The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons (Mammoth Books)

by Paula Guran

  He backed away from them and fumbled his way out into the sitting room on the other side of the door. There he took his fiddle out of his case. Tuning the instrument was horrible. Playing it was worse. There was nothing there anymore. No resonance. No depth. Only the same hollow echoing quality that he’d heard in Darlene and Norton’s voices.

  Slowly he laid his fiddle back into its case, loosened the frog on his bow and set it down on top of the instrument. When he finally made his way back down the stairs and out into the street, he left the fiddle behind. Outside, the street seemed overcast, its colors not yet leached away, but definitely faded. He looked up into a cloudless sky. He crossed the street and plucked a pretzel from the cart of a street vendor, took a bite even though he had no appetite. It tasted like sawdust and ashes. A bus pulled up at the curb where he was standing, let out a clutch of passengers, then pulled away again, leaving behind a cloud of noxious fumes. He could barely smell them.

  It’s just a phase, he told himself. He was simply adjusting to his new existence. All he had to do was get through it and things would get back to normal. They couldn’t stay like this.

  He kept telling himself that as he made his way back home, but he wasn’t sure he believed it. He was dead, after all – that was the part of the equation that was impossible to ignore. Dakota had warned him that this was going to happen. But he wasn’t ready to believe her, either. He just couldn’t accept that the way things were for him now would be permanent.

  4

  He was right. Things didn’t stay the same. They got worse. His senses continued to deteriorate. The familiar world faded away from around him until he found himself in a gray-toned city that he didn’t always recognize. He stepped out of his house one day and couldn’t find his way back. The air was oppressive, the sky seemed to press down on him. And there were no people. No living people. Only the other undead. They huddled in doorways and alleys, drifted through the empty buildings. They wouldn’t look at him, and he found himself turning his face away as well. They had nothing they could share with each other, only their despair, and of that they each had enough of their own.

  He took to wandering aimlessly through the deserted streets, the high points of his day coming when he recognized the corner of a building, a stretch of street, that gargoyle peering down from an utterly unfamiliar building. He wasn’t sure if he was in a different city, or if he was losing his memory of the one he knew. After a while, it didn’t seem to matter.

  The blank periods came more and more often. Like the other undead, he would suddenly open his eyes to find himself curled up in a nest of newspapers and trash in some doorway, or huddled in the rotting hulk of a sofa in an abandoned building. And finally he couldn’t take it anymore.

  He stood in the middle of an empty street and lifted his face to gray skies that only seemed to be kept aloft by the roofs of the buildings.

  “Dakota!” he cried. “Dakota!”

  But he was far too late, and she didn’t come.

  Don’t wait too long to call me, she’d told him. If you change too much, I won’t be able to find you and nobody else can help you.

  He had no one to blame but himself. It was as she’d said. He’d changed too much and now, even if she could hear him, she wouldn’t recognize him. He wasn’t sure he’d even recognize himself. Still, he called her name again, called for her until the hollow echo that was his voice grew raw and weak. Finally, he slumped there in the middle of the road, shoulders sagging, chin on his chest, and stared at the pavement.

  “The name you were calling,” a voice said. “Did it belong to one of those watchers?”

  John looked up at the man who’d approached him so silently. He was a nondescript individual, the kind of man he’d have passed by on the street when he was alive and never looked at twice. Medium height, medium build. His only really distinguishing feature was the fervent glitter in his eyes.

  “A watcher,” John repeated, nodding in response to the man’s question. “That’s what she called herself.”

  “Damn ’em all to hell, I say,” the man told him. He spat on the pavement. “ ’Cept that’d put ’em on these same streets and Franklin T. Clark don’t ever want to look into one of their stinkin’ faces again – not unless I’ve got my hands around one of their necks. I’d teach ’em what it’s like to be dead.”

  “I think they’re dead, too,” John said.

  “That’s what they’d like you to believe. But tell me this: if they’re dead, how come they’re not here like us? How come they get to hold on to a piece of life like we can’t?”

  “Because . . . because they’re helping people.”

  Clark spat again. “Interferin’s more like it.” The dark light in his eyes seemed to deepen as he fixed his gaze on John. “Why were you calling her name?”

  “I can’t take this anymore.”

  “An’ you think it’s gonna be better where they want to take us?”

  “How can it be worse?”

  “They can take away who you are,” Clark said. “They can try, but they’ll never get Franklin T. Clark I’ll tell you that. They can kill me, they can dump me in this stinkin’ place, but I’d rather rot here in hell than let ’em change me.”

  “Change you how?” John wanted to know.

  “You go through those gates of theirs an’ you end up part of a stew. Everythin’ that makes you who you are, it gets stole away, mixed up with everybody else. You become a kind of fuel – that’s all. Just fuel.”

  “Fuel for what?” “For ’em to make more of us. There’s no goddamn sense to it. It’s just what they do.”

  “How do you know this?” John asked.

  Clark shook his head. “You got to ask, you’re not worth the time I’m wastin’ on you.”

  He gave John a withering look, as though John was something he’d stepped on that got stuck to the bottom of his shoe. And then he walked away.

  John tracked the man’s progress as he shuffled off down the street. When Clark was finally out of sight, he lifted his head again to stare up into the oppressive sky that hung so close his face.

  “Dakota,” he whispered.

  But she still didn’t come.

  5

  The day he found the infant wailing in a heap of trash behind what had once been a restaurant made John wonder if there wasn’t some merit in Clark’s anger toward the watchers. The baby was a girl and she was no more than a few days old. She couldn’t possibly have made the decision that had left her in this place – not by any stretch of the imagination. A swelling echo of Clark’s rage rose up in him as he lifted the infant from the trash. He swaddled her in rags and cradled the tiny form in his arms.

  “What am I going to do with you?” he asked.

  The baby stopped crying, but she made no reply. How could she? She was so small, so helpless. Looking down at her, John knew what he had to do. Maybe Clark was right and the watchers were monsters, although he found that hard to reconcile with his memories of Dakota’s empathy and sadness. But Clark was wrong about what lay beyond the gates. He had to be. It couldn’t be worse than this place.

  He set off then, still wandering aimlessly, but now he had a destination in mind, now he had something to look for. He wasn’t doing it for himself, though he knew he’d step through those gates when they stood in front of him. He was doing it for the baby.

  “I’m going to call you Dolly,” he told the infant. “Darlene would’ve like that. What do you think?”

  He chucked the infant under her chin. Her only response was to stare up at him.

  6

  John figured he had it easier than most people who suddenly had an infant come into their lives. Dolly didn’t need to eat and she didn’t cry unless he set her down. She was only happy in his arms. She didn’t soil the rags he’d wrapped her in. Sometimes she slept, but there was nothing restful about it. She’d be lying in his arms one minute, the next it was as though someone had thrown a switch and she’d been turned off. He�
�d been frantic the first time it happened, panicking until he realized that she was only experiencing what passed for sleep in this place.

  He didn’t let himself enter that blank state. The idea had crept into his mind as he wandered the streets with Dolly that to do so, to let himself turn off the way he and all the other undead did, would make it all that much more difficult for him to complete his task. The longer he denied himself, the more seductive the lure of that strange sleep became, but he stuck to his resolve. After a time, he was rewarded for maintaining his purposefulness. His vision sharpened; the world still appeared monochromatic, but at least it was all back in focus. He grew more clear-headed. He began to recognize more and more parts of the city. But the gates remained as elusive as Dakota had proved to be since the last time he’d seen her.

  One day he came upon Clark again. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since the last time he’d seen the man – a few weeks? A few months? It was difficult to tell time in the city as it had become because the light never changed. There was no day, no night, no comforting progression from one into the other. There was only the city, held in eternal twilight.

  Clark was furious when he saw the infant in John’s arms. He ranted and swore at John, threatened to beat him for interfering in what he saw as the child’s right of choice. John stood his ground, holding Dolly.

  “What are you so afraid of?” he asked when Clark paused to take a breath.

  Clark stared at him, a look of growing horror spreading across his features until he turned and fled without replying. He hadn’t needed to reply. John knew what Clark was afraid of. It was the same fear that kept them all in this desolate city: death. Dying. They were all afraid. They were all trapped here by that fear. Except for John. He was still trapped like the others; the difference was that he was no longer afraid.

  But if a fear of death was no longer to be found in his personal lexicon, despair remained. Time passed. Weeks, months. But he was no closer to finding those fabled gates than he’d been when he first found Dolly and took up the search. He walked through a city that grew more and more familiar. He recognized his own borough, his own street, his own house. He walked slowly up his walk and looked in through the window, but he didn’t go in. He was too afraid of succumbing to the growing need to sit somewhere and close his eyes. It would be so easy to go inside, to stretch out on the couch, to let himself fall into the welcoming dark.

  Instead he turned away, his path now leading toward the building that housed High Lonesome Sounds. He found it without any trouble, walked up its eerily silent stairwell, boots echoing with a hollow sound, a sound full of dust and broken hopes. At the top of the stairs, he turned to his right and stepped into the recording studio’s lounge. The room was empty, except for an open fiddle case in the middle of the floor, an instrument lying in it, a bow lying across the fiddle, horsehairs loose.

  He shifted Dolly from the one arm to the crook of the other. Kneeling down, he slipped the bow into its holder in the lid of the case and shut the lid. He stared at the closed case for a long moment. He had no words to describe how much he’d missed it, how incomplete he’d felt without it. Sitting more comfortably on the floor, he fashioned a sling out of his jacket so that he could carry Dolly snuggled up against his chest and leave his arms free.

  When he left the studio, he carried the fiddle case with him. He went down the stairs, out onto the street. There were no cars, no pedestrians. Nothing had changed. He was still trapped in that reflection of the city he’d known when he was alive, the deserted streets and abandoned buildings peopled only by the undead. But something felt different. It wasn’t just that he seemed more himself, more the way he’d been when he was still alive, carrying his fiddle once more. It was as though retrieving the instrument had put a sense of expectation in the air. The dismal gray streets, overhung by a brooding sky, were suddenly pregnant with possibilities.

  He heard the footsteps before he saw the man: a tall, rangy individual, arriving from a side street at a brisk walk. Faded blue jeans, black sweatshirt with matching baseball cap. Flat-heeled cowboy boots. What set him apart from the undead was the purposeful set to his features. His gaze was turned outward, rather than inward.

  “Hello!” John called after the stranger as the man began to cross the street. “Have you got a minute?”

  The stranger paused in mid-step. He regarded John with surprise but waited for him to cross the street and join him. John introduced himself and put out his hand. The man hesitated for a moment, then took John’s hand.

  “Bernard Gair,” the man said in response. “Pleased, I’m sure.” His look of surprise had shifted into one of vague puzzlement. “Have we met before . . .?”

  John shook his head. “No, but I do know one of your colleagues. She calls herself Dakota.”

  “The name doesn’t ring a bell. But then there are so many of us – though never enough to do the job.”

  “That’s what she told me. Look, I know how busy you must be so I won’t keep you any longer. I just wanted to ask you if you could direct me to . . .”

  John’s voice trailed off as he realized he wasn’t being listened to. Gair peered more closely at him.

  “You’re one of the lost, aren’t you?” Gair said. “I’m surprised I can even see you. You’re usually so . . . insubstantial. But there’s something different about you.”

  “I’m looking for the gates,” John told him.

  “The gates.”

  Something in the way he repeated the words made John afraid that Gair wouldn’t help him.

  “It’s not for me,” he said quickly. “It’s for her.”

  With each step he took, the sounds she made grew more piteous.

  He stood directly before the archway, bathed in its golden light. Through the pulsing glow, he could see the big sky Dakota had described. It went on forever. He could feel his heart swell to fill it. All he wanted to do was step through, to be done with the lies of the flesh, the lies that had told him, this one life was all, the lies that had tricked him into being trapped in the city of the undead.

  But there was the infant to consider, and he couldn’t abandon her. Couldn’t abandon her, but he couldn’t explain it to her, that there was nothing to fear, that it was only light and an enormous sky. And peace. There were no words to capture the wonder that pulsed through his veins, that blossomed in his heart, swelled until his chest was full and he knew the light must be pouring out of his eyes and mouth.

  Now he understood Dakota’s sorrow. It would be heartbreaking to know what waited for those who turned their backs on this glory. It had nothing to do with gods or religions. There was no hierarchy of belief entailed. No one was denied admittance. It was simply the place one stepped through so that the journey could continue.

  John cradled the sobbing infant, jigging her gently against his chest. He stared into the light. He stared into the endless sky.

  “Dakota,” he called softly.

  “Hello, John Narraway.”

  He turned to find her standing beside him, her own solemn gaze drinking in the light that pulsed in the big sky between the gates and flowed over them. She smiled at him.

  “I didn’t think I’d see you again,” she said. “And certainly not in this place. You did well to find it.”

  “I had help. One of your colleagues showed me the way.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with accepting help sometimes.”

  “I know that now,” John said. “I also understand how hard it is to offer help and have it refused.”

  Dakota stepped closer and drew the infant from the sling at John’s chest.

  “It is hard,” she agreed, cradling Dolly. Her eyes still held the reflected light that came from between the gates, but they were sad once more as she studied the weeping infant. She sighed, adding, “But it’s not something that can be forced.”

  John nodded. There was something about Dakota’s voice, about the way she looked that distracted him, but he couldn’t q
uite put his finger on it.

  “I will take care of the little one,” Dakota said. “There’s no need for you to remain here.”

  “What will you do with her?”

  “Whatever she wants.”

  “But she’s so young.”

  The sadness deepened in Dakota’s eyes. “I know.”

  There was so much empathy in her voice, in the way she held the infant, in her gaze. And then John realized, what was different about her. Her voice wasn’t hollow, it held resonance. She wasn’t monochrome, but touched with color. There was only a hint, at first, like an old tinted photograph, but it was like looking at a rainbow for John. As it grew stronger, he drank in the wonder of it. He wished she would speak again, just so that he could cherish the texture of her voice, but she remained silent, her solemn gaze held by the infant in her arms.

  “I find it hardest when they’re so young,” she finally said, looking up at him. “They don’t communicate in words, so it’s impossible to ease their fears.”

  But words weren’t the only way to communicate, John thought. He crouched down to lay his fiddle case on the ground, took out his bow, and tightened the hair. He ran his thumb across the fiddle’s strings to check the tuning, marveling anew at the richness of sound. He thought perhaps he’d missed that the most.

  “What are you doing?” Dakota asked him.

  John shook his head. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to explain it to her, but that he couldn’t. Instead he slipped the fiddle under his chin, drew the bow across the strings, and used music to express what words couldn’t. He turned to the gates, drank in the light and the immense wonder of the sky, and distilled it into a simple melody, an air of grace and beauty. Warm generous notes spilled from the sound holes of his instrument, grew stronger and more resonant in the light of the gates, gained such presence that they could almost be seen, touched and held with more than the ear.