Murder of Angels

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  The door jingles loudly when she opens it, a cowbell rigged up just above her head, and the old man behind the counter, old man with long white hair and a beard to match, looks up from the biker magazine he’s reading and nods at her. Kris Kringle on vacation from the North Pole and slumming as some desert-rat hippie, this old man.

  “Good evening,” he says in a voice as smooth as melted butter, but he doesn’t smile.

  “Hi,” Daria replies and wipes her nose again. “Do you sell beer?”

  “Yes, ma’am, we certainly do, just as long as you’re old enough to buy it and can show me some ID,” and he winks at her.

  “Better watch yourself,” she says and winks back, wishing that Alex would hurry up, because she isn’t in the mood to be charming. “You really got a museum in here?” she asks.

  “Now, I’ll admit that sign exaggerates just a mite. But we do got a few things most folks don’t see every day. You want a peek?”

  Daria shrugs and glances through the grimy glass door, trying to see if Alex is finished with the gas, but there’s a faded ad for Winston Lights in the way.

  “I really just came in for the beer,” she says.

  “Ah, come on. It’ll only take you a minute. Two minutes at the most. It ain’t the goddamn Smithsonian Institution, but I got a couple of curiosities that’ll make you look twice.”

  “I went to the Smithsonian once. But that was a long time ago.”

  “Well now, that makes one of us,” the old man says, scratching at his beard as he steps out from behind the counter. “Back here,” he says, “past the porno. You can grab your beer after we’re done.”

  Daria glances longingly at the door again, but there’s still no sign of Alex, just a glimpse of the Saturn around the edges of the Winston ad, and maybe whatever the old man has to show her will at least take her mind off everything for a few minutes. So she follows him deeper into the store, past a big display of Hustler and Penthouse, Playboy and at least a hundred other titty magazines.

  “That stuff don’t offend you, does it?” he asks and jabs a thumb at the magazine rack.

  “Oh no,” Daria says. “Not at all.”

  “You’re a dyke, aren’t you, girl?” he whispers and grins at her, showing off a dingy set of loose-fitting uppers. And before she’s even quite sure that he actually said what’s she just heard him say, the old man nods and shrugs his wide shoulders.

  “Hey, it ain’t no big whoop. My own goddamn granddaughter’s a lesbo, and who the hell am I to start passing judgment? Way I see it, ain’t none of it nobody’s goddamn business if women don’t want nothing to do with dick.”

  “Do you always talk to customers like this?” Daria asks, and he shakes his head.

  “Not all of them. Just the ones look like they ain’t got a mop handle shoved up their butts.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Well, I suppose you can take it however you want, miss. Ain’t no skin off my snout,” and he pushes open a brown door with a hand-painted sign that reads MUSEUM THIS WAY nailed to it. And then Daria sees the plaque hung above the door, an oblong disk of varnished pine and there’s a jackalope head mounted on the plaque, glass-blind eyes and tall jackrabbit ears and a small set of antlers—the tiredest joke in the West—and she stops and stares at it.

  “Ain’t you never seen a jackalope?” the man asks, and Daria nods her head very slowly.

  “Sure,” she says. “Sure I’ve seen jackalopes.”

  “Well, that’s not just any old jackalope, mind you. That there’s Senior El Camino, the holy guardian jackalope of Big Sandy Creek. He does me a favor, watching over the place.”

  “You’re a very strange man,” Daria says, and he winks again and disappears through the brown door. She stands staring at the taxidermied hybrid a moment or two longer, remembering the dream that might not have been a dream at all. Niki on the plane, and a few strands of blue fur, a single white feather caught in the stewardess’ hair.

  You have to remember this. You have to remember because I can’t get back there myself.

  There’s never enough time to do things the right way.

  “So, when’s it finally gonna start to sink in, that she’s really gone?” Daria asks the jackalope’s severed head, or she’s only asking herself, or maybe she’s asking no one at all. Maybe she only needs to hear the question. If Senior El Camino has an opinion, he keeps it to himself, and she steps through the doorway into a small, dimly lit room that smells like cobwebs and neglect.

  “My youngest son, Joe, he started this thing, couple’a years before he moved out to Kansas to open his own place,” the old man is saying, standing in front of a sturdy, homemade display case, and he wipes some of the dust off the glass with a red paisley handkerchief from his back pocket. “He went up to Denver when he was still in high school, to that natural history museum they got up there, and I guess it kinda, you know, inspired him.”

  Inside the case is a fossilized jawbone, almost as long as Daria’s arm, studded with curved, two-inch teeth, gray bone and chocolate-black enamel, and she leans closer for a better look. The jawbone is laid out on green felt and surrounded by an assortment of fossil oysters and shark’s teeth and tightly coiled ammonites. Some of the ammonites glint dully, despite the dust and dim lights, still wearing an iridescent covering of mother-of-pearl. There’s a hand-lettered piece of cardboard near the jawbone, and she squints to read what’s written there: PLATECARPUS, A MOSASAUR FROM THE CHALK SEA, 70 MILLION YEARS OLD, GOVE COUNTY, KANSAS.

  “He’s especially proud of that one there,” the old man says, pointing at the case. “Dug it up and cleaned it off himself, showed it to some scientists in Denver, and they wanted it for their museum, but he told ’em no siree, no way. He found it, he was gonna keep it.”

  “What’s a mosasaur?”

  “That depends who you want to listen to, I guess. You ever read the Bible?” he asks, and she shakes her head no. “Well, see, it talks a good bit about this big ol’ sea monster called Leviathan—‘Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible round about. His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal.’ That’s from the Book of Job.”

  “You don’t exactly seem like the sort who quotes scripture,” Daria says.

  “Ain’t you never heard that looks can be deceiving?”

  “Never judge a book by its cover,” she adds.

  “Right you are, missy. Anyway, some damn Baptist preacher wrote all that down for me after I showed him this fossil. He said it was the remains of Leviathan. My son, on the other hand, says that Leviathan’s just an old Hebrew name for crocodiles, and this mosasaur ain’t no crocodile at all, but just a sorta big lizard.”

  “A very big lizard,” Daria says. “So what do you think?”

  “Well, now, I think it’s a fine thing to find just laying there in the ground, either way you look at it. My son, Joe, says that way back when there was still dinosaurs alive, millions and millions of years ago, all these parts round here were at the bottom of the sea. That’s where the mosasaurs lived, I reckon. And those shells, too,” and he taps at the glass case. “That is, unless you listen to Baptist preachers, in which case it’s all just junk from Noah’s Flood. You want to see the rest?”

  “There’s more?”

  “You bet there’s more. I got a two-headed gopher snake and a quartz crystal big around as my fist. I got Indian arrowheads and a live Gila monster.”

  And then Daria sees something else in the case, just a small, rusty metal sphere lying between the mosasaur jaw and an especially large oyster shell, but suddenly there are goose bumps beneath the sleeves of her sweater and a pricking sensation along the back of her neck.

  “What’s that?” she asks, and the man stoops down for a closer look.

  You know what it is. You know exactly what it is and never mind how it got here, you know it anyway.

  “Oh, that,” the old man says and taps on the glass again. “Why, that’s just
a musket ball Joe found when he was picking up sharks’ teeth by the side of the road. That ain’t nothin’, but I figured I might as well put it in there with the rest.”

  “Can I see it? Will you take it out and let me see it, please?”

  “Wait a second now. That’s not usually the way I do things, letting customers handle the exhibits, I mean.”

  “Please,” Daria says again, and the old man frowns and rubs at his coarse gray-white beard.

  “You make one exception,” he mumbles, “you end up havin’ to make exceptions for everyone and his sister.”

  “Please, I won’t tell anybody.”

  “But it’s just an old musket ball, probably someone out shootin’ at deer or buffalo or—”

  “All I want to do is see it.”

  He stares at her and rubs his beard indecisively, his eyebrows arched and furrowed like two albino caterpillars. Daria’s afraid to look away from the rusted ball, afraid it might vanish, afraid it’s just what he says, only dread and wishful thinking making it anything more. Which is worse? she wonders. Which could possibly be worse? and now the old man has stopped staring at her and is busy looking through dozens of mismatched keys attached to a big brass ring.

  “It ain’t nothin’ but a damned old musket ball,” he grumbles, and Daria nods her head.

  “I know,” she says. “I know it’s just an old musket ball, but I need to see it, anyway.”

  “Well, I can tell you right now, the two-headed gopher snake’s a hell of a lot more interestin’.”

  “I’m sure it is,” she replies, and the old man’s at the back of the case now, one of his keys to make tumblers roll and the hasp of a padlock pops open. “I’ll see it later. I’ll see it next time.”

  “Who you tryin’ to kid? You ain’t never gonna be coming back this way, missy. Hell, I been wondering what you’re doing way out here in the first place, smelling like money and some big city by the sea.”

  “I was looking for something,” Daria says, as the old man reaches past the dagger teeth of the mosasaur, and now she knows that’s the real guardian, not Senior El Camino, but the jaws of this Leviathan.

  “Everybody’s out there looking for something. Sometimes, I think that’s the only thing keeps the world spinnin’ on her axis, all the goddamn people out there looking for something.” He lifts the rusted metal ball from the red felt and holds it cradled in his palm for a moment.

  Daria wants to reach for it, wants to snatch it from his hand before he changes his mind and puts it back and locks the case again.

  “Lord, help the poor, damn fools that actually find what they’re after,” he says, then passes the musket ball across the top of the case to her. Only it’s not a musket ball, just a rusty steel ball bearing with four letters written around its circumference. N-I-K-I in black ink so worn by time and rust and touch that she might never have seen them if she hadn’t known there would be something there. Her knees buckle, and she grips the edge of the wooden case to keep from falling.

  “She always said you’d be coming for it, Daria Parker,” the old man says, “and I was to keep it safe, no matter what. She said the Hierophant would need it again one day.”

  “The Hierophant,” Daria whispers, unable to look away from Niki’s name, the faded work of a dead girl’s hand, and when she looks back at the old man, he’s holding one finger to his wrinkled lips.

  “No questions, missy,” he says. “You and that Englishman out there just get yourselves moving again before them others catch up with you. You can thank me when you come back to see that snake someday, like you said.”

  And then the cowbell jingles loudly in the next room, and Alex is calling her name. Daria holds the ball bearing tightly to her chest as the old man leads her back through the brown door and locks it behind them.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The White Road

  Not the golden trumpets of Saint Michael’s angels, but the demon wail of civil defense sirens to signal Armageddon, and what’s the fucking difference? The last sound you’ll hear before the fire comes down, and no, not that, either. Walter opens one eye and stares at the digital clock radio on the table beside the bed. Three thirty P.M. and it’s only the alarm, because they were all so tired that Archer was afraid they’d never wake up on their own, might sleep straight through the night, so it’s not angels or sirens, and he reaches over and punches the OFF button.

  “I’m awake,” Archer mumbles unconvincingly from her side of the bed, but she doesn’t open her eyes. “What time is it?”

  “Time to rise and shine, sweet pea,” Walter says, rolling over onto his back to stare up at the low ceiling of the shabby motel room. There are brown water stains like the pressed blooms of some ancient flower, flower petals or bloodstains, and someone’s written DIE YOU CRACKER COCKSUCKER in green Magic Marker directly above the bed. The room stinks of disinfectant and mildew, stale cigarette smoke and unwashed bodies, and he shuts his eyes again, just a moment’s luxury before he has to fucking rise and fucking shine.

  “It’s your turn to deal with Theda,” Archer Day says, her face half-buried in her pillow and he can barely understand a word she’s saying.

  “Yeah, I know. My turn to deal with Theda,” and behind his eyelids are the last fading, freeze-frame images of his dreams, hurricanes of blood and shattered glass, lightning the color of infection, the cities of the not-quite-dead finally become the cities of stumbling, undying corpses, plagues without names or reason or ends, plagues to rot away the molten core of the world.

  Mount we unto the sky.

  I am sick, I must die.

  Lord, have mercy on us.

  And Spyder—too pure to be real, too pure to believe—the only still point in the storm, and she made him the offer that she always makes. Sanctuary in her tattooed arms, in the silken snare folds of her soul, and all he has to do is stand beside her at the end. And all this will be yours, all this and more. Sleep without nightmares, forgetfulness and days without fear, a Heaven far from this wasted earth, and he only has to see that no one and nothing tries to interfere. She’s never even asked him to face the Dragon, her Preacher Man, the idiot devil that she’s dragged with her from one universe to another. Walter only has to take her hand and be there with Theda, in the basement on Cullom Street, when the moment comes.

  The world shall burn, and from her ashes spring

  New Heaven and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell…

  No, not this earth. This earth shall only burn and then the ashes lie cold and undisturbed another five or six billion years, until a dying, supernova sun at last swallows the planet whole. She’s never made a secret of that, has never tried to hide from him the destruction of this earth. It’s lost anyway, she says. It’s never been anything else. You know I’m telling you the truth, Walter.

  And he does know, has known that all along, and some days it seems to matter, and other days it doesn’t make any difference at all.

  “I have to take a piss,” Archer says.

  “So, who’s stopping you?” and she grumbles something about Theda, something he’s heard so many times that the exact words don’t matter anymore.

  “I said I’ll deal with Theda. It’s my turn.”

  “Why does she always have to build her filthy little nests in the goddamn bathrooms,” Archer says.

  I can’t do it without you, Spyder said, just like she’s been saying all along, because of the three who went down and came back up again, he’s the only one left alive, the only one who didn’t die that long-ago November. Her crooked line back to this place, and for that reason alone he should have put a bullet through his skull. And maybe he would have, if Archer Day hadn’t come along to show him that he wasn’t insane, to show him that he still had a choice.

  The first time I saw her, he thinks. The very first time. Jesus, that’s been almost four years, and for a moment that’s enough to drive back even the things that Spyder Baxter has let him see. A cheated dragon’s wrath, the cities of gra
y ash, black skies and dead seas gone to pus and acid—all of it pale and insignificant against the moment Archer stepped out of the smoke and shadows of a North Hollywood bar. “I know your name,” she said, her voice like honey and heroin and the morning after a stormy night. “I know everything you think no one else could ever know.”

  Never an easier or more immediate seduction, and he ordered her a whiskey, and then sat and listened while she told him about the coming of the Weaver and the prophesied arrival of the Hierophant, about the Dragon and its jackals, all her impossible, true tales of a flat land of vast granite spokes and basalt wheels where oceans drained off into an unfathomable abyss.

  And he knew that it was true, all of it, because Spyder had already shown him every one of those things and more. But still he had to ask the question, how she could know, how these facts had come to her, and for a while Archer sat staring silently at the dirty barroom floor. When she finally answered him, there were tears in her eyes, and he didn’t ask her anything else. They’d gone back to his room in an East L.A. flophouse, and she slept in his arms.

  It was the first time in his life he hadn’t slept alone.

  “I have to piss now,” she says, and Walter opens his eyes. They still sting and burn, no matter how much he sleeps or how many bottles of Visine and Murine he empties into them.

  “I’m not stopping you,” he says again.

  “Just fucking take care of it, Walter.”

  And he marvels that this last day should be so much like all the others leading up to it, that it isn’t marked by a merciful freedom from mundane annoyances and everyday crap. There should be something different, like a condemned man’s final meal, whatever his heart desires, instead of the usual routine of bread and water, something to make this day special, besides the gas chamber or electric chair waiting at the end of that long, last walk. And then Walter gets up and goes to take care of it.

  After the doctor—an apprehensive man with a black leather satchel and wire-rimmed spectacles—carefully removes the old dressing and lances the swelling on Niki’s right palm, after a steaming cup of sweet black tea for the pain and an herbal poultice packed deep into the wound, then a fresh dressing, and after all this they finally let her rest. She lies beneath white cotton sheets and a quilt that only smells faintly musty and watches the orange-blue flame of an oil lamp sitting on a chest of drawers near the bed, the flame trapped safe inside its glass chimney, and she listens to Spyder and the doctor and the wind around the eaves of the house. Maybe I’m so tired I won’t be able to sleep, she thinks, but then the room and the whispering voices and the wind slip away, and for a long time there’s nothing else at all.