Ian Tregillis - Something More Than Night Read online

  Behind her, a door opened. A trio of penitentes emerged, their wounds steaming in the chilly night. They were too busy jabbering to each other—was that Latin?—to see her crouched on the landing.

  “Hey! Watch it!” said Molly.

  She scrambled aside before one of the sweaty, bloody, half-naked freaks tumbled atop her. But they kept coming like she wasn’t there. Molly raised her arms to shield herself. The guy in front lost his footing. Molly flinched—

  —and landed on the floor of the Minneapolis apartment.

  She lay there a moment, panting and stroking the floor. The floorboards slid like silk beneath her fingers. Ria had done such a fantastic job. They were straight and smooth and perfect but for the one blemish where the cherry of Bayliss’s cigarette had damaged the varnish. He deserved a punch in the nose for that. The butt had landed there, tip down, then rolled a few inches away, leaving a curlicue of ash in its wake. A faint trace of smoke, a phantom scent, haunted the bedroom like a revenant spirit. Molly cracked a window open; a frigid February night leaked inside. The moon, nearly full, cast blue shadows from the sash. Waxing or waning? She couldn’t tell.

  Molly took the butt to the bathroom and flushed it. Bayliss had, of course, left the lid up. The shower curtain still lay in the tub, half torn from the rings by his retreat. She returned the baseball bat to its spot under the bed. Then she ran a spare washcloth under the faucet and scrubbed away the ash. The cloth went in the trash rather than the laundry hamper. She was too disgusted to ever use it again, no matter how fiercely it was washed.

  Then she stopped.

  Laundry hamper?

  What if I really am dead?

  If I’m dead, she thought, really, truly dead, why am I still thinking about laundry? What does it matter? What does anything matter?

  This building had burned to the ground long ago. It didn’t exist, except in photographs and memories. It was gone. Like Dad and Mom. And yet here she was: cleaning the floors and worrying about laundry. Pointless.

  Bayliss’s place—what did he call it? His Pleroma? Magisterium?—was filled with people. Granted, they were straight from central casting for an old-time movie, but at least that crapsack diner wasn’t empty. Wasn’t “sterile,” as Bayliss had put it. All Molly wanted was to hear the rhythm of Ria’s breath while she slept, to feel the warmth of her body on the sheets. But she knew, deeper than her marrow, she hadn’t the strength to sew disparate memories into a companion. A woman was more than the sum of her parts. More than a chicken pox scar on the tip of her nose, and radical politics, and a hatred of raisins. Molly secured it all, and more, in the lockbox of her heart. For later. Not much later. Just not tonight. It was all too big for tonight.

  Much smaller was the damaged spot on the floor.

  She sat at the edge of the bed, imagining how things had been before the fire. Imagining the lustrous sheen of varnish. The gentle, unbroken whorls of grain in the oak. The paper-thin seam where the boards joined.

  The spot shrunk. Her heat beat faster.

  The edges of the burn lightened. Gentle ripples lapped at its coarse perimeter, eroding the blemish one hair’s breadth at a time. The pattern of the wood grain grew like time-lapsed ivy.

  Sweat trickled down Molly’s forehead and between her breasts. She gulped down cold air. It numbed her throat, but made her sinuses ache. She tasted turpentine and sawdust and cigarette smoke.

  The alterations slowed, then stopped. The center of the damaged spot wouldn’t budge. It resisted her. The very fact of its presence asserted a contradictory reality. The memory of the unblemished floor slipped away like water through her fingertips.

  Molly pushed. She’d seen the undamaged floor a thousand times, damn it. A dark haze fell across the bedroom. Her vision retreated into a tunnel.

  The burn contracted, pulsed, snapped back. Unmoved. Unchanged.

  Molly collapsed on the rumpled bed, too weary even to remove her boots, and fell into a dark dreamless nothing.

  * * *

  The moon hung a little lower in the sky, but it was still dark outside when she awoke to a clanging sound from downstairs. A metallic banging, as though somebody were rummaging the pots and pans and being none too gentle about it. There was a smash, as of broken glass, followed by what sounded, impossibly, like the roll of surf along a beach.

  What the hell, Bayliss?

  Molly groaned. A hot, spiky headache had taken root inside her skull. She’d strained herself, and now she had the hangover sensation that a layer of grit coated the backs of her eyeballs. She rolled over and once again retrieved the bat from its hiding spot under the bed. A dull ache throbbed in her toes and ankles when she wobbled to her feet; she should have removed her boots. (Hadn’t she been barefoot before? She remembered footprints in the snow.) She crossed the bedroom, boot heels clacking across the floorboards. She opened the door that led to the stairs, and immediately knew something was very, very wrong.

  First: it wasn’t night any longer. The space on the other side of the door shone brighter than a July afternoon.

  Second: the apartment’s staircase had disappeared. The senseless jumble in its place was a scrap heap, a pile of examples—impressions—of the concept of stairs:

  Part of an escalator. A concrete step from behind her childhood home, its riser covered in scrawls of blue and yellow chalk, an ice-cream cone melting, a little boy crying. Step 232 of the Washington Monument, the one where she’d lost count during a school field trip in ninth grade. A half-twist of the spiral staircase from an old 747. The space under the stairs to the choir loft of her mother’s church, the home of Molly’s first kiss.

  She descended the kaleidoscopic gauntlet where the stairs had been; dodged the flickering news footage of firefighters dousing the flames that would gut this building in the future; tripped over the time she’d cheated on Ria; squeezed past the tortured squeaking of a mouse caught on a glue trap in the pantry; and landed just outside a kitchen that smelled of spilled red wine and freshly extinguished birthday candles. She tightened her hold on the bat, took a deep breath, and prepared to scream bloody murder.

  But when she leaped from her hiding spot, the words shriveled in her throat. It wasn’t Bayliss.

  The thing in the kitchen wasn’t remotely shaped like a man at all. Nor, she realized, was it alone. Another loomed behind her. When the being in the kitchen turned, a pair of vast gossamer wings scraped dust from the moon. Its face was a blinding sheet of flame.

  WHERE? its query thundered with demand. The bat in Molly’s hands exploded into a cloud of mismatched butterfly wings. They fluttered to the floor while the furious angels grabbed Molly by the soul, turned her inside out, and shook until all her memories fell away.

  … the sting of salt in the eye, the crumbs of a broken oyster cracker …

  … a needle in Martin’s arm, his bleary eyes not seeing her …

  … downloading a Wynton Marsalis album, playing it on infinite loop while studying for final exams …

  WHERE?

  … the pop of bubble wrap …

  … a dog licking Molly’s fingers, its tongue warm and slobbery …

  … the smell of melted plastic …

  … standing in line at the DMV, getting hit on by a redneck in a gimmee cap …

  … dirt caked under her fingernails …

  … a cracked lid on the container Leslie Johnson used to bring a cow brain to school in fifth grade, the blood smeared on her desk looking like canned ravioli sauce …

  … an earache …

  … Martin pushing her down in the mud so that she’d stop following him and his friends, making her eat it …

  … atonal echoes of a busker tooting his saxophone on a subway platform …

  WHERE?

  … burgundy or maroon …

  … the tackiness of cheap duct tape …

  Bits and pieces of Molly’s life swirled through her consciousness like confetti in a gale. Every memory, every experience of her life, every sig
ht and taste and sound and touch and smell, the taste of every color, the smell of every caress, stretched out and scrutinized and tossed aside. A life unraveled. Sanity as midden heap.

  A tumbling torrent of nonsense. On and on and on.

  … diarrhea, a clogged toilet, panic …

  … dozing on a picnic blanket with her first girlfriend …

  … the morning after a snowstorm, losing track of the snow emergency parking rules, paying money she can’t afford to retrieve her car from the city impound lot …

  … an ice cube pressed against her wrist …

  … a sting, a drop of blood, her last baby tooth embedded in the hotdog she’d just bitten …

  … Christmas party, four other couples, eggnog by the fireplace …

  … the blare of a tornado siren, huddling in the basement with Mom and Dad while the sky turns green, feeling terrified because they can’t hide their worry …

  … “Classical Gas” …

  WHERE?

  … the smell of lilacs in a warm spring rain …

  … hide-and-seek with Martin, cheating, sneaking into Dad’s off-limits study, breaking the antique telephone when she knocks it off the desk—

  Molly grasped at the memory fragment. Her father’s old paperweight had come in two pieces: the base with a dial and a cone for speaking, and a separate earpiece on a cord. The cord stretched like taffy and snapped; the earpiece rolled away past her first skiing lesson and fell into the crevice between the taste of homemade lasagna and the frustration caused by a corrupted e-book file.

  The base was an empty shell of wood and brass. She cranked the dial with fingers that flickered in size and shape and color, from adulthood to childhood and back, from painted nails to metal splints on a sprain to the dainty fingers of a fourteen-year-old.

  The cone coated her lips with the fine grit of house dust. She yelled, “Bayliss!”

  And then her attackers abandoned all restraint.

  * * *

  When she came to, she lay among fragments of a Quinceañera celebration to which her family had been invited when Molly was in junior high. The off-key singing poked in the small of her back. Her thirteen-year-old’s bashfulness tasted slightly metallic, like an accidental bite of moldy bread. She rolled over, but didn’t open her eyes. They still felt as though they’d been coated in sand. Her headache had dived into a foxhole during the assault, but now that was over and it was back to work.

  Somebody let out a long, low whistle. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

  Molly cracked one eye open. Winced.

  Bayliss stood over her, surveying the wreckage of her life. “Never pegged you for the dramatic type. Maybe I spoke too soon about that ing-bing.”

  Warm wetness tickled her upper lip. She touched her face. Her fingers came away red.

  A soft rain fell upward, from the floor, into a cloudless tangerine sky. Molly rinsed her blooded fingertips in the impossible rain and surveyed the shattered debris of her memory palace. The pantry door opened on the narthex of Notre Dame, where candles flickered in time to the grinding of a dying dishwasher. The kitchen table, the one she and Ria had bought at a garage sale before realizing it didn’t fit through the front door, now wobbled on uneven legs made of steam, lust, schadenfreude, and the sourness of bad lemon pudding. The trim around the ceiling had become the musty smell of an ex-girlfriend’s workout clothes forgotten at the bottom of the washing machine. The entirety of Molly’s mortal life had been shredded, confettied, discarded in a jumbled heap. Flotsam and jetsam strewn across a rocky beach. There was one of those, too, where the coat closet used to be.

  She rose to her feet. The tile floor shifted underfoot like the fine gypsum sands she’d once visited in New Mexico.

  “I didn’t do this, you jackass,” she said. “I was attacked.”

  Bayliss blinked. For once, he didn’t respond with an incomprehensible wisecrack. He stared at her, his expression cloaked behind ancient eyes. After a moment he went into what remained of the kitchen. Molly heard a tap running. He returned with a glass of water. She didn’t recognize the glass; part of her wondered what distant and dim corner of her memory had produced it.

  “Here,” he said, offering the glass. “Drown your tonsils.”

  “Thanks.” Molly drank while he found a chair, tossed aside the taste of wood ash on burned campfire marshmallows, and sat down. The water was too cold. It hurt her teeth. But she drank anyway.

  Bayliss said, “So tell me what happened.”

  She did. It didn’t take long. The glass was empty by the end, but her thirst hadn’t subsided. Nor had the headache. She filled the glass by holding it upside down in the topsy-turvy rain. Then she rooted around until she found the bathroom medicine cabinet. It used to contain a bottle of aspirin. Now it contained her scream from the time she was bitten by a llama at a roadside petting zoo in Manitoba. She found the aspirin on a window ledge alongside her first orgasm.

  Fury rose within her; it wrapped the world in a flickering heat shimmer. Memories, her private realities, crackled and blackened around the edges. To see the most cherished pieces of herself—the most intimate, the most personal, the things that made her Molly—cast aside with such disregard, such contempt … It made her feel so small.… She’d never felt so helpless.

  Bayliss still hadn’t said anything by the time she sat again. He lit a match on his thumbnail. Watched it burn almost to his fingertips. Shook it out. Did it again. He was thinking hard.

  “I’m still waiting on an explanation,” said Molly.

  “Can’t tell you what I don’t know,” he said.

  “You know a shitload more than I do.”

  Bayliss sighed. “Maybe I miscounted the trumps. Maybe you got caught in the rain on account of it.”

  The Magisterium sagged like candle wax in heat haze of Molly’s rage. “What were those things? And what were they looking for?”

  “The loogans? Hard to know. Sounds like you tussled with some real torpedoes, though. Couple of Cherubim would be my guess. You sure you didn’t see a flaming sword anywhere?” Molly shook her head; she remembered hearing something about that in Sunday school. He shrugged. “Well, that don’t mean much. You get a count? Eyes, wings, faces, that sort of thing?”

  “Sorry. I was too busy being assaulted.”

  At least he had the courtesy to look abashed. “Yeah. I suppose so.”

  Molly stood. Her boots sank ankle deep in butterfly wings. They smoked and curled when her anger brushed against them. The reek of burned hair wreathed her legs. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Bayliss ran a hand through his hair and massaged the back of his neck. “So, the guy you replaced? Well, it’s true he ain’t around anymore. Just like I said. But maybe there’s more to it than that. I think he got pinked.”

  Molly had to consider his tone and body language before the meaning sank in. Her heart understood before her head: for the first time since dying she was frightened. The anger at Bayliss and an unfair fate for taking her from Martin when he needed her most, the jittering frustration at a world that no longer made sense, even the rage at being attacked—violated—inside her own memories … it all disappeared. Replaced by simple fear. Sweat tickled the fine hairs at the back of her neck. A cold wind swirled across the hollow where her self-confidence had been.

  Pinked: killed.

  Somebody she didn’t know—living to inscrutable rules in an invisible, nonsensical world—had been killed. Somehow she was expected to replace him. And now others—even more inscrutable, moving along their own incomprehensible currents—had ransacked her most intimate personal space. Her attempt to have a personal space. She was embroiled in something enormous, dangerous, and utterly confusing. More than what he said, the way Bayliss said it conveyed a sense of ancient feuds. Of eons-old turf wars cutting through Heaven. And the powers at work were vast. Vast in ways she couldn’t comprehend. This she knew.

  She still hadn’t come to terms with being d
ead. She hardly believed it, even now. But … The cold wind whistled through the empty spaces of her soul, like drafts through a windowless abandoned house. It made her shiver. It was the same shiver she felt when Mom had admitted she’d found a lump some time back but had been too frightened to go in and have a scan done. Dad used to say a shiver like that meant somebody, somewhere, had walked over her grave.

  Did it count if she’d died on a city street?

  She paced. Her footsteps kicked eddies of butterfly dust into the backward rain.

  “You didn’t think to mention this to me?”

  “Look. You were in a bad way. Thought I was doing you a favor by not piling on with the bad news. Didn’t think it mattered in the short term.”

  “You didn’t think it mattered if you warned me about this?”

  “Warn you about what? I didn’t know this was going to happen. How should I? Again, no offense, angel, but you’re small-time.”

  “Oh, I see. I guess I’m just lucky then.” Molly swept up an armful of shredded memories. Somewhere, a narcissistic fifteen-year-old wept over a pimple on her chin. Molly flung the teenage angst at him. “What the hell is going on?”

  Bayliss lit another match on his thumbnail. His hands shook. Molly thought he’d said all he intended, so rapt was he with the flame. But then he sighed.

  “Look. Sometimes a guy hears things, okay? And sometimes he hears ’em and he thinks, that’s gonna be a bad, sad day for everybody. And he don’t want any part of it. No how. So he lams off, okay? And they let him. And they leave him alone. And for a long time everything’s jake. But then he gets a postcard telling him to lamp the heavens, so he does, and when he sees the shape of it he knows the tide’s coming in. The heavies call on him because they want something done, and he knows the score, he knows what they’re telling him, so he does the thing. He does one simple thing, no more, no less, because maybe he’s afraid the big fish are swimming in the deep but if he makes nice and doesn’t rock the boat they’ll leave him alone again. He doesn’t ask any questions and they swim right on past him.”

  The flame burned past the end of the match, into his shaking hand. He didn’t notice. Fire became an emerald mist where it touched his flesh. Its smoke smelled of cinnamon and sulfur, and tasted like pickled starlight.