Murder of Angels

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  A breeze rustled loudly through the branches, ocean-raw breath to set leaf and twig tongues wagging, and maybe that was all she’d heard. The wind in the trees, not a voice, and she was sure that was probably what Marvin or Daria would tell her if they were there, what Dr. Dalby would say.

  Then the shadows moved, or something stitched into the shadows, something huge that slipped ink smooth on long and jointed legs from the cover of a great oak, and for a moment she might have seen it clearly as it crossed the path. And then it was gone again. Just a dog, Daria would say if she were there, reassuring, certain. Only a stray dog, Niki, out looking for its breakfast.

  A dingy yellow cab pulled up close to the curb, and the driver honked his horn at her; Niki Ky stared at the trees a moment longer, at the oblivious blackbirds and sparrows, and then she turned her head and stared at the cabby.

  Wouldn’t a dog have scared the birds away? she thought. Wouldn’t anything have scared the birds away?

  The cabby was an old black man wearing a mostly orange Giants baseball cap, and he stared back at her, motioned for her to hurry up, impatient come-on-if-you’re-coming motion, and Niki slipped down off the concrete wall, trying to forget about the trees and stray dogs, and crossed the sidewalk to the taxi. The old man rolled down his window, and “You called for a cab?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes sir, I did,” and she put her hands into the pockets of her coat to be sure she had the things that she needed, her billfold and pills, her house keys. She resisted an impulse to look over her shoulder before getting into the cab. Inside it was warm, stuffy warm, and smelled like worn Naugahyde and cinnamon-scented air freshener. There was tinny jazz playing on the radio, much too early for jazz, she thought, but there it was anyway. The driver watched Niki in the rearview mirror, waiting for her to give him directions, and when she didn’t he frowned.

  “Where you goin’?” he asked.

  “Oh,” she said, like the necessity for any particular destination hadn’t occurred to her, more the need to escape Marvin and the house on Steiner Street than the desire to actually be somewhere else.

  “I want coffee,” she told him, “Good coffee,” which was true, she did. But the driver grunted and rolled his eyes at her, so Niki added, “Cafe Alhazred, on Fulton,” though it wasn’t her favorite, just the first thing that popped into her head.

  “Ma’am, are you high or somethin’?” he asked. “I know it ain’t exactly none of my concern, and it don’t make me much difference if you are. I ain’t gonna put you out. I just want to know, in case somethin’ happens.”

  Niki nodded her head, thinking that she should feel more offended at his question than she did, and then she remembered the three prescription bottles in her pocket and took one of them out to show the driver. She held the Xanax bottle up so he could see it.

  “I’m on prescription medication,” she said, wishing that he’d just drive and stop glaring at her in the mirror. “Sometimes it makes me a little groggy in the morning.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “I don’t think it’s any of your business.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right,” the driver said. “Sorry,” and he pushed the lever that started the cab’s meter running and pulled away from the curb. “Say, exactly what kind of animal you gotta skin to get a fur coat that color, anyhow?”

  “It’s not real fur,” Niki replied absentmindedly and glanced at the house as they passed it, all the tall windows dark, the curtains drawn. So Marvin must still be asleep, and I got away, she thought.

  “That’s sorta reassurin’,” the driver said and turned west onto Fulton Street.

  “I think you must talk more than any cab driver I’ve ever met,” Niki said to him and put her boots up on the back of the seat, the brown suede boots with bright, canary-yellow laces that made her feet look huge and blocky, Frankenstein feet, and she slid far enough down that she didn’t have to look at the square anymore.

  “Well, I don’t intend to drive this ol’ hack all my life. I plan on writin’ a novel one day, a best seller, after I retire, and so I gotta pay close attention and talk to folks. I figure my book’s gonna have real people, not a bunch’a made-up phonies.”

  “Someone will just sue you,” Niki said. She realized that she hadn’t put the pill bottle back in her pocket, and she shook it a couple of times. The pills made a dry, pleasant sound against the plastic, a comforting noise like a baby’s rattle or a very small maraca.

  “Oh, I ain’t gonna use nobody’s real name. I’ll come up with brand-new ones that fit people better than their real names.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Niki said. “They’ll figure out what you did and sue you, anyway.”

  “Damn, you sure got a cynical streak, girl,” the driver mumbled and then honked his horn at a UPS truck that had pulled out in front of him. “Someone go and piss in your cornflakes this mornin’ or what?”

  “I hope you don’t have your heart set on a tip,” she said and opened the bottle, shook one of the Xanax out into her hand. The swelling on her palm was worse, but the welt had almost stopped hurting, had begun to feel a little numb, in fact. The bump had turned the color of a raisin.

  “Now, see? That is exactly what I mean. I’ll probably be naming you somethin’ awful, like…” and then he paused to honk at a rusty red Toyota and call the driver a blind hippie son of a bitch. He tugged once at the frayed brim of his Giants cap, and “Well, somethin’ disagreeable,” he said. “Eudora Bittlesnipe, maybe, or maybe Miss Suzy Sourmilk.”

  “No one’s going to read a book full of names like that,” Niki said and popped the pill into her mouth. “It’ll be a big flop, and you’ll wind up living on the street.”

  “Well, though it’s been an inspirin’ pleasure making your acquaintance, Miss Bittlesnipe, and I hate to see you go, I think this is your stop,” and he pulled over at the corner of Fulton and Divisadero.

  Niki sat up, quickly swapped the pill bottle for her billfold, plain black leather with her initials in silver thread, and she took out five dollars and told the driver to keep the thirty cents she had coming in change.

  “Hell’s bells. Guess I’ll be able to retire a lot sooner than I thought,” he said, pulled a pencil stub from behind his left ear, licked the tip and jotted something down on a clipboard. His two-way radio crackled to life, momentarily drowning the jazz station in a sudden burst of static and angry, unintelligible voices speaking in Spanish.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Niki said, climbing out of the backseat, and “Hey, wait a sec,” the driver called out to her over the sputtering racket from the radio. But the door of the cab was already swinging shut and, besides, she wasn’t in the mood for any more witty conversation. She crossed the street to Cafe Alhazred and went inside.

  The interior of the coffee shop was a fanciful, mismatched fusion of Middle Eastern kitsch, someone trying hard to invoke the markets of Cairo or Baghdad and getting I Dream of Jeannie instead; sand brown plaster walls decorated with an incongruous assortment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Arabic graffiti, lancet archways and beaded curtains, a few dusty hookahs scattered about here and there like a lazy afterthought, framed and faded photographs of desert places. A pretend Casablanca for the punks and hippies, the goths and less classifiable misfits that had long ago claimed Cafe Alhazred as their own.

  Niki ordered a tall double latte, paid at the register, and took an empty table near the front of the cafe, sipped at the scalding mix of steamed milk and espresso and inspected the people filing hurriedly past the windows. Men and women on their way to work or somewhere else, two purposeful and intertwining trails like strange insects caught in a forced march, northeast or southwest, and she closed her eyes for a moment. Nothing but the warm coffee smells, the commingled conversations of other customers, and an old Brian Eno song playing softly in the background.

  I really got away, she thought again, oddly satisfied by the simple fact of it, but not quite believing it was true, either,
and not quite sure why. Marvin had never actually stopped her from going out without him, but since he’d come to live with them, to watch over her, she’d never tried to venture farther than Alamo Square park alone.

  But I did it, didn’t I? I got away from him and that house. Now I can go anywhere. Anywhere at all.

  Niki opened her eyes, half expecting to be back in her bedroom, but nothing had changed, and she was still sitting there in the wobbly wooden chair at the little table, the Friday morning stream of pedestrians marching past. Only now there was someone standing out there looking in, an ashen-skinned child no more than five or six, seven at the most, gazing straight at her. The girl’s long hair was black, and she stood with her face pressed against the window, her breath fogging up a small patch of the plate glass. Her blue eyes so pale they made Niki think of ice, and the child wasn’t wearing a coat, not even long sleeves, just a T-shirt and grimy-looking jeans.

  Niki smiled at her, and the girl blinked her cold blue eyes and smiled back, a hesitant, uneasy smile as though she wasn’t precisely sure what smiles meant or how to make one, and then she pointed one finger towards the sky. Niki looked up and saw nothing over her head but the ceiling of Cafe Alhazred, and when she looked back down again the child was gone, just a snotty smear on the glass to prove that she’d ever been there.

  We dream of a ship that sails away, Brian Eno sang above and between the murmuring voices crowding the cafe…. a thousand miles away.

  Niki raised the big mug of coffee, both hands and the cup already halfway between the Formica tabletop and her lips when she noticed the mark the child had traced on the windowpane, the simple cruciform design, and she stopped, caught in the disorienting blur of recognition and unwanted memories, the déjà vu freeze-frame collision of then and now and the singer’s insinuating, dulcet-gentle voice.

  We dream of a ship that sails away…

  It isn’t real, Nicolan. It isn’t anything that can ever hurt you.

  …a thousand miles away.

  And a flash of pain through her right hand, spike-steel sharp and electric bright across her stiff and swollen palm, dividing fivefold and racing itself swiftly towards the tips of her cramping fingers. Niki cried out and dropped the mug. It bounced off the table, dumping hot coffee in her lap before it hit the floor and shattered. She tried to stand, but a fresh wave of pain clenched her hand into a tight fist, and she almost slipped on the wet floor, ceramic shards of the broken cup crunching beneath her boots, and she sat right back down again.

  “Hey, what’s wrong?” someone asked. “Are you sick or something?” Someone male who sounded scared and confused, and Niki peered out through her watering eyes at a skinny boy with a shaved head and a ring in his lower lip.

  …we dream of a ship that sails away…

  “My hand,” she gasped, but her voice too small, breathless, lost in the white fire searing its way greedily up her arm, and the stupid, baffled expression on his face all she needed to know that the boy didn’t understand. Wasting her time because he would never possibly understand any of it, and so she got to her feet again, shoved roughly past him, past other tables and other people. All of them looking at her now, sly and knowing glances from beady, dark eyes, suspicious scowls, and Niki tried desperately to think through the alternating waves of pain and nausea, lightheaded and sick and only trying to remember where the hell the restroom was hidden.

  And someone pointed the way, finally, though she didn’t remember asking them, and she stumbled past the counter and down the long hallway, past cardboard boxes of to-go cups and plastic spoons. What if someone’s in there, she thought, but the door was open, the doorknob loose and jiggly in her hand, and she locked it behind her.

  …a thousand miles away.

  The restroom was hardly even as large as a closet and smelled like disinfectant and mildew, shit and drying urine, and everything too stark in the green-white fluorescent light, too perfectly defined. Niki leaned over the tiny rust-stained sink and twisted the handle marked H, but cold water gushed from the faucet, and there wasn’t time to wait for it to decide to get warm someday. She gritted her teeth, held her hand under the icy water, and stared back at herself from the scratched and streaky mirror hung above the sink.

  Her own face in there but almost unrecognizable, pale and sweat-slick junky’s face, puffy, bloodshot eyes and black hair tangled like a rat’s matted nest, and she couldn’t remember if she’d brushed it before leaving the house. That face could belong to almost anyone, anyone lost and insane, anyone damned. Her hand throbbed, and Niki shut off the tap.

  “You should have listened to me,” the dead boy behind her admonished, Danny watching her in the mirror. “It’s probably too late now. It’s probably in your blood by now.”

  “It’s killing me,” she said, whimpered, and the center of the welt had gone the color of vanilla custard, the fat pustule surrounded by skin so dark it looked as if it had already begun to decay.

  “No,” he said. “It won’t kill you. If you’re dead, you’re no good to anyone. This will be worse than dying, Niki.”

  Then something seemed to move inside the welt, something larval coiling and uncoiling in its amniotic rot, and the pain doubled and she screamed.

  “Shhhhh,” the dead boy hissed and held one cautious finger to his lips. “Hold it down or they’ll hear you, Niki. And then they’ll come to find out what’s wrong in here, and they’ll all see what’s happening to you.”

  “Fuck,” she grunted, and spittle flew from her lips and speckled the brown walls, the lower half of the dirty mirror. “You’re dead,” she said. “You got out. You ran the fuck away and left me alone.”

  “You think it’s some kind of party over here?” he asked her and smiled or sneered, black teeth and his eyes almost twinkled the way they did when he was still alive. “Well it ain’t, sugardoll. It isn’t even Hell. It isn’t anything you can begin to imagine.”

  “You left me,” she said again, and he shook his head, the ruined ghost of his pretty, drag queen’s face twisting into an angry snarl.

  “No, Niki. You left me. You ran out on me. I told you the truth because I loved you, and you fucking ran.”

  “Oh,” she whispered, “oh, God,” gasped, consciousness thin and brittle as onionskin now, black at the narrowing edges of her vision, and the thing beneath her flesh wriggled, worming its way in deeper.

  “You wanted her,” Danny Boudreaux said. “You wanted her and now she has you, forever and fucking ever.”

  He laughed at her, empty, soulless laugh like the end of time making fun of the beginning, and Niki screamed again and squeezed the welt between her left thumb and index finger. For a moment the shiny surface of the blister held, a second that might have lasted for hours, days, while she screamed and the dead boy with the crooked neck laughed his apocalypse laugh for her. And then it burst, popped loud, and Niki grabbed at one end of the squirming thing trying to burrow quickly away from her and the dim restroom light.

  “No,” she said. “No, you don’t. I won’t let you in,” and Niki held on to it tightly, her wet fingers slippery with pus and blood, its transparent body like a strand of water, living tissue that insubstantial, jellyfish siphonophore tendril or some deep-sea worm. It grew taut, then went limp, shimmered like a pearl before slipping effortlessly from her grasp and vanishing into the seeping red hole in the palm of her hand.

  “Sorry,” the dead boy said, sounding almost as though he might have meant it. “I thought for a minute there you might win after all.”

  Niki’s legs folded, and she fell to the floor, landed in a heap on the filthy, piss-damp tile and sat there sobbing and cradling her aching hand. Her treacherous right hand become the ragged passage into her body, her heart, her soul if that’s where the thing meant to go. Bright, clean blood flowed freely from the hole, and she let it bleed. Danny was gone, and someone was banging on the restroom door. She wasn’t sure if the lock worked or not, so she leaned on the door and braced one of her boot
s against the toilet bowl.

  “What’s going on in there?” a man with a Middle Eastern accent shouted at her from the other side. “Don’t make me call the police.”

  “I’m sick,” she shouted back at him. “I’m just sick.”

  “But you were screaming,” the man said. “I heard you,” and she could tell that he didn’t believe her.

  “So I’m very sick, okay? But I’m getting better. I’ll be out in a minute. I’m sorry.”

  “I will call the police if you scream again,” he said, and then she listened as his angry footsteps retreated down the hallway. Niki shut her eyes, wondering if there was anything in the restroom she could use for a bandage, and waited hopelessly for whatever was going to happen next.

  Another taxi ride down Fulton to the evergreen sanctuary of Golden Gate Park, and this time a driver who didn’t try to talk her ear off. He dropped Niki in front of the California Academy of Sciences, and she stood on the museum steps for a while, watched as noisy groups of schoolchildren were herded about by their teachers. She’d torn away a strip of the sweatshirt she was wearing under the blue fur coat and wrapped it tightly around her hand, not so tight that she’d cut off the circulation, but tight enough that it would stop the bleeding and stay put.

  She was there because this was where the thing that had crawled inside her said to come. This drab Eisenhower-era edifice of gray stone blocks and concrete columns, an austere and secular church for modern stargazers and alchemists. In a few minutes, she would go inside and see whatever it was she was supposed to see, but for the moment, better to stand out here beneath the wide blue sky and smell the clean ocean air, the mild autumn breeze, the flowers and grass, and Niki imagined that she could smell nasturtiums and roses growing somewhere nearby.