Infernal Angel (5 page)

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Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: Infernal Angel
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Cassie didn’t even move her head to look back at them; only her eyes darted. Xeke, the male, was dressed similarly: late-’70s British punk and appropriate buttons and patches (BRING BACK SID! and Do You Get The KILLING JOKE? and the like). Were it not for her shock, Cassie would’ve been struck by how handsome he was—lean, toned, dark intense eyes on a face like an Italian male model’s. Small pewter bats dangled from his earlobes, and his long jet-black hair had been pulled back into a masculine ponytail. Xeke’s eyes appraised her as though she were iconic, and the same went for the third squatter, the other girl.
What did she say her name was?
Cassie thought.
Hush?
“Hush can’t talk,” Via said, “but she’s cool.”
Cassie felt far away as she listened; she felt detached from herself. Her throat clicked as she tried to speak. “Yesterday ... when I first met you. You said you were dead.”
“We are,” Xeke replied matter-of-factly.
“We can guess what a shock it is to you,” Via continued. “It’ll take you some time to get used to.”
“All three of us are dead,” Xeke said, “and when we died, we went to Hell.”
People living in my house,
Cassie thought numbly. She and her father had been living in the old southern antebellum house for several months now. Her father had suddenly retired from his lucrative law practice in Washington, D.C. His wife, Cassie’s mother, had left him for another, richer man several years ago, and Cassie’s father viewed the move as the only real option now: getting Cassie out of the city would likewise get her away from the memory of her sister’s suicide. No more therapists, no more anti-depressant drugs, just a new and different environment, fresh country air and lazy hills and farmland to look at instead of traffic jams and skyscrapers. It seemed to work—at least at first. The house they’d moved into was an old plantation estate called Blackwell Hall—brooding, dark, a clash of architecture. But Cassie had loved it; it fit her eccentric tastes.
Until the day she strayed up into the attic and found these people there.
Dead people,
she thought.
She didn’t contemplate any of it now. It was either true, or she was insane. Period. Instead, back on the day of their first meeting, she followed Via, Xeke, and Hush down the stairs.
“We’ll just prove it to you now,” Via said, “and get it over with.”
“Then we can really talk about things,” Xeke added.
Hush looked back over her shoulder and smiled.
Yeah. I’m following dead people down the stairs.
“Blackwell Hall is the strongest Deadpass in this part of the Outer Sector,” Via was explaining.
“Deadpass,” Cassie stated.
“It’s because of Fenton Blackwell—”
“The guy who built this section of the house, in the ’20s.” Cassie latched on to the familiarity. “The Satanist who ... sacrificed babies.”
“Uh-hmm,” Via verified.
Xeke laughed when they got to the next landing, his mirthful eyes on Cassie. “Jeez, you must think you’re losing your mind about now.”
“Uh, yeah,” Cassie said. “The thought has occurred to me more than once.”
“Just be patient. Follow us.”
When they went down the next flight of steps, Via advised, “Don’t make an idiot of yourself, Cassie. Remember,
you
can see us and hear us—but
they
can’t.”
Cassie wasn’t sure what they meant until the four of them marched into one of the dens, where Mrs. Conner, her father’s new housekeeper, was busily waxing some antique table tops.
Cassie stood there, looking at her.
The older woman glanced up. When her eyes met Cassie’s, there was no way that she couldn’t have seen Via, Xeke, and Hush standing alongside of her.
“ ‘Mornin’, Miss Cassie.”
“Huh—hi, Mrs. Conner.”
“Hope you’re feelin’ better. Your Pa said you had a spell yesterday.”
Via laughed. “Your
Pa!
Jesus, what a hayseed!”
Mrs. Conner didn’t hear the comment.
“Uh, yes, I’m feeling a lot better,” she replied.
“She’s got the hots for your father,” Via added.
The remark startled Cassie. “What?”
Mrs. Conner looked back up. “Pardon, Miss?”
“Uh, er, nothing,” Cassie said fast. “Have a good day, Mrs. Conner.”
“You too.”
“Your father’s got the hots for her too,” Xeke said through a grin.
“That’s ridiculous,” Cassie replied.
Mrs. Conner looked up again, a bit more oddly. “What’s that, Miss Cassie?”
Instantly, Cassie felt idiotic. “Just, uh, er—nothing.”
My father,
she wondered,
has a thing for Mrs. Conner?
The notion was absurd, but then—
So was the notion of dead punk rockers occupying her house.
“I told you to be careful.” Via chuckled, leading on.
“Something smells good,” Xeke said.
It did. Via was leading them into the kitchen, and when the four of them entered, Cassie saw her father puttering at the range, clumsily wielding a metal spatula. When he glanced—and noticed her sheer, short nightgown—he cast her a fatherly frown. “You trying out for Victoria’s Secret?”
“Relax, Dad. No one’s going to see me,” she replied.
“No one except us,” Xeke piped in. “Your daughter’s got some smokin’ hot bod, huh, Dad?”
He and Via laughed out loud.
Cassie’s father clearly didn’t hear them, or see them.
“You feeling better?”
“Fine, Dad. I was just out in the sun too long yesterday,” she tried to placate him.
“Well, good, ‘cos you’re just in time for a Cajun catfish omelette.”
“Sounds a little too heavy for me,” Cassie said.
“Hey, Dad, look!” Via exclaimed. She walked right up to him, hoisted her black t-shirt, and flashed her breasts.
BiU Heydon didn’t see it.
“So what are you going to do today, honey?” he asked, searching for the pepper grinder.
Xeke chuckled. “Yeah,
honey?”
Shut up,
Cassie thought. “I don’t know. Probably wander around.”
“Yeah, Dad,” Via chided. “She’s gonna wander around with the dead people living in your house.”
“Well, remember. Not too long in the sun this time.” Her father tried to sound authoritative.
“I won’t.”
“Still don’t believe us?” Via asked her.
“I guess I do,” Cassie answered, then immediately thought
Damn!
More laughter from her cohorts.
Her father looked at her. “You guess you do
what?”
“Sorry. I was thinking out loud.”
“That’s a sign of senility, you know.” Now her father was dropping pieces of catfish into the fry pan. “You’re too young to be senile. Me? That’s another story.”
“Hush?” Via said. “Show her.”
The short mute girl in black drifted across the kitchen. She grabbed Cassie’s bare arm and squeezed, to verify it to Cassie. Then she grabbed her father’s arm but—
Hush’s small hand seemed to disappear into Mr. Heydon’s solid flesh and bone.
“All the way now,” Via instructed.
Hush stepped
into
Bill Heydon’s body—and all but disappeared.
He suddenly shivered. “Damn! Did you feel that cold draft?”
“Uh, yeah,” Cassie said as an afterthought. Her fascination gripped her as she watched Hush step back out of her father’s body.
“If you don’t believe us
now,”
Via said, “then you’ve
really
got a problem.”
“Tell me about it,” Cassie said.
Another funky look from her father. “Tell you about what, honey?”
Diamn! Did it again!
More laughter.
“Come on,
honey,”
Xeke said. “Let’s get out of here before your father thinks you’ve completely lost it.”
Good idea.
This was getting way too confusing. “See ya later, Dad,” she bid.
“Sure.” He gave her another look, shrugged, then returned to his cooking.
She followed them out, back toward the atrium-sized living room. Hush smiled at her and took her hand, as if to say,
Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it.
Cassie had no idea where they were taking her. Via led the way down the hall. Her leather boots thunked loudly on the carpet, but by now, Cassie realized that only she could hear them.
“Down here,” Via said at the door. “We can talk better down here, in the basement.”
“So,” Cassie deduced once they were down. “You’re ghosts.”
“Nope.” Xeke sat on the cold stone floor, lounging back against the basement’s long wall of tabby bricks. “Nothing like that at all. We’re living souls. We’re physical beings.”
Hush sat beside Cassie on a row of moving boxes; she leaned her head against Cassie’s shoulder as if tired, her black hair veiling her face. Via remained standing, walking back and forth.
“How can you be living souls,” Cassie asked, “if you’re dead?”
Via answered, “What he means is that we’re living souls in
our
world. We’re physical beings in
our
world. In your world, though, we’re subcorporeal.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means that we exist... but we don’t.”
“But we’re not ghosts,” Xeke said. “Ghosts are soulless projections. They’re just images left over. No consciousness, no sentience.”
Cassie considered this. “If that’s true, then what are you?”
Via took off her punky leather jacket and dropped it in Xeke’s lap. By her attitude and gestures, it was clear that she was the leader of this little group. She began to diddle with the safety pins holding the tears in her t-shirt together. “It’s a long story, but here goes. First, you gotta understand that there are Rules. We weren’t really bad people in life, but we were fucked up. We couldn’t hack it. So we killed ourselves. That’s one of the Rules.”
“No ifs, ands, or buts,” Xeke said.
“If you commit suicide, you go to Hell. Period. No way around it. If the
Pope
committed suicide, he’d go to Hell. It’s one of the Rules.”
Cassie touched her locket, felt something shrivel inside. Her sister, Lissa, had committed suicide.
So she went to—
Cassie couldn’t finish the thought.
“This house is a Deadpass. Fenton Blackwell, the previous owner, committed atrocities so extreme that they created a Rive—that’s, like, a little hole between the Living World and the Hellplanes. If you’re like us—if you can find one of the holes—you can take refuge in the Living World.”
“But no one in the Living World can see you,” Cassie figured.
“No one. Period. That’s another one of the Rules.”
Cassie began, “Then how come—”
“You can see us?” Xeke held his finger up. “There’s a loophole.”
A dense silence filled the narrow basement. Via, Xeke, and Hush were all trading solemn glances. Hush held Cassie’s hand and squeezed it, as if to console her.
Cassie looked back dumbfounded at them all. “What is it?”
“You’re a myth,” Via said.
“In the Hellplanes,” Xeke went on, “you’re the equivalent of Atlantis. Something rumored to be true but has never been proven.”
Via sat down next to Xeke and slung her arm around him. “Here’s the myth. You’re a virgin, right?”
Cassie flinched uncomfortably but nodded.
“And you were never baptized.”
“No. I wasn’t raised in any particular faith.”
“You’ve genuinely tried to kill yourself at least once, right?”
Cassie gulped. “Yes.”
“And you have a twin sister who
did
kill herself.” Via wasn’t even asking anymore; she was
telling
Cassie what she already knew. “A twin sister who was also a virgin.”
Cassie was beginning to choke up. “Yes. Her name was Lissa.”
More solemn stares.
“In Hell, you hear about it the same way you hear about the angelic visitations here, like these people who see Jesus in a mirror, or St. Mary on a taco,” Via went on. “Stuff like that. You hear about but you never really believe it.”
“It’s all written down in the Infernal Archives,” Xeke said. “The Grimoires of Elymas, the Lascaris Scrolls, the Apocrypha of Bael—the myth’s all over the place. We’ve all read about it, and never really believed it either. But you’re real.”

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