“So how do I stop this from happening again?” Staley asks.
“Figure out what your music’s all about,” Robert tells her. “And take responsibility for it. Dig deep and find what’s hiding behind the trees—you know, in the shadows where you can’t exactly see things, you can only sense them—and always pay attention. It’s up to you what you let out into the light.”
“Is that what you do?”
Robert nodded. “ ‘Course it’s different for me, because we’re different people. My music’s about enduring. Perseverance. That’s all the blues is ever about.”
“What about hope?”
Robert smiled. “What do you think keeps perseverance alive?”
“Amen,” I say.
After a moment, Staley smiles. We all clink our porcelain mugs together and drink a toast to that.
Wingless Angels
Christina’s not particularly happy and I don’t blame her. If it wasn’t for me, we wouldn’t be hiding behind this Dumpster in back of the Harbor Ritz, trying not to breathe while these freaks keep getting closer and closer to where we’re pressed up against the wall, pressed up so tight the bricks are leaving imprints on our skin. The sound of approaching footsteps is faint but distinct, hard leather brushing the concrete. I thought everybody did rubber-soled shoes these days, but what do I know?
Of course Christina’s got to take some of the heat for this—if it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t have been out on the streets tonight, sticking our noses in where they don’t belong. But I’m the one who didn’t take any of this seriously. Turns out my idea of how the world works is so off-base I’ve put a serious crimp into the question of our continued well-being. But, really. Life’s complicated enough without adding monsters to the equation. Or whatever these things are.
One thing I know, they’re ugly as sin. I pulled a couple of stretches in county, back in my impressionable youth, and, trust me, I know ugly, but correctional services never locked up anything like this. They smell like a sewer, great hulking creatures that remind me of neither rodents nor reptiles so much as something in between. Greasy-haired, with long narrow faces. Eyes like slits, lit by some inner hunger. Muscles corded and bulging under the thin fabric of their cheap suits, yet they move as delicately as ballerinas, a murderous bourrée in perfect demi-pointe.
There’s five or six of them—I never stopped to take an exact head count—and they’re strong. Scary strong. Earlier tonight, I saw one of them pull apart the iron railings of a fence the way you or I might tear cardboard, and I swear, from the way those long noses of theirs keep twitching, they’re tracking us by smell.
“Oh, man,” Christina breathes in my ear. “If they—”
I put a finger across her lips, but it’s too late. The footsteps stop.
It starts with a roll of undeveloped film, nothing special, Kodak 100, black and orange metal canister with plastic at either end, we’ve all seen them a hundred times before. Baxter and I are leaving a Williamson Street diner when I spy it in the gutter, peeking out from behind a fast food wrapper, like it’s shy, or embarrassed to be seen in such company. Trash offends me, and since there’s a waste container provided by the city conveniently close at hand, I pick them both up. The wrapper goes directly into the trash can, but I hesitate with the film canister.
“Whatcha got there?” Baxter asks.
I hold it up between my forefinger and thumb to show him. “Nothing. Some garbage.”
“You should get it developed.”
I shrug. “What for?”
But I stick it in my pocket all the same and then promptly forget about it until a week or so later when I’m looking for a phone number I jotted down on the back of somebody’s old business card. Organization isn’t one of my strong points. I have an electronic organizer which’d be really useful if I could ever get it together to actually input some information. As it is, it only serves as a glorified calculator, though I did manage to set the time and date when I bought it.
Anyway, I’m looking for this number, trying to remember what I was wearing that day and going through the pockets of pretty much anything I’ve had on over the past couple of weeks, when I come across the film canister. I put it aside while I continue my search, finally tracking the card down in the jumble on my dresser top where I dump the detritus that hangs out with the lint in my pockets. I make the call, then have another look at the film canister. What the hell. I run it by Kiko’s Kwick Print where my friend Christina works.
Last week, she was a blonde. Today she’s got a kind of raggedy pageboy, black and shiny as a crow’s feather. It suits her better than the long blonde hair did. Brings out the character in her eyes, big and warm as a summer’s day, an appealing mix of blues and greens and hazel browns. But she’s wearing the frumpiest dress, one of those old-fashioned belted affairs that looks more like a housecoat, white with faded yellow polka dots and it’s not closing properly in the front, showing way too much cleavage. Christina does all her shopping in the thrift stores, but the day she bought this dress she wasn’t rolling sevens. ‘Course I don’t tell her that.
“I didn’t even know you had a camera,” she says as she writes out my order.
“I don’t.”
I’m finding the dress distracting.
“My face is up here,” she says.
“Sorry. It’s just…”
“Are you coming on to me?”
She’s teasing, but I catch something unfamiliar in her manner, like she wouldn’t mind if I was. We’ve been friends a long time, but not like that. I hit on her when we first met, but she was going with some guy and it’s not something I ever really think about anymore. Whenever one of us doesn’t have a commitment, the other one does. You know the scene.
“Depends,” I tell her. “Are you seeing anyone?”
I’m trying to remember her last boyfriend. Dan? Don?
“Depends,” she gives me right back. “Do you want me to be?”
There’s a long heartbeat of silence that swells there in between us, a moment that could go either way. In the end, we put it on hold, something to consider. Christina smiles.
“So where’d you get the film?” she asks.
“I found it on the street and I guess curiosity just got the better of me today.”
Her smile gets a little wider, more knowing.
“Yeah,” she says. “Like that’s never happened before.”
I can’t help it. I’m like the cat that’s just got to know everything.
She hands me my claim ticket.
“Maybe I’ll call you sometime,” I say. “We could go for dinner, take in a show or something.”
“Maybe I’ll call you.”
And she does, a few hours later, but she hasn’t got cozying up on her mind.
“Sammy,” she says. There’s an odd quality to her voice. It takes me a few moments to realize it’s anxiety. “These pictures …”
“What about them?”
“They—I can’t explain over the phone. You have to see them.”
I understand what she means when I swing by Kiko’s a little later. It’s the date stamps on the photos. They start off normal enough, last month, last week, but then they head off into the future, the red numbers marking off days and times that haven’t happened yet.
“Must’ve been a defective camera,” I say.
I never have understood the need some people have to document the exact moment they took each shot.
Christina shakes her head. “Look at the pictures.”
I’d been flipping through them, a catalogue of some boring tourist’s mementos of their trip to the big city, but stopped looking at the actual images when I twigged to the screw-up with the date stamps. Now I return my attention to the pictures.
It takes me a moment to see what she means because you don’t spot them at first. They aren’t pretty when you do. Ugly monster-men, slinking around in the shadows. Kind of an X-Files take on finding Waldo. Like the shot of St. Paul’
s, long view including the rose window and bell tower. Pay attention and you see the freak standing back there where darkness pools in the cathedral’s arches. Once you twig to their presence in one, you can pick them out in each of the others, doing their creepy thing. I wonder who’s filming a bad B-movie in town this week when I get to the last couple of shots on the roll.
This is sick stuff. There’s a group of the freaks in these, a couple holding down some guy while the others do things to him I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies, and some of them seriously deserve it. Like the guy who keeps repoing my car.
“We have to do something,” Christina says. “Report them to the police.”
I shake my head. “And say what? We’re talking big time con job here. I mean, check them out. These guys don’t even look human.”
“I think that’s supposed to be the point.”
“What? That there are monsters hiding among us?”
I do a Vincent Price impression, stentorian tone and all, but Christina ignores it.
“I don’t know about monsters,” she says. “But guys running around in costumes killing people is serious business.” She hesitates a beat, then adds, “They are costumes, right?”
“Well, I’ll tell you this. They’re not real boogie men.”
The pictures put a lie to that, but we both know what they can do with special effects in the movies these days.
“Except,” I add, reluctantly, “who takes pictures of a murder and then leaves the undeveloped film around for anyone to find? And if someone was taken apart the way they did that guy, it’d be in all the papers.”
“What if it hasn’t happened yet?” she says.
She puts her finger on the date stamp of the last one. It’s a week away. Okay, six days, if you want to get anal about it.
I shake my head. “Come on.”
“But what if?” she says. “You hear about weird stuff like this all the time.”
“Only in the tabloids and on TV,” I say. “Real life’s got a whole other take on something like this.”
“But—”
“We don’t even know who these people are supposed to be.”
“We should try to find out. If it can save somebody’s life …”
I want to repeat, nobody’s in danger, this whole thing is a bad joke, but she looks so upset and serious I figure the least I can do is go through the motions and check it out. Give her a little peace of mind.
“I know some people who claim to have the inside track on this sort of thing,” I tell her. “You know, the weird and the wooly. I’ll see what they can tell me.”
“You think I’m nuts.”
I smile. “But not dangerously so.”
I bundle up the photos and negatives and stick them back into their envelope.
“How much do I owe you?” I ask.
“It’s on the house.”
“Thanks.”
She’s still looking upset. She also needs another button at the top of that dress.
“You know,” I tell her, lifting my gaze to those eyes of hers. “When I first heard your voice, I thought you were calling to ask me out.”
I can tell that helps ease the bad way she’s feeling.
“I guess this must be my lucky dress,” she says.
“So you busy tonight?”
She nods. “But I’m free tomorrow. Anything in particular you’d like me to wear?”
Point for her.
“Surprise me,” I tell her.
And she does.
When I come by to pick her up the next night, she meets me at her door in this slinky black vinyl affair that’s clinging to everything that it’s not pushing into a more interesting shape.
“You like?” she asks.
I’m not going to tell her I feel we should be going to some seriously hip club where they probably wouldn’t even let us in instead of this little Italian restaurant over in Crowsea where I’ve made reservations. I’d prefer her in jeans and a blouse, but I have to admit there’s something fascinating about what she’s wearing. How often do you actually see anyone poured into a dress like this outside of a fashion spread?
“I picked it up as a joke,” she says. “I just wanted to see that look on your face, but now I feel like an idiot.”
“I like,” I assure her.
She puts on a jacket over the shiny vinyl and we head off for the restaurant in her car. I hoofed it to her apartment since my own wheels got repoed again this afternoon. Story of my life. I don’t mean to fall behind on my payments, but that’s the downside of walking the straight and narrow. These days I do legwork for a couple of lawyers, take on a few odd jobs on the side, all legit. It leaves me scrambling some weeks, but it sure beats doing time. Hell, pretty much anything beats doing time.
“Did you have any luck with your friends?” Christina asks after the waitress has brought us our drinks.
“Yes and no,” I say, and then I tell her about my day.
Newford’s got more than its fair shake of the gullible, not to mention the usual cadre of psychics and charlatans waiting on the sidelines to relieve them of their hard-earned cash. Sometimes it seems that no matter where you turn you’re hearing about seances and oracular readings, spiritual this and mystical that, not to mention whole shelves devoted to books and magazines on the same topics in the local B & N, revealing mysteries, explaining the unknown, half of them laying it all out so you can do it yourself, in the privacy of your own home, a little quality time spent with the ghosts and the goddesses. There must be something in the water here because sometimes it seems that people in this city will believe any damn thing.
But at least most of the ones I know who’re into the weird and the wacky also know when to leave the hoodoo at home. In other words, they can make like normal people when need be. It’s only when they’re open for business that they put on the spooky voices and do their mystical thing.
But today when I set out looking for the usual suspects with their business in mind, I keep coming up with a losing hand. Bones, Christy, the Prof, nobody’s in their usual haunts until I finally track down Father Sully in Jimmy’s Billiards, corner of Vine and Palm. He’s not my first choice, an alcoholic ex-priest I only know by reputation, but I’m running out of options.
Sully’s got something of the insect about him, he’s all arms and legs with big, buggy eyes and hair that stands up like so many antennae or centipede’s legs. He’s already half-cut and it’s barely mid-afternoon. But I want to do good for Christina, play it straight and give this deal a fair shot, so I sit down on the bench beside him, buy him another shot of whiskey with a beer chaser, tell him about my problem to the accompaniment of the click and clatter of billiard balls making their way around the tables and into the pockets. It doesn’t take much to get him going. It never does with these guys.
“They’re angels,” he says when I show him the pictures.
Maybe I should have held out for one of the others. Christy’s friend the Prof, maybe. When I called, his housekeeper was expecting him back any time.
“Angels,” I repeat.
He nods. “Good shot,” he tells a player at the table near us when he sinks a tough shot. “Wingless angels,” he adds, turning back to me. “And don’t ask them to sing—it’ll just break their hearts. It’s very distressing, as I’m sure you can imagine. They get all maudlin and homesick, which isn’t a pretty sight. Mind you, they’re never a pretty sight, are they?”
“Can you tell me something that actually makes sense?” I ask.
“They sing like angels, but they can’t fly,” he tells me. “Chose the wrong side when the war raged in heaven and now they’re living down below with the rest of the sinners. Lucifer’s boys.”
I really should’ve held out for one of the others.
“See,” he goes on, alcohol heavy on his breath as he leans closer to me, “sometimes they walk among us, but they can’t ever have what we have.”
“Which is?”
“A
shot at getting back upstairs.”
“So what’re they doing here?” I have to ask.
He shrugs. “You know, the usual thing. Taking in the sights, a little R &R, leading us into temptation.”
“And the guy they’re killing?” I say, pointing to the last couple of pictures.
“Hasn’t happened yet—at least not according to these dates. Why do people date stamp their photographs anyway? Can’t they remember when they took them?”
So we have something in common. Why isn’t that a comfort?
“Beats me,” I tell him.
He nods, returns his attention to the game at the table.
“So what should I do?” I ask, not expecting any more sensible an answer to this than I’ve gotten so far. He doesn’t disappoint me.
“You mean to stop them from killing the man?”
I nod.
Sully gives me a drunkard’s grin. “Ask him what he did to tick them off.”
“And I would find him how?”
“Use your intuition.” He taps his temple with a forefinger. “Go out walking with the intent of finding him and you will. If you concentrate on what you’re looking for, fill your head with it, nine out of ten times, whatever you’re looking for will come to you. That’s what Jesus would do.”
“I don’t remember anything like that in the Bible.”
Maybe that surprises you, that I’ve read the Big Book, but when you’re doing time and other material is scarce, it turns out to be a pretty good read. These days I do a lot of reading—it keeps me out of trouble.
“That’s one of the things that didn’t make it into the texts,” Sully says. “But everybody knows it.”
Right. Like everybody knows about these wingless angels, I suppose. But I can’t be too hard on the old guy. I mean, I’m the one who came asking.
“Thanks, Sully,” I tell him. “You want another drink?”
“I believe that would be in order. Long conversations make for dry throats.”
I leave him with his drinks, absorbed in the game once more.
“Let’s try it,” Christina says when I finish my story.
All I can do is look at her across the table, and I’ll admit that’s not hard on the eyes, even with the vinyl dress, but I can’t believe she’s taking any of this seriously.