Lost Angels

by David J. Schow

  "Certainly not," he said, returning Jade's corner-of-the-mouth smile. "I'll take the book just as a curio?'

  "Born pitchman, am I not?" he said as he punched it into the humming register. It peeped and clicked and burped out a skinny receipt designed to read Blessed Be just shy of the sawtoothed perforation.

  Grant unclipped a fifty and folded it double in his hand, making ready. "Tell me one more thing."

  "Business is so brisk I don't have a second to breathe," Jade said, opening his arms to indicate the empty store.

  "What do you know about the Spilsbury Murders - cult killing, happened in 1959? Could that have had something to do with witchcraft or some kind of cult or coven?"

  "Never heard of it."

  He slid the fifty across. "Keep the change. For consultation rendered?'

  Jade and Ulysses S. Grant stared each other down for an instant. "Where ya off to now, ace?" he said, tucking the bill away.

  "To talk to a little old lady who can tell me about the Spilsbury Murders." He nodded. "Thanks for your time."

  "It's your time," he said. "You bought it. No sweat - as soon as you walk out, somebody else'll roll in. That's the way things work around this place?'

  Before he left, he used Darkmoon's phone to try and warn—no, no, ask Jenny not to go back to his apartment alone, to let them meet at her place. He left the message on her machine. Then he made the drive back to Avalon Circle.

  Mrs. Saks was already dead.

  He later thought that perhaps he had pounded on Jenny's door a bit too hard, rattling it in its secure frame, very possibly stirring a neighbor. Stupidly, he at least startled her into taking her time answering the door, lest the knocker be 61-year-old Mr. Jensen from down the hall, horny and drunk again. He watched darkness swirl around the dot of light in the bull's eye of the door peephole.

  The raven hair fell to mingle with her deep-burgundy robe. She waved him in without the expected admonishments, sighing heavily, and that made him feel sufficiently dumb. The jump he had just given her was not entirely gone from her eyes yet. She watched him attempt to recover from his fumble by fading around it.

  "Where the hell have you been?" Instantly, he regretted the line. Pro forma soap opera shorthand for emotional scenes.

  She would let it pass - it was in her nature, he thought - but not without retort. "You look like hell yourself." She let him shut the door himself, and preceded him into her airy and clinically ordered kitchen. Everything in Jennifer's apartment appeared to have been recently uncrated by designers, lovingly reconstructing a diorama: Quarters of Modern Professional Woman. Magazines arranged oh so artfully on the table; agate ashtrays spotless; espresso machine gleaming; kitchen tiles as radiant as those in a floor-wax commercial. At first, the entire display had made Grant feel uncomfortable and shabby. He soon decided he liked it. Other people, he supposed, would complain that it was too reminiscent of their parents' house. He knew, certifiably, this was nothing like his parents' house. He knew from experience that Jennifer did sit on her sofa, despite the even, directional scape of the fabric nap. From experience, he knew Jennifer had done much more acrobatic things on that sofa.

  The sofa did not betray the things it had witnessed.

  She had given up the idea of touching him in greeting for now. It would be awkward, inappropriate. Atonement was due. But she despised the inexorability of the ritual, so said, "Sit, you. We shall back up and start again, since I don't want either of us to be mad. It's not worth it, not at this time of night. Not for us." Water was a boil and coffee was premeasured. Of course she had expected him. Maybe. "And I won't apologize for being out of touch. I did get your message on the machine. I had to run out. A chore I couldn't avoid." She favored him by looking back for a reply. "You staying?"

  "Huh?" He stumbled mentally. "Yeah. Of course."

  "I don't want to bother being domestic unless you're staying. You're very late. And I haven't been able to get in touch with you, either."

  He blundered about for a place to begin. With his dream, with the hideous logic chain forged at Darkmoon Occult Supplies?

  With the contrite, elderly woman he had found doing sentry duty on Mrs. Saks' front porch?

  "Just a pity, young sir, a shame. One of those awful vans, with the whirling lights, took her away this afternoon. If you met her, of course, then you knew she was carrying around too much, you know. Like a side of pork. Poor, dear woman. My heart couldn't stand a job like that, and neither could yours, for long. It would just burst. I bet the doctor says her heart just POPPED from the overload, like a circuit breaker. The least teeny bit of tension or stress. Or excitement."

  Or how about a hulking, creepy, bearish manifestation, come a-calling to stamp her out before she could tell one Grant Mantell damning facts about the Spilsbury Murders? It might not be capable of crossing Mrs. Saks' hex sign ... but as Jade Wing had advised, it could lob a few rocks.

  Grant considered the coffee, almost made. He was not sure he needed any more stimulation this night.

  Max's nails clicked on the kitchen floor. A warm, damp, pink-black nose pressed into Grant's free hand. The dog sat his head heavily upon Grant's knee and proceeded to dust his jeans with white hair.

  "No barking at the door allowed," said Jennifer. "He has better-developed manners than you."

  The incident with the mirror that morning seemed years distant. He released a tired exhalation. "Remember what they told you about acne in high school? The self-renewing cycle. Don't worry about getting pimples, they said, because worrying causes them. Talk about a fixed game." He pinched the bridge of his nose, hard, then ruffled the dog's head without looking. "Now I'm thinking about crap I don't want to. But I can't help it. I can't stop it. Now, I can't."

  She was pulling things down from shelves, keeping her back to him, he thought, because he had sinned earlier. Now he could tell she was making extra work for herself, averting her eyes. All he heard her say was: "You're scared you've got it. That disease you think your father had -"

  Suddenly the word narcolepsy swelled up to ridiculous zeppelin size in his head, becoming unmanageable for the narrow limits inside which he wanted to confine his explanation. Everything fizzled. "I'm terrified I've got it," he said in a small voice. "I'm scared I've got it, and it's driving me bonkers in some weird chemical way, making me see phantoms, giving me nightmares to feed the superstitions. Another goddamn cycle, like a hungry little cancer, chomping away. Auto-cannibalism of the sanity, to the point where a missing coffee cup sends me into an untethered panic."

  "Hang onto this one." She handed over a steaming mug, eyes still direct and dry.

  He preferred not to exchange meaningful silences. "It just figures, you know. Now that I've come into all the cash I'll ever need, it so happens I've also got" - he flubbed the word; had to force it out - "a disease. And inherited insanity. I can afford the best hospitals. Custom-tailored strait-jackets, when the hallucinations get really pro."

  "Stop?' She sat within reach, knees poking from the division of robe.

  "Stop thinking about it? That's what they'd say in high school - don't think about getting zits all over your face or you'll get 'em - and thinking this thing to death is what will shove me off the proverbial edge. Did I mention the nightmares I'm having about the mirror are progressive? More information each time; definitely freaky enough to certify me for a private closet. Classic pattern of decay. Did I mention that I've gone in for occult consultation?" A wild laugh squirmed free and sounded unhealthy. "Did I mention I'm about this far away from actually believing a corpulent little old lady was somehow killed by the forces of darkness this morning? Jesus H. goddamn Christ." He let the mug warm his hands. Max, bored with this trifling, checked his dish to see if anything edible had appeared in his absence.

  "So wallow if you want," she countered sharply. "But if you're going on that kind of drunk, get your terminology right. Try corybantiasm, I quote, 'a sleepless delirium accompanied by wild and frightening hallucinations.' N
ot narcolepsy. Try getting a definite prognosis if you really think you're sick. Get a different doctor. Stay away from your father's camp. And why not just dump the fucking mirror - no antique is worth this kind of anguish." Clunk - her mug came down like a gavel on the breakfast bar.

  "You really have been listening," he said, as though at last recognizing her through a fogbank of vertigo. He raised the cup and tasted chocolate, cinnamon, coffee, cream, all spiked with something that imparted a nice, subtle bite.

  She made a futile gesture, as if trying to encompass the improbability of it all. "Suppose your mirror isn't haunted, Grant?"

  "Then I guess we're back to the stuff that bothers me a bit deeper?"

  "No, I mean, what if it's the bed that's evil and not the mirror?"

  "Now who's being superstitious?"

  She leapt to correct: "Assuming, just assuming for a moment that there's any profit to be had from that line of logic." For the record, she qualified: "And not that I believe it, anyway." She killed a bit more thinking time by drinking from her own mug, then picking up the slim silver cigarette case from the counter. Its mechanistic Deco engraving caught light. Trapped it. "By the way - is this yours?"

  Disorientation crept up his skeleton. "No. They're yours?'

  Her expression told him she was being unfairly toyed with. "These are lady cigarettes, doll, but they're not mine. I wouldn't smoke these things. They'd kill me dead." She smiled, shrugged, put the case aside.

  A sophisticated little jest, Grant thought; that's it. He tried to hold down his unease. Grow up, spud, learn some adult humor, get some subtlety into your wit. Keep up with her. Forsake the puns and fart jokes, huh?

  Do nothing. Pretend you get it. And let her play with the wolves awhile.

  "Okay" she said. "So - think about this for a moment, Goodman Mantell. Your problems are all sleep-related, from the nightmares to the real-or-imagined illness. Think of what a holding tank for fear a bed could be - your new bed could be. Think of all the fears beds are party to. When you were a little kid, how many things about your bed scared you?"

  "I had at least two boogeymen in residence underneath," he said, warming to the idea. "There must've been some kid somewhere without one. I wouldn't let my feet hang over the edge; I still don't. But it was a place of security, too - where else can you hide under the covers, except in bed?"

  "But that security was a result of the fear, the thing you were hiding from. I used to think there were monster hermit crabs who wanted to clip my bare toes off with their pincers. And think - when you get older, schedules start to victimize you. You fear being up too late, fear your parents will whack you for reading under the blanket with a flashlight. Then you fear oversleeping - you'll be late for school. Late for work. Then you fear not sleeping enough - what am I doing to my body?"

  "And then there's my father," Grant said, hating the way the progression formed a neat, ordered chain. "He resents sleeping at all because it detracts from work-time with Calex. His body starts compensating and he immediately thinks he's sick, and starts worrying over how such a sickness could ball up his high-gear corporate life." He suddenly felt his stomach roll. "Pimples."

  "Think of the attendant fear standing in line, ready, when sex becomes an issue in life," she said, pleased now with the wealth of examples. "Fear of the first time. Very powerful; very scary. Some people worry about loss of virginity; more people worry about how they'll perform. Fear of missing an orgasm, or messing one up, or not feeling what you think you're supposed to. A million fears regarding the person who has consented to get into such a ridiculous position with you." After a beat, she added, "Fear of impotence."

  "God, do I hate the sound of that word," he said. "Another one that feeds on itself. You either best it, or just have to find somebody who doesn't scare you so much..."

  "And how many people die in bed?"

  Now that, he thought, was terrific PR for what inane waterbed ads called "sleep systems." A lot of people died flatbacking it in their own, comfy, familiar beds, without any special supernatural assistance. Death and beds. Deathbeds. Could a long enough association between the two lead to some kind of causal relationship? A coffin, to be sure, was just a narrow bed with silk cushions and a lid.

  "No bedsores and senility, not for me, not at this rate," he said. Jenny's brewed concoction was beveling the sharp corners in his head.

  "I can think of better ways to go," she said, inclining her head downward, her eyes darkening, having much the same effect as the drink. "Enough for one more?" She indicated the glass pot, the tiny silver pitchers, the condiments on the counter.

  "Sure, I -" He stopped cold. Something, a thought, had just fallen out of his head like a chunk of rotten insulation. It's happening again! He clenched his fists. No, surely it was the mad whipsaw of tension-stress; having made it intact to Jenny's, he relaxed (let his guard down?) and had momentarily forgotten what he was going to –

  He gave his coffee mug a secret-agent glance of doubt. No, that suspicion was even dumber.

  He looked up; saw her watching him with a most peculiar expression. The mug made him remember.

  "The mirror," he said, giving over the cup. "Jenny, I've got to go back to the apartment and see if the mirror is unbroken, if the mug is still gone. See if I fantasized this whole thing. I need you to come with me. Remember what you said about being alone with the damned thing? If this was all a hallucination, then I've got my mental stability to fret about. But if it wasn't - then I've got palpable proof."

  "Of what?" she said, appearing derailed, annoyed. "Either a busted mirror or a coffee cup that's MIA. Truly substantial evidence, my love."

  "To me it is, yeah!" He nearly shouted. "I know the goddamn thing was shining back at me when I left. I pitched the cup at it, and broke it, and didn't break it! I know—"

  "I'll go, I'll go, cease fire." She took the cup from his hands and returned it, steaming, full. "But in the morning, Grant, okay? I'm shagged." She braced him, placing her hands on his shoulders and pushing her own shoulders back. Her vertebrae pop-pop-popped. She sighed in relief. The belt of the burgundy robe gave up a few inches. "Seriously?"

  His reserves of iron were crapping out. "No, Jenny. Now. Don't you get it? I can know one way or the other, now, tonight, and I need you well, to notarize what I find out."

  She tapped away his iron with her touch, seemingly absorbing it through her fingertips. "No, yourself. If it's such cosmic proof, it can wait till sunrise, because I need you right now." She guided his hands into the slack of the robe. "Pause a moment to let it sink in, boy."

  The solid rise of her chest, between her breasts, seemed to be raging with warmth. He squashed the nutty urge to ask if she was running a fever. An imp stationed near his ear counseled him not to blow it twice in one night, and capitulation began.

  Her hand pushed his to the knotting of belt. "I don't have a stitch on under this thing," she said, her breath carrying her voice to him in soft little clouds. "You might have guessed."

  He croaked out a syllable of agreement. The thin belt surrendered faster than an Italian infantryman and she arched into his grasp.

  "I don't want you to go right now," she said. "I don't want to go. It's night out there, Grant, and now you've got me scared of it. Love me instead?"

  The attitude of her face was a picture Grant had imagined on a thousand nights he had spent alone, and he shut up protesting, for his own good. He stifled himself despite the renegade interior voice, the imp, warning him that manipulation of this brazen sort was a diversion one of the bad guys might pull. One of the enemy; one of them. He tried to see clues in the familiar agate-gray eyes of his lover. The newly poured coffee began to cool.

  Bed was an utter disaster.

  He sat in the cold concrete night of the parking garage below his apartment. He chuckled. It was a small, fatal sound; a noise of self-destruction.

  "I'm going. Over there. Right now." Still groggy with new sleep, she had said, "No. Not yet." He said o
kay; she had rolled over. Then he sneaked his clothing out of her bedroom on tiptoe. Edging out the door, he heard a final syllable: "Don't."

  He did not attempt to join the ends of the circle by leaving her a note, signed love.

  Don't.

  Perversely, the center of his attention had become Jenny's digital clock. He had watched it tote up elapsed time as he kissed her once more, caressed her again, and nothing else happened. More lost time, Panic. He felt displaced, goading his own erection as though he was inside a different, uncooperative skin. Coaching had never been needed before. He came up mechanically hard and lost it before he could even move, before his brain could pester him about the trouble he was experiencing. The second time was worse, pyramiding his frustration.

  Jennifer's calm disclaimers only angered him inside. You're exhausted distracted frightened tired. It's all right. It's not necessary. You're just—

  Impotent. The reflex cliché locked smoothly on, extracted blood and detached. Getting old, ditto.

  He thought disgustedly that excuses like age were still decades away. Not only that, but through it all his apartment, his bedroom, was still waiting with open arms and maybe jaws, perhaps getting itchy for action.

  He thought of boffing Max on the snout to keep him from thundering through the living room, wagging and rowfing, but instead mutely motioned him out the door. He'd gotten it into his pinpoint doggie brain that there was A RIDE to be had, and he would wake up the entire building should Grant refuse him a chance to stick his head out the car window into the mesmerizing slipstream of moving air. He piled himself into the suicide seat of the Pinto and panted. His breath was awful this morning.

  Grant thought of the clock, counting time, and booted his door open. "Okay, dogface, let's go do it."

  On the way up, it occurred to him that the culpability for last night's performance might not be entirely his - what if the brass bed was some kind of sexual exciter, as Jade Wing had claimed, the way the mirror seemed to be a paranormal videotape deck, rerunning the past?