Murder of Angels (29 page)

Daria wants to reach for it, wants to snatch it from his hand before he changes his mind and puts it back and locks the case again.

“Lord, help the poor, damn fools that actually find what they’re after,” he says, then passes the musket ball across the top of the case to her. Only it’s not a musket ball, just a rusty steel ball bearing with four letters written around its circumference. N-I-K-I in black ink so worn by time and rust and touch that she might never have seen them if she hadn’t known there would be something there. Her knees buckle, and she grips the edge of the wooden case to keep from falling.

“She always said you’d be coming for it, Daria Parker,” the old man says, “and I was to keep it safe, no matter what. She said the Hierophant would need it again one day.”

“The Hierophant,” Daria whispers, unable to look away from Niki’s name, the faded work of a dead girl’s hand, and when she looks back at the old man, he’s holding one finger to his wrinkled lips.

“No questions, missy,” he says. “You and that Englishman out there just get yourselves moving again before them others catch up with you. You can thank me when you come back to see that snake someday, like you said.”

And then the cowbell jingles loudly in the next room, and Alex is calling her name. Daria holds the ball bearing tightly to her chest as the old man leads her back through the brown door and locks it behind them.

N
ot the golden trumpets of Saint Michael’s angels, but the demon wail of civil defense sirens to signal Armageddon, and what’s the fucking difference? The last sound you’ll hear before the fire comes down, and no, not
that,
either. Walter opens one eye and stares at the digital clock radio on the table beside the bed. Three thirty
P.M
. and it’s only the alarm, because they were all so tired that Archer was afraid they’d never wake up on their own, might sleep straight through the night, so it’s not angels
or
sirens, and he reaches over and punches the
OFF
button.

“I’m awake,” Archer mumbles unconvincingly from her side of the bed, but she doesn’t open her eyes. “What time is it?”

“Time to rise and shine, sweet pea,” Walter says, rolling over onto his back to stare up at the low ceiling of the shabby motel room. There are brown water stains like the pressed blooms of some ancient flower, flower petals or bloodstains, and someone’s written
DIE YOU CRACKER COCKSUCKER
in green Magic Marker directly above the bed. The room stinks of disinfectant and mildew, stale cigarette smoke and unwashed bodies, and he shuts his eyes again, just a moment’s luxury before he has to fucking rise and fucking shine.

“It’s
your
turn to deal with Theda,” Archer Day says, her face half-buried in her pillow and he can barely understand a word she’s saying.

“Yeah, I know. My turn to deal with Theda,” and behind his eyelids are the last fading, freeze-frame images of his dreams, hurricanes of blood and shattered glass, lightning the color of infection, the cities of the not-quite-dead finally become the cities of stumbling, undying corpses, plagues without names or reason or ends, plagues to rot away the molten core of the world.

Mount we unto the sky.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us.

And Spyder—too pure to be real, too pure to believe—the only still point in the storm, and she made him the offer that she always makes. Sanctuary in her tattooed arms, in the silken snare folds of her soul, and all he has to do is stand beside her at the end.
And all this will be yours, all this and more.
Sleep without nightmares, forgetfulness and days without fear, a Heaven far from this wasted earth, and he only has to see that no one and nothing tries to interfere. She’s never even asked him to face the Dragon, her Preacher Man, the idiot devil that she’s dragged with her from one universe to another. Walter only has to take her hand and be there with Theda, in the basement on Cullom Street, when the moment comes.

The world shall burn, and from her ashes spring

New Heaven and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell…

No, not
this
earth. This earth shall only burn and then the ashes lie cold and undisturbed another five or six billion years, until a dying, supernova sun at last swallows the planet whole. She’s never made a secret of that, has never tried to hide from him the destruction of
this
earth.
It’s lost anyway,
she says.
It’s never been anything else. You know I’m telling you the truth, Walter.

And he
does
know, has known that all along, and some days it seems to matter, and other days it doesn’t make any difference at all.

“I have to take a piss,” Archer says.

“So, who’s stopping you?” and she grumbles something about Theda, something he’s heard so many times that the exact words don’t matter anymore.

“I said I’ll deal with Theda. It’s my turn.”

“Why does she always have to build her filthy little nests in the goddamn bathrooms,” Archer says.

I can’t do it without you,
Spyder said, just like she’s been saying all along, because of the three who went down and came back up again, he’s the only one left alive, the only one who didn’t die that long-ago November. Her crooked line back to
this
place, and for that reason alone he should have put a bullet through his skull. And maybe he would have, if Archer Day hadn’t come along to show him that he wasn’t insane, to show him that he still had a choice.

The first time I saw her,
he thinks.
The very first time. Jesus, that’s been almost four years,
and for a moment that’s enough to drive back even the things that Spyder Baxter has let him see. A cheated dragon’s wrath, the cities of gray ash, black skies and dead seas gone to pus and acid—
all
of it pale and insignificant against the moment Archer stepped out of the smoke and shadows of a North Hollywood bar. “I know your name,” she said, her voice like honey and heroin and the morning after a stormy night. “I know everything you think no one else could ever know.”

Never an easier or more immediate seduction, and he ordered her a whiskey, and then sat and listened while she told him about the coming of the Weaver and the prophesied arrival of the Hierophant, about the Dragon and its jackals, all her impossible, true tales of a flat land of vast granite spokes and basalt wheels where oceans drained off into an unfathomable abyss.

And he knew that it was true, all of it, because Spyder had already shown him every one of those things and more. But still he had to ask the question, how
she
could know, how these facts had come to her, and for a while Archer sat staring silently at the dirty barroom floor. When she finally answered him, there were tears in her eyes, and he didn’t ask her anything else. They’d gone back to his room in an East L.A. flophouse, and she slept in his arms.

It was the first time in his life he hadn’t slept alone.

“I have to piss
now,
” she says, and Walter opens his eyes. They still sting and burn, no matter how much he sleeps or how many bottles of Visine and Murine he empties into them.

“I’m not stopping you,” he says again.

“Just fucking take care of it, Walter.”

And he marvels that this last day should be so much like all the others leading up to it, that it isn’t marked by a merciful freedom from mundane annoyances and everyday crap. There should be something different, like a condemned man’s final meal, whatever his heart desires, instead of the usual routine of bread and water, something to make this day special,
besides
the gas chamber or electric chair waiting at the end of that long, last walk. And then Walter gets up and goes to take care of it.

After the doctor—an apprehensive man with a black leather satchel and wire-rimmed spectacles—carefully removes the old dressing and lances the swelling on Niki’s right palm, after a steaming cup of sweet black tea for the pain and an herbal poultice packed deep into the wound, then a fresh dressing, and after
all
this they finally let her rest. She lies beneath white cotton sheets and a quilt that only smells faintly musty and watches the orange-blue flame of an oil lamp sitting on a chest of drawers near the bed, the flame trapped safe inside its glass chimney, and she listens to Spyder and the doctor and the wind around the eaves of the house.
Maybe I’m so tired I won’t be able to sleep,
she thinks, but then the room and the whispering voices and the wind slip away, and for a long time there’s nothing else at all.

And she dreams of Esme Chattox, floating weightless in waters that will never see the sun, her crimson gills like living bellows, fish-skin robes become beautiful Japanese fans of spine and fin and fleshy membrane, and there are yellow-green rows of bioluminescent organs on her breasts and belly. She drifts down, past towering Atlantean ruins, past great stone doors sealed a hundred thousand years, shattered Corinthian columns and sunken temples to gods that have never been named. Esme’s long legs become a sinuous tail, and she glides ever deeper, between the grotesque walls of yawning subterranean canyons, until there’s no farther down left to go, only a perfectly level plain of gray-black ooze, a desolate landscape for urchins and sea cucumbers and brittle stars. And something else. Something that has lain here more ages than the minds of man can comprehend, tentacles and eyes the size of manhole covers, eyes that burn so brightly they slice the darkness and send even the blindest things scurrying for cover.

And the feverish, wordless prayers from Esme’s hyacinth lips,
Mother Hydra, Father Kraken, awake and receive me, Sleeper in the Deep, Dreamer at the Bottom of the World.

Esme embraces her lover, and it spreads her wide with a dozen suction-cupped arms, as the gray ooze floor of the ocean folds and collapses beneath their weight. And for a time Niki can’t see anything through the tempest of silt thundering soundlessly across the boundless azoic wastelands.

And other things, an argument between an anglerfish and an eel, a heretic crustacean counting stars in a night it’s never seen, and the silt settling kindly over Niki as the storm subsides and the wish that she could lie there forever, buried and unremembered, and still
other
things, before she begins to rise. Rushing towards the surface, falling towards the sky, as the gas in her bloodstream bubbles out of solution and her aching lungs expand until she’s sure that she’ll burst, but there’s only the briefest, silver pain, and then she’s standing on the Bay Bridge again, and the white bird is there, too, perched on the guardrail.

“She has found the philtre,” it says, and it takes Niki a moment to remember, to realize that it means “philtre” and not “filter.” “But there’s so little time. It may already be too late.”

“Then I died for nothing?”

“Everyone dies for nothing, Hierophant,” the bird squawks. “Why should you be any different?”

“You
know
what I meant, bird.”

“The jackals would have had her. They almost did, but they’re weak in that world.”

“So Daria isn’t dead?” Niki asks and looks down at the water shimmering far, far below. The bird flaps its wings and shifts uneasily from foot to foot.

“Not yet,” it replies. “But perhaps it’s only a matter of time. She still has a long way to go. And there is another danger.”

“Daria’s strong,” Niki says. “She’s smart.”

“You have no idea what’s to come, do you?” the bird asks and hops a few inches farther away from her. “No one is smart enough or strong enough. We fight because we will not die in shame without a fight, but we
will
die, nonetheless.”

“I’ve already jumped,” Niki says, and the bird looks up at the low clouds sailing past overhead.

“That depends on when you mean. Some places you’ve already fallen. Others you haven’t. Others you never will.”

“Leave me alone, bird,” she says, sick of anything it might have to say, and it vanishes in a burst of fire and mossy, sage-scented smoke.

And when Niki turns around—because
this
time she won’t jump, this time she’ll go back to the hotel on Steuart Street and wait for Daria—she’s standing at the edge of a highway beneath a wide blue sky, hot asphalt on one side of her and the brown-green Kansas prairie stretching away on the other. She looks left, looks east, and the truck stop isn’t far away, the one that Daria didn’t remember, but then she did, she
did
remember, and Niki steps off the blacktop into dry weeds and cacti and over a tangle of rusted barbed wire. A few yards away, there’s a young man in a straw cowboy hat and overalls, walking slowly across a place where rain and frost have worn away the soil to expose the chalky earth underneath. He walks with his eyes on the ground, and every now and then he bends down and picks something up, a fossil seashell or a bit of petrified bone, examines it closely before dropping it into the old Folgers coffee can that he’s carrying.

And she understands that she’s come here, to this when and where, because years later Daria won’t have time to reach Kansas, because the jackals will be too close, and they may be weak, but not so weak that they can’t kill, that they can’t delay. The man stoops down and picks up something that looks a little like a large, wooden spool. He rolls it back and forth in his palm and then turns towards Niki. He smiles when he sees her.

“It’s a fish vertebra,” he says. “Paleontologists call this fish
Xiphactinus
. Big old fucker, fifteen feet long, if you’ll excuse my French.”

“What’s that there?” Niki asks him, pointing at a metallic glint on the ground, picking her way along the chalk wash until she’s standing beside him.

“Hi,” he says. “My name’s Joe.”

“Right there, Joe,” Niki says and picks the ball bearing up from the place where it’s come to rest in the white-gray-yellow gully. “Look. There’s writing on it.”

“Damn,” he says, taking the ball bearing from her and holding it up to the sun. “N-I-K-I,” he says, reading out the letters. “Niki. Now what do you think that means?”

“You never can tell,” she replies, and he smiles and puts the fish vertebra and ball bearing into his coffee can.

“Don’t lose that, Joe. It’s more important than you think,” and then Kansas goes away, dissolves like frost on a summer day, and for a while she’s nowhere and nowhen at all. It isn’t dark, but there’s no light, either, and she waits with the whispering ghosts of all the babies trapped in Limbo until she’s finally somewhere else again.

Standing in Spyder’s old house, almost dark outside and getting cold inside because Spyder never runs the gas heater, and Niki was asleep only a few minutes before. Asleep in Spyder’s bed, until she woke up alone and the bedspread was missing. She called for Spyder but no one answered. The stub of a candle flickering on the floor, so it looked even darker outside than it really was, and there was the sound of hammering coming from somewhere in the house.