Murder of Angels (4 page)

“No,” he said, but no change at all in his expression, the strained patience, his good-nurse face that she hated so much. “It’s not your fault. I think I’m getting a headache.”

Niki picked up one of the CDs, turned it over and stared at her reflection in the iridescent plastic. Her face too round, too fat because the Elavil made her gain weight and hold water. Dark circles beneath her eyes and the disc’s center hole where her nose ought to be. She held the CD at an angle so it caught the lamplight, sliced it up into spectrum wedges, violet to blue to green, yellow to red, and she hummed quietly with the song. Daria’s bass thumping out the rhythm like an erratic heartbeat, breathless fingertip dance across steel strings to draw music from nothing, and Niki murmured the last part of the chorus just loud enough that Marvin would hear.

“‘Dark in day, I’d always say, that’s not the way to know,’” her voice and Daria’s, pretending they were together because Daria was still on tour, out singing for other people in Nashville or Louisville or Memphis, some distant Southern city that Niki had never seen and never wanted to see. And her reflection in the CD wavered then, as if the plastic were water now and someone had just dipped their hand into it, concentric ripples racing themselves towards the edge of the disc, and Niki dropped it.

“Is something wrong?” Marvin asked, and no, Niki said, didn’t
say
the word aloud but shook her head, not taking her eyes off the CD lying on the floor. It had stopped rippling and she stared back up at herself from the mercury-smooth underbelly of the disc.

“You’re
sure,
Niki?” and she looked up at Marvin, hoping he wouldn’t see that she was frightened, because then he’d try to get her to tell him why, to explain another one of the things that no one ever believed she really saw or heard. The things they gave her pills for, so that she wouldn’t really see or hear them, either.

“I dropped it,” she said. “Sorry,” and then she smiled for him, and Marvin smiled back and stopped looking so concerned.

“It’s almost midnight,” he said. “Don’t forget your medicine. And will you please use the headphones if you’re going to keep playing that same song over and over?”

Niki glanced nervously back at the CD, but it was still just a CD again. Nothing that shimmered or rippled like ice water, and she reached for the headphones lying in their place on the shelf beside the stereo as “Dark in Day” ended and began again.

Lady lost in all your pain and thunder, all your shattered wonder…

She reached down and used one finger to gently flip the disc over so she wouldn’t have to see the mirrored side anymore. The safer, printed-on side instead, Tom Waits’
Bone Machine,
and hardly any of the silver showing through.

Walking where the spinning world grows brittle, and I can’t find you there…

She plugged the black headphones into the stereo, and Daria’s voice shrank to a whisper, a small, faraway sound until Niki pulled the phones down over her head so that the music swelled suddenly around her again, wrapped her tight in electric piano and drums and the constant, comforting thump, thump, thump of the bass guitar.

You never look over your shoulder anymore,
Daria sang, her gravel-and-whiskey voice suspended somewhere indefinable between Niki’s ears, somewhere inside her head.
I’m afraid what you would see.
And Niki began singing again, never mind if it annoyed Marvin, because everything she did annoyed Marvin, and singing made her feel a little closer to Daria.

“‘Dark in day, I’d always say, dark in day, that’s not so far to fall.’”

The three prescription bottles were lined up neatly for her on one of the big speakers, the pills sealed inside like flies and ants and moths in polished chunks of amber. All her crazy medicine, her psychoactive trinity: Elavil and Xanax and the powder-blue Klonopin tablets. It made her feel better to have the bottles nearby, especially when Daria wasn’t. Niki reached for the Xanax, first station of that pharmaceutical cross, calming palindrome, and the glass of water that Marvin had brought her almost half an hour before.

Lady lost where night can’t reach you anymore, tripping softly ’round the edges you endure…

She popped the top off the plastic bottle and tipped it carefully so that only two or three of the pills would spill out into her open palm. Always careful, because she hated it when she poured out a whole handful by accident, that sudden rush like candy from a vending machine, and always a few that slipped, inevitably, between her fingers, bounced or rolled away across the floor, and she’d have to scramble about to find them. She tapped the mouth of the bottle once against her hand, but nothing happened. Niki checked to be sure the bottle wasn’t empty, saw there were at least two weeks’ worth of tablets left inside and tried again. And that time a single white pill came rolling out and lay glistening like a droplet of milk on her skin. It certainly wasn’t Xanax, whatever it was, wasn’t anything she was supposed to be taking and nothing she remembered ever having taken before, that tiny, glistening sphere like a ripe mistletoe berry, and
Those are poisonous, aren’t they?
she thought, holding the strange pill closer to her face.

Dark in day,
Daria sang inside her head,
I’d always say, dark in day, that’s not so far to fall.

And then a very faint, rubbery
pop,
and the white pill extended eight long and jointed legs, raised itself up, and she could see that there were eyes, too, shiny eyes so pale they were almost transparent, a half-circle dewdrop crown of eyes staring up at her. Niki squeezed her hand shut around the thing, the impossible spider pill, and glanced quickly towards Marvin. He was still sitting on the sofa, his nose buried in
The Moon and Sixpence
. So he hadn’t seen, had not seen anything at all and he wouldn’t, even if she walked across the room and showed it to him.

Pain then, little pain like someone pricking at her skin with a sharp sewing needle, and so she opened her hand again. But the spider was gone and there were only three pink Xanax, instead; Niki put the extra pill back into the bottle, set the bottle down on the floor beside her. She exhaled slowly and then took a deep, hitching breath. Her heart was racing, adrenaline-dizzy rush and beads of cold sweat, a faintly metallic taste like aluminum in her mouth.

You hold it all inside, you hold it all in, you hold it all inside you…

Niki chewed her lower lip and concentrated on breathing more slowly, breathing evenly, knew from experience she’d only wind up hyperventilating if she didn’t. She stared at her palm like a fortune-teller trying to divine the future from two Xanax; but there
was
something else there, something other than the pills, so small she hadn’t noticed it at first. A pinpoint welt, raised skin gone a slightly brighter shade of pink than her medication, and she closed her hand again, making a fist so tight her short nails dug painfully into her flesh.

The song ended, and this time Niki pulled the headphones off, let them fall to the floor among the CDs. The noise drew Marvin’s attention, but only for a moment. She forced a smile for him, something false but credible enough to pass for a smile, a strained charm against his questions, and he smiled back, relieved, and let his eyes drift once more to his book.

Not real,
she whispered, not aloud but safe inside her head, the way that Dr. Dalby had taught her.
Not real at all. Even if it meant something, even if I needed to see it and pay attention and remember I saw it, nothing real.

Like a memory or a ghost. Nothing that can
hurt
me.

But when she opened her hand again the welt was still there, the swelling a little more pronounced than before, and her palm had begun to throb slightly. The patient, faithful Xanax, as well, and four half-moon dimples left by her fingernails; any harder and she might have drawn blood, and that would have freaked Marvin out for sure.

Don’t you lock up. Keep moving,
and so she pressed her lips to her hand; the small welt felt hot when the tip of her tongue brushed over it, and Niki dry-swallowed the pills. She snapped the cap back on the Xanax bottle, took the Elavil next, then the Klonopin last of all, this routine methodical as counting rosary beads, and she drank all the water Marvin had brought her, even though it was warm and tasted faintly of dishwashing liquid. If she hadn’t he might have asked why, and one question could have led to another, and another. She set the prescription bottles back on the speaker, pressed the
OFF
button on the CD player, and “I think I’ll go to bed now,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning, Marvin.”

“Good night, dear,” Marvin replied, not bothering to look up at her. “Sweet dreams.”

“Yeah. You too,” she whispered, and then Niki took a deep breath and climbed the stairs alone.

Awaking from a dream of something she should have done differently, something lost, and Niki Ky stared up at the ceiling for a few minutes before she rolled over and looked at the alarm clock. LED numbers and letters that glowed the same murky yellow-green as cartoon toxic waste, 6:07
A.M
., and the darkness outside the bedroom window in case she needed a second opinion. Niki watched the window, wondering what woke her so suddenly, so completely, and if she was going to be able to get to sleep again. Her dreams, especially the very bad ones, usually left her disoriented for hours, uncertain if this world was real or if the other might have been. She’d once argued with Dr. Dalby for an hour over whether or not anyone could ever know the difference, could ever be sure.

And then Niki realized that her right hand was still hurting, so maybe that was what had pulled her out of the dream place; she held it up and examined her palm in the darkness, the pale, reflected glow of the city coming in through the curtains, and so she could make out the welt, swollen as fat and dark as a red-wasp sting. Something she’d hoped had only been part of the dream, the white spider pill and her injured hand; she touched it gently, tentatively, with the fingers of her left hand, pressed the soft pad of her index finger against the swelling, and it felt hard and feverish. Niki winced and sat up, switched on the lamp beside the bed, a Tiffany-shaded reading lamp Daria had given her as a gift on her twenty-sixth birthday, blue and green and violet kaleidoscope glass and the bronze mermaid rising graceful from the base, the whole sea caught in her outstretched arms.

Niki leaned back against the tall oak headboard and squinted at her hand; the lamplight hurt her eyes and she closed them for a second or two, opened them and blinked as her stubborn pupils began to adjust. The swelling was almost as big around as a quarter now, a purple-red hill disrupting the familiar topography of her hand, an ugly new obstacle for her troubled lifeline, and Niki touched it again. The solid center of the bump seemed to roll very slightly, as though a steel bead had been inserted just underneath the skin. She pushed at it a little harder, stopped when the pain made her eyes begin to water, tried to close her hand so she wouldn’t have to look at it anymore, but the muscles ached too much to make a fist.

“Shit,” she whispered, thinking that she should go to the bathroom down the hall and put something on the swelling, Bactine or Neosporin cream, maybe a Band-Aid, too. That she should probably show it to Marvin in the morning; no need to tell him about the tiny white spider, but surely this was real enough that even he could see it.

“Maybe you should
cut
it out,” said the boy standing at the foot of the bed, and when she looked up at him he smiled and his teeth were the color of polished hematite. He must have been there all along, watching her, waiting; his thin, solemn face was dirty, dirty face and dirtier hands, black grime beneath his nails. He held his head at an odd angle, like it was too heavy or his neck too weak to support it properly, and there was a ring of bruises circling his throat. The boy was dead.

“It might start to fester,” he said. “You should find a razor and cut it out before it does.”

“Maybe. I’ll ask Marvin about it in the morning,” Niki said, talking to a dead boy with a crooked neck, a dead boy standing there in her bedroom, and she knew she wasn’t
that
crazy, so she was still dreaming, same act, different scene, that’s all.

“You shouldn’t wait that long, Niki. It might be too late by then. It might eat in too deep and you’ll never get it back out.”

“How do you know my name?” she asked him, and the boy smiled at her again, a cold, secretive kind of smile, she thought. A smile because she didn’t understand and
he
did, that sort of a smile.

“You take too many pills,” he said, his dark, iron-ore teeth moving up and down, something nestled at the corner of his mouth that might have been a scab or an insect. “You don’t remember things you should. You don’t remember me.”

And then she does, and Niki closes her eyes, lies down hoping that she can force the dream to change again, some less tangible nightmare, some lesser regret or failure looking to settle the score with her.

“You never even told that fucking shrink of yours about me, Nicolan,” Danny Boudreaux said. “Daria pays someone a hundred and fifty dollars an hour just to listen to you whine, and you don’t even have the guts to start at the beginning.”

“Go away,” Niki whispered. “Leave me alone,” and she reached for Daria’s pillow and put it over her head, dim hope that he would go away if he couldn’t see her face anymore.

“You’re never going to be able to run
that
fast,” he sneered, and Niki felt all the sheets and blankets yanked suddenly away, the violent flutter of cloth like a fleeing ghost, and a damp gust of air washed over her. Heavy, smothering air too dank even for a San Francisco autumn morning, the stench of mold and mushrooms, stagnant water and vegetable rot, and she would drown in half the time it took to scream.