by Sean Stewart
Dante must have looked as confused as he felt; Jet leaned in and murmured, "Remember the '75 Series? The Indians took game seven at home on back-to-back inside-the-park home runs."
"But a hospital where people actually get well!" Laura said. "That's Permitted City calibre work."
Dante wasn't sure he'd ever seen Laura in awe before. It made him uneasy. "Laura Chen. Chen Dai Fei's great- niece," he added pointedly.
"Ah," Chu murmured, and he made a little bow. "Please remember me to your revered uncle. It has been"—he frowned—"three years since we last spoke."
Chen Dai Fei had died in 1977. Somehow Laura was sure Tristan Chu knew that very well.
"I'm here to see Jewel," Dante said.
"Ah." Delicately, Chu spread his hands. "Unfortunately, no one has seen her for days. . . . And there is a kind of madness leaking underneath her door." Chu hesitated. "She taught me a great deal, many years ago. Last week I dreamed her very dark; so dark I caught the first plane from Cleveland." He paused to look at Dante once again.. "I dreamed that she had gone to Hell. . . and I dreamed that you were there with her."
"Me?" Dante yelped.
Chu shrugged. "A gatekeeper with the devil's eyes, then, whose shadow wore a butterfly." He turned to Jet. "Tell me, are you an angel or a Sending?"
Dante knew Jet well enough to see the anger behind his twin's upraised eyebrows. He watched Jet raise his camera and shoot Tristan Chu—Snap! "Are those my only choices?"
Chu blinked, dazzled by the flash. "Don't do that again," he said quietly.
"You know what I (Snap!) think," Jet went on, ignoring him. The flash jumped like lightning, freezing Chu against the backdrop of broken toys and ancient furniture. "I think our (Snap!) friend here was the one that broke into Dante's apartment."
Laura's eyes narrowed, suddenly thoughtful. She looked back at Chu, waiting for him to deny it.
Still blinking, he removed a pair of gold-wire glasses and polished them on his raw silk shirt. "I was concerned," he said.
"Now isn't that nice," Jet observed. "Such concern from a former pupil."
"Jewel demanded certain. . . sacrifices from her students," Chu said. He was ignoring Jet now, speaking directly to Dante. "She had something of mine. Something of me, you might almost say." He frowned. "Of course it had no more right to feel betrayed than, say, a vice that one has outgrown; and yet, I always detected a certain bitterness between this . . . gift and myself. It is very important to me that I understand its current disposition."
"You're afraid to go into her room," Dante said slowly. "You think something has happened to her."
Hooray! one part of Dante cried. . . . Well, no use following this lead any further. No point in staying around this spooky old house, either. While we're at it, let's call the cops and bust Chu's ass for break and enter, the supercilious bastard.
Dante had done his best. You couldn't say he hadn't given it the old college try. And after all, if Jet got this far without knowing what happened at his birth, a few more years wouldn't hurt him. . . .
The pain in Dante's abdomen came back, a sharp stitch that bought his breath up short.
"Let's make a deal," he said, wincing around the pain.
"A deal!" Laura cried. "Let him make a deal with the district attorney. He was rooting through your stuff, Dante!"
Summoning up the ghost of his old charm, Dante waved the whole unsightly affair away. "Nothing there worth stealing: you've told me so yourself a hundred times." He shrugged. "He can tell us about Jewel's friend. The Sending who broke Pendleton."
As he said it, Dante realized how much he didn't know about the Sending. Would the thing Jewel had jokingly called Albert still be in his early thirties, or would he be pushing sixty now, with graying hair? Would time have stolen the cold sparkle from his eyes? Would his fingers slip and slide unfeeling, plucking at the cards, losing their edges when he shuffled the pack?
Chu shrugged. "You mean Confidence, the hustler. Her first true Sending. I've heard of him. I don't know where he is now." He paused, his gaze traveling from Dante, to Jet and back. "I could find him—if you were to go down to the study in the basement and look behind Jewel's door."
"Maybe you could find him if I were to go over to a telephone and call the police about a break and enter," Jet said pleasantly.
Chu shrugged. "I wouldn't tell you what you wanted to know, at least not until I was sure my very expensive lawyers weren't more expensive than yours." He gave Dante a quick measuring glance. "But I have a hunch you don't have a lot of time to waste."
Dante looked back at his friends. Crisply Laura shook her head.
Jet remained impassive. Waiting, as he had always waited, for Dante to keep his promises.
This time I won't betray him, Dante thought. As God is my witness. "Okay," he said.
Chu nodded. "Good. Of course, you should be warned that Jewel's study is a dangerous place." He waved his hand at the broken dreams disguised as antique rubbish that cluttered the entryway of Hell. "Far subtler and more dangerous than this. But if you don't mind me saying so, I think you have made the right . . . no, the only choice. You have a destiny here."
Jet's eyebrows rose. "You mean a destiny has him."
NOT ONE OF THEM WHO TOOK UP IN HIS YOUTH WITH THIS OPINION THAT THERE ARE NO GODS EVER CONTINUED UNTIL OLD AGE FAITHFUL TO HIS CONVICTION. —PLATO
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
They crept down a winding stair with a single yellow light at the top; it dwindled away above them as Heaven must have fled the falling Lucifer. The way was cramped and narrow and the smell of death waited for Dante at the bottom of it—black dirt, talcum powder, urine, leaf mold. Candles.
Once Dante stopped and Jet bumped into him. In the darkness, where no one could see, he grabbed his twin's hand and squeezed until he felt the blood come back into his own fingers. When be started forward again, only Jet and Laura followed him. Tristan Chu and several other angels stood waiting in the darkness behind them.
At the bottom of the stairs a thin light leaked out from under Jewel's closed door, flashing and fading. Its trembling edges slid and shifted, inconstant as the waterline of an unquiet sea. Behind the closed door the restless air soughed strangely, swelling and fading. It reminded Dante of the sonorous throb of summer insects, long ago; him and Jet lying heat-drunk in their fort, bedded in the cicadas' tidal song, among the willow fronds.
"Jesus Christ," Laura breathed. "What's going on?"
Dante's lips were very dry. "I guess I'd better open the door," he murmured. The angel in him unfurled its bright wings and opened its terrible eyes. Dante wanted to run away, wanted to drink wine and watch baseball and forget about all of it, forget Jet's loneliness and Sarah's secret grief, forget the body buried in the muddy soil of Three Hawk Island.
It was impossible. He felt his life splitting, tearing like a silk cocoon, ripping open so the bright-winged angel inside him could tumble out.
Jet snickered from the darkness behind him. "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."
"Fuck you," Dante said, and he pulled the door open.
Tiny wings exploded around Dante like a spray of flower petals. His yell was cut short as something filled his mouth, fluttering. He spat it out, swearing and swinging his arms. They were everywhere: a storm of butterflies bursting from Jewel's study, whirling up around him and into the darkness. Up, up they streamed, shuddering rags of silk, gold and green, cobalt blue and bloody scarlet. Another volley of shouts and swearing as they flooded around the angels waiting on the stairs. (Damn right, Dante thought savagely. I hope the bastards choke on them.) Then out, he imagined, shooting from the stairwell like a conjurer's silk handkerchief pulled from a black top hat.
Slowly the flood subsided. Butterflies settled like motes of dust over everything in Jewel's room. Butterflies on the bookshelves and on the glass cabinets, butterflies the size of postage stamps on the escritoire. Monsters the size of Dante's hands flapped slowly on Jewel's desk. Tiny on
es, gross ones, lace-edged beauties that crept on thin legs: with each step Dante took they rose like dust from an ancient carpet. They covered every surface, blind and heaving, their frail wings flapping: each of them marked in a curious diamondback pattern.
Jewel was gone, blown into butterflies. She had left her empty clothes behind. Butterflies clambered inside the pair of women's pumps beneath her desk; they struggled, trapped and thrashing, in the limp nylons tangled on the floor. Butterflies crawled on the hem of the businesswoman's skirt lying crumpled in the chair behind the desk. Their unseen wings heaved inside the white blouse lying over the chair's back. The empty silk shook as if it still clothed a beating heart.
Stunned by the madness of butterflies, Dante realized he would never leave the study the same person he came in. Dark things lay in tangles everywhere; memories of naked emotion, sticky as spider-silk, enwrapping him. He could feel them tearing, like tissue, each time he moved.
He stood stock-still, examining the room. Across from Dante sat Jewel's desk, a solid Victorian edifice of oiled brown wood and drawers of the sort that locked with long iron keys. Tall bookshelves loomed over him, with curious trophies on the top. One might have been a mask, hairy-browed and round-eyed, alternately hidden and half-revealed in the pulse of butterfly wings. He saw the skin of a tropical bird; its jeweled feathers trailed from the highest shelf, dimmed with dust. Glass cabinets with bandy legs stocked row after row of liquor decanters, ink bottles, yellowing photographs, and dolls most of all: dolls in porcelain and brass, dolls carved from ebony with painted smiles, , leather puppets from Indonesia with long thin arms; dolls of girls and boys and monsters, dolls made from cloth and straw and wax, fine or tattered or mutilated to some unknown purpose. Dolls looking out the windows of a grim Victorian dollhouse like the inmates of an asylum.
"It's Tristan Chu," Laura whispered, pointing at one of the larger dolls. It sat on Jewel's desk, an angular little boy with stiff black hair and glass eyes in a china face.
No, it didn't exactly sit, Dante realized, looking more closely. Only arms and a head extended from the doll's torso. Its legs had been carefully removed. Dante spotted them high on a shelf behind Jewel's chair.
Invisibly and with great deliberation a hidden clock ticked off the slow seconds. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Time heaved and gasped, like wet insect wings.
Behind the desk, Jewel's gray wool skirt and white silk blouse billowed, seething with butterflies. Stirred by paper wings, the air whispered. O God, it wept. O God, O God, O God.
Holy, holy, holy.
The doll on the desk spddenly smacked its porcelain hands together, crushing a batterfly between its palms. Laura yelled. Dante screamed. Jet swore.
One gold tooth showed in a narrow smile as with stiff fingers the doll scraped the crushed butterfly off its hands. "Serves her right," it muttered. It glanced up at Dante. "Give me my legs."
"O Christ."
The doll's head turned and it pointed up at the shelf on the back wall to where its legs rested, each foot ending in a shiny patent leather shoe with a silver buckle on top. "Now. Now before Chu comes back. Give me my legs."
"Sweet Jesus." The butterflies stank of madness, so thick Dante could hardly breathe. He felt his mind heaving and fluttering with the pulse of them.
Unsteadily he backed from the study and fled up the stairs, followed by Jet and Laura. The doll was right, he thought savagely: Jewel got what she deserved. She had tried to unchain the angel within herself, and it had come fluttering out at last. Like a story out of Ovid: the god reaching down, the liquid melting moment; and your life exploded, scattered into thin legs and paper wings.
Up on Hell's main floor, butterflies fluttered onto the antiques, balancing on the arms of abandoned turntables, settling on the golden bird cage.
Tristan Chu stood with his arms outstretched, butterflies heaving in each of his palms. His narrow face was grim. "So passes the greatest angel of her age."
"She asked for it," Dante said fiercely. His whole body was shaking. He swept his arm around the room at the clouds of butterflies crawling on silk panels, tumbling from overstuffed chairs, marked on Jet's cheek. " 'Do not ask for what you will wish you had not got.' "
Chu looked curiously at him.
"Seneca," Jet explained. "It's one of Father's favorite maxims."
Chu nodded, then looked questioningly at Dante. "And is it . . . ?"
Dante felt like throwing up. "It isn't going anywhere."
"Ah." Chu drew a small gold-plated derringer from the inside pocket of his silk jacket. "Good."
Jet stepped a little behind Dante. Laura stepped a little ahead of him, feet sliding into an inconspicuous fighting stance. Butterflies settled on her hands and hair.
"Would you excuse me for a moment?" Chu said politely. He turned and padded down the stairs. They heard the flat crack of the derringer and a noise like a dozen dinner plates smashing onto a stone floor.
Moments later Chu emerged from the staircase, straightening the lapels of his superbly tailored jacket.
He cupped his hand gently around a diamondback butterfly panting in his palm. Then, gravely, he walked back into the sitting room. The other angels parted for him as he made his way to a table at the back where a coffeemaker stood. Soon he returned with a saucer of warm water, into which he poured three packets of sugar. He placed the sugar water on one of the shelves in the long entrance corridor. Butterflies settled on the saucer's rim and began to drink.
Dante backed away, knowing he had to get out of the angels' hall, with its odor of old secrets. Laura turned to follow him and they hurried outside.
Jet, though, paused, and raised his camera to take a picture of the feeding insects. "Goodnight, Mother," he said. Gently he blew a butterfly off his lens and screwed the cap back on. "Sweet dreams."
A jerky, scraping noise came from downstairs, as of bits of plate being swept across a stone floor.
Every head whipped around to stare at the dark doorway at the top of the basement stairs.
"I wonder about my brother," Jet said slowly to Tristan Chu. "Sendings were Jewel's talent. Architecture yours, I guess. Yours would be tracking," he said, looking at the angel who had come with the cops to Dante's apartment.
Jet began to nod. "Dante, now: Dante's good with dead things. Ghosts have been springing up all around him, these last few days."
From downstairs, a couple of scrapes. A clink. A clatter.
Softly Jet laughed, thinking about how Dante had drawn forth the body on the dresser, then Pendleton's ghost. Understanding just what Dante's presence might mean to the unquiet spirit stirring in the basement.
The first traces of real fear were blooming in Tristan Chu's eyes.
"He's a Resurrection Man," Jet murmured, looking at Tristan Chu with no sympathy at all. "A Resurrection Man whether he wants to be or not. And lo, the dead rise around him."
* * *
"What took you so long?" Laura said impatiently when Jet came trotting down to the car a moment later. "You had some business to do with Chu?"
Jet grunted. "Paying my last respects," he said.
He started to explain, but Dante, lying in the back seat, lost the thread of it. He had thrown every last scrap of strength he had into forcing himself down into Jewel's room. Now, after being furious and terrified and halfway to crazy, he was utterly exhausted, drained beyond words. He felt resistless as a jellyfish, as if the sac inside his abdomen had leached all the nutrients from his bones, leaving him strung together by nothing but cartilage and skin.
He slid into dreaming as Jet and Laura talked quietly in the front. Overhead, street lights waxed and waned like so many ticks of Grandfather Clock.
(He remembered riding at night in a long brown car, an Olds or an Impala—Jet would remember. Thrown by the street lights, shadows would sweep over them, swelling and streaming away. They would be coming home from a movie, or a rare restaurant dinner. Always the two of them in the back seat, him and Jet, their legs so s
hort they could swing out straight without touching the seat in front of them. The vinyl upholstery slick and dry as snakeskin. There was an ashtray on the armrest; the little metal lid squeaked when he pushed it open, and snapped shut when he let it go. Push, squeak, snick; push, squeak, snick. It made Father mad.
Push, squeak, snick.
He could feel his father's anger, pushing out from the front seat like a brooding cloud. He didn't know why he kept on swinging his legs, kept on clicking the ashtray; only kept his head down, and did it, like a boy playing jacks while a thunderstorm bore down on him.)
Dream-ridden, Dante drifted on angel's wings. But a part of him never left Jewel's study. Or rather, Jewel's study was inside him now, like a web within his body. A part of him struggled there still, paper wings beating like a dying heart.
He woke gasping from unquiet visions as Laura's car rolled to a stop in his parents' gravel drive. He felt Jet's hand on his elbow a moment later, helping him out.
He flinched at the touch of the chilly autumn air. God, he was so tired. He wished he could clear his head enough to say something reassuring to Laura, but sleep was a poison in his blood, making it hard to think, hard to talk. He might have promised to see her the next day, but he wasn't sure.
Then they were in the hallway, Jet sure and stealthy, Dante leaning like a drunk against a wall, crushing a felt hat on a nearby peg. Long coats and hats and umbrellas hung around him.
Hat?
His father hadn't worn a hat in years. Dante examined the hat, trying to place it. Oh—Pendleton's, he thought with relief. That explained things. Pendleton's snappy fedora, the one he'd clapped on his head as he left the ritzy hotel room. Funny I didn't notice it before, Dante thought. Could have used it when I was dowsing for Pendleton's past.