Something More Than Night (26 page)

“I still don’t understand,” said Anne, “why you care about any of this.”

“I don’t know either. I don’t know why any of this is important. Or even if it is. Maybe it isn’t. I’m just trying to make sense of the world.” Molly hugged herself, vaguely aware that Bayliss had once said something similar.

Anne drained her tea, stirred the ice, sipped at meltwater. “Why did you say that about me not sleeping?” The aura of rue, regret, and bitterness faded away. Now the air around Anne crackled with cautious hope like clashing thunderclouds.

Molly searched her face for more signs of sleeplessness. She lingered on the bloodshot eyes, and told herself she wasn’t seeking eye contact. But it happened, and it tickled, and she looked away to suppress a shiver.

“Just a hunch,” she said.

Anne sighed like somebody choosing between an ugly sweater and an uncomfortable one. The silence grew long but, somehow, not awkward.

“The nightmares started after I received the Indulgence,” she said. “I think it tore me up even worse than I first realized. I toyed with seeing somebody about it but I can’t afford therapy.”

Gooseflesh prickled Molly’s nape. Pacholczyk had been weary, too. Worn down by a succession of sleepless nights.

“I know I’ve already asked you a ton of personal shit that’s none of my business. But can I ask about the dreams?”

So earnest was the gust of hope emanating from Anne that it seemed a wonder their napkins didn’t flutter in the updraft. “If I show you, can you interpret them for me?”

Anne pushed the plates and glasses aside. From the breast pocket of her coveralls she produced a narrow Moleskine journal.

“When I sleep,” she said, sliding the notebook across cracked and coffee-stained Formica, “this is what I see.”

Molly opened it. It was a sketchbook filled with page after page of drawings rendered in colored pencil. Some hasty, some detailed, but every image rendered with the skill of a delicate hand. And each one terrifying, disturbing: Faces of fire. Feminine faces fringed with beards of starlight. Eyeballs and wheels and flaming swords. Beings with the heads of eagles, and oxen, and lions. Wings of silver, wings of bats, wings of glittering diamond and pitted brass. Swirling clouds of darkness that scuttled like a millipede on legs of lightning.

Anne was tormented by dreams of the Pleroma. She’d been dreaming of the Choir.

Knowing the answer, Molly asked, “This started immediately after they bestowed the Plenary Indulgence on you. That very night. Didn’t it?”

Anne’s nod was jerky, tremulous.

Molly paged through the entire notebook. One image, in particular, was a recurring theme throughout Anne’s sketches. Six luminous wings; four faces; a flaming sword. She had filled page after page with images of a Seraph, not understanding what she sketched. In some of the images, wisps of smoke rose from the angel’s wings as they crumbled to ash. In others, maggots dripped from the angel’s empty eye sockets.

Anne suffered dreams of dead Gabriel.

15

OLD FRIENDS, NEW PROBLEMS

I tossed a dime on the counter. It rolled. Flo poured a stiff three fingers into my cup. I winked. She scowled. The dime spiraled to a stop. The flies and the ceiling fan cycled through their eternal three-second dance. In the kitchen, DiMaggio hit a triple.

It wasn’t palatable, the muck Flo served, but a splash of hooch fixed that well enough to wash down the last of the bacon. I lit a pill, picked the pork from my choppers, and waited. Two cups later I was running low on hooch and my plate looked like an ashtray. The pills were running low, too. Low enough that I considered bumming a smoke from the brush salesman, and was wondering whether I had the patience to endure his penny-ante sales pitch for the hundred-thousandth time, when my lunch date entered.

The lights dimmed. The play-by-play on the kitchen radio fuzzed out with interference from a station playing klezmer transcriptions of the music of the spheres. Up near the ceiling, wisps of burnt-bacon smoke succumbed to despair and hurled themselves into the fan blades; it didn’t work. A Power sidled into the diner.

Say what you will about them, but they know how to make an entrance. An inky shadow wrapped in a lashing rain of ash and sleet, it rode on 144,000 constantly flickering legs of forked lightning. This particular jasper’s proper name was the basso profundo thrum of dark matter winging through the void, the fizz of neutrinos boiling off a moribund blue supergiant, and the bitter-tangerine taste of a quadrillion-dimension symmetry group. But I called it Sam for short.

I waved it over. “Park the body, Sam.”

It oozed over the stool beside me, enveloping the cracked leather like a thunderstorm wrought of molasses and shame. “Long time no see, Bayliss. I heard you were back in town.”

Not exactly what it said, but let’s stick to the executive summary. It’s the thought that counts, and besides, a faithful transliteration would require seeding a daughter universe with a spectrum of radically different physical constants. Who has the time for that these days?

Flo sidled over. “Who’s your handsome friend?”

She really did say that. Leave it to a crafty jane like her to know a butter-and-egg man when she sees one.

“Flo, Sam. Sam, Flo. Breakfast’s on me. They do a mean fried egg and bacon sandwich here. Coffee ain’t terrible, either.” I gave a wink and let Sam catch a glimpse of my flask.

“Hey, you,” called the guy staked out near the telephone. He fiddled with his bow tie. “That lightning must be murder on the hair. I’ll bet you go through brushes by the bushel.”

I yelled, “Stuff a sock in it, chiseler.”

He made a rude gesture. “Go soak your head, rummy.”

Sam didn’t exactly say, in a voice like burning sapphires, “Nice place you have here.”

I said, “My own little slice of heaven.” Sam grimaced. That gag had been getting creaky when the solar system was just a ball of gas. But Sam was dining on my nickel so it could afford to laugh at my jokes.

Rather than take my suggestion, Sam glanced at the menu. It ordered toast dipped in a fractal space with negative dimensionality. I guess it was on a diet. Flo took her time filling its cup, giving it doe eyes all the while. Sam didn’t play along. She got the hint and took a hike.

“I was surprised to get your message,” it said. “Surprised to hear you’d returned at all. I figured a smart angel in your shoes would have kept to himself.”

“Nobody ever accused me of being smart. I get by with charm and wit.”

“Even those are in limited supply these days, from what I hear. The talk is that the Thrones nabbed you, and then Uriel nabbed you from the Thrones.”

“She goes for me in a big way. Bing, I tell you. Always has.”

“That’s not how she tells it.”

“Yeah, well. Dames.” I took a sip. Lukewarm, Flo’s coffee tasted like boiled wood chips stewed in paint thinner. But it was high-end paint thinner, thanks to my hooch. “What else are people saying these days?”

“They say you’re mixed up with Gabriel’s death. Some say you’re the trigger man. Others say you’re a witness and the real trigger men have you in the crosshairs. Others blame the Nephilim. They say the bulls will have you dead to rights sooner than later. They say METATRON’s latest tantrum was your doing, or that of your human sidekick. Half the Choir thinks you know where the Trumpet is, and the other half think you already have it and can’t decide whether to chance using it.”

“I tell you, I’m getting tired of always playing the fall guy in this lousy little drama. Let me know if you want to take my seat on the bus.” I chewed at my thumbnail, waited until Flo turned her back, and spat. “As for my human sidekick, she ain’t human. Anymore.”

“She doesn’t belong in the Pleroma.”

“There was no choice. We had to find a replacement for Gabriel.”

“The talk is you fumbled that job down the sewer.”

“Well, at least they got that part right. More or less. I was a little tight. But hey, lay off flametop. She’s all right.” I wasn’t so certain about that, but I tried to sound convincing. Full of surprises, that one, but I saw no point muddying the waters with Sam.

“They say that when the Nephilim strike again, it’ll be you and your monkey feeling the noose.”

“Oh yeah? What do they say about us after that?”

“Nothing. The smart money,” it said, “isn’t on you and the human.”

“That’s why I like you, Sam. When I’m feeling glum I can always trust you to feed me some sugar.”

“You didn’t call me here to lie to you. You can do that to yourself for free.” It paused while Flo refilled its coffee. She worked the moon-eye treatment for all she was worth; deep inside Sam’s roiling darkness, lightning speared a microburst of downspiraling ash. She sighed and drifted away to check on the tomcat chewing face with a roundheels in the corner booth. It said, “The Pleroma is changing. It isn’t the place you remember.”

The Powers orbit the periphery of the Pleroma, pacing the perimeter of our playground. There are those who say the Pleroma is holographic, and that anything known inside the joint can be read in the pattern of ontological wrinkles on the boundary. I don’t know if that’s the case, but I do know the Powers keep a closer ear to the ground than even the Thrones. Or, at any rate, they’re not full of spaghetti like the bulls. I’d known Sam a long time, always known it to have a solid line on the players and their angles.

“Speaking of which, tell me what you know about the Nephilim.”

“You’ve been out to see them, I assume?”

“Yeah. Caught the show a few mornings back when Michael and Raphael decided to stop playing nice.”

If it had had a mouth, Sam would have whistled through its teeth. “Harder to get rid of those things than a wart.”

Again, you get the gist of it.

“What does the smart money have to say about them? Why are they here?”

“They’re waiting,” said Sam. “For what, nobody knows. But only a fool would bet they’re not connected to Gabriel and the rest of this mess.”

“How am I the only bum to see the big picture here? Their purpose, if they even have one, is small potatoes compared to the real issue. Doesn’t anybody find it strange that after umpteen-billion years we suddenly discover a previously unknown topological property of the Pleroma?”

Sam’s shrug sent tendrils of ash eddying through the diner. The salesman tried to cover his cup, but too late. He scowled at us. “Hey, watch it, bub.”

“Ignore the sourpuss,” I said.

Sam said, “Gabriel’s death changed the topology of the Pleroma. It swirled through all our Magisteria. A cold wind, Bayliss. A cold, cold wind. Who knows what detritus those deep currents dredged up?”

I rubbed out my last pill. I wasn’t out of matches, though, so I struck one on my thumbnail. The flame burned down while I checked the room. Nobody seemed to be paying us any wise, so I asked, “Fine, then. What’s the word on Gabriel? And no baloney here. Don’t drag me into it.”

“As to what happened? A few theories. Nothing concrete. Most folks don’t like to linger on it.”

I remembered a silvery snowfall, remembered how the friction heat of conflicting Magisteria crumbled Gabby’s wings to ash. “I’ve never met anybody who punches in that weight class. Wouldn’t care to.”

“Don’t pretend the Nephilim don’t top your list, too.”

“Yeah, well. You can’t make a killing on the ponies if you don’t bet the long shot once in a while.”

Sam took a long sip of its coffee, but declined when I offered the last drops from my flask. I treated myself.

“When’s the last time you took a trip to Earth?” I asked.

“That’s your playground,” said Sam. “Never understood how you could stand it down there.”

“It ain’t so bad. You like this joint, don’t you?”

Sam didn’t exactly say, in that rasp of burning sapphires, “I like a free meal.”

“Who doesn’t?”

Since Sam hadn’t been down Earth-way in a millennium of Sundays, I took a minute to tell it about the
penitentes.
I described the surgically sculpted wounds, the dancing, the mortal attempts to evoke shorn wings and stigmata. I described the mugg I’d caught leaving the confessional right after somebody had rubbed Father Santorelli. Flo brought its order of toast. Sam chewed while I recited the headlines.

I finished. “Any thoughts?”

“On Earth as it is in Heaven,” it said.

“Yeah,” I said. “My thoughts were running down the same tracks. Let me save you some time: they don’t lead anywhere.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Sam scribbled on its napkin with a feathery quill pen of lightning. “Funny, the stuff you can find if you keep your eyes peeled. Everybody has their dirty secrets.”

Sam knew a few of mine, too, but I didn’t remind it. The note it slid down the counter stank of a forest fire. I took the napkin and squinted at the chicken scratches. Powers don’t have much in the way of penmanship; maybe it comes from being insubstantial all the time. I realized, after the nimbus of Saint Elmo’s fire faded, that Sam had scribbled down an address.

“Thanks, Sam. You’re a champ.”

“Anybody asks, you didn’t get that from me.”

“Get what? I don’t know what this is.”

I had to shout to get that last part out, because just then Sam erupted like Krakatoa. It became a roiling plume of ash and sulfurous fumes, inky blackness shot through with blazing talons of lightning. Thunder shook the diner. The fry cook’s radio fuzzed out and gave up the ghost. Flo dropped the coffeepot. It sent up a fountain of burned coffee when it shattered on the linoleum. She said something unladylike. So did I.

The salesman said, “Hey, rummy, I think your pal there is choking.”

I threw a plate of toast at him. “Shove off, grifter.”

Over in the window booth, the sheik came up for air. He and his girl glanced at Sam, looked at each other, shrugged, and went back to necking. She was built for it, long and lean.

To Sam, I said, “Maybe this is the wrong time to mention it, but if you’re having an ing-bing, you should know they took my medical license away.”

If earlier Sam’s voice had been the rasp of burning sapphires, now those jewels were naught but plasma. It got the eruption under control just enough to rumble a stream of concepts so blue they hadn’t been heard since before the universe had begun to expand. From the torrent of prime numbers and indignation I picked out just enough to know what had it doing figure eights. Another Nephil had just manifested in the Pleroma. It had slipped right past the Powers’ patrols.