Ian Tregillis - Something More Than Night

by Ian Tregillis

  That brought Anne up short. Her ringlets swept past her ears. She blinked when she was startled. If she hadn’t been frothing over with anger it could have been attractive. “Come again?”

  Molly glanced around the library, wondering if this was the right place to discuss a murdered priest and Anne’s traumatic Plenary Indulgence. She wasn’t sure how to bring that up without sending Anne through the roof. The guy from the no-longer-a-circulation-desk watched them.

  “It’s a little complicated.” Molly checked her lenses for the local time, then asked, “I’ll buy you lunch if you’ll let me tell you about it. Please?”

  * * *

  A few mare’s tail clouds had unfurled across the southern sky. But the day was warm, the breeze cool. Molly ignored the smell from the river, focusing on how the day appeared to her human senses. Another dust devil sent bits of rubbish swirling alongside them like an ephemeral chaperone. Most storefronts along the street had been boarded up, much like the bank. The hardware store, a real estate office, even the movie theater were closed. But the army recruiting office on the corner had become a café.

  Molly hadn’t eaten since she died. Her human body would have been ravenous, even weak. She conjured the memory of hunger. She breathed on the dull red spark until it flared anew with the feeling her stomach would crumble upon itself for being so hollow. That would make it easier to share a meal with Anne. Ancient tradition, breaking bread; it fostered connection. How sad that she had to die and become something else in order to appreciate the beauty of this.

  Molly asked, “What are you guys doing at the library, anyway?”

  “Archiving. We scrounge for scraps to feed the great digital maw.” Anne shrugged. “Not everything made it online before the library system collapsed. The important stuff did, or the stuff deemed important at the time. The major university collections got slurped up early on. But the apocrypha and ephemera, the miscellany of small-town life, never made the transition. Thirty-year-old Little League scores, ads for used tractors, self-published manifestos by the local wackos. We’re combing for bits and pieces to fill in the picture of life in a simpler time.”

  “Who cares about some podunk baseball game from decades ago?”

  “You’d be surprised how many home movies we’ve converted. All blurry, all shaky, all boring as hell. But we have a grant from the state, so in they go. Along with all the rest of it.”

  “What happens when you’re done here?”

  “Move somewhere else and start over.”

  “But why care about so much worthless crap?” That earned a glare from Anne. Molly shook her head, sighing. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”

  Anne paused with her hand on the door to the café. “Everything was important to somebody at one time or another. We’ll forget who we are if we forget who we were.”

  She went inside while Molly stood on the sidewalk, digesting that. Anne had already taken a table in the corner by the time Molly caught up with her. There were more people here than at the library, but they were mostly concerned with each other. Oddly, Molly felt more comfortable with the prospects for a private conversation here than at the abandoned library.

  “What’s good here?”

  “Nothing. But you’re unlikely to get food poisoning as long as you don’t order anything with eggs in it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Relax. I’m kidding.”

  Molly ordered a cup of tomato soup and a BLT. Anne didn’t look at the menu. She ordered an iced tea, a tuna sandwich with mayo and please remember the mustard this time, chips on the side instead of greens, plus an extra pickle, and please remember the extra pickle this time.

  “Eat here a lot?”

  “It’s the only place to eat unless you feel like driving fifteen miles. You’d know that if you were from around here.” Their waitress brought Anne her iced tea. As she twisted the lemon slice, drizzling juice into the tea, Anne said, “But I already know you’re not. So why do you think I could help you?”

  Truth, Molly reminded herself.

  “I understand that you knew Father Santorelli. He, uh, died recently. I’m talking to people from his church to understand him better.”

  “Dead, huh? Well, too bad I’m not there to piss on his grave. But I’ll be sure take a pit stop if I’m ever in Chicago again.”

  Molly asked, “Why do you hate everybody so much?”

  Emotion flitted across Anne’s face too quickly for Molly to read it. But the pH of her perspiration shifted almost imperceptibly toward the alkaline, where ruffled feelings resided. She didn’t, Molly realized, want to be perceived as somebody so angry. A jangly chartreuse thing, the scent of hurt.

  Anne said, “Why are you really talking to me? Lots of people attend that church. You went well out of your way to find me.”

  Truth. “I’m in a lot of trouble,” said Molly. She lowered her voice. “There are some people who think I have something that doesn’t belong to me. I don’t, but they don’t believe me. For reasons I don’t understand, the guy who used to have the thing I don’t have was very interested in Father Santorelli and the people who received Plenary Indulgences at his church. If I can understand why, maybe I won’t get my ass kicked again.”

  “Wow.” Anne looked around the café, then leaned forward. Also in a lowered voice, she said, “That’s the most confusing lie I’ve ever heard. Am I supposed to believe you’re hiding from the Mafia, or that you’re a spy?”

  “I know how it sounds. Maybe I oversimplified a little bit, but the full story is even crazier. You’d be much less likely to believe me if I told you the rest of it. I promise I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Crazier, huh? Are you being chased by the Loch Ness Monster?”

  Molly said, “Why are you being so difficult?”

  Anne said, “Why are you so full of bullshit?”

  Molly didn’t want to force the issue as she’d done with the dealer in the lobby of Martin’s building; there was always the danger Anne could stroke out. But she also didn’t want to spend the rest of the day talking in circles like this. She studied Anne more closely, seeking a hook that would win her over. She looked again at the bloodshot eyes. The skin beneath them was dark and papery. Crumbs of a restless night had gathered in the corners of her eyelids. The lids were just a fraction of a second slow to rise after every blink, as though they carried extra weight. Anne’s hand trembled faintly when she lifted her glass of tea; her breathing carried a weary wheeze. Deep in the part of Molly that was still human, something sat up. She asked, “How long have you had trouble sleeping?”

  A pulse quickened at the hollow of Anne’s pale throat. To Molly’s disappointment, Anne didn’t make that little blink of surprise this time. She was able to cover her alarm because their food arrived. Anne concentrated on dissecting her sandwich. But Molly knew she had found the hook so she let her take her time. The soup was thin. It had come straight out of a can; the residual buzz of metal tingled across Molly’s tongue. She sipped at it anyway.

  While spreading mustard on her sandwich, Anne said, “What makes you think I’m not sleeping?”

  “Same thing that tells me your parents forced you to pursue a Plenary Indulgence.”

  That did the trick. This time, Anne did blink. She said, “My parents are religious, okay? As in really religious. As in they keep a statue of the Blessed Virgin in the dining room, complete with votive candles.”

  “Yikes. For real?”

  “Yeah. For really real. And when they found out I was gay, they freaked the fuck out.”

  The moment Molly had experienced via Anne’s stolen memory suddenly made sense. “They thought you were damned.”

  “Yep.”

  “But that’s crazy. Why did you go along with it?”

  “Because I couldn’t take the constant badgering. It got so tiresome … I just thought, I don’t know, I thought that if I went along with their stupid ceremony and then kept quiet about my personal life they would draw their
own conclusions and leave me alone. But it was so awful. They were so smug when they thought they’d finally won. I’ve never felt so alone as when I was sitting in that church realizing how deeply I’d betrayed myself and knowing they would never give up. But by then it was too late and I was trapped. I hated myself when I realized how foolish I’d been. They would never accept me. They would never even try. I had to cut them out of my life if I didn’t want to be miserable forever.”

  In another life, with different parents, Anne’s situation might have been Molly’s. She wanted to dab away the tears forming in Anne’s eyes. She caught herself reaching across the table and turned it into a grab for the pepper shaker. She tipped it over the remains of her soup.

  “I’m lucky,” Molly said. She carried the taste of lavender in her mouth, soft as a soap bubble. “My dad was really cool when I came out to him. Mom came around pretty quickly after that.”

  Anne shook her head, wafting rancid rue and envy across the table. “Lucky dog.”

  “If it helps,” said Molly, “and while we’re sharing family secrets, my brother is a drug addict.”

  “No kidding?”

  “He’s a really good guy at heart. Martin’s just … He has problems sometimes, you know?”

  “What kind of drugs?”

  “Just about everything, at one time or another.” Molly thought of the apartment she’d departed a few hours earlier, and the trail of pharmaceutical transmutations she had left behind. She hadn’t recognized most of what she’d seen.

  “I’m sorry I was such a bitch at the library.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I kinda want to punch your parents now. And I don’t blame you for being upset when a complete stranger shows up and starts prying into your personal history.” Molly shook her head. “I handled this terribly. I didn’t even introduce myself. I’m sorry. Can we start over? My name is Molly.”

  “Anne.”

  Molly reached across the table. “Nice meeting you.”

  Anne looked perplexed for a moment, but apparently decided a handshake was harmless enough. Her hand was soft and warm.

  “I still don’t understand,” said Anne, “why you care about any of this.”

  “I don’t know either. I don’t know why any of this is important. Or even if it is. Maybe it isn’t. I’m just trying to make sense of the world.” Molly hugged herself, vaguely aware that Bayliss had once said something similar.

  Anne drained her tea, stirred the ice, sipped at meltwater. “Why did you say that about me not sleeping?” The aura of rue, regret, and bitterness faded away. Now the air around Anne crackled with cautious hope like clashing thunderclouds.

  Molly searched her face for more signs of sleeplessness. She lingered on the bloodshot eyes, and told herself she wasn’t seeking eye contact. But it happened, and it tickled, and she looked away to suppress a shiver.

  “Just a hunch,” she said.

  Anne sighed like somebody choosing between an ugly sweater and an uncomfortable one. The silence grew long but, somehow, not awkward.

  “The nightmares started after I received the Indulgence,” she said. “I think it tore me up even worse than I first realized. I toyed with seeing somebody about it but I can’t afford therapy.”

  Gooseflesh prickled Molly’s nape. Pacholczyk had been weary, too. Worn down by a succession of sleepless nights.

  “I know I’ve already asked you a ton of personal shit that’s none of my business. But can I ask about the dreams?”

  So earnest was the gust of hope emanating from Anne that it seemed a wonder their napkins didn’t flutter in the updraft. “If I show you, can you interpret them for me?”

  Anne pushed the plates and glasses aside. From the breast pocket of her coveralls she produced a narrow Moleskine journal.

  “When I sleep,” she said, sliding the notebook across cracked and coffee-stained Formica, “this is what I see.”

  Molly opened it. It was a sketchbook filled with page after page of drawings rendered in colored pencil. Some hasty, some detailed, but every image rendered with the skill of a delicate hand. And each one terrifying, disturbing: Faces of fire. Feminine faces fringed with beards of starlight. Eyeballs and wheels and flaming swords. Beings with the heads of eagles, and oxen, and lions. Wings of silver, wings of bats, wings of glittering diamond and pitted brass. Swirling clouds of darkness that scuttled like a millipede on legs of lightning.

  Anne was tormented by dreams of the Pleroma. She’d been dreaming of the Choir.

  Knowing the answer, Molly asked, “This started immediately after they bestowed the Plenary Indulgence on you. That very night. Didn’t it?”

  Anne’s nod was jerky, tremulous.

  Molly paged through the entire notebook. One image, in particular, was a recurring theme throughout Anne’s sketches. Six luminous wings; four faces; a flaming sword. She had filled page after page with images of a Seraph, not understanding what she sketched. In some of the images, wisps of smoke rose from the angel’s wings as they crumbled to ash. In others, maggots dripped from the angel’s empty eye sockets.

  Anne suffered dreams of dead Gabriel.

  15

  OLD FRIENDS, NEW PROBLEMS

  I tossed a dime on the counter. It rolled. Flo poured a stiff three fingers into my cup. I winked. She scowled. The dime spiraled to a stop. The flies and the ceiling fan cycled through their eternal three-second dance. In the kitchen, DiMaggio hit a triple.

  It wasn’t palatable, the muck Flo served, but a splash of hooch fixed that well enough to wash down the last of the bacon. I lit a pill, picked the pork from my choppers, and waited. Two cups later I was running low on hooch and my plate looked like an ashtray. The pills were running low, too. Low enough that I considered bumming a smoke from the brush salesman, and was wondering whether I had the patience to endure his penny-ante sales pitch for the hundred-thousandth time, when my lunch date entered.

  The lights dimmed. The play-by-play on the kitchen radio fuzzed out with interference from a station playing klezmer transcriptions of the music of the spheres. Up near the ceiling, wisps of burnt-bacon smoke succumbed to despair and hurled themselves into the fan blades; it didn’t work. A Power sidled into the diner.

  Say what you will about them, but they know how to make an entrance. An inky shadow wrapped in a lashing rain of ash and sleet, it rode on 144,000 constantly flickering legs of forked lightning. This particular jasper’s proper name was the basso profundo thrum of dark matter winging through the void, the fizz of neutrinos boiling off a moribund blue supergiant, and the bitter-tangerine taste of a quadrillion-dimension symmetry group. But I called it Sam for short.

  I waved it over. “Park the body, Sam.”

  It oozed over the stool beside me, enveloping the cracked leather like a thunderstorm wrought of molasses and shame. “Long time no see, Bayliss. I heard you were back in town.”

  Not exactly what it said, but let’s stick to the executive summary. It’s the thought that counts, and besides, a faithful transliteration would require seeding a daughter universe with a spectrum of radically different physical constants. Who has the time for that these days?

  Flo sidled over. “Who’s your handsome friend?”

  She really did say that. Leave it to a crafty jane like her to know a butter-and-egg man when she sees one.

  “Flo, Sam. Sam, Flo. Breakfast’s on me. They do a mean fried egg and bacon sandwich here. Coffee ain’t terrible, either.” I gave a wink and let Sam catch a glimpse of my flask.

  “Hey, you,” called the guy staked out near the telephone. He fiddled with his bow tie. “That lightning must be murder on the hair. I’ll bet you go through brushes by the bushel.”

  I yelled, “Stuff a sock in it, chiseler.”

  He made a rude gesture. “Go soak your head, rummy.”

  Sam didn’t exactly say, in a voice like burning sapphires, “Nice place you have here.”

  I said, “My own little slice of heaven.” Sam grimaced. That gag had
been getting creaky when the solar system was just a ball of gas. But Sam was dining on my nickel so it could afford to laugh at my jokes.

  Rather than take my suggestion, Sam glanced at the menu. It ordered toast dipped in a fractal space with negative dimensionality. I guess it was on a diet. Flo took her time filling its cup, giving it doe eyes all the while. Sam didn’t play along. She got the hint and took a hike.

  “I was surprised to get your message,” it said. “Surprised to hear you’d returned at all. I figured a smart angel in your shoes would have kept to himself.”

  “Nobody ever accused me of being smart. I get by with charm and wit.”

  “Even those are in limited supply these days, from what I hear. The talk is that the Thrones nabbed you, and then Uriel nabbed you from the Thrones.”

  “She goes for me in a big way. Bing, I tell you. Always has.”

  “That’s not how she tells it.”

  “Yeah, well. Dames.” I took a sip. Lukewarm, Flo’s coffee tasted like boiled wood chips stewed in paint thinner. But it was high-end paint thinner, thanks to my hooch. “What else are people saying these days?”

  “They say you’re mixed up with Gabriel’s death. Some say you’re the trigger man. Others say you’re a witness and the real trigger men have you in the crosshairs. Others blame the Nephilim. They say the bulls will have you dead to rights sooner than later. They say METATRON’s latest tantrum was your doing, or that of your human sidekick. Half the Choir thinks you know where the Trumpet is, and the other half think you already have it and can’t decide whether to chance using it.”

  “I tell you, I’m getting tired of always playing the fall guy in this lousy little drama. Let me know if you want to take my seat on the bus.” I chewed at my thumbnail, waited until Flo turned her back, and spat. “As for my human sidekick, she ain’t human. Anymore.”

  “She doesn’t belong in the Pleroma.”

  “There was no choice. We had to find a replacement for Gabriel.”