she can do to stop it.

“You can’t start blaming yourself for this.”

“Yes, I can,” she says, and the tears cloud her vision and leak from the corners of her eyes. “I left her there. She begged me not to go and I went anyway.”

“You did what you had to do. Niki was very sick, and you did everything you could to keep her safe. You pissed away the last ten years of your life trying to keep Niki safe, and it’s almost killed you.”

“No, that’s not true. I
didn’t
do everything. I was always too afraid to listen—”

“Stop it,” Alex says, pulling his hand away, and he takes a quick step back from the edge of the bed. The anger in his voice like straight razors beneath worn velvet, and his gray irises spark with something that Daria doesn’t want to see, not now or ever, so she closes her eyes. She tries to wish herself into the dream again, down to the freezing, silent wastes where no one will ever find her, that night without mornings or horizons and only the blind, indifferent fish and Niki’s fraying ghost for company. But it’s deserted her, left her stranded here in this white antiseptic place choked with sunlight and people determined to keep her alive.

“
You
almost died on that goddamn plane,” Alex says. “You heard what the doctor said. Your fucking heart stopped beating, and you were real fucking lucky that they didn’t have to take you straight from the bloody airport to the morgue.”

“She’s
dead,
Alex.”

“Yeah, Daria, she’s dead. She jumped off a fucking bridge, and if you’d been there
maybe
it wouldn’t have happened, maybe she wouldn’t have killed herself until next month, but you
weren’t
there, and now she’s dead, and that’s something you’re going to have to find a way to get through.”

“You’re a son of a bitch,” she says, squeezing her eyes shut tighter, tasting her own hot tears leaking into her mouth, salt and snot and stingy drops of herself her body can’t spare. Alex has started tapping his fingers hard against the side of the bed or the table with the blue pitcher, and she wants to scream at him to stop, to fuck off and let her be alone.

“Right. Maybe that’s exactly what I am,” and Daria thinks he doesn’t sound half so angry as he did a moment before, that he sounds more like someone who only wishes he could stop talking before he makes things worse. “Maybe I’m a son of a bitch, and I’m sorry as hell about what happened to Niki. But you didn’t kill her and I’m not going to let you lie there and convince yourself that you did.”

“You don’t know,” she says. “You don’t have any idea,” and she opens her eyes, is about to tell him to please stop tapping his fucking fingers when she sees the white bird perched on the windowsill. It pecks at the glass with its beak, three times in quick succession,
tap-tap-tap,
then stares at her through the glass, its tiny, keen eyes the color of poisonous berries.

Do not fail her.

The Hierophant will need you, at the end.

“Oh God,” she whispers. “Turn around. Turn around and tell me that you see it, too.”

Alex doesn’t turn around, but he glances over his left shoulder and then back at her, and she can tell from his expression that he doesn’t see the white bird, that he doesn’t see anything there at all.

“What is it?” he asks. “What do you see?” and
How am I supposed to pretend there’s nothing there?
she thinks, unable to take her eyes off the white bird.
How can I pretend there’s nothing, when it’s right there, looking in at me?

“Daria, tell me what’s wrong.”

“A bird,” she says, “a white bird,” and he glances at the window again.

“I don’t see a bird. I don’t see anything.”

“I know,” she whispers, and the bird pecks at the glass.

Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.

“I saw it on the plane, after Niki came to me, right after the pain started.”

Alex rubs at his furrowed eyebrows and sighs. “That was a dream. You know that was a dream. I heard you tell the doctor—”

“Maybe I only thought it was a dream,” she says and wipes her nose with the back of her hand, speaking as softly as she can because she’s afraid of frightening the bird away. Or she’s afraid it will hear her, and she’s not sure which. “Maybe I was wrong.”

“There’s
nothing
out there, Daria,” and he turns and walks across the room to the big windowpane, stands silhouetted against the garish Colorado sunset and raps hard on the glass with his knuckles. The white bird doesn’t fly off, but it glares up at him and ruffles its feathers.

“What if you’re not supposed to see it?” she asks, and the bird looks away from Alex and goes back to watching her. “Maybe it’s only here for me, so I’m the only one who can see it.”

Tap-tap-tap.

“Jesus, it’s right
there
.”