Murder of Angels (20 page)

“You’re not dreaming, and you can’t go home.”

Niki Ky mutters a half-remembered prayer to the Catholic god of her mother, then accepts Spyder’s hand, that milk-white palm, her skin as soft as silk, but she doesn’t take her eyes off the jackals. They’re no more than a hundred yards away now, a hundred yards at most, and the bridge is moving so much that she’s having trouble staying on her feet. The steel groans and creaks beneath them, and Niki imagines the upper level collapsing, pancaking, crashing down on the lower, eastbound tier.

“It’s a long way,” Spyder says. “A lot farther than it looks.”

“A long way to what?”

“The water,” Spyder says, and she picks up Niki’s backpack with her free hand. “The water is our passage. The jackals can’t follow us that way. They’re things of earth.”

“So all we need’s a firehose.”

“No, Niki. It doesn’t work like that.”

And Spyder leads her quickly to the edge of the heaving bridge, to the low concrete barriers, and tells her not to look at the jackals again. So Niki looks down at the bay instead, the flat and motionless waters like a mirror, like a polished crimson gem.

“I can’t swim very well,” Niki says.

“You won’t have to swim, Niki. Trust me. You only have to fall.”

“I’m going to die now, aren’t I?”

“Everyone dies,” and Spyder smiles for her, smiling as the jackals’ paws hammer the bridge like artillery fire. “But it isn’t what you think. You’ll see.”

And then she helps Niki over the concrete and squeezes her left hand tight as they step off into space, and gravity does

the

rest.

T
he lines that hold the universe together, this universe and all others, elsewhere, elsewhen, closed strings and open strings, loops to break or strings held forever open, and the tension sings unfathomable chords along the lines of inconceivable instruments. Symmetry and supersymmetry, wool and water, looking-glass insects, and the spacetime between a boson and its corresponding fermion.

These things happen.

These things happen.

These things happen.

And the mother Weaver at the blind soul of all creations dreams in her black-hole cocoon of trapped light and antimatter, her legs drawn up tight about the infinitely vast, infinitely small shield of her pulsing cephalothorax. Her spinnerets spew quantum particle lines, opened or closed strings, depending on the dream. Explosions to spray a new cosmos across the common void, and “In
that
direction,” the Cat said. The Weaver shivers in her sleep, twitches a fang, and stars die and are born in the gaseous furnaces of her vomit. All paths lead to her, and from her, beginnings and middles and ends, and the event horizons of her bottomless funnel webs leak only the finest, most distilled radiations.

“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“—so long as I get
somewhere
.”

Eternal spiderweb’s dance of worldlines and world-sheets—
adagio, pirouette, pas de deux, pas de trois, pas de quatre
—and the particles that move through spacetime sweep out curves as strings will sweep out the invisible surfaces of worlds.

These things happen. And these.

And the Weaver in her hole opens one eye, sensing discord, shimmering disharmony as lines from
here
are drawn at last towards
there,
and for an instant two universes brush or grind or bleed, one against the other. She knows the great price of this contact and looks away.

Oh, you wicked wicked little thing.

But. These things happen.

And in a moment (as she counts moments), the strings will sing true again, in the age between an angel’s heartbeats, and she has all the patience there will ever be. Patience drips like venom from her jaws.

But the wrinkle does not pass unnoticed.

At 2:38
A.M
., a man crossing the Bay Bridge on his way to Alameda makes a 911 call from his cell phone. He describes a young Asian woman wearing a blue fur coat, standing at the edge of the bridge, staring down at the water. He tells the operator that he thinks she might be a jumper. When asked for his name, he hangs up, because the girl really isn’t his problem and there’s a nickel bag of pot and three tabs of ecstasy in his glove compartment. He turns up the radio, and his sleek yellow Jaguar roars eastward.

At 2:40
A.M
., a security camera in the California Academy of Sciences’ Hall of Insects records a bright flash and the sound of breaking glass. At 2:46, a guard finds three cases in the hall smashed and a fine gray powder covering the insect and arachnid specimens mounted inside. Days later, the gray powder will eventually be identified as a mixture of silica particles and industrial-grade graphite.

At 2:43
A.M
., three teenagers walking past Alamo Square along Hayes Street experience what they will later report as a “downpour” of living spiders from the cloudless night sky. The three are forced to take refuge on the porch of a house facing the park and watch as the spiders blanket the ground. The rain of spiders lasts until about three
A.M
., when it ends as suddenly as it began. Spiders also fall from the sky at the eastern end of Bush Street and at several locations on the campus of the University of San Francisco. The spiders on Bush Street are all found to be dead and frozen solid. In the following days, zoologists will identify three distinct species present in samples collected from the spider falls—
Pityohyphantes costatus, Araniella displicata,
and
Tetragnatha laboriosa
—all native to the San Francisco area. The next morning, great quantities of a sticky white substance similar to, but not chemically identical with, spider silk will be discovered blanketing several acres of John McLaren Park.

Sometime before 2:45
A.M
. a middle-aged woman named Eleanora Collins, living alone near Chinatown, awakens to a vision of five golden-winged angels standing around her bed. One of them smiles and speaks in a language she can’t understand and then they disappear, one by one, leaving behind the scent of ammonia and roasting meat. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Eleanora Collins was diagnosed as schizophrenic at the age of fourteen. Three weeks later, she will hang herself, leaving several apparent suicide notes written in a language no one can read.

According to the captain’s log of the Japanese container ship
Hirata-Gumo Maru,
at precisely 2:57
A.M
., as the vessel neared the Bay Bridge from the southeast, the captain and two crewmen watched from the compass deck as a “shallow, bowl-shaped depression with smooth sides” formed on the surface of the water directly ahead of them. The depression was estimated by Captain Takahashi to have been not less than twenty to thirty-five meters in diameter, and seemed to glow softly. Before orders could be given to reduce speed or alter course, all three sailors saw a body plummet from the bridge into the center of the depression, hitting the water without a splash. Within seconds, all evidence of the phenomenon vanished completely, and the
Hirata-Gumo Maru
passed beneath the bridge without further incident. Though the captain ordered a search for the body, no evidence of it was found. The duration of the anomaly was estimated to have been less than two minutes.

Ninety-eight years and seven months earlier, Mr. J. P. Anthony is awakened at 5:05
A.M
. in his room at the Ramona Hotel on Ellis Street. He lies very still, silently watching a flickering, transparent apparition he will later describe to newspaper reporters in both Los Angeles and the town of Pacific Grove as “a coolie girl standing at the window, having a conversation with a white pigeon.” He will be able to recall few details about the ghost, and almost nothing of what she said to the bird or what it said to her. He will clearly remember only one remark—“Not even the Dragon can stop them, once the hunt begins”—but will not remember which one of them said it, the girl or the bird. At 5:10, by the clock beside his bed, the ghost vanishes, and at 5:13 the city is hit by an earthquake that lifts the six-story Ramona Hotel off its foundations and collapses its roof. J. P. Anthony spends the rest of April 18, 1906, trying to escape the burning wreck of San Francisco on foot, one refugee among thousands, and, for a time, he will forget the strange sight immediately before the quake. In 1933, he describes the incident in a letter to Maurice Barbanell, editor of the spiritualist journal
Psychic News
. Barbanell will eventually connect Mr. Anthony’s experience with similar reports immediately before other San Francisco earthquakes, including the massive shocks felt on October 8, 1865.

These things happen.

A few miles north of Lexington, Kentucky, at precisely 4:48
A.M
. CST, a man driving a rusted purple Lincoln Continental with Illinois plates pulls off into the breakdown lane on I-65 South and stares through the windshield at the night sky above the interstate. He knows all the signs of Heaven, the secret tongue of stars and comets and meteors, and tonight he understands the things he sees happening above him. He wakes the woman sleeping in the front seat next to him, who calls herself Archer Day, and yes, she says, yes, she sees it, too.

They don’t bother waking the girl sleeping in the backseat, the girl named Theda, the girl they found in Connecticut, because she still hasn’t seen enough to understand what the lights signify, the bobbing blue and white lights that are neither stars nor airplanes nor only the man’s exhausted, road-weary eyes. The man and the woman watch the lights for almost fifteen minutes, and when they finally vanish, he kisses her and wipes tears from her brown eyes. She makes notes in a leather-bound book she keeps beneath the front seat, and the man says a prayer before continuing their long drive.

Dreaming in the wide backseat of the Lincoln, the girl who calls herself Theda, because, arranged another way, the letters spell “death,” remembers things that have happened and things that haven’t and things that still might happen.

“You’ve
always
known,” the white woman at the foot of her bed whispers, and smiles. “You knew you weren’t like them. You were certain you were something more.”

And yes, Theda tells her, she has always known these things, always, and she weeps, and tiny white spiders swarm across her bedspread, the crystal, snowflake spiders that have been dripping from the white woman’s dreadlocks. She lets them climb across her skin, burrowing into her hair, slipping inside her nostrils and down her throat, filling her with the white woman’s light.

“You will be me,” she says, and Theda is starting to understand what she means.

In the dream, she wakes, still dreaming, and stares in wonder and secret satisfaction at the Dragon’s fire outside her open bedroom window, inferno exhalations sweeping slowly across the sky to sear the rooftops of the Hartford suburb. Fire to burn everything clean, clean at last, and now she feels the crystal spiders growing inside her, spinning their webs, laying crystal eggs, and the smell of burning drifts across the windowsill into her room on a sizzling breeze.

“Freak,” someone sneers and shoves her—every single humiliation reduced to this single word, this single moment, this one act—all the insults and countless embarrassments, and Theda turns to see all the hateful faces staring back at her.

“Freak.”

“Fucking lesbo freak.”

And then the cleansing fire falls down and takes them all at once, their perfect, normal faces melting together like wax and time, becoming indistinguishable, one from the next. But Theda knows she’s the one it
really
wants, the reason it’s here, and her tormentors are only fuel for the fire.

“Is it really that petty?” Archer Day asks and shakes her head disapprovingly. “Is that all you have inside you, little girl?
Revenge?
Is there nothing more?”

“Maybe it’s enough for me,” Theda replies. “Do you have something better?”

Archer coughs and lights another cigarette. “Go back to sleep. I’m tired of listening to you.”

“A psychomaterial conduit,” the white woman says, so maybe she hasn’t awakened after all. “You are so powerful, so beautiful, you will bridge the void and draw the poison out.”

“I don’t want to die.”

“It’s not death. Only another kind of
being,
that’s all. The things that you will see—”

Eleven of them waiting in the cemetery that night, and the tall man chose her. Ten chances to fail, to be passed over, but she was the one he’d been looking for all along.

“The truth is buried inside you,” the white woman promises. “Ancient fragments, but the angels will find you too late, Theda. The angels will never find you at all.”

And the big car rolls on through the Southern night, as the girl rolls from one dream current to the next, drowning in herself.

At 4:58
A.M
. CST, Daria Parker opens her eyes somewhere above western Kansas and stares at the moonlight washing ice white across the tops of the clouds outside the cabin window of the 767.
They look like the tops of mountains,
she thinks.
They look like the tops of very high mountains covered with snow.
And then she remembers where she is and why, that she’s on her way back to San Francisco and Niki, and that memory leads her immediately to all the other things she doesn’t want to remember, and she closes her eyes again. The airplane hums reassuringly, the steady, everywhere rumble above and below and all around her, and
Maybe
that’s
the dream,
she thinks.
Maybe I’m asleep in my hotel room in Atlanta, and Alex is holding me and this time Niki’s okay.
Maybe she’s never heard the strange message left in her voice mail, and Niki hasn’t told her it’s already too late, and maybe in the morning she’ll be able to figure out a way to fix everything.

And then we all lived happily ever after.

“Wake up, Daria,” Niki says, and she opens her eyes.

So, it really is a dream,
and that ought to be another comfort, like the thrum of the jet’s engines, but then she realizes that it isn’t that sort of dream at all.

“I only have a second,” Niki tells her. “I can’t stay.”

“I’m on my way, baby,” Daria replies and touches Niki’s cheek, her skin so dark against the pale tips of Daria’s fingers. “Just like I said. I’m racing the sun.”

“I didn’t want to ask you to do this. I wanted to let you go and never have to ask you for anything else ever again.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And Niki Ky looks away, then, looks down at her hands folded in her lap and then up at the movie playing silently on the screen at the front of the cabin.

“We never saw that,” she says. “I wanted to, but you didn’t have time, and I didn’t want to go with Marvin.”

“When I get home, we’ll rent the DVD.”

“It wouldn’t be the same, even if we could.”

“Fuck it. I’ll make the time,” Daria says and puts both her arms around Niki, leans forward and holds her tight. Niki’s wearing her blue fur coat, and it smells faintly of dust and jasmine, and Daria wants to bury her face in it and make this be a different dream.