“What if you’re wrong, and we never get to find out? It’s kind of presumptuous, isn’t it, assuming that dead people get all the answers? Maybe they don’t know any more than we do.”
“My, but we’re in an existential mood today, aren’t we?”
“It’s just something I was thinking about yesterday morning, that’s all. How terrible it would be to be dead, to be a ghost and know that you’re dead, and still not know if there’s a God.”
“Is that how you think it works?”
“I don’t know what I think anymore,” Niki says, and then Marvin’s finished, has started putting everything back into the medicine cabinet, and the bloody water is swirling away down the drain. “But I’ve seen ghosts, and they don’t seem very happy about it. Being dead, I mean.”
“Are you afraid of them?” he asks, not exactly changing the subject, and he closes the medicine cabinet; Niki looks at the mirror, but the only reflections she can see there are hers and Marvin’s.
“There are worse things than ghosts,” she replies.
“Like wolves?” he asks her, and Niki doesn’t answer, glances down at the floor, instead. There’s a single red drop of her blood spattering the tiles.
“We should hurry,” she says, and Marvin doesn’t reply, and she waits impatiently while he takes time to wipe the floor clean again.
Thirty-five thousand feet above the mesas and buttes of Monument Valley and Daria stares through the tiny window in the 767’s fuselage, watching the sunset turning the tops of the clouds all the brilliant colors of the desert below. Flying into night, deep indigo sky ahead and fire behind them, and soon there will be stars. A cramped seat in coach because she’s too worried about money these days to spring for first-class tickets when this will get her to Atlanta just as fast. She has her headphones on, an old Belly album in her Discman, Tanya Donelly singing “Untogether” to simple acoustic guitar, and it makes her miss Niki that much worse. Music from the year they met, though not exactly the sort of thing she would have listened to back then. Too busy trying to keep up with the boys to suffer anything so pretty or vulnerable, too busy learning to be harder than she already was, and for a moment Daria thinks about digging a different CD out of the backpack at her feet. But the song ends, and the next track is faster and edgier and a little easier to take.
She closes her eyes, so far beyond sleepy, but it’s a nice thought, anyway, dozing off to the soothing thrum of jet engines, and then the man sitting in the seat next to her touches her lightly on the shoulder.
“You’re Daria Parker, aren’t you? The singer,” he asks, only a very faint hint of hesitation in his voice, and she almost says No, I’m not. No, but people are always telling me how much I look like her. She’s done it plenty enough times before, and it usually works.
Instead, she opens her eyes, the sky outside the window a shade or two darker than before, and “Yeah,” she says, and the man shakes her hand. Nothing remarkable about him, but nothing unremarkable, either, and she wonders how anyone could look that perfectly average. He introduces himself, perfectly average name she’ll forget as soon as he stops bothering her and goes back to the computer magazine lying open in his lap.
“Wow. I knew it was you,” he says. “I never would have recognized you, but my daughter has a poster of your band on her bedroom door. She’ll die when I tell her about this.”
Daria slips her headphones off and tries to remember all the polite things to say to an inquisitive stranger on an airplane, the careful, practiced words and phrases that neither insult nor encourage, but she’s drawing a blank, and he still hasn’t stopped shaking her hand.
“What’s her name?”
“Alma. It’s a family name. Well, my mother’s middle name, anyway,” and he finally lets go of her hand, has to so he can dig out his wallet to show her a picture of his daughter.
“How old is she?” Daria asks as the man flips hastily past his driver’s license, a library card, and at least a dozen credit cards.
“Fourteen. Fifteen next month,” and then he passes the wallet to Daria and the girl in the photograph stares back at her through the not-quite-transparent plastic of a protective sleeve. The sort of picture they take once a year at school, yearbook-bland sort of photograph your parents have to buy, and aside from one very large pimple, Alma looks almost as average as her father.
“She has every one of your records. Even an old cassette tape she bought off eBay, from when you were in that other band, the Dead Kittens.”
“Stiff Kitten,” Daria says, correcting him even though she probably shouldn’t, probably rude, but he just nods his head agreeably and takes the wallet when Daria hands it back to him.
“Right, yeah. Stiff Kitten. Anyway, she paid seventy-three dollars for that old tape, if you can believe it.”
“I don’t even have a copy of that myself,” which is true, her last copy of the demo she recorded with Mort and Keith lost before she and Niki moved to San Francisco. “I haven’t heard it in years.”
“Well, let me tell you, I sure have. She plays it constantly. I keep telling her she’s going to wear it out. Personally, I prefer your newer stuff.”
“Me, too,” she says, and the man laughs.
“Would you mind signing something for her? I hate to bother you, but she’d kill me—”
“No, it’s okay, really,” relieved that they’ve gotten around to the inevitable and he’ll probably stop talking soon, hoping that she doesn’t look relieved, but running out of chit-chat and patience. Just wanting to shut her eyes again, put the headphones back on, and with any luck she can sleep the rest of the way to Atlanta.
The man tears a subscription card out of the computer magazine and Daria signs one side of it with a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket. “To Alma, be true,” and “That’s nice,” the man says when he reads it. “That’s very nice. Thank you. She’ll be tickled pink.”
Daria almost laughs, the very last thing in the world she would have expected him to say, tickled pink, and then she sees the tattoo on the back of his right hand. Fading blue-black-green ink scar worked deep into his skin, concentric and radial lines connecting to form a spider’s web, and he sees that she’s staring at it.
“Stupid, isn’t it? Had that done when I was in college. My wife says I should have it removed, but I don’t know. It reminds me of things I might forget, otherwise.”
And Daria doesn’t reply, gives the man’s pen back to him, and he asks her a couple more questions—what’s it like, all the travel, the fans, has she ever met one of the Beatles—and she answers each question with the first thing that comes into her head. Forcing herself not to look at the tattoo again, and then the stewardess comes trundling down the narrow aisle with the beverage cart. The man asks for a beer, a lite beer, and Daria takes the opportunity to turn away and put the headphones over her ears again. Outside, it’s almost dark, a handful of stars twinkling high and cold and white, and she stares at them through her ghost-dim reflection until she falls asleep.
CHAPTER THREE
Ghosts and Angels
Niki wanted to call a taxi, but they took Marvin’s car, instead. A very small concession, she thought, give and take, only something to make her seem a little more reasonable. On the outside, the old VW Beetle looks like someone’s been at it with a sledgehammer and a crowbar; inside, it smells like mold and the ancient, duct-taped upholstery, the fainter, sweeter scents of his cologne and something she thinks might be peppermint Altoids. A puttering, noisy punch line of a car and “How much does Daria pay you?” she asks him, though How much doesn’t she pay you? seems more to the point.
“Enough,” he says, turning off Steiner onto Fell, the streetlights much, much brighter than his wavering low beams.
“Obviously not enough to buy a new car,” she mutters, thinking that Marvin won’t hear her over the Volkswagen’s clattering engine, but he does.
“Yes. Enough to buy a new car, if I wanted a new car. I’ve had Mariah here since
I started college. She gets me everywhere I need to go. How’s the hand feeling?”
“It hurts.”
“More or less than before?” and Niki thinks about that for a few seconds before answering, staring down at the bandage, thinking about Cafe Alhazred and the old man at the museum who wasn’t Dr. Dalby.
“Just about the same,” she says, finally.
“Well, then. It could be worse.”
“I don’t need to see a doctor,” she whispers emphatically.
“Yes, Niki, you do,” he says, and she wonders how he can hear anything at all over the racket the car’s making. “You do, and you will. We’re not going to argue about this.”
She sighs and holds her aching hand up, rests it against the cool, streaky glass of the passenger’s side window. And wonders again if maybe this whole thing isn’t just a trick to get her to the hospital, a trick to keep her in San Francisco. Maybe Marvin didn’t really call the airport at all. Maybe he called Dr. Dalby, instead.
Maybe they’re already waiting for her at the hospital.
You just get her here, and we’ll take it from there.
Thorazine and restraining straps, needles and pills and perhaps it wasn’t even Marvin. Maybe Daria set the whole thing in motion before she left the house.
“We’re going to do this,” Marvin says resolutely. “But we’re going to do it right. I’m not sure you understand how serious that cut could be if it gets infected. Hell, for all I know it’s already infected.”
“It doesn’t feel infected. It just hurts some, that’s all.”
“Trust me,” Marvin says, squinting at the street through the Volkswagen’s dirty windshield. “We’ll be in and out and on our way in no time.”
He’s lying, Danny Boudreaux whispers from the backseat, his ghost’s voice like venom and sugar. You know he’s lying, Niki. I can see it in your eyes.
She glances reluctantly at the side-view mirror, and there’s nothing in the backseat but their luggage, half hidden in the darkness behind her.
“I never said that I didn’t trust you, Marvin,” and so he smiles a nervous smile for her, then wrestles the stick into third.
“It was just a figure of speech, you know that. Don’t start getting paranoid on me, Niki.”
“I’ve always trusted you. You and Daria both. The two of you, you’re the only people I have left in the world now, aren’t you?”
There’s a red light up ahead, and Marvin shifts down again, grimacing at the noises coming from the transmission. “Easy, girl,” he says, and Niki isn’t sure if he’s talking to the car or to her.
Listen to me, Danny whispers urgently from the backseat. Listen to me while there’s still time. You know damn well what’s going to happen when he gets you to the hospital. You know they’ll lock you up again.
“You don’t have to whisper,” she says, glancing back to the mirror and the pile of luggage. “He can’t hear you.”
You don’t know what he can hear, Niki.
“Who are you talking to?” Marvin asks, flipping a lever for the right turn signal, and the car comes to a stop at the intersection of Fell and Divisadero. A teenage girl on inline skates and a homeless man in a baggy pink sweatshirt and cowboy hat cross the street in front of them.
“Myself,” Niki tells Marvin. “I’m talking to myself,” but she can see he doesn’t believe her, the look in his eyes, his hesitant frown.
“If you’re hearing voices again, you need to say so. You know keeping them a secret only makes things worse.”
Lying nigger fag, Danny Boudreaux sneers, but she’s pretty sure it’s not Danny’s voice anymore; some other voice back there, words ground against words like metal grinding metal, like the Volkswagen’s worn-out transmission. You know better, Niki. I fucking know you know better than to trust this faggot son of a bitch.
“I don’t hear anything,” she insists, biting at her lower lip and turning away from the mirror, staring up at the traffic light, instead. “I don’t hear anything at all.”
“You know you can tell me the truth,” Marvin says, and he steals a nervous peek at the rearview mirror, so maybe he can hear the voices.
This time they won’t stop with the drugs, Niki. This time you’ll get electroshock. This time—this time they’ll plug you in and fill your head so full of lightning you’ll never think of anything else ever again. Just white fire and crackling sparks trapped inside your skull with no way out until it burns you to a cinder.
“Is that really what you think?” she replies, replying to the crankshaft, gear-rust voice in the backseat, not Marvin, but he nods his head, anyway.
I can smell the smoke already.
“Yeah, Niki. That’s really what I think. I think you know that you can trust me.”
The stoplight like a crimson eye blazing in the chilly November night, a single dragon’s eye peering into this world from someplace else, peering in and finding her trapped inside the ugly little car with Marvin and the ghosts in the backseat. She’s cornered, rat in a cage, rabbit with no place left to run, and in another second or two, it’ll tear its way through, shredding the space between worlds in its steel and ivory claws.
He has more eyes than you could ever count. If you had three eternities, you’d never count them all.
“We’re going to the airport,” Niki says quietly, shutting her eyes so she doesn’t have to see the dragon seeing her. “You’re taking me to the doctor, and then we’re going to the airport.”
“Yes. That’s exactly what we’re doing.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me, Marvin? Not ever? Not even if you thought it was for my own good?”
“No, I wouldn’t lie to you, Niki.”
They’ve prepared a special place for you, the voice from the backseat purls. You should know that. Here and there. A place where no one will ever find you, not even Spyder.
“I need to believe that, Marvin. I fucking want to believe that,” but she’s reaching for the door, her hand around the handle before her eyes are even open, and he sees her and grabs her shoulder.
“What are you doing, Niki. I told you—”
“I can’t take any chances. You don’t know what’s at stake. You don’t know—”
“I can’t know what you won’t tell me.” And now he sounds frightened, more frightened than angry. The light changes, crimson eye blinking itself to emerald green, and he looks at it and then quickly back to Niki.
“Please, Niki. I need you to let go of the door handle. The light’s changed.”
“Yeah, but it’s not looking for you, Marvin, is it? It’s not fucking looking for you,” and it scares her how small and far away her voice sounds now, like she’s watching a movie or television and the volume’s been turned almost all the way down; her heart so much louder than her voice, her heart grown as wide and endless as the black California night spread out overhead.
Claws to tear through time and space and anything in between, anything in its way. Claws to tear the sky, to tear your heart apart—
“You can’t even hear it.”
“I’m going to pull over now, okay? And I need you to be still, just long enough for me to pull over, and then we’ll get out of the car if that’s what you need to do.”
Liar, the voice growls softly, unbelieving, and now it only sounds like Danny Boudreaux again. Only sounds like the strangled voice of a dead boy, not the vulcanized rubber tongues of damned and scorched machineries. He’s just trying to save himself. He’s made deals, and if you get away, if he lets you get away—
Behind the Volkswagen, someone begins honking their horn, and Niki looks up at the green light again.
“I fucking swear to God, Niki, I am not lying to you,” and Marvin cuts the wheel, nowhere to park but the crosswalk, and for a moment, the still point between breathing in and breathing out, she can’t look away from the light, from the eye. Red means stop, green means go, go Niki, go now, while there’s still somewhere left to run.
“I’m sorry, Ma
rvin,” she says and opens the door, jerking free of his grip and almost tumbling out onto the pavement, catching herself at the last and stepping quickly away from the car.
“Niki, don’t do this! Please, listen to me,” but she’s already turned her back on him and his musty car and all the other cars trapped there behind the sputtering Volkswagen. She’s not running yet, because none of this feels real enough to let herself start running, not just yet, but she is walking very fast, the soles of her boots loud against the sidewalk.
You better run, babe, Danny says, and she realizes that he’s following her. You better run fast, because you can bet he’s going to be coming after you any minute now.
Niki looks back over her shoulder; Marvin’s pulling over to the curb, and she starts walking faster. Her head’s grown so full that she can’t think—the drivers still blowing their horns because Marvin can’t get out of their way quickly enough, Danny and all the other voices, the ruby fire and green ice of the dragon’s eye. Everything getting in through her ears and her eyes, flooding her, and there’s no way she can shut it all out, no inch of silence left anywhere in her deafened soul.
Where you going, Niki? Danny asks her. Where you headed in such a goddamned hurry?
“You leave me alone,” she spits back, wishing there were flesh and blood left of him, something solid for her to dig her nails and teeth into, something that could bleed. “You’re dead. You’re fucking dead because you were too afraid to live anymore. You’re dead, so leave me the hell alone and be fucking dead!”
That morning you left me, that was the end of the world for me, Nicolan. That morning I trusted you, and you left me alone. I knew you’d never ever be coming back for me.
“Where am I going? Where the hell am I supposed to go now?” she asks, not asking him, not asking anyone, just repeating questions over and over and over because she needs the answers more than she’s ever needed anything in her life.
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