Ian Tregillis - Something More Than Night Read online

  “Thought we agreed this heap went to ash some years back. So how’s it still your house?”

  “Get out! Leave me alone!”

  “Don’t get so sore. Look at it this way. You’ve just won the big bad granddaddy of all lotteries.”

  Molly tossed the covers aside. Now she wore a nightgown. She knew this one; Ria had liked it so much. Bayliss averted his eyes like a reluctant gentleman, but not before a momentary glance made her feel naked.

  “I gotta admit, angel, it could’ve been worse. You’re easier on the eyes than your brother.”

  She reached under the bed. He was still smiling to himself and shaking his head when she pulled out Ria’s baseball bat. A remnant from when they’d lived in an iffier neighborhood. The cigarette fell from Bayliss’s mouth and hissed on the wet tiles.

  She crossed the bedroom on the balls of her feet, richly varnished oak boards creaking under her soles. Bayliss raised his hands. His heels bumped the bathtub. He toppled backward, sliding down the plastic shower curtain with a grating squeak and the pop of broken curtain rings.

  “Just calm down, angel.” He wasn’t looking at her legs anymore. All his attention was on the bat. “Okay. You’re still sore about the train. I get that. But let’s not get hysterical, okay?”

  “I’ll show you hysterical, you sexist prick.”

  Molly reared back. The bat knocked against the medicine cabinet; the bathroom was too small for her to put everything into the swing. Bayliss flopped to one side and caught the blow on the shoulder.

  His shoulder made a cracking sound like a broken celery stalk, along with a slappy thud like a meat tenderizer hitting cheap steak. The reverberation shot up the bat and stung Molly’s fingers. Bayliss’s eyes and mouth went wide. No sound came from his contorted mouth. Just for an instant, something dark flashed in his ancient eyes, but then he found his voice and screamed.

  “Ouch! Jesus, lady, are you completely out of your gourd? What’s wrong with you?”

  The bat fell from her fingers. A tile cracked.

  The grain of the wood against her palms, the smell of Ria’s soap, the special way the floorboards creaked in the winter, the crunch of Bayliss’s shoulder … No dream had ever felt like this.

  “What’s happening to me?” she said.

  “You’re about to get a hard lesson, sweetheart.” Bayliss stood, rubbing his shoulder. He gasped. “Ah, damn, that’ll take some effort to fix. First things first.” He slid his toes under the bat, kicked it off the tiles, caught it in his free hand. He waved it under Molly’s nose. “Naughty, naughty.”

  He reared back. She flinched.

  But suddenly they weren’t standing in the Minneapolis apartment. They were somewhere outside, at night. A crowd had gathered, staring at something Molly couldn’t see. Bayliss stood beside her. A thin dusting of pure white snow reflected the red and blue lights of emergency vehicles.

  “You’ve been knocked for a loop, so I tried to go easy on you,” he said. “But it didn’t take. So here you go. You want to know what happened?” He paused long enough to fish a cigarette from his trench coat. He lit a match on his thumbnail and shielded the flame behind a cupped hand. After a couple of puffs, he flicked the extinguished match at the bystanders.

  “Feast your eyes.”

  Sickly dread coated her tongue: she knew this place. Molly approached the crowd of bystanders. The knot in her gut accreted more ice, stole more of her cold blood, with every step. She reached forward to gently nudge the rearmost folks aside, so they would know her presence and let her join them in their silent contemplation of tragedy. But it wasn’t necessary. In unison, half the bystanders took a step to the left, the other half to the right, though their backs were to her. Molly traversed the impromptu path and came to the front of the crowd.

  But there was nothing to see. The gathering surged against a barricade of fluttering police tape that cordoned off a tram stop on the center island of a busy street. Two tram cars were parked at the stop, sandwiched between opposing lanes of traffic. Traffic inched past emergency vehicles clogging the road. Their flashing lights strobed the onlookers and the surrounding city with flashes of red and blue and yellow.

  The police cars looked strange to her. And the traffic, she realized, kept to the left instead of the right.

  Australia, she remembered. We came to Australia for Mom’s funeral.

  A thin metal scaffold had been erected around the front of the tram. Tall sheets of milky material rippled in a cold wind, blocking the onlookers’ view. The sheets glowed full-moon white; a high-intensity lamp shone on the far side, where most of the cops had gathered.

  Molly fingered the tape. Though he was well behind her now, cut off by the crowd, Bayliss’s voice came to her as though he spoke in her ear. The unwelcome intimacy caused her to shiver.

  “Keep going. The bulls won’t stop you.”

  She ducked under the cordon, expecting shouts and cries and threats that didn’t come. The policeman watching the cordon barely noticed the intrusion. He gave only the slightest nod of acknowledgment as his gaze slid past Molly. A dreamlike silence had fallen upon the world. Shrouded it, as though the world were holding its breath for she knew not what. And yet she could hear the crunch of snow underfoot and the electrical hum of the emergency lights. Even the faint hiss where dark puddles steamed on the tracks. The steam tasted like salted iron.

  Molly sidestepped the plastic barrier. She cast no shadow over the scene at her feet. Two men crouched on the tracks at the center of a patch of red-black snow. They wore purple latex gloves. The night smelled of cold metal and ozone and shit. A black rubber pouch roughly the size of a sleeping bag lay on the snow beside the two men. They fished meaty things from the discolored snow and plopped them in the bag. A dented taxicab rested on the platform where tram passengers normally waited and disembarked.

  Martin sat slumped on a broken bench, head in his hands. A policewoman sat next to him. She looked uncomfortable, or bored, clearly waiting for him to finish with whatever grieved him so. Why was Martin crying? He never cried. Not even at their mother’s funeral.

  Molly glanced again at the men in the bloody snow. They finished their task; they zipped the bag, stood, then stripped off the gloves.

  She remembered the taxi careering across the wet street. Remembered grabbing Martin. Remembered falling.

  Oh. No. No.

  “Martin!”

  She hopped onto the platform, crouched, and pulled his hands from his face. She tried to smile for him. “Hey, look! I’m okay!”

  God, he looked awful. He yanked his hands away, as though something tickled or stung or burned them.

  His teary eyes looked through her.

  She knelt on the concrete and planted her hands on either side of his head. “Look at me! I’m here!”

  Martin flinched again, shaking off her hands. He scratched vigorously at the spots where she’d touched him.

  The policewoman watched it all with the same bored expression on her face.

  Molly grabbed Martin by the back of the neck, pulled his head toward her and leaned forward until their foreheads bumped together. She found his eyes, pushed past the wall of confusion and despair, and forced eye contact.

  He slid off the bench, fell to hands and knees, and puked over the side of the platform. The policewoman sighed, but not unkindly. Molly smelled vodka and beer in his vomit. How long ago had they left the bar?

  “Martin!”

  “Careful, angel.” Bayliss stood beside her. “He’ll stroke out if you keep giving him both barrels.” He watched the police dismantling the scaffold and lights. “Yeah. It’ll take some practice before you can interact.”

  “Shit. Holy shit.” Molly clutched her forehead, ran her hands through her hair. She closed her eyes; counted ten long, slow breaths. “If you’re about to tell me that I’m stuck as a ghost, I swear to God I’ll kick your nuts out through the top of your head.”

  Bayliss coughed. “Kinda blue for a high-en
d swell, aren’t you? Anyway, ghosts are a fairy tale.”

  His hat, his coat, the cigarettes … She remembered the rest. She remembered everything. She remembered his ancient eyes watching her die.

  ”Motherfucker! You did this to me!”

  He backed away again, farther and more quickly than he had in Minneapolis. “Bygones. Bygones!”

  “Kick you? Screw that. I’m going to shoot you.” She reached for the policewoman’s belt. Did cops even wear guns in Australia? At the very least, Molly figured, they must carry pepper spray or a zap gun or stickyfoam. Something that would make Bayliss yelp.

  The cop made notes on her pad, completely unaware or uninterested in the woman unbuttoning the compartments on her belt. Molly found a thin spray canister. She took a second to ensure the nozzle pointed away from herself and then advanced on Bayliss again. He retreated down the station’s handicapped access ramp.

  Molly charged. She thrust the canister forward in her right hand, steadying it with the left … and saw, in the corner of her eye, her naked arms. She still wore the nightgown from Minneapolis. Her legs were bare, too. The concrete underfoot was crusted with a thin layer of snow except where her bare feet had melted perfect five-toed prints. A breeze ruffled her nightgown.

  She wasn’t cold.

  The tinny clink and rattle of chains broke through the pregnant silence of the accident scene. A tow truck had arrived to haul away the taxi.

  Flitting through different scenes of her own life? That she could chalk up to trauma. Martin’s inability to recognize her? Maybe that was shock. But she’d just taken a weapon off a cop who couldn’t have cared less. Now she stood half-naked on icy concrete while a wintry wind tugged at her nightgown. And she didn’t feel it.

  Yet she could smell the alcohol in Martin’s puke and the salt in the ocean a few miles away. She heard the hum of electricity in the tram lines overhead and tasted the faint metallic tang of evaporated blood in the air—her blood—as the cop cars’ waste heat warmed the tracks. But for all that, she felt nothing. No discomfort.

  Molly dropped the canister. “Oh my God.” She ran her hands through her hair again. “Shitshitshit.”

  Bayliss said, in a quieter tone of voice, “Hey, chin up. It ain’t as bad as you think, angel.”

  “My name is Molly, not ’Angel.’ I don’t appreciate your chauvinistic little pet name.”

  Bayliss laughed. “Don’t you get it, doll? ’Angel’ ain’t a nickname. From now on, it’s your job.”

  3

  TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN

  Maybe I should have eased into that one. I thought she was going to slip her clutch.

  Then she gave me a look that should have sliced through the back of my coat. Her fingers, tangled deep in that coppery mop, kept kneading her scalp. “What the hell are you talking about? And who are you? What are you?”

  “Told you. Name’s Bayliss. And at the moment I am one red-faced psychopomp.”

  Seemed like she was absorbing that, because she got real quiet. When she spoke again, her voice was fragile as spun sugar.

  “Am I really dead?”

  “Your human body squiffed it, yeah.”

  “But I’m still thinking and talking.”

  “You’re not human any longer.” Well, not entirely. “You’re a member of the Choir now.” I flicked my pill at the tow truck. It sizzled on bloodstained ice. “Hell of an introduction, huh?”

  She frowned at that. “You don’t look like any angel I’ve ever seen.”

  Oh, for crying out loud. Bad enough I tagged the wrong bird, but did the frail have to be so damn stubborn?

  “That so? Seen a lot of us, have you?”

  That shut her yap.

  She dropped her hands. She craned her head back, watched the sky. The stars had reverted to their sluggish twinkle. Junk fragments—real junk this time—flared across the sky from south to north, remnants of a polar orbit. But the world around us no longer ticked and wobbled like a scratched record. We’d stabilized reality, flametop and me, though she didn’t know it yet. I’d done my duty and was free to go back to my quiet unobtrusive life just as soon as I sent the girl on her merry. But she wasn’t making it easy.

  “Angels are a fairy tale, too,” she said. Somewhere to our south, the floodwalls boomed.

  “Beg to differ, sweetheart. I’m as real as you.”

  After that, I had to wait for the revving of a truck engine to subside. The tow truck jingled its chains like Marley’s ghost when it pulled the dented hack away. It slid through a gap in the traffic while the bulls kept rubbernecked drivers at bay. One by one the emergency vehicles quenched their flashers and receded into the slushy night. The crowd dissipated.

  Meanwhile, flametop still had the bit in her teeth. “I can’t be dead,” she mumbled.

  I sighed. I knew she was trouble the minute I saw her.

  “You’re peddling your fish in the wrong market, lady.”

  Her eyebrows came together, hunched low over eyes the color of polished amber. “What does that even mean?”

  “It means you have a lot to learn and the sooner the better.” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “C’mon. I know a place. I’ll buy you a cup of joe and read you the headlines.”

  “What about Martin? I can’t leave him like this.”

  The hard boy had gone back to cradling his head on his hands. He was alone. Maybe the bulls had given him a card, a referral for a grief counselor, before hitting the road. But they had breezed and he hadn’t. The clouds of his breath formed a pale pall around his head. He whimpered like a motherless puppy.

  But my ward wasn’t going to budge until he scrammed.

  I sighed. “Does he have somewhere to go?”

  “We’re staying at a hotel.” She shook her head. For a second there, I thought she was going to turn on the waterworks. Big brother squeaked like a schoolgirl; I wondered how it sounded when flametop cried. But she drew a breath and said, “He has a room there.”

  “Where?” I asked. She gave me the name of the joint. I didn’t know it.

  “Can we send him there? Can you? Can you”—she gestured vaguely, hopelessly—“zap him there?”

  “‘Zap’ him?”

  Her voice was as weary as I felt. “I dunno. Use your angel mojo.”

  I cracked my knuckles, straightened my fedora. “Let me show you how it’s done, doll.”

  And so I strode over to big brother and said, “Hey, pal, why the long face?” And a few minutes later I’d waved down a taxi, poured him into it, and bought his fare. I stiffed the driver on the tip, but one could argue that wasn’t the worst thing I’d done all evening. I returned to her after ditching the lush.

  She wasn’t impressed. “I could have done that.”

  “Well, strictly speaking, no you couldn’t. Not without popping a vein in his noggin. It’ll take some practice.”

  “All you did was put him in a taxi.”

  “It worked, didn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t seem very … angelic.”

  “I’ve been down here a while, so sue me. Let’s call it going native and move on.”

  The traffic had returned to normal. The taxi merged into the flow, and soon it was just another trio of taillights in the windy night. The ocean gave the floodwalls hell.

  Flametop said, “He shouldn’t be alone.”

  “Lady, you are one cuckoo twist if you think we’re following him. He’ll be fine. We got our own problems, me and you.”

  For a second there I thought she’d let me off the hook. Thought she’d choose to tough it out on her own. Damn near stubborn enough, this frail. But I should’ve known not to get my hopes up.

  “Our mother died,” she said, almost to herself, though I knew it was a question. “We had a funeral…”

  “Sorry, kid. There ain’t no Santa Claus and there ain’t no afterlife. Dead is dead, not a family reunion.”

  “But … You just said I’m dead, too.”

  “I also said you�
�d won the lottery. You’re one in a trillion. Don’t let it go to your head.”

  “I don’t understand anything,” she said in that spun-sugar tremor. Something about the way she said it gave me a glimpse of the kid who wore footie pajamas and a ballet tutu, the frightened little girl before she became the dish who wore cashmere and strode the world with red-carpet dignity. Never let it be said Bayliss turns a cold hard heart to a damsel in distress.

  “Look. I know it’s all cockamamie right now. But you’ll get the gist of things. Promise. Now follow me.” I offered my elbow but she gave it a dead pan. So with a sigh I led her back into the rabbit warren of the laneways. A couple doglegs later, surrounded by hucksters and lost souls and the occasional penitente, one could almost forget someone had died. She didn’t, though. I ought to have taken a different route through the lanes, but I wanted her to get a sense of where we were and where we were headed. I figured it’d be a gentle introduction to the Pleroma if I could play on her expectations a bit. But she was too busy noticing all the places her brother had lost his footing, giving little Bambi sighs each time we passed a spot where she’d hauled him to his feet, to give our heading any thought.

  Somewhere along the way she ditched the nightgown and reverted to her original outfit without even realizing what she’d done. And she gave no sign of feeling odd—no warning prickle in the primitive depths of the lizard brain, no dissonance in the seat of higher reasoning—when we shifted into the Pleroma. I tell you, the kid was a natural. But I wasn’t about to tell her that. Already high maintenance, this one.

  So there she was in a Melbourne laneway, neon shining on her wet eyes as she faced the gin mill where she’d had her last tiff with big brother. Then I opened the door for her, and with the next step she was a guest in my Magisterium. But it took her a moment to realize the gin mill had become a diner in the couple hours while her corpse lay in the snow, snarling up the traffic.

  A heavenly aroma greeted us, like a whiff of God’s own aftershave. Say what you will about the monkeys, but a side of bacon cures a lot of ills. I took a stool at the counter. Frayed batting poked through the cracked red leather, and both carried discolorations the color of spilled coffee. A waitress in a pink apron cleared away a plate of half-eaten pancakes drenched in syrup, then wiped down the counter. I could smell the maple on the plate and the cigarette smoke in her hair. Her dish towel had been white once, but it probably hadn’t seen the inside of a washtub since Roosevelt could dance. She tossed a paper menu at me. It landed in a wet spot left behind by her towel. She wore a name tag, but it was blurred in the same way a newspaper headline becomes blurred and indistinct when you try to read in a dream. I’d never caught her name in the mundane realm, back in the day, so here I’d glossed over that detail. Didn’t matter much. I called her Flo. She never objected.