Murder of Angels (33 page)

“Which are we?”

“Which do you think?” she asks and starts chanting again.

And the truth is that he’s spent years trying
not
to think about it. The three of them might be traveling in the same car through the same night, heading together towards some semblance of the same end, their fates interlocked like jigsaw fragments, but he has no doubt that they each have their own private motivations. Theda’s worn right there on her sleeve, Archer’s held close to her chest despite the things she’s said and all that she’s promised him. And his own not much more than a wish to finish something he never meant to start.

But I was the one who brought them the peyote,
he thinks,
and none of this would ever have happened without me.
And that’s true, Walter at twenty-two, the candyman for Spyder’s fucked-up coterie of goths and outcasts, bringing them whatever he could score to win his way deeper and deeper into the group. A bag of weed, a few tabs of acid, a bottle of absinthe, a brick of hash, whatever came his way, but the peyote buttons had been something else, something special. Something that Robin had been wanting for a long, long time, and if she’d never gotten them, if he’d never
given
them to her, if he could take back that
one
simple exchange, the cash he handed over for a brown paper bag of dried cactus—change that one action and a different life would have been laid out before them all.

Change that one thing and Robin might still be alive.

“Did you love her?” Archer asked him once, not long after they met, at the end of a long night of sex and conversation.

“Does anybody really fall in love at twenty-one?” he replied, and she looked at him like she had no idea what he was talking about.

“In this place, you all seem determined to stay children forever,” she said, finally, and there was really no way he could disagree with that.

And then the road ends, and there’s the house, waiting for him all this time, crouched beneath the limbs of the ancient live oaks and pecan trees, and Walter pulls to a stop at the edge of the driveway and shuts off the headlights.

“That’s it?” Archer asks him, expectant and maybe disappointed, too, and he nods his head very slowly.

“Fuck,”
Theda whispers from the backseat. “It’s fucking beautiful,” and Walter wants to turn around and punch her in the face.

“It’s just an ugly old house,” he says instead, loading the words with as much hatred and anger as he dares, enough so there’s no doubt in Theda’s mind how he feels about the place. “It’s an evil old house where terrible things have happened. There’s nothing beautiful about it, and there never fucking was.”

“Maybe you’re not seeing the same house she is,” Archer suggests unhelpfully, and “Yeah,” Theda says. “Maybe you’re not seeing the same house at all.”

“I’m seeing the only house there is to see,” he replies and cuts the motor. The Chevy sputters and in another second the night is silent, save the cold wind rattling the dry leaves in the trees. The house is in a lot better shape than he thought it would be, all but tumbledown the last time he was here, back when it was still just Spyder’s house, the November that Robin died. Someone’s painted it once or twice since then, and maybe there’s a new roof, too, though it looks as if nobody’s lived here in a while. All the windows are dark, and the wide front porch, which Spyder always kept heaped with all sorts of junk and garbage—a broken-down Norton motorcycle that she never could get running and an old washing machine, bits of bicycles and car parts and other rusting, unidentifiable machineries—is bare except for ankle-deep drifts of fallen leaves. It hardly looks worthy of the apocalypse brewing in its bowels.

“Are we just gonna sit here or what?” Theda asks, and Archer sighs and laughs softly to herself.

“There’s plenty of time,” she says. “Don’t be so eager for what you can’t avoid. It’s coming.”

It’s coming,
Walter thinks, and at least he knows that’s absolutely fucking true. This last night when the scraps of his life will finally burn themselves out and, one way or another,
it’s coming,
and that will be the end. The house, a squat and secret thing, bitter whitewashed walls and windows looking in on an insane soul, watches him, and he knows the house has been waiting for that end, as well. The white columns round the porch like the confining bars of a cell, or pine-lumber teeth sharpened by so much time and spite, and his end will also be the end of this rotten, cursed place.

Are we ready to die?
he asks the house.
Are we ready to put it all to rest?

Are we ready to dance?

“Okay.
Fuck
this shit,” Theda grumbles, and then her door is open, and she’s climbing out of the car, letting in the clean, spicy smells of the fall night, the fainter, sour undercurrent of disintegration. “You two can sit here all night long for all I care, but I didn’t come all the way from fucking Connecticut to just sit in the goddamn dark and
look
at it.”

“Should I stop her?” Walter asks Archer and reaches for his door handle, but Theda’s already halfway to the porch.

“No. Let her go. It won’t make any difference, and I’m tired of listening to her.”

Walter takes a deep breath and lets it out very slowly, then leans back in his seat and stares at the ceiling of the car.

“It’ll be over before you even know it,” Archer says.

“And you really think this is going to work?”

Archer glances at him, her eyes distant and unreadable, and then she turns back towards the house. “Without the surrogate on this side, the Weaver can’t effect the congruence. She has to stand on both sides of the gate simultaneously, which she can’t do, so she has to have Theda here to act as her contralateral proxy. If Theda dies—”

“—the doors stay shut.”

“Yes,” Archer says and takes out a cigarette, but doesn’t light it. “If Theda dies, the doors stay shut.”

“And if we destroy the house, if we burn it to the ground, it won’t do Spyder any good to find another surrogate. You’re sure of that?”

“This house is the Weaver’s nexus in your world. She can’t create another. She can only reenter from the place she exited.”

“Because this is where her father fucking raped her.”

“Because that’s the way it works. Walter, we’ve been over all this shit more times than I can remember,” Archer says, and she stares at the cigarette a moment and then slips it behind her right ear. “Nothing’s any different tonight than it was four years ago.”

“Except we’re actually
here
. I’d almost rather put a bullet in my head than go back down to that fucking basement.”

“It’ll be over before you even know it,” Archer says again and opens her door. “Now pull yourself together. We don’t know how much time we have. We don’t even know whether or not the Hierophant has the philtre. We may only get one shot at this.”

“I guess we’re lucky no one’s living here,” he says.

“It wouldn’t have made much difference. It wouldn’t have changed what we have to do, or where we have to be to get it done.”

“I’m right behind you,” he says as she slips out of the Chevy and slams the door shut behind her. For a second or two, he’s alone in the car, alone with his ghosts and visions and that house trying to stare him down or inviting him in, and he wonders how it might go if he started the car again and simply drove away. Drove straight to the interstate and kept on driving until he was somewhere so far away that she’d never find him again. There’s nothing here that Archer can’t do on her own. She’s a big girl, after all, a big girl with secrets and powers he’ll never begin to grasp, and he’s nothing but a crazy man with a gun.

Run like I ran the first time,
he thinks, and
Look where that got me.

Just past the row of low, stunted shrubbery dividing the front yard from the street, Archer has stopped and is looking back at the car, looking straight back through the night and the windshield at Walter, her brown eyes poisoned arrows, and he knows his soul is naked to her. All his fears and doubts and second thoughts laid bare for her, as plain to see as the exposed and beating heart of a vivisection.

“I’m coming,” he says, and she glares impatiently back at him with night-bird eyes, cat eyes, eyes much too intent for any human woman’s face.

Walter checks the Beretta one last time, and the butterfly knife tucked into his boot, then takes the keys from the ignition and opens the driver’s-side door. The night washes over him like memories and old blood, cheap white wine and pot smoke, and he would swear the house is laughing now.

“The sooner we get this over with, the better,” Archer says. “There’s no telling what she’s up to in there.”

“Hey,
you’re
the one who said to let her go.”

“That was almost five minutes ago. Stop stalling,” and so he follows her down the narrow, overgrown walkway that leads to the porch, between oleander bushes and honeysuckle vines, and he has to walk fast to keep up with her. He climbs the stairs, and they stand together on the porch, standing inside the maw of the house now, and stare at the open door.

“She’s a precocious cunt, isn’t she,” Walter says, and waves the barrel of his gun at the brass doorknob swathed in spider silk, silk clogging the keyhole, and here he’s been planning to just break out a window.

“She’ll be in the basement by now,” Archer says, and Walter catches the faintest hint of anxiety in her voice, not quite panic, but something that might become panic in just a few more minutes.

“It’s right back here,” he says, stepping quickly past Archer and across the threshold, letting the house close around him before he can change his mind and run all the way back to the Chevy. But nothing happens, no haunted house clichés waiting for him in the tiny foyer, no disembodied, warning voices or wailing phantoms. Just an old house, a house made something monstrous by recollection and dread. It smells musty, shut away, and he wonders how long since anyone’s been inside.

“The electric’s off,” Archer says, repeatedly flipping the switch on the wall at their left, the very same iron switch plate Walter remembers.

“You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?” he asks and laughs, laughing from relief or nerves or both, not caring whether Archer thinks he’s laughing at her or not. He pulls a Maglite from his back pocket and shines it across the dusty floor. Theda’s footprints are easy to see, and the sticky, tangled trail of silk she’s left behind.

“Goddamned stupid bitch,” Archer mutters.

“Let’s just get this shit over with and haul ass out of here,” he says. “We can curse Theda later,” and Archer mumbles something unintelligible and starts chanting again. He leads her from one empty room to the next, living room to dining room to the short hall past the kitchen. All of it repainted, white walls and floral-print wallpaper that can’t be more than a couple of years old, and no hint whatsoever of the cluttered life Spyder Baxter once lived here.

In the hallway, the trapdoor leading to the basement is standing open, and Walter plays the flashlight back and forth across the gaping hole. There are sturdy wooden steps leading down to the earthen cellar beneath the house, and those are new, too, sensible replacements for the treacherous, dry-rot planks that were there ten years before. There are thick strands of spider silk clinging to the trapdoor, and the Maglite catches the glinting, smooth body of a black widow before it scuttles away into a crack.

“It’s just a house,” he says out loud. “Just an ugly, old house.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?” Archer asks and takes the flashlight from him, is already descending the narrow steps before he can reply or try to stop her.

“Theda!” Archer calls out, her voice echoing beneath the floor, directly beneath Walter’s feet. “Where the fuck are you, you little bitch!”

“Just an old house,” he says again, never mind what Archer might think, what Archer might
know,
and he starts down the stairs after her, following the bobbing white beam of the Maglite.

And then there’s a gunshot, the sharp crack of Archer’s .38 Colt, and Walter misses the next step and almost falls the rest of the way to the basement floor, would have fallen if there hadn’t been a thick bundle of wires hanging from the underside of the floorboards, just a few inches above his head. But he comes down wrong on his right ankle, and there’s bright pain and a wet snap like a handful of green branches broken across someone’s knee, and he grits his teeth to keep from screaming. The Beretta slips from his fingers and clatters on the basement stairs.

Another shot from Archer’s revolver, deafening in the close space, and Walter shuts his eyes and tries not to pass out or lose his balance. He can hear her talking somewhere not too far below, but it’s impossible to make out the words through the roar of the Colt still reverberating inside his skull.

“Fuck,”
he moans, and he’s leaning one shoulder against the hard-packed red-dirt wall now, just the wall and his left foot to hold him up, and slowly, he begins to lower himself into a sitting position on one of the steps.

“It’s over,” Archer says, or might have said, her voice muted by the noise in his head and then she turns and shines the flashlight up into his eyes. He squints, trying to find her through the glare.

“That
wasn’t
the plan,” he grunts and sits down; the wood squeaks loudly under him. “You
know
that wasn’t the fucking plan. I fucking
told
you to wait until we were
both
in the fucking basement, and then I’d be the one to do her.
Christ
…”

“Their names mean nothing,” Archer says, and she lowers the Maglite just enough that he can make out the rough outlines of her face, pale skin and those dark and gimlet eyes, the dull gleam off the muzzle of her gun. “Nothing at all. Not if they can’t hear you, or have chosen not to listen. If their prophets are only fools and madmen.”