Angel of Darkness Page 13

  He started north on Elgin Street, in the direction from which he felt it was the strongest. By the time he was a few blocks from the station, nearing Gladstone Avenue, he knew he’d made the right choice. He stopped at the corner, head cocked to listen.

  It was stronger now. He could hear the voices that had been synthesized to sound like instruments. But there was no disguising the pain in them. Agony in each note. It lifted the hairs at the nape of his neck, and he drew the .38 from its shoulder holster, holding it down by his leg as he continued on.

  A block and a half farther north, he knew he was almost upon its source. He thought about the angel—

  (Janet Rowe’s bloated body floating by in the river)—about her turning—

  (her skin bursting open and the cloud of bugs flying out)

  —and he stopped. He looked around. He was getting used to the awful reek in the air, but his eyes were beginning to sting from whatever was in that layer of smog hanging over the city. It seemed to be a little darker now. Night coming? How long had he been here, anyway?

  He checked his watch. It told him it was about a quarter past four. But the second hand wasn’t moving. He held it to his ear. The watch was dead. It could be any time. He listened to the music and wondered if he could go through with it. Facing her again—

  (her skin puddling on the ground where she’d been standing)

  —didn’t seem like the bright idea it had been before he’d gone to sleep. If this place was real, if people could be killed here, their bodies pushed back through whatever membrane separated the worlds from each other . . .

  He could be next.

  Nobody ever said it was going to be easy, he told himself.

  But he hadn’t even left a note. Nobody knew he was here. Ned might guess, but the whole idea of this place actually being real was so far off the wall, he doubted that even Ned—experiencing the flashes as he had—would be able to accept its existence as possible, let alone true.

  Until Jack’s corpse appeared back in the real world, in the same place that correlated to wherever he bought it here. Popping in out of nowhere. With the skin burned away . . .

  Maybe then someone would take it seriously. They sure as hell wouldn’t otherwise—not without some proof that Jack didn’t know how to go about collecting.

  Nobody’d believe?

  Maybe not.

  But they all had to go to sleep sometime. And he knew that Ned at least was going to show up here the next time his head hit the pillow.

  The weight in his right hand helped him decide. He looked down at the .38, then, holding it back down by his leg, muzzle pointed at the buckling asphalt, he trotted quietly across the street. There was a tall brick apartment building there on the corner of Elgin and Waverly. Its windows were all blown out. The side facing Waverly had a hole in it the size of a Volkswagen, bricks and crap lying like rubble around it. The side facing Elgin was a bewildering collage of graffiti. All violent. Threatening. A rat darted out of sight, into the hole, at Jack’s approach. The music was coming from Elgin Court, the little basement-level plaza just north of the building.

  Jack thought of the stores there. Couldn’t be more than four. The ice-cream place. A hairdresser’s. A Mexican restaurant. Shake Records, where Anna bought all her blues and import albums . . .

  He approached the corner slowly, bobbed his head around once, then ducked back, adding up what he’d seen. Dick-all. He repeated the motions with the same results. Rubbing his face with his free hand, he took a deep breath, then stepped around the corner, gun hand pointing straight, left hand grasping his right wrist for support.

  Nothing to see. The glass windows of the stores had all been trashed. There was more graffiti. A litter in front of the record store. Records and CDs pulled out of their packages, cassettes with all the tape pulled from them in long brown streamers. Newspapers and magazines glued together in abstract papiermâché shapes by the weather.

  The music was coming from inside the record store. Someone had pulled the neon S and H from the sign so that it read AKE

  RECORDS.

  Cute.

  Jack moved down the short incline, eschewing the stairs farther along to walk down the slope of dirt and dead grass beside the apartment building. Gun held out. Pointed at the store.

  He had a moment’s confusion as he looked at it. The store seemed twice as big as he remembered it, as though it had swallowed whatever had been next door. Then he remembered Anna telling him that they’d expanded a month or so ago. Twice the room. The place looked so clean and bright, she’d said.

  She should see it now.

  Christ, no. Don’t let her ever see this place like it is. In this world.

  He jumped down from the incline where it ended in a short stone wall. His boots clunked. The music never faltered. Three quick steps and he was at the door, gun moving back and forth, covering all the angles, slowing to a stop and holding as something moved in a nest of garbage.

  The Smith and Wesson Centennial didn’t have the usual safety. It couldn’t be fired unless it was held in the proper grip. You had to squeeze the handle as well as the trigger.

  Jack’s fingers started to squeeze as a head appeared out of the refuse, then they loosened.

  Garbage dropped away from the figure, revealing an old rubbie in shapeless trousers and sport jacket, no shirt. His shoe tops were cut away at the toes to show dirty socks. He had a straw hat on, the brim gone. A bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand, half gone. Primo booze for a bum. His face was a road map of every hole and dive he’d crashed in over the past twenty years. Stringy hair crawled out from under the hat. He was unshaven, the stubble dark against the exaggerated pallor of his skin. Eyes no more than dark hollows.

  Jack kept the muzzle of the .38 pointed at the bum. His gaze darted around the man, looking for the source of the music. He spotted the cassette deck at the same time as the bum reached for it. Jack started to squeeze the handle and trigger again at the movement, but the man was only pushing the stop button.

  The music died in mid-note. The continuous rasp that had rubbed against his spinal column, stroking each nerve into a shriek, was abruptly gone.

  The silence almost hurt.

  “You look a little wound up,” the bum said. He offered up the Jack Daniel’s. “Have yourself a swig, stranger.”

  7

  ANNA MADE HERSELF a promise while she was out shopping: no more lectures, no more unsolicited advice. Support, sure. Beth needed the support. What she didn’t need was a mother hen hovering around her like she was liable to shatter at the slightest jostle. That was not the way to build up somebody’s confidence, though God knew it sometimes seemed that it took only one wrong word to reduce Beth from what she could be, back into what the ugliness of her past had shaped her to be.

  But that wasn’t Beth’s fault.

  She wasn’t a loser.

  Two hours at the Rideau Center, a downtown shopping center that Anna was sure had more shoe stores per square foot than Parliament Hill had MPs, was about all she could take. All she had to show for her effort was a new T-shirt that had been on sale at Fairweather’s. Cathy, on the other hand, was loaded down with a pair of sandals, a blouse, three dresses—one so slinky that Anna still couldn’t believe her friend had bought it— and a jean jacket that had been on sale at the Bay, a department store that was all that remained in the eighties of the Hudson Bay Company, which had been responsible for most of Canada’s first explorations when it was still considered to be the New World.

  “Think about it,” Cathy said as they left the Bay. “We’re the only country founded by a department store. That makes it our duty, as good citizens, to shop till we drop.”

  “Well, I’m ready to drop,” Anna said.

  “Me too. I’m going to go home and just collapse for a few hours. But you can’t fool me. You’re going to go home and probably clean the house, put in a couple of hours on your sculpture, write a book, and do God knows what else—all before dinner.
I don’t know how you do it.”

  Anna grinned. “Clean living, toots.”

  “Are you staying in tonight?”

  “Probably.”

  “Maybe I’ll come by later. I was supposed to go out with Janice, but she’s probably still in bed with her bejeaned dreamboat.”

  “So that’s why you bought the jacket.”

  “Oh, please.”

  They took separate buses. The #1 bus deposited Anna just a block or so from her house. She started off whistling as she walked, then remembered Chad Baker as she looked down Chesley. She got a chill looking at his house and quickly stepped up her pace until she was home. She flung the bag with her day’s one purchase onto the neat stack of Jack’s bedding and called a cheery “Hello” but got no response.

  Beth must have already gone off to work, she thought.

  She started for the kitchen to make some tea, then paused to look back at the front door. It hadn’t been locked. She’d just walked right in. That was odd. Beth never went out without locking up behind her.

  All of a sudden the house had a funny feel about it. Anna’s head filled with a tumbling rush of all the strange things that had happened in the last little while. The horrible discoveries at Chad Baker’s house. Last night’s dreams. Jack acting so funny. Beth getting weirded out this morning.

  She went quickly up the stairs, calling Beth’s name as she went.

  There was no reply.

  Anna shivered as she went into Beth’s room. The bed was unmade, Beth’s nightie thrown on top of the rumpled comforter. That wasn’t like Beth, either. Then Anna spied her housemate’s purse, sitting on the chair by the window. The room took on a sudden closeness, and she found it hard to breathe. She went over to the chair and picked up the purse. Rifling through it, she found Beth’s keys, and her wallet with all its ID.

  Something was very wrong.

  It took Anna ten minutes to go through the house from top to bottom, but there was no sign of Beth. No sign of a struggle. Nothing. She looked behind the stack of stereo and appliance boxes in the basement, in back of the furnace, under the beds, in every closet. Still nothing. It was as though Beth simply had walked out in whatever she was wearing, leaving her purse behind, her bed unmade, the door unlocked.

  That was not Beth.

  She called Mexicali Rosa’s, but Beth wasn’t there, either.

  You’re making too much of this, she told herself, but by now she had the heebie-jeebies so bad that she was expecting the worst.

  She called Jack, at home and at his answering service, then at home again. No answer. The answering service hadn’t heard from him all day. Periodically, as the afternoon dragged on, she tried Jack’s number. Mexicali’s again.

  Nothing.

  She sat in the living room, in the easy chair by the window, and stared out at the street.

  You’re just letting yourself get spooked, she thought, berating herself. You’re making a fool of yourself. What could happen in the middle of the day?

  But she thought of Chad Baker. Everybody had liked him. She’d gotten an odd, weird feeling from him, but she had just put that down to his wanting to get something going with her. Everybody thought he was just a normal guy Except all the time he was completely wacked out.

  Last night’s dream.

  Jack acting so odd.

  Beth going so strange this morning when they were talking about the dreams. She could almost hear Beth now, the wanting in her voice.

  I was the one in control there. I felt like nobody could hurt me— nobody could even touch me.

  Oh, Beth. You’re scaring the shit out of me.

  She tried Jack’s number again. Mexicali’s—Beth was late for work by now. Finally she dragged out a phone book and tried to get Ned Meehan at the police station. Gone home. She pulled out her personal phone directory, looked up his number, and dialed it.

  She heard it ring at the other end. And ring.

  Please be home, Ned.

  The phone continued to ring.

  8

  JACK SHOOK HIS head at the bottle of whiskey that the bum was offering to him. Mind games, he thought. The place was spitting up mind games just to mess up his head.

  Was the bum real? Was he another dreamer, crossed over from the world where Ottawa was still a thriving metropolis, the nation’s capital, not this dead place? Or was he some part of the angel, lying there in the trash, playing her music? The gun never wavered in his hand, muzzle sighted on the bum.

  “Who are you?” Jack asked.

  “Nobody special. Just another dead guy looking to get by.”

  He took a swig from the Jack Daniel’s, set the bottle by his knee where it wouldn’t tip, and brought out the makings for a cigarette.

  “Name’s Buddy Dempsey—least it was,” he added as he shook dry tobacco out of a pouch into the crease of the cigarette paper. He rolled the smoke one-handedly and stuck it in the corner of his mouth, patting his pockets for a light. “You’re new here, I guess. Got a match?”

  Jack shook his head slowly. He wasn’t sure he was ready for this conversation.

  Buddy Dempsey.

  Just another dead guy looking to get by. . . .

  “Are you saying you’re dead?” he asked.

  “I like to think of it as an alternative life-style.” Dempsey pawed around in the trash as he spoke and came up with a Bic lighter. He lit his cigarette, blowing out a wreath of gray-blue smoke. “Good booze and a smoke,” he said. “What the hell else do you need?”

  “There’s this woman,” Jack began.

  Dempsey shook his head. “Too late for women now, pal. I’m too old and too dead—haw haw.”

  Jack lowered the .38 finally, holding it down by the side of his leg instead of holstering it. “Look,” he said. “I need to know—”

  “You’ll find two kinds of people here,” Dempsey interrupted. “Those that’re dreaming and those that’re dead. Me, well, I fell asleep in an alley back of here one night last winter. When I woke up, everybody was gone and the city looked pretty much like it does right now.”

  “There’s no one else around?” Jack asked. He felt like he was in the middle of one of those European films that Anna liked to go see—the kind where nothing seemed to happen and nothing seemed to make any sense.

  “Don’t really know how it works,” Dempsey said. “I see people from time to time—most of them are dreaming, you know? You see them walking down the middle of the street, all fucked up ‘cause there’s nothing around, and then bang!” He snapped his fingers. “They just disappear. Those’re the ones that are dreaming. The dead ones . . . they’re only here for a while and then they go on.”

  “Go on where?”

  “Damned if I know, and I’m not about to follow them to find out. Old Buddy Dempsey, he likes things just fine the way they are. Don’t need to eat. Got my booze, got my smokes. Get to walk around in stores and places I couldn’t get in the front door of when I was alive. So I like it just fine.”

  “What do you mean, ‘they go on’?”

  Dempsey touched his chest. “You get a feeling in here—a kind of pulling that makes you want to get up and go. And they all do just that. Me, I just kind of deaden it with the booze. Gets so I hardly ever feel it anymore.”

  “That music you were playing . . . ?”

  “That helps too.” Dempsey popped the cassette out of the machine and read the label. “This here’s an old Willie Nelson— back when he was still an outlaw kind of a guy.”

  He tossed the tape over. Jack caught it with his left hand and looked down. “This is what you were just listening to?” he asked. The label was one of the old red CBS ones. The Red-Haired Stranger, by Willie Nelson.

  “Where the hell are you from that they haven’t got Willie Nelson?” Dempsey wanted to know.

  Jack shook his head. “What I heard . . .”

  Was different music.

  Put together in Chad Baker’s studio.

  Voices instead of instruments.<
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  Pain in every note.

  The graffiti-smeared walls of the record store wavered.

  Flicker.

  And Jack was in the dead plains. The music burned through him, so loud that it made his eyes tear.

  Flicker.

  The store was back and the old bum was looking at him strangely. Jack ran a hand across his face. He could still hear an echo of the music, like an afterimage of light when a room’s plunged into sudden darkness. Dempsey took a quick pull from his bottle.

  “That’s how they go,” he said. “Just like that. Eyes get all glassy and they do a slow fade until you can see right through them.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jack asked.

  “The way the dead ones go. There’s like a crackle in the air—a kind of humming—and then they just sort of start to fade away. Not like the dreamers. They just disappear. The dead ones take longer. First they get kind of hazy to look at—just like you were—and then they fade away.”

  “There’s this empty plain—” Jack began, but Dempsey shook a hand back and forth.

  “Don’t tell me nothing about it—I don’t want to know.”

  Jack wasn’t prepared to let it go. “What is this place?” he demanded.

  Dempsey didn’t answer. He seemed to be listening. And then Jack could hear it too.

  There was a buzz in the air—had been for a while, he realized. It had just taken him some time to pick up on it. He glanced around the store but couldn’t pinpoint its source. He could hear the music again—just a faint breath of sound under the buzzing. He remembered—

  (movement in Janet Rowe’s eye sockets)

  —the last time he’d—

  (her upper torso splitting open with a sound like tearing cloth)

  —dreamed himself into—

  (the stream of insects flying out to cloud the air)

  —this place.

  He looked at the bum, the .38 lifting in his hand. But he didn’t fire. There was just a corpse lying there in the trash now, maggots crawling under the skin. Sightless eyes stared at him. A slash of mouth appeared to be grinning. The bottle of Jack Daniel’s had fallen to one side, amber liquid pouring out. A cigarette still smoldered between the corpse’s fingers.