Ian Tregillis - Something More Than Night

by Ian Tregillis

  So when a congregant coughed and Santorelli glanced toward the narthex, I rode the slipstream of his gaze from the memory fragment into the flickering shadows near the votive candles. Then I skipped ahead from that blustery December morning to the present, a few days after flametop squiffed it. Felt like a few years at most, but that was a guess because the good father hadn’t been giving thought to the calendar when Gabby lifted the memory fragment.

  The church smelled like incense, candle wax, cheap wine, and old people. In prouder times, the joint had boasted an imitation pipe organ; its reverberations were etched in the atmosphere. The arches and stonework gave the place decent acoustics. (The monkeys had done their best, but compared to the Pleroma it still sounded like two cats fighting over last night’s blue plate trout special.) Somebody had fixed the broken window. Sunlight cast prison-shadows from the grille over the replacement glass. Other windows depicted the stations of the cross; dust motes swirled in the cross fire between the Stripping of Garments and the Crucifixion. A fresco behind the altar depicted some joe who looked like the model for the Shroud of Turin as envisioned by a Hollywood focus group. The jasper was attended by a flock of little angels, none of them remotely correct. If the scene up there hadn’t been so repressed, with everybody clothed and nobody grinding anything, I might have fingered the artist for a penitente.

  It was quiet as a nun’s boudoir. But for an old bat in the rear pew who mumbled while she fingered her beads, the place was deserted. So much the better. I lit a candle for flametop and dropped a few beans in the donation box. Then I crossed the nave heading for the confessionals. My footsteps shattered the reverent silence. The old bird gave me the evil eye until I doffed my hat. Some bluehairs know how to make a decent guy feel like a creep.

  A pair of confessionals sat in the wings of the transept, a bit behind the altar, but in plain view of an electroplated crucifix. I figured this was accidentally on purpose. Maybe the theory was nothing got people’s tongues wagging like the sight of a little torture. Silly monkeys. A bottle of hooch was the quickest way to a man’s heart or a roundheel’s sheets. That had been the case since the invention of hooch.

  A mugg wearing a leather jacket over a shirt that might have been respectable a dozen Easters ago tiptoed from a confessional. He wore clunky boots, but he stepped more quietly than me. Just about jumped out of his skin when he saw me waiting. He gave me a quick, jerky nod as he passed. His eyes were a little red and a lot unfocused. He reminded me of whatshisname. Molly’s brother.

  He moved stiffly. The jacket rode a little too high on his shoulders. The breeze of his passing gave me a whiff of wet iron and fresh antiseptic. I wondered what fresh wounds lay beneath the leather.

  “Hey, mac. The father in?”

  He spun around. “What’s that?”

  “Santorelli. He on the clock or were you just sawing logs in there?”

  “Oh.” He looked around. “Nah. He stepped out. I think he went to the can. I dropped my wallet. Just went back to grab it.” He held it up where I could see. It was one of those old black leather things with the chain; the clasp on the chain had slipped open. Then he jammed the thing back into his trousers, winced, and rubbed his shoulder.

  “You don’t say? What’s the going rate for coveting an ox these days? If it’s more than a double sawbuck I’ll have to roll someone in the parking lot.”

  The penitente frowned. “What?”

  “Been a while since I’ve been to confession.” I pointed at the pocket with the dangling chain. “Guess times have changed. Didn’t used to pay up front.”

  “I’m not paying nothing to nobody. The father gave me a card. For some guys I should talk to.” Reflections of stained glass melted together in his wet eyes. Yeah. Definitely reminded me of whatshisface. Though he might have gotten piffled just to deal with the pain from his recent surgery. Maybe he wasn’t a hard case.

  But maybe he was. I nodded, like I’d been down those same mean streets. “Counselor?”

  “Up yours,” he said. “I’m not an alkie.” Off he went, no longer caring about the noise. I didn’t shush him. The bird with the rosary would cut the twerp down to size with one frown.

  Santorelli still hadn’t shown. I hate waiting. I lit a pill. Drawing deep, I tipped my head back, and jetted the smoke at a window depicting a newly beheaded Saint John. The poor lug looked surprised. Like he’d been minding his own business, making no trouble for nobody, when the axman came calling.

  I gave him a sympathetic shrug. “You and me both, pal. You and me both.”

  I’d waited about half a cigarette and was looking for an ashtray when another old bag came squeaking into the transept on a pair of denim tennis shoes. She wore a thin gold necklace over her sweatshirt. Built like a cannonball but without the personality. You know the type.

  “Sir!” she hissed. “This is a church!”

  “Yeah, but don’t worry. It’s my day off.”

  “There is no smoking in a church.”

  “That’s queer. Play your cards wrong and it’s nothing but smoke and flame forever and ever amen. Ain’t that so, sister?”

  “You are smoking. There is no smoking in a church!” I had never heard anybody pack so much self-righteousness into a stage whisper.

  “All right, all right. Don’t flip your wig.” If it had been handy, I would’ve doused my pill in the little birdbath full of water. But that was back by the front door. So I ground the butt under my heel. “Say, is Father Santorelli still in the can? It’s worth some cabbage if you send somebody after him. I don’t have all day.”

  She blinked. “The father,” she said, “is performing the Sacrament of Reconciliation.” It started as a hiss and ended just below a shriek. She had all the emotional range of a teakettle.

  “If you say so, doll.” By that point I figured she was about an inch from calling the bulls. That would have soured the father on me, and I wasn’t up for using my shine on Santorelli if I could avoid it. Between METATRON and my pals the Cherubim, I was feeling about as spry as a geriatric transplant patient. So I made nice by picking the butt from the floor and sticking it in my pocket. She spared time for one last harrumph before squeaking off to wherever they store the busybodies. I pictured watery fruit punch in paper cups and a coffee urn so old it might have belonged to Pontius Pilate before he swore off the stuff because it made him edgy.

  Still no sign of Santorelli. I wandered around until I found the biffy. He wasn’t there. I checked the frails’ side, too, just in case. No soap.

  I returned to the confessional. The door where ratface had emerged hung slightly ajar. I bent my ear but came up empty. Not a whisper. So unless another sinner had slipped in while I was in the can, and Santorelli was doing his thing telepathically, he had to be waiting for another sad sack to come along and play the fiddle for him.

  I looked at the door again, then to the window. Saint John gave me a little shrug of encouragement. Bad influence, that one.

  I slipped into the confessional, latched the door behind me. “Forgive me, father, for I’ve never done this before. And I’ve been sinning since before Adam’s first birthday.” I took the silence as a prompt to continue. “But I’m in a jam and hoping you’ll lend a guy a hand.”

  Then I put a sock in it, waiting for him to say something. He didn’t. That’s when I noticed the way something on the other side cast a heavy shadow on the screen between us. I listened to the silence again, and caught what I’d missed before: no heartbeat.

  Oh, Bayliss. You’re a fine lollipop.

  I slipped out again, checked for stray eyes, then reentered the priest’s side. My shoe sent a handful of beads skittering into the church. A few more rolled under the sole of my shoe, like pranksters poised to trip me. But I couldn’t kick them away and I couldn’t bend down to pick them up. It was cramped in there on account of the stiff.

  Santorelli’s face had gone the color of an early sunrise, and his peepers looked like they were trying to make a break for i
t. A line of small round indentations stippled his throat just above the dog collar. Somebody had tried to perforate his neck with a rosary. He looked more put out than Saint John’s haberdasher.

  I fished out a handkerchief and closed his eyes. Took a bit of digging before I found the lids. They’d beat a hasty retreat into his skull.

  Chemistry and biology had taken him beyond anything I could do. Beyond anything any of us could do short of taking an ax to the Mantle of Ontological Consistency, but I figured METATRON had been riled up plenty already. Dead men don’t dance, they don’t answer questions, and they don’t finger their killers. So says the MOC.

  Somebody had Santorelli rubbed. Would this lead back to Gabriel and the Pleroma? Or was this sheer bad luck, a private little tiff purely among the monkeys? Maybe the padre had made it with that lonely housewife after all.

  Yeah. Fat chance, Bayliss.

  It isn’t so easy, rifling a dead man’s pockets. The father kept slumping forward on his little bench and I kept shoving him back, like a coed fending off a drunken suitor. Hard to do it quietly. I managed to search him, but it was a bust. He didn’t have a single thin dime on him. All I found was a tiny plastic case, the kind the monkeys use for storing contact lenses and an earbud, but that was empty. His canals were clean, and I knew from my close acquaintance with his peepers that he wasn’t wearing lenses. I wondered what secrets were stored in their cache.

  There was nothing to tell me whether he’d made enemies here on Earth, and twice as much nothing to tell me why Gabriel had been keeping tabs on him.

  Dead priest. Dead end.

  I felt a powerful need for fresh air. I slipped out again and used the handkerchief to close the door gently behind me. Let somebody else find Santorelli. His groupies would start missing him long before the smell gave him away. I looked up at Saint John again and put a finger over my lips.

  There was nobody to stop or question me on the way out. The church was deserted. The kid had legged it. So had the bird working the rosary. I cupped a hand in the birdbath and wet my gills with some holy water. Then I flicked a few droplets into the air; they became the vanguard of a steady rain within my Magisterium.

  The downpour made streams of the gutters, rushing cataracts of the storm drains. By the time I made the door to my building, the brim of my hat released a little waterfall each time I tipped my head. I was soaked to the bone. Good. It fit my mood.

  The hair in the door frame hadn’t moved. Which meant that either nobody had come by to toss the place, or that somebody had and they were throwing punches well above my weight class. Hard to say. The boys with the flaming faces didn’t have much of a track record for subtlety. I was too bushed to get twisted up over it.

  I tossed my hat on a hook behind the door. My coat squelched when I draped it over a hanger. In the kitchen I poured myself a stiff one. Then I returned to the living room. The leaden sky outside the window turned the chessboard a mottled gray. I settled in the chair alongside the board and pulled out a pipe. Don’t know how many times I packed and unpacked the bowl while frowning at the puzzle.

  Gabriel’s murder. The Jericho Trumpet. A dead priest. Plenary Indulgences. Molly. This board had too many pieces, and I didn’t know the rules.

  The phone rang again. Like it had been all day. By now flametop was probably doing figure eights. I sighed. Couldn’t avoid her forever. But I also couldn’t swallow the thought of dealing with her right then; it gave me indigestion.

  I unplugged the phone and stuck it in the cupboard. Nuts to her. But while in the kitchen I took the opportunity to refill my glass. Somebody had emptied it when my back was turned. (Charming little neighborhood you’ve built for yourself, Bayliss.) My tonsils drowned under the taste of fire and oak. I lit a match on my thumbnail, and puffed until smoke glazed my sinuses with the aroma of cherrywood.

  I moved a knight. Moved it back. I smoked and drank and stared at the chessboard while rivulets of holy water traced nonsense patterns on soot-smeared windowpanes.

  8

  JUST BE GLAD IT WASN’T A TUBA

  The light hurt worse than getting sliced apart by any tram. And knowing what she’d done to Ria hurt even worse than the light. Molly tried to scream, but she was caught like a bug in amber too thick for the faintest exhalation. Yet she couldn’t flail and couldn’t struggle because there was nothing to push against. Something had erased Heaven and Earth, leaving in their place only pain.

  Molly returned to consciousness through a vague awareness the pain had receded. But there was no sensation of the passage of time; time did not exist, neither did a reality against which to measure it. Something had erased the pain, leaving in its place … nothing. Her incorporeal awareness inhabited a formless void, a solipsistic universe. The Pleroma, if this was the Pleroma, had been rebooted.

  She didn’t come to her senses in comfortable, familiar surroundings. She couldn’t. Her Magisterium had been deleted. Her sense of self, her identity, her connection to her earthly life, her imprint on the universe … gone.

  This was a punishment. She’d broken the rules. Whatever those were.

  What had Bayliss said about laying low? Maybe she should have listened. Maybe she would have, if he’d bothered to explain the rules to her.

  Was Bayliss still around? Shit, did Earth still exist? Or had that been wiped out, too? And what about Martin? And—

  Ria.

  Oh, fucking hell. Ria.

  The memory hit like a lightning bolt. Molly’s mind crackled. If she’d had a body, the fiery intensity of her shame would have incinerated it.

  But she had no mouth with which to scream, no Magisterium to echo with her sorrow. She had no eyes with which to weep, no pocket of reality where gravity could clutch at her tears. Molly’s anguish could have no outlet until she built one.

  That, she realized, was her true punishment.

  * * *

  After reestablishing the fuzziest approximation of matter and energy and objective persistence (as well as time, to provide a sense of “after”) Molly recovered her consciousness in the bedroom of a hastily sketched semblance of her kaleidoscope Magisterium.

  Tears of blood crusted her face. On her way to the ghostly bathroom, she tripped over the sensation of being sneezed upon by a sick horse. She scrubbed her face, her cheeks, her nose, her eyelids. Flakes of scabbed blood fell into her eyes when she washed her face. They scratched and pinched, then melted into long crimson smears along her eyeballs. She pinched the bridge of her nose until her tears ran pink. In the mirror she watched a thin red trickle leaking from the corner of her eye—

  Blood streaming from Ria’s nose, piss staining her pants …

  A violent spasm wracked Molly. She hit all fours and vomited foggy moonlight. Where it splashed against the bathroom tiles, her puke jangled like fistfuls of silverware flung against a gong. It tasted like the stale air inside a bicycle inner tube, and carried chunks of a shattered bike pedal. Her stomach convulsed until her face ran wet with tears and snot, and streamers of foggy spittle dangled from her lips.

  When the spasms subsided, she hauled herself to the edge of the bathtub and wept. These tears burned. But they couldn’t cleanse the guilt that clung to Molly like a sheen of oil. She had lobotomized the woman she’d loved, and maybe even still loved. She’d turned one of the people whom she held most dear into a shuddering, mindless, pants-wetting vegetable. Ria would never listen to another Édith Piaf song, never again tell anybody that spinach tasted like ass, never haul another wheelbarrow of poisoned lake bed.

  Molly couldn’t even say she was sorry. Couldn’t ask for forgiveness. So she wept until the tears ran dry.

  Then, on top of everything else, she’d been assaulted again. It had felt as though it were directed at her, this perfect Platonic anger.

  She had one option, and she hated herself for considering it. But she called Bayliss anyway.

  It rang thirty-two times on the first attempt. She hung up, redialed, listened to another nineteen
rings. Bayliss was ignoring her, or too drunk to answer, or dead. Maybe whatever he’d been running from, the thing that had him so terrified, had finally caught up to him. She didn’t relish the thought of being stuck in eternity without a tour guide. Even one as obnoxious as Bayliss. Eternity was a big place.

  He’d mentioned a Choir, by which he seemed to be referring to all the angels. It sounded like there were many. Maybe there was a way to encounter them, learn from them, foster a relationship. Maybe they weren’t all as bad as Bayliss. But maybe they were worse. Maybe they all had invisible wings and faces of fire and voices appropriate for narrating the end of the world.

  Molly put the notion aside. She was on her own.

  And first things first: she refused to live in a diaphanous trash heap. It would take forever to re-create and reassimilate the fragments of memory debris, but then again, she had eternity. And the process would keep her rooted in her human life. She didn’t want to lose that. No matter what, she didn’t want to become something else. If she drifted away she might forget about Ria and Martin, might lose the connection, might lose the drive to help them and heal them. She had to cling to whatever part of herself was still human. Wasn’t she still human at heart?

  The bedroom floorboards lay under a synesthetic puddle, the soapy taste of wind rustling a field of lavender mixed with just a hint of the tingly smell of her father’s stubble when he kissed her on the forehead. She stepped into the field, felt the sunlight on her skin, and remembered. She’d been riding in the car with Dad, back when they had lived in Alberta, and they were bumping down back roads the way he always liked to do, just to see what he could see. They came around a bend to suddenly face a vast field of purple. She had been sixteen and hadn’t said anything to him all day because she was sixteen and hated everybody. She scowled when he parked and got out. But she followed, and when a breeze came swirling through the field, the world smelled of lavender soap. On the way home she told him she was a lesbian and fuck him if he didn’t like it, and without any pause he said, “Okay, but can I still be your dad?” and that was that. Molly spent the rest of the ride home with her head on his shoulder, telling him about a girl at school. Mom did pretty well with the news, but not as good as Dad.