Queen of Angels

by Greg Bear

  | Let’s conjure up a guide, then. Use whatever power we have. Make a few constructive suggestions.

  | I’m not sure what you mean, Martin said.

  | Let’s agree on its form and bring something up out of the ground. A guide.

  He turned and looked over the shadow figures still flowing around them like a dark river around rocks. I’m just not sure what we have left to lose…

  Carol shivered. If I don’t do something, I’m going to lose it all.

  | We should pick out something probable. Something in tune with this environment.

  He pointed to a dilapidated shopfront, its signboard askew above dusty mud splattered windows. The letters on the sign were meaningless but their style and color suggested something Latino or perhaps Caribbean. They cautiously intruded into the stream of shadow figures and moved closer to the windows, peering at what was contained inside.

  | Tell me what you see, Martin said.

  | Glass jars full of spices. Candles. Herbs. Old magazines. Religious paraphernalia.

  Martin saw something very similar. He was most attracted to a plastic and foil frame around a vividly colorful portrait of a woman in a shawl. The iconography suggested the Virgin Mary but the picture itself was of a blackskinned female, eyes startlingly large and white, breasts exposed and bountiful. Two boys, both black and covered with red fur, hung from her breasts. Twisted roots lay on red cloth before the icon. One of the roots had been cut and oozed a milky fluid.

  | Do you see her, too? Carol asked.

  | I do. The twins again. They’re both black this time…

  | She looks like the woman in the dream…what was her name, Hazel?

  | Erzulie.

  | Let’s call her up.

  | No, Martin said firmly. She’s not a minor player. We don’t even want to deal with a figure that powerful. Not for a mere guide.

  | She spoke to us, she told us what had happened, Carol persisted, puzzled by his reluctance.

  | There’s a knot tied there. Some connection with the male figure who attacked you. I say let’s work with simpler figures for now.

  | You think Goldsmith was fixated on Mama? Carol asked. Her flippancy and continuing dread made an odd and irritating combination for Martin.

  | I draw no conclusions yet.

  He examined the window’s objects more carefully. They seemed to be for ritual purposes; cheap plastic horns painted with snakes and fish, paper umbrellas ornamented with grimacing faces limned in jagged red lines, dried fish with shrunken eyes, jars filled with pickled snakes and frogs.

  | Let’s go in here, Martin said.

  | Why?

  | A hunch.

  She followed him reluctantly through the door into the shop. A bell jingled overhead and the interior suddenly took on a fixed solidity indistinguishable from reality. The effect was startling; Martin could smell the herbs and flowers arrayed in stacks and rows along the shelves. He could feel his shoes rolling sandy grit and sawdust on the old wood floor.

  A wrinkled old woman, not Erzulie, stood behind a counter pouring out brown powder into a white enamel basin on a scale. “May I help you?” she asked, her voice clear and her words distinct. Her face was wrinkled and shiny like the skin on a dried frog. Her yellowed ivory eyes were full of humor.

  “We’re lost,” Martin said. “We need to find somebody in charge.”

  “I run this shop,” the woman said, smiling broadly and waving her arm in gentle scallop sweeps at the shelves. “My name is Madame Roach. What can I get you?”

  Carol stepped forward. The woman fixed her eyes on her. “Poor girl,” she said, smile fading into pained sympathy. “You’ve been through a lot of trouble lately, haven’t you? What happened, my dear?”

  The woman lifted a gate and emerged from behind the counter shaking her head and tsk tsking. “You’ve been attacked,” she said. She touched Carol’s longsuit. The suit vanished, leaving Carol in her previous flowing white dress. Patches of blood stained the front of the dress. “Some savage things have been at you.” She turned on Martin. “You brought this poor girl here. Why didn’t you protect her?”

  Martin had no answer.

  “We were caught in a nightmare,” Carol said, her voice like a little girl’s. “There wasn’t anything either of us could do.”

  “If you don’t know your way around I wonder why you came here at all,” the old woman said, expression deeply disapproving. “This isn’t a nice neighborhood anymore. It used to be wonderful. People came in all the time to shop. Now it’s just commuters rushing uptown to work, and then dying at the end of the day, no money to spend, no need for Madame Roach. Why are you here?”

  “We’re looking for someone in charge,” Martin repeated.

  “Won’t I do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “At least I’m willing to answer your questions,” she said slyly, winking at Carol. “Does he really understand anything?” she asked her behind a cupped hand.

  “Maybe not,” Carol said, voice still girlish.

  “You come back with me to the rear of the shop and I’ll fix you up,” the old woman said. “As for you, young man, you just look around here. Whatever you need you’ll find on these shelves. But whatever you do, don’t open that jar on the table.”

  Martin turned to see a great glass jar sitting on a low, heavy wooden table before the counter. Within the jar was a cadaver coiled up in greenish foggy fluid, wrinkled skin the color of a green olive. The blind eyes of its face were turned accusingly on Martin. Martin approached to see if it bore any resemblance to Emanuel Goldsmith or to Sir, the male in the dream, but it did not; this was a very different looking fellow even allowing for his nose and cheek pressed for an age against the smooth interior of the jar.

  He was bald and broad faced.

  The cadaver winked at Martin and squirmed a little, making the jar shiver. Martin backed away.

  The old woman wrapped her arm around Carol’s shoulder and led her through the gate into the back of the shop. “Mind what I told you,” she said.

  Martin turned from the jar and scrutinized the packed shelves. As he expected the contents of the shelves were not constant; they changed if he looked away and looked back. So long as he focused his attention on the assorted jars and cans and implements, however, they seemed as real as outside life, perhaps more real.

  He bent to examine a lower shelf filled with clay jars wrapped in cloth and sealed with wax. Behind the jars skulls had been stored. They seemed completely convincing and real yet none of them possessed the grinning quality common to human skulls. They all seemed disconsolate.

  Fascinated by this recurrence of a theme—sad skulls—he reached to pick one up and examine it. At his touch, however, the skull disintegrated to dust.

  Against the left hand wall of the shop wooden drums of all sizes hung from black wires. The largest was as tall as Martin. He stood beside this drum, studying the carvings that ornamented its body. Again, the carvings changed when he looked away. They maintained the same subject matter however—city streets filled with cars and stickfigure people, bordered by rows of crude colorless flowers covered with large, garishly painted insects.

  He tapped the taut skin of the drum with one finger. The drum said, “Whom you seek has gone away.”

  Martin removed his hand and stepped back, startled. He gathered up his courage and approached the drum again, tapping it lightly. “No sun in this land. He is gone away.”

  From behind him the old woman’s voice said, “The assotor is a very powerful drum. You must not play with it. It calls the spirits and they are angry with you unless you have important business.”

  “I do have important business,” Martin said. Carol emerged from behind the curtain wearing a multicolored caftan. Her long blond hair flowed loose around her shoulders and she smiled at him but he could no longer feel her emotions.

  “An ignorant man comes here with important business,” the old woman said. “That means danger.”


  Martin tapped the drum again. It said: “Go with Madame Roach.”

  The old woman flung her head back and laughed. “You come with me. I am a horse now.”

  Carol walked to Martin’s side and together they watched the old woman wrap her shoulders in a white robe and ribbons. She sprinkled the contents of several jars in her hair, rubbed it in—the smell of ammonia, pungent herbs and burning metal filled the air—and then marked a black wheel on her forehead with paste from a dish on the counter. She fixed her eyes on Martin. Her voice changed to a deep masculine growl. “Why am I brought here? Who calls this busy loa who has important work to do?”

  “We need…to meet with somebody who’s in control,” Martin said. “We have questions to ask.”

  “I speak through Madame Roach. Without her we have no words. She is our horse. Ask your questions.”

  “I need to know who you are. What you are.”

  “I dance on graves. I cover the sun with a blanket each night. I sing to the bones in the earth.”

  “What is your name?” Martin asked.

  “We are all horsemen.”

  “I need to know your name.”

  Madame Roach shivered violently, straightened her back and held out her arms. Another voice spoke through her lips, a child’s voice with a liquid trill.

  “We would rest and die. Why do you disturb our peace? We are in mourning. The funeral is today.”

  “Whose funeral?”

  “The King’s funeral.” Now the voice broke into singsong gibberish. Madame Roach danced lightly between the aisles, upsetting shelves and tumbling the shop’s goods to the floor. Clay pots broke and vapors rose, noxious and cloying. She whirled and stumbled beside Carol and Martin, steadied herself and shot her hand out to grab his chin. Regarding him with wide, colorless eyes, she said, still using the child’s voice, “We send the King to the Land Under the Sea, sou dleau. Then we dance.”

  “Which King is that?” Martin asked.

  “King of the Hill. King of the Road.”

  “Take us to the funeral, then,” Martin said.

  “It is everywhere. Now. The horse is tired of talking.” She tripped away, toppling more shelves. She knocked against the large jar containing the cadaver. The jar wobbled on its low base, tipped one way and another and fell over, shattering on the floor.

  The smell that rose from the spilled fluid and sprawled cadaver was unbelievably vile. Martin and Carol backed away, hands clamped over their noses—which did nothing whatsoever to block the fetor.

  “Pardon me,” the child’s voice said as Madame Roach retreated from the mess. She trembled violently again, wrapped her hands around her neck, threw back her head and made strangling noises.

  “Let’s go,” Carol suggested. “Now.”

  But the cadaver twitched in the shattered glass and fluid. It rose slowly on its arms, shot out one wrinkled knee and foot and stood. It wore a ragged pair of cutoff shorts and sandals. Madame Roach moaned and shrieked. The cadaver mumbled but could say nothing intelligible. It looked around with blind eyes and lurched toward the wall of drums. Martin and Carol sidled quickly into another aisle to let it pass.

  The cadaver picked out a smaller drum and pulled it from the wall with a twang of broken wires. It kneeled down on the floor and beat the skin heavily with dead fingers. At each beat the shelves and walls of the shop sucked inward, opening cracks and gaping holes. Through the cracks and gaps Martin saw a smoking darkness.

  “Let’s go, please,” Carol said. He could not feel her. All he could feel was his own confusion. He had no idea where they really were in relation to Goldsmith’s Country or whether they had any true control.

  A shelf splintered in two and delivered hundreds of tiny glass jars to his feet. The jars’ tops broke away and insects crawled around the floor chittering and singing in tiny children’s voices. The drum beat insistently beneath the cadaver’s fingers.

  Martin reached up for the toolkit. It came down intact, seemingly ready to use. He tugged on the ripcord and it turned into a knife, a huge Bowie knife, the blade smeared with blood. The cadaver dropped the drum and moaned, falling backward to the floor.

  | What did you do? Carol asked.

  | I don’t know!

  On the cadaver’s neck welled a fistsized bubble of fresh blood red as roses. The surface of the bubble appeared crystalline. Martin stared at the gout, unable to see or think of, anything else. His point of view dropped to a level with the blood

  | Martin—

  and he swam into the gout. On all sides curtains of amber and red shimmered. His nose filled with the rich gravy copper smell. He was drowning in it swallowing choking breathing blood. The toolkit hung in his vision upper left ticking off another wide journey across the loci another fall away from the Country.

  | Carol—

  Neither of them had any control at all. Wherever Carol was, like himself, she was on her own.

  The blood fog cleared. Martin felt warmth and a sharp sensation of joining, a deep intimacy with something confused and terrified yet horribly foul.

  Margery wrinkled her nose nervously. She did not like the traces on the equipment. She thought again about calling for Erwin but resisted again. Not enough time had passed for them to be alarmed; none of the alarms had gone off. Other than the displacement and gyrations through the loci everything seemed in order.

  All was quiet. The three sleeping bodies in the theater breathed almost in unison, faces carrying only the expression that separates those sleeping from those dead.

  if when a child nobody lets you forget what you are You are responsible for your Mama she was a beautiful lady. She:

  Picks up clothes scattered around the cluttered room, bends over her little darling, shows the beautiful rings on her fingers and the necklaces adorning her slender and graceful neck, her face is wise yet she is angry at you, the north wind blows from her eyes cold and freezes the water of the toilet you are sitting on. Something dark comes into the room and tells your mother Hazel she must go it is definitely time to go, people are waiting in line to die.

  Before she goes with the dark figure in a ceramic mask she bends over the little child on the potty and says You be good now. Mama has to go away. She won’t be able to write or send you postcards.

  Another someone like Mama but not smells sweet like a garden lies in bed all the time twisting a lace handkerchief and weeping that her men just don’t love her enough never enough her name is Marie the dark figure comes in tells her it is time to take your punishment. Marie weeps diamonds and when the dark figure beats her with a smoke arm she reaches out to the child and says, You be good now. Your Papa he knows I been bad.

  No more someones now. Just the two children wrapped in their own red fur playing on the wood floor the dark figure comes he says Don’t

  You be good now or you’ll make me mad

  When I’m mad I’m

  Beats the other red furred twin

  The twins go into a room and see a woman lying on the bed. She must be a woman but she is twisted like a broken timber like crossroads rearranged in an earthquake we go up to her onto the bed and see she has a face like Mama only it’s covered with paint, garish makeup, amber and orange and red in the sun through the window, the other twin says, That’s Mama, I say no it isn’t. Yes

  It’s Mama.

  Go to suckle on her breast. Milk flows from the teat white and then turns pink and then red.

  The Dark Man he comes in beats us beats the other twin takes him to the hospital white walls smell of alcohol squeaky vinyl seats He fell down a whole set of stairs the Dark Man says.

  They take the Dark Man away. The twins live elsewhere for a time, with a huge woman who puts amulets around their necks and tells them stories of snakes and wolves and bears and coyotes.

  The Dark Man returns and the twins live with him again.

  The Dark Man does what he does

  Shatters the little clay jar pot de tête

  Inside is the
very large knife big in hand.

  Martin stood on a cold snowy street looking up at shadows on a curtained window, struggling. Dramatic music score in the background. Big voice booming shrieking gurgling.

  Can’t kill the Dark Man

  Lives forever. Comes back to claim you.

  Moves back into the apartment.

  The Dark Man does

  The knife moves

  The red furred twins escape it’s a miracle! And live in the land of grass, where the woman in jewels languishes on a great couch shaded from the bright sunshine, waving her feather fan, approving of all the twins do, except when she sighs and weeps that no man loves her nearly enough, that all her lovers cheat on her, that nobody brings her enough gifts, is she not Erzulie?

  “I told you not to mess with that jar,” Madame Roach says, taking him by the hand. Martin is confused but follows her up the long dark stairs. His arm and hand are the arm and hand of a boy about fourteen, skin black. “We stuffed your papa in that jar. But you had to mess with it. I don’t know about you, child. Now he wants to see you. Wants to ask you some questions.”

  She leads him to a door and opens the door, dragging him reluctantly through. “Sir, I have brought Martin Emanuel,” she proclaims, and pushes through a bead curtain into a sparsely furnished room. In the middle of the room sit two thrones, one empty, the other occupied by a broad faced man with a flat nose and a bald head, sclera of his eyes yellow and lusterless.

  “You’ve come to ask us questions,” the broad faced man says. Martin stands before him, Madame Roach behind; Carol is nowhere to be seen.

  “I need to speak to somebody in charge.”

  “I’m the one in charge,” the man says. His face becomes lean, his skin white and hair gray. “I am Sir and I’m in charge.”

  Martin knows instinctively that this is not the representative of Goldsmith’s primary personality. It is all wrong. It takes the wrong forms; such representatives do not make themselves up from shadows or nightmares or Dark Men.