Ian Tregillis - Something More Than Night

by Ian Tregillis

  She was a ghost, a revenant spirit cursed to witness the death of her old love.

  No, something told her. A sickening murmur at the edge of her consciousness said, Not to witness. It was Bayliss’s voice, she realized, making a pronouncement final as the dregs of a wine bottle: Careful, angel. He’ll stroke out if you keep giving him both barrels.

  She had caused this. She had done this to Ria.

  The memory of something else Bayliss had said landed like a punch in the gut: there ain’t no afterlife.…

  Molly grabbed her hair with one fist. She cried. “Oh no, no, no. Oh God no.” She wailed; the Earth shook.

  This was her fault. If Molly truly were an angel, she was Ria’s Angel of Death.

  The girlfriend checked Ria’s breath and heartbeat. Molly could hear Ria’s heart thumping away beneath the panicked panting of the girlfriend, the whispering of wind through the surrounding oaks, the patter of squirrels on the roof. She could smell mint on Ria’s breath, too. She was still breathing.

  The girlfriend pulled an earbud from a pocket and called an ambulance. Though there were tears in her eyes she didn’t cry while explaining the situation and giving directions. “Calhoun lake bed,” she said, “corner of West Lake and the parkway.” She was calm and focused. Molly liked her for that. It was what Ria needed. She needed somebody strong and effective. Somebody who could hold her.

  Molly couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t even hold Ria’s hand while the ambulance came. She was powerless—

  What else had Bayliss said? Back at the diner?

  … an angel all by its lonesome could shape reality to any old whim, anything at all …

  “Screw this,” said Molly. I reject this bullshit reality.

  But she had no idea how to fix things here in the real world. She couldn’t even make her phone call out. How could she undo this?

  What if it really was a stroke? Had a blood vessel burst in Ria’s brain? How would she fix that? If she knew where it was, maybe she could imagine it whole again. Imagine no surfeit of blood pressing on the surrounding brain tissue. Undo the leak, push the blood back into its container, seal the hole. But what was Ria’s brain supposed to look like? What had it been before Molly hurt her? Where had all the jelly and blood gone? What if she tried to fix it, but changed something without realizing it, and then Ria wasn’t Ria any longer? Like that railroad guy with the iron rod blown through his skull?

  That was just as bad as watching her die. Either way she’d be gone forever.

  A faint thrum shook the floor. The vibrations, low and slow like the heartbeat of the Earth, felt more like a subtle pressure than a sound. Ria’s girlfriend didn’t react, but Molly could feel it brushing her eyelashes, tickling her skin. It was too subtle for human senses.

  It came from Ria’s skull. The sloshing of spilled blood made it ring like a bell with every beat of her fluttering heart. Molly knew she was listening to the soundtrack of a massive hemorrhage: the inaudible scream of a dying mind.

  Shit, shit, shitshitshitshitshit.

  She had to fix this. But all that blood … it kept coming and coming, a crimson flood squeezing Ria’s head like an overfilled balloon. Trying to push it all back would be as futile as King Canute cursing the tide. And even if she won, the damage to Ria’s brain … She didn’t know where to begin.

  She couldn’t mend this. But she could undo it. It was much simpler to imagine a reality where none of this had ever happened. Where she hadn’t tried to force Ria to see her. Where she had never come here in the first place. Where the last few minutes had never happened. Where Molly wouldn’t have to shoulder this regret, too. A reality that conformed to Molly’s frantic wish to undo this. Everything had been fine five minutes ago.

  Five minutes, thought Molly. That’s all she needs.

  Molly shut her eyes and concentrated. She needed a rhythm, but Ria’s feathery heartbeat was too irregular, too weak. Instead she attuned herself to the adrenaline-fueled tempo of the girlfriend’s despair. Her heart was a strong and steady metronome. Somewhere, the shriek of an ambulance siren pierced the evening.

  Molly imagined time slowing down, each swing of the metronome’s inverted pendulum taking just a tiny bit longer. She imagined sand trickling through an hourglass, each grain falling more slowly than the one before it. She imagined the blood pulsing more and more slowly into Ria’s skull.

  The first signs of change came at the edge of perceptibility. Molly couldn’t tell if the slowing of the other woman’s heartbeat happened because she was finding her center and taking the crisis in stride like a zen master, or because the time between beats was stretching out like soft taffy. But then she felt it in the invisible air, sensed the torpid molasses-eddies of each exhalation.

  She pinched the bridge of her nose. Pushed.

  Sand grains drifting like feathers. A heartbeat ponderous as church bells. Blood flowing slower than syrup. The ambulance wail fell through the octaves until it became a foghorn. The lub-dub of a panicked heart stretched and stretched and stretched until it was just a lub, just a negative space in the soundscape, nothing but the liminal silence of a single hand clapping.

  Molly opened her eyes. She stood at the center of a frozen tableau. Ria’s girlfriend still knelt beside her, frozen like a victim of Medusa’s gaze, caught in the act of stroking Ria’s face. The whispers of encouragement passing her lips were trapped in gelled air like flies in amber. The world had become a sideways hourglass, its sand motionless, flowing to neither bulb.

  She had dammed the river of time, but it pushed back. It squeezed her. A relentless pressure, a swell of pain. The weight of the world was heavy indeed. But it wasn’t enough. Molly gritted her teeth against the pain and pushed still harder. She struggled to maintain her concentration. Backward, she managed. Only a hair … just a few minutes … She rallied her strength for one final shove.

  An inhaled prayer swirled into the girlfriend’s mouth.

  The un-beat of a feeble heart sucked a teaspoon of blood from Ria’s brain.

  A siren’s un-wail receded into a retreating ambulance, leaving a hole in the night where its shriek had been.

  It was working. Just a little more—

  The world disappeared in a blaze of searing white light. Molly cowered before an anger so vast it shook the pillars of Heaven; a tidal wave of indignation overwhelmed the breakwaters of her mind. The light scorched away everything it touched. Molly’s concentration shriveled like an ant caught in the sunlight through a third-grader’s magnifying glass. Her consciousness followed.

  FORBIDDEN, screamed the universe.

  7

  DON’T GET UP, I’LL LET MYSELF OUT

  Maybe you’ve been in the sneezer. So maybe you know what it’s like when the prowl car boys get bored and decide you’ll make a fine little pigeon, powerless but smart enough not to kick up a fuss. And maybe you know what it’s like when the brass sees your shiner and he knows the score but you feed him a line about taking a tumble on the curb while you were jammed to the gills. And he’s looking you in the eye and he knows you’re not on the level but the buttons are there looking innocent as altar boys and all you can do is smile and nod and thank him for the hospitality. But he doesn’t like the look of your nose so he asks the wrecking crew to unstraighten it for you.

  That’s what it’s like when METATRON gets hot under the collar. It’s no picnic.

  The difference is that when the buttons call it a night and pack up the rubber hoses they don’t leave your consciousness spread across a thousand little stains on the walls and floor. Your mind doesn’t disperse into a hundred million fireflies, each crumb of your existence reduced to a feeble glow trapped in a barrel of amber. You go back to your cot and sleep it off. You don’t have to reassemble yourself from bits and pieces of carbon and hemoglobin and nucleic acid and vitreous humor. So after the godlight faded it took a while to rebind the more esoteric pages from the book of my long and fascinating life.

  I’d tell you
I came to, except there was no “to” at which to come. The Pleroma was still without form and void. But so was my Magisterium. Like a snowball in a potter’s kiln, it had melted, sublimated, steamed away until the furnace heat of METATRON’s rage had cracked the component molecules, stripped the atoms, prised the baryons apart, sintered the underlying concepts. The Voice of God had taken a fire hose to the blackboard. Clean slate.

  Joes and janes all over the Pleroma were having the same experience. Not a single Magisterium left standing. The Pleroma had become a featureless infinite-dimensional expanse; the homogeneous superposition of uncountable maybes. It’s like that when METATRON goes on a tear. Been a spell since the last time, though. I’d have to check the calendar, but I’d wager the sun hadn’t yet been making helium the last time around.

  Sure it hurts when METATRON does its thing, but that’s beside the point. The pain is a side effect. And besides, it’s not pain as the monkeys would understand it. METATRON doesn’t brandish a willow switch when it takes us behind the shed. No. To beings accustomed to shaping reality with the merest thoughts and whims, there is no greater punishment—no greater chastisement—than the revocation of willpower. The erasure of our personal imprints upon the universe. (How would you feel if you were billions of years old with nothing to show for it after all that time? People skip school reunions for less.) So that’s what I found after putting myself together. The Choir’s collective Magisteria had been stripped away, leaving nothing but a bare bones Pleroma.

  And the MOC, of course. Always the MOC.

  That’s the long version leading to what happened next. Short version? I had to rebuild my apartment from the quarks up before I could have the luxury of waking up with the worst hangover since the discovery of alcohol.

  So I did. And then I passed out again.

  Sometime later I rolled out of bed while a vengeful mariachi band tested the acoustics inside my skull. My options were an ice pick behind the eyes or two aspirin and a glass of water. I opted for the latter. The bathroom was closer and besides which I hadn’t an ice pick handy because I don’t take my rye on the rocks. So I chewed a couple of tablets and chased them with enough water to drown a fish. The mariachis fired their trumpet player and found somebody who knew how to stay on beat. Those kids had promise.

  By the time I wobbled to the kitchen and got the percolator going I felt halfway human. Which should tell you just how bad it was. The Voice of God really takes it out of a person. And my pals the Cherubim took pride in their work; I still had the marks to prove it. But the bacon grease was popping along and I’d just cracked a couple eggs into it when the phone rang. It didn’t take a green label shamus to finger the caller.

  What’s a guy to do? She had a habit of flinging herself into trouble. It seemed that no matter how hard I tried to drill just the tiniest bit of common sense into Molly’s head, she was having none of it. Stubborn as a mule, that cluck. I told her to stay buttoned, so what did she do? Apparently she made a beeline for METATRON to poke it in the all-seeing eye. And now that things had gone sour she was calling me again.

  Dames.

  I took a steadying breath and reminded myself I carried some of the blame for this flop. After failing to find somebody suitably passive, as I’d been strong-armed to do, I compounded the mistake with my eagerness to put some distance between us. Maybe—maybe—I cut a few corners when reading her the headlines.

  So it wasn’t without sympathy when I contemplated the hole she’d dug for herself. The Choir would lay this at her feet sooner than later. She was the new kid, and this mess had her fingerprints all over it. She was in trouble.

  But so was I, no thanks to her.

  So I decided to let flametop simmer. Couldn’t give her the cold shoulder forever; I’d have to tell her about the Trumpet and what I found at Gabby’s place. Plus, if I wanted to get through this mess with my skin intact, I needed to know what kind of stunt she’d pulled to arouse METATRON. But that conversation could wait until I wasn’t full of no coffee.

  It takes some effort to get on the bad side of the Voice. Far as I knew, it took a major violation of the Mantle of Ontological Consistency. Something you couldn’t hide under a fresh coat of paint. Like making thermodynamics nonlocal, or putting a dent in causality. I tried to figure how she might have pulled that stunt, but the sums came up short.

  Meanwhile the phone kept ringing, and I kept not answering it. It rang while I ate. It rang while I rinsed the dishes in the sink. It rang while I had a second cup of joe, lit a pill, smoked it, and emptied the percolator. It rang while I glanced over the chess problem arranged on the board under the window; it rang while the mariachis ensured today wouldn’t be the day I found that elegant mate in seven. It rang while I scraped my face. It rang while I donned a clean shirt and collar. It rang while I slipped out and locked the door. I could hear its ring echoing through my digs when I plucked a hair from my head and stuck it high in the door frame where any casual thieves weren’t likely to spot it.

  Figured it was only a matter of time before they tossed my place, too. I could try to keep my distance from Molly, but the hard boys already had us together. I’d told them as much. Careful, Bayliss, you’re getting soft.

  Gabby had been keeping an eye on Molly, but I couldn’t get my arms around that one. Not yet. He’d also put the bee on a priest, though, and I figured that was gravy. I’d drop in on the guy, brace him a little bit. If he clammed up I’d play the miracle card and turn his communion wine into communion water. That one’s always a big hit with the godly types.

  I pulled the priest’s memory fragment from my wallet. Thing of beauty, the way Gabriel had lifted it; damn thing was still going strong on its short little loop. I let it unfold around me until I sank into that vast empty space behind the eyes that the monkeys call, with no small amount of self-delusion, their subconscious.

  Father Vincent Santorelli’s flock liked him because he was a product of the same Chicago neighborhood. His family had been there for generations going back to the time of speakeasies and tommy guns. His brother was a firefighter. He’d given the Last Rites to his very own mother, not five blocks from the church where he’d given the homily every week for the past ten years. He coached Little League games in the summer, worked with a local youth choir, and donated the rest of his spare time to act as a chaplain at the army hospital up near Oak Park. A real pillar of the community. But the kid thing gave me pause. When I first sensed that pride in overcoming temptation, and the hidden guilty secret, I figured I knew where this was headed. Figured it wouldn’t take much digging to find a history of trying to make it with the altar boys. I’d seen this story too many times to expect anything else. But I was wrong.

  Near as I could tell, Father Vince was the real deal. The man wouldn’t hurt a child if you pressed an iron to his temple. He considered himself a failure because he struggled to find loving forgiveness in his heart for the creeps who did like the little boys. His recent brush with temptation had involved the wife in an estranged marriage he’d been trying to counsel. Nice figure, gentle words, a hand on the knee. He reacted the way any red-blooded man would. As propositions went, it was about as chaste as you could imagine, but he berated himself for it. Some guys need to loosen up.

  Santorelli was solid. Didn’t agree with his choice where the lonely frail was concerned, but that was between him and his conscience. I liked him.

  But something had him wound tighter than a moneylender on a bank holiday. I sank deeper, feeling around for a thread of awareness that might have swirled through the back of Santorelli’s mind while he laid a communion wafer on a fat pale tongue and tried not to recoil from the stench of an abscessed tooth. A lingering worry like that usually finds room to fester at the edges of the subconscious; that’s why it lingers.

  Took a bit of digging because the loop was just a few seconds long. It’s tricky getting your fingers on something that slippery. But then I found it. And you could have knocked me over with one swipe of
the racing forms.

  Santorelli was worked up over a bit of simony.

  The Plenary Indulgence predated the Middle Ages, in one form or another, but the Catholics had resurrected it at the turn of the millennium. A piece of paper with the power to bleach the stain of sin from a man’s soul. A Get-Out-Of-Purgatory-Free card, certified (in theory) by the pope himself. Say a few Our Fathers, do a few rosaries and a few good deeds, donate a bit to the ol’ church coffers, and that roll in the hay with the hotcha babysitter gets expunged from the scroll on Saint Peter’s desk. Got her pregnant, jack? What’s that about an abortion? Better buy the triple pack.

  As rackets went, it was a thing of beauty. The monkey who dreamed up this one back in the day must have been so bent he tied his shoes with his tongue. But this had been business as usual for decades. They’d revisited the Indulgence racket long before Santorelli had taken his vows. So what was his angle?

  That detail was too complex, tied in with too many other things, for me to pull it from a few seconds of memory. Even one lifted as cleanly as Gabriel had done. If I wanted the rest, I’d have to speak with the good father in person. But now at least I had a bead on why Gabby had been shadowing the priest.

  Santorelli heard confessions on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Figured it was the perfect time to pay him a visit. The poor lug didn’t get much traffic, but I still bet he’d be happy for a break from the usual litany. Most monkeys share a few things in common, chief among them impure thoughts and a tendency to spit on the golden rule. After ten years of listening to that twice a week he’d be more than ready for a little grace from yours truly. Sure, I was rusty, but so what? This guy was a believer. A real hard case. He’d eat it up with a spoon. And he seemed a solid sort. We’d be fast pals, him and me.