Murder of Angels

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

“A piece of her?” Marvin asks the thing at the dressing table.

  “The Hi-ero-phant, blackie. A smidgen of the darkling girl that the Weaver’s called down upon us all, the one who holds the day and night in her dirty little bitch’s fists. But one hair is all we need, one hair or a baby tooth or a snip of fingernail, and we’ll send her back here forever.”

  “Why don’t you turn around and face me?” Marvin asks it, and he glances at the table beside the bed—the blue vase and the wilting Peruvian lilies, the alarm clock that reads 8:45 A.M.—and then he glances back at the monster. It’s still watching him through the snot- and spit-smudged mirror, and Marvin thinks the expression on its long, angular face must be wariness.

  “Ah, you would like that, wouldn’t you,” it growls. “But I know the law. And now I know you’re from the witches, trying to trick me like that. Thas’ how they operate,” and the monster picks up Niki’s hairbrush.

  “Of course,” Marvin says, looking from the brush clutched in the monster’s hand to the vase and back to the brush again. “Yes, of course you do.”

  And it’s only a dream, only the most ridiculous fucking nightmare that he’s ever had, lying here in Niki’s bed and talking with an ogre in broad daylight, but the way it’s gazing at the brush, the way it’s smiling—those obscene lips curled back to show uneven teeth like chunks of coal, the wicked triumph on its face—and then it begins to pick strands of hair from the bristles.

  “One for the ravens, one for my wishes,” it snickers to itself in a tuneless, nursery rhyme singsong. “One for the ladies, and one for the fishes.”

  “I’ve insulted you,” Marvin says, thinking of Sylvia Thayer’s wolves as he reaches for the vase on the nightstand. “You know the law.”

  “Turn from the mirror and lose your way,” the monster mutters absently, inspecting a single strand of Niki’s hair with the tip of its scabby pink tongue. “Turn away from the mirror, Mossrack, and you’ll never come home again. Yes, I know the law, I do.”

  The vase feels very heavy in Marvin’s hand, thick glass and at least half full of water, and he sits up very slowly, until the balls of his feet are touching the chilly floor, and the monster’s so close that he could reach out and touch it, too.

  “It’s a lifeline, that mirror,” he says, and the monster nods its massive head and pulls another hair from the brush.

  “Five for the horses, and six for the foxes—”

  “Without it we’re lost,” Marvin says, tightening his grip on the vase, “both of us.”

  “You know that,” the monster grunts, and now it’s beginning to sound exasperated. “You know that perfectly well. Without the mirror, there’s only the void waiting to claim us. Even the red witches and their darky bastard lapdogs fear the void. Cold, cold, cold without ends, without even beginnings, either. No blackness in the void, ’cause there’s never been so much as a spark of light to divide the one from the other.”

  “Sounds a lot like South Dakota,” Marvin says. “I spent a whole week there one January. Sweet piece of ass, but he wasn’t worth South Dakota.”

  The creature stops sniffing at the dark strands of Niki’s hair and glares at Marvin from the looking glass. A glare from those boiled-egg eyes so filled with contempt and confusion that he almost sets the blue vase down and waits for the nightmare to find another way to end.

  “Your skin would look nice on the wall of my burrow,” it says and grins again. “A sorry shame you’re there, behind me. Perhaps, though, if you came closer.”

  “What comes after the foxes?” Marvin asks it and, before the monster can reply, he hurls the vase at the mirror. It sails past the thing’s right ear and, for a moment, the entire world is lost in the sound of breaking glass.

  And then Marvin is alone in the bedroom again, the sun shining in through the parted drapes, and he stares at the mess the monster’s made of the dressing table, the hairbrush lying there, the reflecting shards of mirror and the Dresden blue vase, bent flower stems and water dripping from the cherry wood, the lipstick tubes scattered across the floor.

  And he starts waiting to wake up.

  In a narrow upper berth, somewhere far below the deck of the smuggler’s four-masted barque, Niki lies wide awake by candlelight, staring at the planks only a few inches from her face. Scarborough is in the berth beneath her, trying to sleep off his seasickness. There’s a tin pail on the floor beside his bed, half filled with vomit, but the air smells so bad down here that the odor from the pail is only a very minor nuisance. Air so redolent that she imagines she can see it passing before her eyes, almost as thick as the mist at the Palisades, the sour-sweet-spicy odors of mold and salt water and rot, the stench of fish and greasy tallow smoke and human filth. The hull is cold and damp to the touch, wood and pitch and the sea right there on the other side. From time to time, she hears the mournful calls of things that sound like whales, but she has a feeling there aren’t any whales in this ocean. Maybe it’s the enormous creatures that the walls and foundations of Padnée were built from, instead.

  “Scarborough,” she whispers, “are you awake down there?”

  There’s no reply, so maybe he isn’t, and she should just leave him alone, let him sleep while he can, and she goes back to staring at the ceiling and listening to the timbers creak around her. It doesn’t seem that long since she rested in the bed in Esme Chattox’s house, that soft bed so much better than this hard, mildewed bunk, and there’s really no point trying to sleep. She’d be up on the deck, but Malim came back and ushered them both below, for their “own good,” he said. So she spent half an hour or so going through her backpack, emptying it, inventorying its contents, then neatly repacking everything before she zipped the nylon shut again. Her pills are in there, and she almost took them out of habit, went so far as opening the Klonopin bottle, but then she thought about what Spyder said and screwed the cap on again. Not so much because of Spyder’s opinion that she didn’t need her medication here, but because her head hasn’t felt this clear in years. So long since she’s thought clearly, thinking free of the haze of psychoactive drugs, that she can’t be quite sure she’s ever thought clearly before this very moment.

  Her infected hand is itching beneath its latest dressing, the one the doctor in Padnée gave her. She wonders if he’s dead now, too, and she wonders how bad the wound beneath the bandage looks. It hurts a lot less, so maybe that’s a good sign.

  “Scarborough,” she calls out, louder than before. “Are you awake?”

  “I’m dead,” he moans. “Leave me alone.”

  “Did I wake you up?”

  For an answer, she can hear him retching into the tin pail again and is surprised he could have anything left inside him to throw up. Malim ordered him to drink water from the brown ceramic jug on the floor beside the pail, so maybe he’s just vomiting the water.

  “I fucking hate boats,” he groans.

  “I think you pissed off the captain, calling his ship a boat.”

  “Fuck him,” Scarborough says, and then she hears him moving around below her.

  “I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

  “Don’t be. I was only dreaming about being sick.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says again, anyway, and rolls over, putting her back to the hull of the ship. She’s using her pack as a pillow, because there wasn’t one in the berth. “Which is worse?”

  “I really don’t think there’s much fucking difference,” Scarborough replies.

  “Do you think he’ll do right by us?” Niki asks.

  “Who? Malim?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I mean, who’s to say he won’t just dump us anywhere he pleases? Who’s to say he won’t cut our throats?”

  “You’re a trusting soul.”

  “I was just thinking about it, that’s all.”

  “Don’t worry. He only gets his money when he delivers us—alive—to Auber. And he only cares about his money, so that’s where he’s taking us.”

  Niki doesn’t say an
ything else for a while, lies still, listening to the faintly booming, sometimes shrill not-whale songs bleeding in through the walls of the ship, considering Scarborough’s logic as he climbs out of his berth and steadies himself against a beam. He uncorks the water jug, takes a mouthful, and spits it out onto the floor.

  “Christ,” he grimaces. “It’s fucking brine.”

  “Salt water?” Niki asks, and he curses and throws the jug. It shatters loudly somewhere farther back in the hold.

  “Maybe I gave him too much credit, after all,” Scarborough says and spits again. “I’d give my left nut for a Coke.”

  “Yeah,” Niki agrees. “A Coke and a Big Mac with fries and an apple pie,” and that makes Scarborough throw up again.

  When he’s done, Niki apologizes, but he just sits on the floor, the cramped aisle between the two rows of bunks, and shakes his head. “Just don’t do that again,” he croaks.

  “I have questions, Scarborough,” she says, because she does, and it seems like a good idea to change the subject. “Ever since this started, I’ve had questions, and no one’s even tried to answer them.”

  “That’s what happens when you fall in with all these mystical snoke-horns—the Weaver and Esme, the lot of them—they don’t like answering questions. None of them do. Trust me on this.”

  “What’s a ‘snoke-horn’?”

  “That’s beside the point,” Scarborough says and wipes the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “You can’t get a straight answer from them with a yardstick and a level and a double-barreled shotgun, that’s the point.”

  “Can I get straight answers from you?”

  Scarborough looks at her a moment, his face as pale as cheese, and then he sighs and looks up at the ceiling. “We’re right beneath the foremast, I think,” he says.

  “Is that a ‘no’?” Niki asks him.

  “You’ve got this notion in your head that the answers are going to make it all better somehow,” he replies. “You think, maybe if you know what’s up, you might have some say in what comes next. Maybe you’ll even have a choice. Am I right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You think it’s that simple? I expound, give you a neat little infodump to shine some light into that pretty skull of yours, and at last you’ll find yourself empowered against the forces of darkness and chaos?”

  “But that’s why I’m here, isn’t it? I mean, that’s what Spyder and that talking white bird kept saying to me, that without me everything was lost. But how am I supposed to save anything when I have no idea what’s going on or what I’m expected to do about it?”

  “It’s just horse shit,” Scarborough says and rubs at his temples. “The more I tell you, the less you’ll know. That’s how it always works.”

  “Is that some sort of riddle?”

  “No, Vietnam, it’s just the goddamn, sick-ass truth.”

  “What’s the Dragon?” Niki asks, undaunted, and she leans over the edge of her bunk and looks down at him.

  “You’re not listening to me—”

  “That’s because you’re not saying anything. Now, tell me, what’s the Dragon, Scarborough?”

  He pushes away the vomit pail and glares up at her, his bloodshot eyes and the sweat rolling down his face, bright beads in the candlelight. “I work for Esme Chattox. That’s what I do. Before that, when I was alive, when I was home, I worked for something even worse.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “What’s the fucking Dragon?” he mutters and stares at the floor between his knees. “Jesus, you get straight to the point, don’t you?”

  “It’s not a real dragon, is it? I mean, not some big scaly lizard thing with wings and fiery breath.”

  “Oh, you better believe it’s got fire enough,” he replies. “Don’t you go forgetting Padnée so quickly. Before this shit’s done, you’re gonna wish it was just some big scaly lizard thing.”

  “But it’s not?”

  Scarborough stops rubbing his temples and peers up at her again. “The Dragon was always here. No one knows what the fuck the Dragon is. Maybe it’s evil. Maybe it’s God. Maybe it’s just a goddamn force of nature or a bad joke the cosmos decided to play on this place, but when the Weaver came, she changed it somehow. Just her being here, or something she brought with her, and that’s when everything started going to hell. But, hey, that was before my time.”

  “Spyder brought me here to stop the Dragon,” Niki says. “She said it would destroy this place if I didn’t stop it.”

  “Yeah, okay, whatever. But you gotta understand something. You gotta get it straight and keep it straight. This thing’s complicated. We’re not playing Dungeons and Dragons here. This isn’t hobbits versus Sauron. If there’s good and evil, black and white, it’s just as hard to see here as it is back home.”

  “So, you’re saying the Dragon isn’t bad?”

  “No. I’m not saying that at all,” Scarborough replies wearily and wipes his face again. “The Dragon’s a bad motherfucker, and you can bet your skinny Asian ass on that and come up flush every time. And he’s got a lot of bad motherfuckers out there to do his dirty work. What I’m saying is that you need to see that the Weaver might not be so goddamn different her own self. On a good day, it’s all just goddamn shades of gray, Vietnam. On a good day.”

  “Then what am I doing here?”

  “Near as I can tell, making things worse,” Scarborough tells her, and then he gags and doesn’t say anything else for a while.

  Niki lies in her bunk and thinks about the things he’s said, the consequences of the things he’s said, and watches the empty berth across the aisle from her. There are footsteps overhead, the inconstant tattoo of hobnailed boots and bare feet, and she tries to shut out all the sounds and smells of the ship. A runaway train since she stepped off the bridge, however long ago that might have been, no way of reckoning time when she doesn’t have a watch, and the nights here seem to last forever. Back home, maybe Daria’s dead, or maybe she went to Kansas and found the ball bearing, and she’s on her way to Birmingham, or maybe she just went home with Alex Singer and they’ll live happily ever after, freed from the inconvenience of having a crazy girl around.

  “I wish you would stop thinking of yourself like that,” Dr. Dalby said, more times than she can recall, but she does, anyway. Niki, the crazy girl hung about Daria’s neck since Boulder, the stone to drag her down. Part of her can’t blame Daria if she’s glad to finally be rid of that weight.

  And another part of her aches at the loss.

  Maybe it’s already been a month, or a year, or ten years back there, in the San Francisco where she started out. Scarborough’s remarks about Sauron and hobbits has her thinking about time and other books, Narnia and Oz and The Land, and how such a long time where she is could be a very short time in the “real” world. Maybe it’s only been a moment back home, one tick of a second hand, and no one even knows she’s dead yet.

  Stop thinking of it as “home,” she chides herself. That’s not home anymore, because I can never go back. Spyder said so.

  But what if Spyder lied, another voice inside her whispers. What if Spyder’s wrong?

  “They don’t want me in Auber,” she says. “I heard Esme say that to Spyder.”

  “Did you?” Scarborough replies, and he stands up again, propping himself against the edge of her bunk; she can smell him, sweat and sick and body odor, and wonders how she must smell. His lips are badly chapped, and there’s a dab of blood at one corner of his mouth. “Well, I expect she was telling the truth. Anyone who takes you in is asking for what Padnée got, or worse.”

  “What if they turn me away? What if they won’t pay Malim?”

  “Why don’t we worry about crossing that particular bridge when it pops up and smacks us in the face?”

  “Chance favors the prepared.”

  “What the hell’s that? Were you some sort of fucking Camp Fire girl or something?”

  “I’m just real
ly scared, that’s all. And I wish Spyder had left me alone, like I was. I wish she’d left me where I was. At least there, only a few people didn’t want me around.”

  “I think I liked you better without the self-pity, Vietnam.”

  “That puts you one up on me. I don’t think I like me at all.”

  “‘My soul is crushed, my spirits sore; I do not like me any more.’”

  “Dorothy Parker,” Niki whispers, half to herself, and smiles, a familiar line or two of poetry almost enough to lift her spirits. “Daria always hated Dorothy Parker because sometimes the press would get her name wrong and print it ‘Dorothy Parker.’ Sometimes people writing fan letters even did it. I always told her she ought to be flattered.”

  “Who’s Daria?” Scarborough asks.

  “Never mind,” she says, because she doesn’t want to get started trying to explain Daria, what she did and didn’t mean, and for all Niki knows, Scarborough Pentecost hates dykes. “I’ll tell you about Daria some other time.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Overhead, there’s a crackling thunder-and-lightning sort of noise, noise like the sky cracking open, so loud that Niki covers her ears.

  “Just what I fucking need,” Scarborough frowns, glaring up at the place where the sky would be, if all that wood weren’t in the way. “A goddamn storm. The only thing worse than being on a boat is being on a boat in a goddamn storm. With my luck, it’ll be a hurricane. It’s that time of year.”

  “We used to have big storms in New Orleans,” Niki says, thinking of the rain beating hard against her and Danny’s windows in the French Quarter, remembering the night her mother came into her room and talked about fire falling from the sky. “I’ve been through a couple of hurricanes. Never on a boat, though.”

  “It’s all kinds of fun, let me tell you.”

  “And you think Spyder’s just as bad as the Dragon,” Niki says, not asking, a statement to change the subject because even her doubts about herself and Spyder are better than imagining the little ship caught at sea in a hurricane.

  “That’s not what I said. I didn’t say that because I don’t know that. I just don’t know otherwise.”