The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons (Mammoth Books) Page 4

  Rose’s comments were always solicited, whether she was visible or not. And she always had a sip of blood at bedtime.

  Of course this couldn’t go on forever, Rose understood that. For one thing, at the outer edges of Stephanie’s aura of thoughts and dreams she could see images of a different life, somewhere cool and foggy and hemmed in with dark trees, or city streets with a vaguely foreign look to them. She became aware that these outer images were of likely futures that Stephanie’s life was moving toward. They didn’t seem to involve staying at Rose’s.

  She knew she should be going out to cultivate alternative sources for the future – vampires could “live” forever, couldn’t they – but she didn’t like to leave in case she couldn’t get back for some reason, like running water, crosses, or garlic.

  Besides, her greatest pleasure was coming to be that of floating invisibly in the air, whispering advice to Stephanie based on foresight drawn from the flickering images she saw around the girl:

  “It’s not a good part for you, too screechy and wild. You’d hate it.”

  “That one is really ambitious, not just looking for thrills with pretty actresses.”

  “No, darling, she’s trying to make you look bad – you know you look terrible in yellow.”

  Rose became fascinated by the spectacle of her granddaughter’s life shaping itself, decision by decision, before her astral eyes. So that was how a life was made, so that was how it happened! Each decision altered the whole mantle of possibilities and created new chains of potentialities, scenes and sequences that flickered and fluttered in and out of probability until they died or were drawn in to the center to become the past.

  There was a young man, another one, who came home with Stephanie one night, and then another night. Rose, who drowsed through the days now because there was nothing interesting going on, attended eagerly, and invisibly, on events. The third night Rose whispered, “Go ahead, darling, it wouldn’t be bad. Try the Chinese rug.”

  They tumbled into the bed after all; too bad. The under rug should be used for something significant, it had cost her almost as much per yard as the carpet itself.

  Other people’s loving looked odd. Rose was at first embarrassed and then fascinated and then bored: bump bump bump, squeeze, sigh, had she really done that with Fred? Well, yes, but it seemed very long ago and sadly meaningless. The person with whom it had been worth all the fuss had been – whatshisname, it hovered just beyond memory.

  Fretful, she drifted up onto the roof. The clouds were there, the massive form turned toward her now. She cringed but held her ground. No sign from above one way or the other, which was fine with her.

  The Angel chimed, “How are you, Rose?”

  Rose said, “So what’s the story, Simkin? Have you come to reel me in once and for all?”

  “Would you mind very much if I did?”

  Rose laughed at the Angel’s transparent feet, its high, delicate arches. She was keenly aware of the waiting form of the cloud-giant, but something had changed.

  “Yes,” she said, “but not so much. Stephanie has to learn to judge things for herself. Also, if she’s making love with a boy in the bedroom knowing I’m around, maybe she’s taking me a little for granted. Maybe she’s even bored by the whole thing.”

  “Or maybe you are,” the Angel said.

  “Well, it’s her life,” Rose said, feeling as if she were breaking the surface of the water after a deep dive, “not mine.”

  The Angel said, “I’m glad to hear you say that. This was never intended to be a permanent solution.”

  As it spoke, a great throb of anxiety and anger reached Rose from Stephanie.

  “Excuse me,” she said, and she dropped like a plummet back to her apartment.

  The two young people were sitting up in bed facing each other with the table lamp on. The air vibrated with an anguish connected with the telephone on the bed table. In the images dancing in Stephanie’s aura Rose read the immediate past: There had been a call for the boy, a screaming voice raw with someone else’s fury. He had just explained to Stephanie, with great effort and in terror that she would turn away from him. The girl was indeed filled with dismay and resentment. She couldn’t accept this dark aspect of his life because it had all looked so bright to her before, for both of them.

  Avoiding her eyes, he said bitterly, “I know it’s a mess. You have every right to kick me out before you get any more involved.”

  Rose saw the pictures in his aura, some of them concerned with his young sister who went in and out of institutions and, calamitously, in and out of his life. But many showed this boy holding Stephanie’s hand, holding Stephanie, applauding Stephanie from an audience, sitting with Stephanie on the porch of a wooden house amid dark, tall trees somewhere . . .

  Rose looked at Stephanie’s aura. This boy was all over it. Invisible, Rose whispered in Stephanie’s ear, “Stick with him, darling, he loves you and it looks like you love him too.”

  At the same moment she heard a faint echo of very similar words in Stephanie’s mind. The girl looked startled, as if she had heard this too.

  “What?” the boy said, gazing at her with anxious intensity.

  Stephanie said, “Stay in my life. I’ll try to stay in yours.”

  They hugged each other. The boy murmured into her neck, where Rose was accustomed to take her nourishment, “I was so afraid you’d say no, go away and take your problems with you . . .”

  Seeing the shine of tears in the boy’s eyes, Rose felt the remembered sensation of tears in her own. As she watched, their auras slowly wove together, flickering and bleeding colors into each other. This seemed so much more intimate than sex that Rose felt she really ought to leave the two of them alone.

  The Angel was still on the roof, or almost on it, hovering above the parapet.

  Rose said, “She doesn’t need me anymore; she can tell herself what to do as well as I can, probably better.”

  “If she’ll listen,” the Angel said.

  Rose looked down at the moving lights of cars on the street below. “All right,” she said. “I’m ready. How do I get rid of the blood I got from Stephanie this morning?”

  “You mean this?” The Angel’s finger touched Rose’s chest, where a warm red glow beat in the place where her heart would have been. “I can get rid of it for you, but I warn you, it’ll hurt.”

  “Do it,” Rose said, powered by a surging impatience to get on with something of her own for a change, having been so immersed in Stephanie’s raw young life – however long it was now. Time was much harder to divide intelligibly than it had been.

  The Angel’s finger tapped once, harder, and stabbed itself burningly into her breast. There came a swift sensation of what it must feel like to have all the marrow drawn at once from your bones. Rose screamed.

  She opened her eyes and looked down, gasping, at the Angel. Already she was rising like some light, vaned seed on the wind. She saw the Angel point downward at the roof with one glowing, crimson finger. One flick and a stream of bright fire shot down through the shadowy outline of the building and landed – she saw it happen, the borders of her vision were rushing away from her in all directions – in the kitchen sink and ran away down the drain

  Stephanie turned her head slightly and murmured, “What was that? I heard something.”

  The boy kissed her temple. “Nothing.” He gathered her closer and rolled himself on top of her, nuzzling her. What an appetite they had, how exhausting!

  Other voices wove in and out of their murmuring voices. Rose could see and hear the whole city as it slowly sank away below her, a net of lights slung over the dark earth.

  But above her – and she no longer needed to direct her vision to see what was there but saw directly with her mind’s eye – the sky was thick with a massed and threatening darkness that she knew to be God: still waiting, scowling, implacable, for His delayed confrontation with Rose.

  Despite the panic pulsating through her as the inevitable
approached, she couldn’t help noticing that there was something funny about God. The closer she got, the more His form blurred and changed, so that she caught glimpses of tiny figures moving, colors surging, skeins of ceaseless activity going on all at once and overlapping inside the enormous cloudy bulk of God.

  She recognized the moving figures: Papa Sol, teasing her at the breakfast table by telling her to look, quick, at the horse on the windowsill, and grabbing one of the strawberries from her cereal while she looked with eager, little-girl credulity; Roberta, crying and crying in her crib while grown-up Rose hovered in the hallway torn between exhaustion and rage and love and fear of doing the wrong thing no matter what she did; Fred, sparkling with lying promises he’d never meant to keep, but pleased to entertain her with them; Stephanie, with crooked braids and scabby knees, counting the pennies from the penny jar that Rose had once kept for her. And that was the guy, there, Aleck Mills, one of Fred’s associates, with whom love had felt like love.

  If she looked beyond these images, Rose realized that she could see, deeper in the maze, the next phase of each little scene, and the next, the whole spreading tangle of consequences that she was here to witness, to comprehend, and to judge.

  The web of her awareness trembled as it soared, curling in on itself as if caught in a draught of roasting air.

  “Simkin, where are you?” she cried.

  “Here,” the Angel answered, bobbing up alongside of her and looking, for once, a bit flustered with the effort of keeping up. “And you don’t need me anymore. Guardian angels don’t need guardian angels.”

  “Now I lay me down to sleep,” Rose said, remembering that saccharine Humperdinck opera she had taken Stephanie to once at Christmas time, years ago, because it was supposed to be for kids. “A bunch of vampires watch do keep?”

  “You could put it that way,” the Angel said.

  “What about Dracula?” Rose said. “Could I have done that instead?”

  “Sure,” the Angel said. “There’s always a choice. Who do you think it is who goes around making deals for the illusion of immortal life? And the price isn’t anything as romantic as your soul. It’s just a little blood, for as long as you’re willing.”

  “And when you stop being willing?”

  The Angel flashed its blank eyes upward. “Your life will wait as long as it has to.”

  “I’m scared of my life,” Rose confessed. “I’m scared there’s nothing worthwhile in it, nothing but furniture, and statuettes made into lamps.”

  “Kid,” the Angel said, “you should have seen mine.”

  “Yours?”

  “Full of people I tried to make into furniture, all safe and comfortable, with lots of dust cuzzies stuck underneath.”

  “What’s in mine?” Rose said.

  “Go and see,” the Angel said gently.

  “I am, I’m going,” Rose said. In her heart she moaned, This will be hard, this is going to be so hard.

  But she was heartened by a little scene flickering high up where God’s eye would have been if there had been a god instead of this mountain of Rose’s own life, and in that scene Stephanie and the boy did walk together on a winter beach. By the way they hugged and turned up their collars and hurried along, it was cold and windy there; but they kept close together and made blue-lipped jokes about the cold.

  Beyond them, beyond the edges of the cloud-mountain itself, Rose could make out nothing yet. Perhaps there was nothing, just as Papa Sol had promised. On the other hand, she thought, whirling aloft, so far Papa Sol had been 100 per cent dead wrong.

  Stackalee

  Norman Partridge

  Stagger Lee – or “Stackalee”, “Stackolee”, “Stagolee”, and other versions – was a real man, Lee Shelton, who murdered William “Billy” Williams on Christmas night, 1895, in St Louis, Missouri. Versions of a song about the incident were sung by African-Americans long before folklorist John Lomax first published one in 1911. Stag Lee became a legend – either bargaining with the Devil before execution or hanged for the murder, but still so powerfully bad he kicks the Devil out and takes over Hell itself. The real Shelton Lee went to prison. Pardoned in 1909, in 1911 he killed another man while robbing his house. Again imprisoned, he was pardoned a second time, but died of tuberculosis in the prison hospital before he could be released. His fictional counterpart lives on, celebrated in song and literature hundreds of times. In Norman Partridge’s story, Lee pays a demonic visit to a modern musician who has sung “his” song.

  Billy Lyons stared at the painted message above the fireplace. The red letters dripped, still wet, trickling down the grass cloth wallpaper and over the white Fender Stratocaster that hung above the oak mantelpiece. He dropped his car keys, took down the guitar, and wiped its polished body with his shirtsleeve. The red paint came off too easily, soaking Billy’s forearm. The few droplets that remained beaded like water on the instrument’s glassy pickguard, trapped beneath the strings.

  The Fender slipped from Billy’s grip; a gunshot crack sounded as it struck the hardwood floor. Red droplets spit through the strings and spattered Billy’s tennis shoes as the instrument bounced once, twice, and then collapsed. He backed away, trembling, not thinking about how much the guitar was worth, not worrying about damage.

  Blood, he thought, and for a long moment that was the only word in his vocabulary. Blood . . . not paint!

  Billy wiped his hands on his jeans and stared at the message. Part of it had been written on the guitar, and now without the instrument mounted on the wall the red letters looked like a puzzle from some twisted game show. But Billy was a winner; he’d been clued in ahead of time and recognized the message well enough. It was the same garbage that had been eating at him for weeks, ever since his recording of “Stackalee” had hit number one.

  Where’s my magic Stetson? That’s what the message had said, just like the postcards he’d been receiving. But this was one hell of a lot worse than a postcard – this had rattled Billy to the bone. Without thinking, he’d smeared the bloody writing and touched things he should have left alone, like the guitar, and the cops would be highly pissed about that. He’d probably screwed the whole crime scene. And with his fingerprints all over everything and blood splattered on his clothes and shoes, he might be accused of setting up the scene himself, for publicity.

  The phone rang and Billy snatched it up, expecting to hear the song again, figuring that his tormentors would have their cues planned perfectly. Instead, he was greeted by his agent’s voice: “Billy, where are you? You were supposed to be here an hour ago for the costume fitting. We’re shooting the ‘Stackalee’ video tomorrow, remember, and—”

  “They’ve been here, Alan,” Billy interrupted. “They’ve been inside my house. This time they stole a page from Charlie Manson’s playbook and painted a message on the wall. It’s about the song again . . . Jesus, I don’t care if it is a hit, I wish I would have listened to those old bluesmen and left the damn tune alone.”

  “Calm down. What’d they write?”

  Billy looked at the wall. The blood was dripping over the mantel, dribbling down the stone hearth. The words that had stared at him from the grass cloth were nearly illegible now, just pinkish shadows. “Doesn’t matter what they wrote. It was written in blood, that’s what matters, and it just dripped away.” Billy sighed. “But it was about the hat again. Just some silly shit about magic.”

  “I want you to call the cops. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  “I don’t know, Alan. I touched a lot of stuff. I got blood all over my clothes. The cops might think—”

  A sharp series of clicks rippled over the line. Billy heard laughter, then the sound of a needle skating across a record.

  “Alan? What’s going on?”

  The answer came in Billy’s own voice, singing softly:

  At midnight on that stormy night there came an awful wail –

  Billy Lyons and a graveyard ghost outside the city jail.

  “Jailer, jaile
r,” says Stack. “I can’t sleep.

  For around my bedside poor Billy Lyons still creeps.

  He comes in the shape of a lion with a blue steel in his hand.

  For he knows I’ll stand and fight if he comes in shape of man.

  “Alan, don’t pull this shit.”

  “It’s not coming from my end, Billy.”

  Floorboards complained in an upstairs bedroom. The receiver squawked like a wounded bird and then went quiet. A single thought hit Billy, something he should have realized long before now: if the blood on the wall was fresh enough to drip down the fireplace, the painter couldn’t be far away.

  “Alan, I think someone’s in the house.”

  “Get out of there. Get the hell out. If you won’t go to the cops, come over here . . .”

  Billy dropped the receiver and ran for the door. He twisted the knob as his own voice roared at him from somewhere upstairs:

  Red devil was sayin’, “You better hunt your hole;

  I’ve hurried here from hell just to get your soul.”

  Billy hit the brakes and the Testarossa screeched to a stop just inches away from a Pinto’s rusty bumper. Music slammed at him from six speakers, and he stared at the red light and tried to stop thinking about the blood on his Fender Stratocaster. He popped the clutch when the light turned green and the Testarossa peeled out, whipped up an on-ramp, and roared onto the freeway.

  Yes, Stackalee, the gambler, everybody knowed his name:

  Made his livin’ hollerin’ high, low, jack and the game.

  Once more, Billy slapped at the tape deck controls, but his effort was useless. In the short time that he’d been in the house, someone had screwed with the deck. The knobs wouldn’t turn. The eject button wouldn’t work. The deck was caked with some kind of superglue, and the only song that Billy was going to hear tonight was his newest hit, his own version of “Stackalee” cranked up to full volume, over and over—