“Sully’s a drunk,” I tell her.
“You said he was a priest.”
“Ex-priest, as in no more.”
“He knew what they were, straightaway.”
“He said he knew what they were. There’s a big difference. I could make up as good a story. I mean, really. Angels?”
“Come on,” she says, those big eyes of hers just drawing me in.
I’m going to tell her no?
I have to tell you the truth here. What I said before was only partly true. We are only friends, but I’ve always had a thing for her. Who wouldn’t? She’s smart and pretty and she’s got a heart as big as the sky is wide. When she turned me down, back when we first met, I took it at face value and settled for being pals. Funny thing is, I like having her for a friend. I never had a woman for a friend before and it’s an experience I’d recommend. For one thing, I come away from our conversations with things to think about, and let me tell you, that doesn’t happen around the guys I know. Before I knew Christina, I never gave a whole lot of thought to what we’ve been doing to the world, what we do to each other. I minded my own business and asked others to do the same. But how hard is it to clean up after yourself or to look out for someone worse off than you are?
So being friends is good, and I don’t want to lose that. But if she wants to take it to another level, I’m not going to complain.
See, anyone I’m going to be serious with in the romance department, we’ve also got to be friends. I don’t want to end up like my parents who could barely tolerate each other. I want it to mean something, us being together. I want us to look forward to being together, instead of thinking up excuses as to why I’ve got to get out of the apartment, just to get some breathing space. That was always the old man’s line. He couldn’t breathe around Ma and us kids.
So would I go chasing down the monsters’ victim for Christina, given that I don’t believe either he or the uglies exist? Hell, I’d go look up Lucifer, slap him silly and damn the consequences, if that’d make her happy. Which is how we end up wandering the streets long past midnight, and where I blow it because I can’t keep my mind—my intent, as Sully put it—on this victim. When I’m not thinking about Christina, I’m thinking about these monsters, how good the costumes were in the pictures, the time that had to have gone into making them, the way they set up the shots, and the next damn thing you know, we’ve got them chasing us down Williamson to the waterfront and all my doubts go out the window. Because whatever these freaks are, they’re not make-believe.
“They must’ve felt us thinking so hard about their victim,” Christina says when we duck into an alleyway that’ll take us in behind the Harbor Ritz.
“I was thinking about them,” I tell her.
She gives me a look, half angry, half scared.
“Jesus, Sammy. You brought them right to us. You weren’t supposed to be thinking about them.”
So she’s not all that happy with me, with good reason, and I hate the way it feels, but right now we’ve got more serious concerns on our mind. Like staying alive.
That’s when we try hiding out behind the Dumpster and you know how well that turns out.
Okay, I think. I’ve made a mess of things so far, but I can still make good. For Christina, anyway.
I stand up and pull her to her feet. The freaks are closing in on us, but there’s still room for what I’ve got in mind. I tell Christina to make a run for it, I’ll be right behind her, but I can see it in her eyes, she’s not buying it. She knows I plan to do the hero thing and from the way she squares her shoulders, it’s plain she’s going to stick with me. I appreciate the gesture, but what’s the point of both of us dying if the uglies might be satisfied with only one?
“Just go,” I tell her.
We have to breathe through our mouths, the reek’s so bad, a combination of the Dumpster and the monster boys coming for us.
Christina shakes her head. “Sing,” she says.
I look at her like she’s gone insane. The freaks have got us boxed in now, a semicircle of greasy long faces, eyes glittering with this weird inner glow. The smell of them is almost overpowering. It’s too late for either of us to make a break. Too late for anything.
“Sing?” I say.
She nods. “Maybe we can get them going.”
I try to keep myself between her and the freaks. I can see the pleasure grow in them as they savor the moment. I remember the last couple of photos on that damn roll of film I was stupid enough to pick up and get developed. They’re going to have some fun with us tonight.
“You’re not making sense,” I tell her.
“It’s like your friend the priest said.”
Ex-priest, I think. And he’s not my friend. He’s just some old drunk who could have done a better job of convincing me these monsters are real.
“He said a lot of stuff …” I start to say, but Christina’s not listening.
She starts in with the drawn-out refrain from “Gloria.” Her singing voice is high and sweet and it breaks my heart that these freaks are going to silence it forever. But something strange happens with the monsters. They cock their heads and listen. Oh great, I think. Good choice. A hymn to their old boss. That’ll win them over. But they start to sing along with her, first one, the others falling in with harmonies, and the sound is unbelievable. It’s like sunrise, a cathedral sound filled with light and mystery and the great swelling feeling you get in your chest when something’s just too beautiful for words.
Then I realize what Christina meant. Sully’s wingless angels. Get them singing, he told me, and they’ll get all maudlin and homesick. And maybe too distracted to pull us to pieces.
Christina falls silent, her own pretty singing shamed before these celestial voices. Damned if tears don’t come to my eyes as their voices wash over us, echoing and bouncing throughout the alley until it sounds like a choir of thousands. I know we should be trying to slip away, but it’s just too mesmerizing. Christina’s crying beside me. Hell, even the uglies have tears streaming down their cheeks.
I don’t know how long we stand there listening, but finally I stir. I take Christina’s hand and lead her past the freaks with their honey gold voices, my heartbeat drumming wildly as we approach, then pass in between two of them. But they keep right on singing, faces lifted to the sky, tears flowing, and we just head off down the alley, walk around to the front of the hotel and walk inside. We get a hard stare from the concierge, and I can’t blame him. I know how bad we look, Christina in that dress, both of us disheveled and shaky like a pair of junkies. But I give him as hard a stare back that tells him in no uncertain terms that I’ll bust him in the head if he even thinks of kicking us out. He gets real busy with some papers behind his counter.
“Don’t take it out on him,” Christina said. “What happened to us wasn’t his fault.”
I realize she’s right. Maybe he’s an officious little prick, maybe he’s just doing his job. But I can’t take it out on him, my feeling so helpless before the fallen angels.
“Can you still hear them?” Christina asks.
I nod. It’s all I can hear, though Christina and I seem to be alone in that. The concierge, the bellhops, the desk clerk, a couple sitting together surrounded by a small tide pool of luggage, none of them give any indication that they can hear that unheavenly chorus. My ears are ringing, like we just got back from a loud concert.
“Look,” Christina says.
It’s the guy from the pictures, coming in through the front door into the lobby, big as life and still alive. Of course he’s not due to die for another five days, if the date stamps on the photos are to be believed. Christina gets up to meet him, tugging down the hem of her dress.
“Excuse me, sir,” she says.
He gives Christina a once-over that makes me really understand—emotionally, as well as intellectually—how she feels when my gaze gets locked on her cleavage.
I stand up as well, feel like hitting the guy, but Christin
a plays mind reader again. She puts out a hand to stop me from walking past her.
“What can I do for you?” the man asks, implying there’s a great deal and all of it would be pleasurable. What, does he think she’s a hooker and I’m her pimp? It’s that damn dress.
Christina cuts right to the chase.
“Have you had any dealings with strange beings?” she asks.
It’s amazing to see the man’s facade collapse, a balloon losing all its air, macho man goes flaccid.
“Are they here?” he asks. Scared now, libido forgotten. “I know we had a deal, but I just need a little more time. Do you know how hard it is to find a teenage virgin in this city?”
Christina’s revulsion is plain. I don’t even want to know what he needs the virgin for.
“You better start running,” I tell him.
It’s funny. He doesn’t question us or anything—what we know, how we know it—just bolts back out the door he came in. Christina and I collapse back on our couch and let the soft cushions envelop us.
Christina leans her head against my shoulder. “What happens now?”
“You want to go out there and chance running into them again?”
She shakes her head.
“Me neither.”
I dig a charge card out of my pocket. It belongs to one of the lawyers I work for, couple of grand limit. It’s for expenses and normally I wouldn’t touch it.
“I’ll get us a couple of rooms,” I say.
Christina catches my arm as I start to get up.
“One room,” she says.
Of course, later I start in to wondering what happens when the monsters think of us again and that involves another visit to Father Sully. This time I bring Christina with me. She’s wearing a nice flower print cotton dress, another thrift shop find, but this time it’s a winner. We find Sully drinking out of a paper bag in Fitzhenry Park, doing a really lousy job of hiding what he’s got in the bag. I ask him what we can do to keep the monsters from coming after us again.
“Live a good life,” he tells us. “Be good people. Keep hateful thoughts out of your heart and mind. The angels will be too busy tempting sinners and following up on old bargains to even think about you again.”
That’ll be easy for Christina, I think, but where does it leave me? I’m not the gentlest guy in the world, though lord knows I’ve been trying. I figure with my luck, I’ll have the uglies on my tail within a couple of weeks, though they’ll have to wait in line behind the repo man since I just got my car out of hock again.
I feel Christina’s fingers twine with mine and turn to look at her.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she says.
I never could put anything past her.
“I’ll be here to keep you honest,” she tells me.
Sully gives a big amen to that and I nod in agreement. Looks like I’ve got my own debt to his wingless angels. I just hope they don’t try to collect because I don’t have what could even remotely be called a decent singing voice.
The Words That Remain
“Not yet,” she said. Her voice was measured and calm, calmer than she’d ever thought she’d feel when this time arrived. “Give me a little longer. Just long enough to know who I am.”
But Death had not come to bargain that night and took her away.
“This place is haunted, you know,” the night clerk told him.
Christy stifled a sigh. Normally he was ready to hear anybody’s story, especially on this sort of subject, but he was on a book tour for his latest collection, and after today’s long round of interviews, signings, drop-in visits to bookstores and the like, all he wanted was some time to himself. A chance to put away the public face. To no longer worry if he’d inadvertently picked his nose and someone had seen and made note. (“While the author’s premises are intriguing, his personal habits could certainly stand some improvement.”) He needed to get back to his room and call home, to let Saskia’s voice remind him of the real life he led the other fifty or so weeks of the year when he wasn’t out promoting himself.
But he felt he owed it to Alan, not to mention his own career, to do what he could to promote his books. Ever since the surprising success Alan’s East Side Press had had with Katharine Mully, particularly her posthumous collection Touch and Go, the media had taken a serious interest in what Alan liked to call their contemporary myth books, said interest translating into better coverage, more reviews, and increasingly lucrative deals for paperback editions and other subsidiary rights. Alan considered Christy’s and Mully’s books to perfectly complement each other, rounding out his catalogue, the urban myths and folktales Christy collected telling the “real story” behind the contemporary fairy tales Mully had so effectively brought to life in her fiction.
He approached the various readings and signings with a genuine fondness for the readers who came to the events with their own stories and enthusiasms, and he made the rounds with as much good grace as he could muster toward those media types who sometimes seemed to be less interested in the actual work than they were in filling a few column inches of type, or minutes of airtime. Still, at the end of a long day, it was wearying and hard to maintain the public persona—not so much different from his own, simply more outgoing. Right now he seriously needed some downtime.
But, “Haunted?” he said.
She nodded. “Like in your books. There’s a ghost in the hotel.”
Christy could believe it. There’d been a mix-up with his reservations so that when he’d arrived from the airport to drop off his bags, he’d been shunted to this other, smaller hotel down the street. Truth was, he liked it better. It was an older building, its gilded decor no longer the height of fashion, furnishings worn and decidedly frayed in places, but no less charming for that. If there weren’t ghosts in a place like this, then they’d certainly drop by for a visit. It was the kind of hotel where bohemians and punks and open-minded businessmen on a budget could all rub shoulders in the lobby. The staff ran the gamut from the elderly man in a burgundy smoking jacket who’d checked him in this morning to the young woman standing on the other side of the counter at the moment. Earlier he’d heard the big band music of Tommy Dorsey drifting from the small office behind the check-in desk; tonight it was the more contemporary sound of Catatonia.
Leaning against the counter, Christy made note of the woman’s nametag. Mary, it read.
At first he thought the name didn’t really suit her. Mary struck him as a calm name, a little on the conservative side, and the night clerk was anything but, though he had to give her points for trying. She could have been anywhere from nineteen to twenty-nine, her frame more wiry than skinny, her chopped blonde spikes twisted and poking up at random from her brown roots through an odd collection of clips, bobby pins and elastics. Her fashion sense was riot grrl attempting business chic; he could tell she was about as comfortable in the sleek black skirt, white blouse and heels as he was in a tie and jacket—it didn’t feel like your own skin so much as some stranger’s. Her multiple earrings and the tattoo peeking out from below the sleeve of her blouse, not to mention that mad hair, told another story from the one her clothing offered, revealing part of the subtext of who she really was.
“What sort of ghost, Mary?” he asked.
There was an old smell in this hotel, but he didn’t mind. It reminded him of favorite haunts like used book stores and libraries, with an undercurrent that combined rose hip tea, incense, and late night jazz club smoke.
“A sad one,” she said.
“Aren’t they all?”
She gave him a surprised look.
“Think about it,” he said. “What else can they be but unhappy? If they weren’t unhappy, they wouldn’t still be hanging around, would they? They’d continue on.”
“Where to?”
“That’s the big question.”
“I suppose.”
She fiddled with something on the desk below the counter, out of Christy’s sight. Paper rustled. The
monitor of the computer screen added a bluish cast to her features and hair.
“But what about vengeful ghosts?” she asked, gaze remaining on the paperwork.
Christy shrugged. “Vengeful, angry, filled with the need to terrorize others. They’re all signs of unhappiness. Of discontent with one’s lot in life, or should we say afterlife? Though really, it’s the baggage they carry with them that keeps them haunting us.”
“Baggage?”
“Emotional baggage. The kind we all have to deal with. Some of us are better at it than others. You’ve seen them, sprinting through life with nothing more than a carry-on. But then there are the rest of us, dragging around everything from fat suitcases to great big steamer trunks, loaded down with all the debris of our discontent. Those ones with the trunks, they’re the ones who usually stick around when the curtain comes down, certain that if they can just have a little longer, they can straighten up all their affairs.” He smiled. “Doesn’t work that way, of course. Alive or dead, there’s never enough time to get it all done.”
She lifted her gaze. “You even talk like a writer.”
“I’m just in that mode,” Christy told her. “Too many days talking about myself, going on endlessly about how and why I write what I do, where I find the stories I collect, why they’re relevant beyond their simple entertainment value. It gets so that even ordinary conversation comes out in sound bites. I’ve been at it so much today my brain hasn’t shifted back to normal yet.”
“I guess you can’t wait to get home.”
Christy nodded. “But I like meeting people. It’s just hard with so many at once. You can’t connect properly, especially not with those who’re expecting some inflated image that they’ve pulled out of my books and all they get is me. And it gets pretty tiring.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m keeping you up, aren’t I?”
Christy had long ago realized that, in one way, ghosts and the living were much the same: most of them only needed to have their story be heard to ease their discontent. It didn’t necessarily heal them, but it was certainly a part of the healing process.