Murder of Angels (2 page)

U
pon completing Chapter Six of
Murder of Angels,
I realized that I’d unconsciously borrowed the refrain “These things happen” from Paul Thomas Anderson’s superb (and notably Fortean) film
Magnolia
(1999). For the next several months I debated whether to leave it in or take it out. In the end, I made the decision to keep the phrase, but to acknowledge its origins. As with all things, serendipity is critical to writing, and it seemed to me as though omitting it would lessen the force and significance of the chapter. To varying degrees, this novel owes similar debts to Matthew Arnold, John Milton, Lewis Carroll, The Cure, Brian Eno, The Crüxshadows, L. Frank Baum, The Sisters of Mercy, Carl Jung, VNV Nation, Joseph Campbell, and the works of two Vietnamese poets, Van Hanh (d.1018) and Vien Chieu (988–1050). Also, three songs played an important role in the conception of this novel: “All Along the Watchtower” and “Changing of the Guards” by Bob Dylan, and “The Queen and the Soldier” by Suzanne Vega.

Murder of Angels
was begun in July 2000, then shelved while I wrote
Low Red Moon
and begun again in January 2003. Of all my novels, it was the most difficult, and I’d likely never have finished without the help of a number of people. My grateful thanks to Darren McKeeman and Sherilyn Connely, who were my eyes in San Francisco; to Kathryn Pollnac, who acted as tireless first reader, proofreader, and sounding board; to Rogue and Jessica, for being there when I needed to talk; to Jim and Jennifer, Byron, Sissy and Kat, Jean-Paul, Jada and Katharine, for their friendship; to Derek cf. Pegritz and Nyarlathotep: The Crawling Chaos, for sharing their music with my writing; to Poppy Z. Brite, Neil Gaiman, and Peter Straub, for listening; to Jack Morgan, who read an early draft and offered many helpful comments; to William K. Schafer for Subterranean Press, where books are still books; to my agents, Merrilee Heifetz and Julien Thuan, and my editor, John Morgan; to everyone on the phorum (my social life), all those who have followed the writing of this book via my blog, and to all the other “greys” at Nebari.net. This novel was written on a Macintosh iBook.

The abyss becomes me, I wear this chaos well…

—VNV Nation, “Genesis” (2002)

Dark revolving in silent activity:

Unseen in tormenting passions;

An activity unknown and horrible;

A self-contemplating shadow,

In enormous labours occupied.

—William Blake,
The Book of Urizen
(1794)

1

O
n past the scurry and endless, breaking dreams of Manhattan, north and east past all the sour rivers and the industrial tatters of Greenwich and Bridgeport, and as the miles and towns slip by, there are still hints of the world before. Dulled and brittle hints left unshattered by The Fall, The Fall before The Fall, but
he
can see them, sure, the tall, pale man that the dark children haven’t found a name for, or they know all his names but are too afraid to ever say them aloud. Past New Haven, New London, following the Connecticut coastline because the sight of the ocean is still a small comfort to him, something so vast and alive out there, and if it isn’t pure at least it hasn’t rotted like the damned and zombified cities, like the faces of the people trapped and not-quite-dying inside their casket walls.

And some nights, the children find him in smoky, music-bruised clubs, or cemeteries, or walking alone on rocky beaches. He leaves them rumors strewn like stale bread crumbs, and the ones who need to hear what he has to say can find him, and all the others don’t really matter, anyway. The others are content with their lies or half-truths, and their eyes give them away every time, the fact of their fear and their contentment with shadows. The things that he says, his shining steel and red molten words, his face, the sound of his breath, all of it only an intrusion into the faithless peace they’ve fashioned from shreds of night and mystery.

Yesterday, Mystic, with all its high, maritime streets and tourist-haunted seaport scenery, and hardly anything or anyone waiting for him there; suspicious glances from policemen and shopkeepers, old women selling shells and wooden sailing ships built inside tiny bottles, and so he slipped away sometime after midnight. Only a few miles more to Stonington Village, long and time-crooked finger of land pointing towards a cold Atlantic heart, and it’s a better place for him to be. He knows that they will find him here, a handful or less, perhaps, but the ones who do come will sit still and listen.

So another night and the big, ugly Lincoln Continental that he’s driven since Chicago is parked in the sand and gravel cul-de-sac at the end of Water Street. The old, old town crouched sleepy at his back, aged and unwary town, colonial walls and whitewashed fences, and there’s a granite marker at the water’s edge to commemorate an unredeemable summer day in 1814 when the HMS
Ramillies
burned and sank somewhere just offshore and the towns-people held back a British landing party.

“Did you hear that?” the nervous woman who calls herself Archer Day whispers in his ear, and he waits a moment before answering her, strains to hear whatever might be hiding behind or beneath the waves lapping against the worn schist boulders and seaweed concrete. Foghorns calling out to one another across the sound and the rheumy chug of a fishing boat traversing the harbor, the chill wind and nothing else.

“You’re just scaring yourself again,” he says finally, and she nods her head slowly, because she wants to believe him, every single word he says, because she
always
wants to believe him. “It’s nothing but the sea,” he says.

“I thought it was music,” she whispers. “I thought I heard music in the sky.”

And so he looks up then, because it will make her feel better if he does, stares defiantly up at the July moon one night past full, baleful white-orange eye to make the water shimmer or shiver, the cold and pinprick stars, and he takes a deep breath, filling his lungs with the moist and salty night.

“No, I don’t hear it.”

“It sounded almost like trumpets,” Archer Day says, and he turns and looks at her, her anxious brown eyes gone black in the night, the moonlight caught in her ginger hair that’s grown so long and shaggy, tangled by the breeze. He brushes a hand gently across her cheek and then kisses her on the forehead.

“Not yet,” he says. “You know how it will be.”

“I know what you tell me,” and she isn’t looking at him anymore, is staring out to sea instead, watching a buoy bobbing up and down in the waves, the distant, vigilant beams of the lighthouses far out on Lords Point and Fishers Island. Her eyes almost as secret as his soul, and he wants to hold her. Would hold her close to him and tell her not to be afraid, if he remembered how. If he didn’t know all the things she knows and tenfold more, so he only brushes the windblown hair away from her face instead.

“She was in my dreams again last night,” she says. “She said something about the sky—”

“It’s getting late,” he tells her, as if he hasn’t heard, and glances back towards the town. “They’ll be waiting. Some of them will have come a long way.”

“Yeah. They’re always waiting,” Archer whispers, and she pulls away from him and walks back to the car without saying another word, just her boots crunching gravel and broken bits of mussel shell. He watches her go, waits until she’s safe inside the Lincoln and he can hear music blaring from the tape deck before he turns to look out across the sound again. The deep and deathless sea to give him courage, to keep him moving night after inevitable night, but the moon’s out there, too. A moon that shines the fevery color of an infection, and the ocean not so very vast, not so eternal, that the moon doesn’t drag it back and forth at will, and “tide” is just another pretty word for coercion, after all, another unnecessary reminder that gravity always wins.

But there are no trumpets in the sky, and the only wings are the wings of hungry night birds skimming low above the waves.

2

This plot of land a boneyard since sometime in 1849, Stonington Cemetery secure behind thick rock and mortar walls, behind wrought-iron pickets crowned with rusted fleur-de-lis. Tidy city of the dead, garden of the dead, marble headstone rows and manicured lawns, ancient maples and the sugar scent of rhododendrons, the great drooping hemlocks, and this is where they’ve come to wait for him. And ask any one of them why here, why
this
place in particular, and they would only shrug or look anxiously at the toes of their shoes. Where else would he ever find them? Where else would he ever know to look? Where else would ever be
right
?

They’ve all heard things, or read cryptic posts to Internet newsgroups, or dreamed these gray memorials carved with dates and names and Bible passages. All these and none of the above, if the question were ever asked aloud. But it only matters that they’ve come, all of them, a dozen if there were just one more, and they sit together and apart, uneasy in one another’s company, suspicious and resentful and confused, because they all thought for certain they would be the
only
one, his message meant for them and them alone. Most have met before tonight, have shared sex or pain or hesitant snatches of conversation, a cigarette or suicidal love notes, stingy or extravagant fragments of themselves, even if they pretend now that they’re strangers. Velvet and torn fishnet, fingernails polished black or wounded shades of red, gaudy rings like vampire bats and ankhs and the delicate skulls of birds cast in silver.

“Well, I don’t think he’s coming,” a girl in a raveling summer sweater and long skirt says, thrift-store crinoline skirt that rustles like dead leaves every time she moves. “I don’t think
anyone’s
coming.”

“You don’t know that,” someone else replies, a boy hiding himself in shadows and long bangs that cover the left side of his face like a caul. “You
can’t
know that,” and he’s starting to sound angry or scared or something that’s just a little bit of both.

“It’s a
joke,
” the pale boy sitting at his feet says. “Like Linus Van Pelt and the Great fucking Pumpkin,” and then no one says anything because now they’ve all heard the low, mechanical-animal growl of a car turning off Elm Road, tires rolling slowly through the open cemetery gates, and no one says another word. Eleven faces filled suddenly with expectation and dread, with furious desperation, and even breathing might be too much, a single sigh to shatter this crystal moment and wake whichever one is having this dream. This exquisite nightmare, Hell and Heaven caught in the twin will-o’-the-wisp brilliance of those headlights moving towards them between the trees and graves, parting the darkness as they come.

“Jesus,” the girl in the sweater whispers, and all of them stand very still and wait for the car. It might only be the caretaker, or the cops, or a high school couple looking for someplace dark to make out.

“It’s still not too late, is it? Not too late to run, I mean?” a girl in a black Rasputina T-shirt asks apprehensively, hopefully, asking loudly enough that they can all hear her. But it is, and she knows it. They all know it. It’s been too late for a long, long time, all their short lives or the moment their parents met, everything forever leading inescapably to
now
. And in a few more seconds the purple and rust-colored Lincoln comes to a stop and the driver’s-side door opens. The motor idling like a dying clockwork tiger and all the summer garden graveyard smells suddenly shoved aside to make room for its hot metal stink, burning oil and exhaust fumes. Their eyes shielded against the blinding headlights, twenty-two eyes squinting painfully through the glare. And when the tall man finally climbs out and stands beside his noisy car, he’s nothing that any of them expected. Something more and less, expectation turned cruelly back upon itself, and they have never imagined such an ordinary monster.

“Which of you is Theda?” he asks, and the girl in the raveling sweater takes one small step towards him.

“Then you called me,” he says to her.

A restless murmur trickles through the group, then bright flecks of fear and jealousy like a sparking electrical current, and for a moment none of them notices the milk-skinned woman who has slipped out of the passenger side of the car and stands there watching him watching them all.

“She’s the one,” the woman says. “
She
has the mark,” but the tall man doesn’t look at her, doesn’t take his eyes off the girl named Theda.

“I didn’t think you would come,” she says, starting to cry and speaking so quietly that he has to move nearer to hear what she’s saying. “I swear to God, I thought it was all bullshit. I
never
thought you would really ever come.”

“I never thought we’d find you,” he replies, his voice like a drowning man washed unexpectedly ashore, and his fingertips gently touch the space between her eyebrows, linger there a moment as though her skin were Braille-dimpled pages.

“No,” the woman from the car says impatiently. “Not there. Look at her
wrists,
” and Theda is already pushing up the sleeves of her baggy sweater, raising both her arms so he can see the symbols carved into her flesh, the small, irregular crosses of pink-white scar tissue drawn against a pulsing canvas of veins and arteries.

“The dreams—” she whispers, but he shakes his head and the expression on his face is more than enough to silence her.

“I know. I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen everything,” he says, and that only makes her cry harder. “I stood at the edge of the pit and she brought me back. She led me across the outskirts of Hell, through the fire and back up to the World again.”

Theda’s eyes are bright and wide, irises the color of unfinished emeralds to glimmer wet in the headlights, and she’s begun to tremble now; her hands so small in his, his calloused thumbs pressed tightly against her scars, the razor-blade tattoos, and “She was the most…the most beautiful thing…” he says, but then she’s sobbing too hard to say anything more. He smiles down at her, the faintest, guarded smile that is neither kind nor cruel.

“Hush,” he says. “She doesn’t want us to cry. She hasn’t ever wanted us to cry.”

“Well, what
does
she want, then?” a boy in silver-gray velvet and lips like city smog asks, and the man turns and stares at him for a moment without saying anything.

“You just come across too goddamn much like a preacher to me, that’s all,” the boy mumbles, trying hard to sound like no one who’s ever needed a savior, someone who’s been kicked around enough he doesn’t dare rely on dreams or visions or pretty stories, nothing out there but himself so he’ll never be hurt or disappointed again. “You sound like you’re selling something,” he says, but takes a cautious step or two backwards, towards the sheltering night waiting just beyond the reach of the Lincoln’s headlights.

And Theda and all the others hold their breath when the tall man raises his right hand, opens it so they can see the soft place where his palm should be, the impossible gyre of colors they’ve never seen before, the colors there are not even names for. It’s Archer’s trick, of course, Archer’s magic flowing through him, but it’s also what he needs them to see.

“The only part of the treasure left was a stone,” he says, his thunder-and-firestorm voice spilling out loud across the cemetery, words he wishes were true seeping out of him hot and wild, and now the woman from the car is standing next to the man, an arm around his waist and one hand resting on the top of Theda’s head. Her white fingers twine themselves in the girl’s jet-black hair and the man hasn’t stopped talking, hasn’t taken his eyes off the boy in smoggy lipstick.

“A stone full of God’s most beautiful and most terrible secrets. And they knew that they had been wrong and they couldn’t hide themselves or the stone forever. So they found a way to take it apart and put it back together again,
inside
themselves. But that still wasn’t enough, was it, child? Just ask Theda here. She’s
seen
them, His jackals, waiting for us in the dead of night, waiting in the shadows behind shadows.”

The old wounds on Theda’s wrists have begun to bleed again, and the warm blood drips unnoticed onto the grass at her feet.

“I am her fist and her tongue, child. She left me alive to remember what I’ve seen, to find all the whining, ungrateful little shits like you while there’s still time.”