Strange Angels

And they say maturity is just for adults.

The house was empty. It started talking, groans and squeaks as the wind outside rose. Everywhere you go, the air changes around dusk. Sometimes it’s soft and sweet, or whistling just enough to make you feel happy to be inside and snuggled up.

When something bad is coming, it’s different. Like a moan, only with big glass teeth.

Tonight the wind had that sound. I hoped Dad would be home soon. Once I finished my drink I fished in my bag for a pencil and paper and started to draw. The long curved lines turned into a frilly iris, one of Gran’s favorite flowers. I got into it, shading the different textures of the petals, imagining the colors—vibrant purple, snowy white, the green of the stem. I’d drawn a lot of irises, especially after Mom died and Gran got me paper and a pencil to keep me busy while she worked in her cabin.

When I think of right after Mom died and Dad disappeared for the first time, the smell of paper and the sound of Gran scrubbing something—she was always cleaning—mixes together with the feeling of a pencil in my hand. She was always washing the floors with hawthorn water or wiping down the windows, in between the other tons of work that had to happen to keep the cabin running right. Like collecting eggs or feeding the pigs or splitting wood. I still can’t pass a house without looking for the best place to put a woodpile, and I always spin the eggs once clockwise on the counter before breaking them.

Somehow she found time to keep the place clean as a whistle and rinsed down with all sorts of floor and window washes—hawthorn, mountain ash, true rowan, sometimes yarrow or lavender. Bundles of wild garlic and onions strung up everywhere, and Gran working on her spinning wheel late at night, the thump and whirr getting into my chest as I cried myself to sleep, missing Dad, wanting my mommy, terrified and lonely and not understanding.

What does a five-year-old understand about “dead”? Or “forever”? Or even about “be back in a while”?

Full night fell. The clock blinked on and on. I got up to go to the bathroom a couple times, taking the quilt with me. Once I went downstairs for another Coke and Beam. Dad would give me another Lecture—probably the one about Responsible Choices and Adulthood, and how I wasn’t close to either yet—if he ever guessed I drank while he was out. But since he put the stuff away at a pretty steady rate himself, I don’t think he ever twigged.

I went on to drawing simple shapes—the lamp on my nightstand, the bookshelves, the closet doors. Then I sketched the pile of laundry in front of the closet, taking care to shade everything just so. The clock kept blinking. I finished the second glass of Jimmy Beam lightly misted with Coke and fell asleep with the pencil still in my fingers, a jagged line sliding down the pad of paper in my lap, opened to a fresh page.

When I woke up in the morning, Dad still wasn’t there.

INTERMEZZO

He walked down a long corridor, picking his way carefully in booted feet. The concrete was crazed with broken lines and slick with fat rivulets and lakes of something best not to name; he stepped over them like a kid stepping over sidewalk cracks, break your mother’s back.

A buzzing had started in my head. I wanted to open my mouth, tell him not to go down that hall, that Something Invisible was looking at him. But the hall was so long, and it was so hard to think through the hornets in my head. They were having a fine old time building condos inside my skull, and the buzzing spread through my bones as if I’d stepped on a live wire.

I didn’t use to have these buzzing dreams often. Lately they’ve been once a month or so, usually just before I start my period, cramps and weird sleeping going hand in hand. But this one wasn’t the usual buzzing dream, where I am flying over rooftops, or even the worst dream of all that ends with me in close darkness, surrounded by stuffed animals.

No. This dream was hyper-colored. I could see every hair on his head, the fine lines of lavender in his blue irises, the nap of his favorite green Army jacket, every line and crease on his polished combat boots. The gun gleamed dully in his hand, held loosely, professionally.

There were fluorescent lights overhead, their buzz echoing the idiot noise in my head. That’s why I couldn’t speak, you know—that sound just destroys anything you might say, like static on the television screen will eat whatever you’re thinking for hours at a time. You can just sit and stare. Like some brain-sucking thing has, well, sucked your brain.

Time slowed down, getting all stretchy and elastic. Each step took a century, and by the time the door came into view—just a plain steel door, with those fluorescents noising overhead—the hornets weren’t just crawling through my bones and brain but touching my skin with fleshy little prickling feet.

There was something behind that door, something that smelled of iron and cold darkness, a freezing shiver up the spine. It was like the feeling I got in that broken-down house on the outskirts of Chattanooga, my first job with Dad, right before a poltergeist started throwing little shards of glass hard enough to bury them in rotten drywall with little sounds like puckering lips.

Or like that small podunk in South Carolina where the local voodoo king sent the zombies around because Dad was cutting into his business by breaking the hexes the king had been throwing at people who got in his way—or who wouldn’t give him what he wanted. I’d had to use every scrap of anti-hexing Gran taught me and a few things from our books to break through some of those old, nasty curses, and Dad had lost some serious blood fighting off the zombies. That had been bad.

This feeling was worse. Much, much worse.

Don’t go in there, I wanted to say. There’s something in there. Don’t do it.

He walked down the hall, and the buzzing got so bad it shook everything out of me, the dream running like colored ink on wet paper, and as it receded I struggled to say something, anything, to warn him.

He didn’t even look up. He just kept walking toward that door, and the dream closed down like a camera lens, darkness eating through its edges.

I was still trying to scream when Dad reached out his free hand slowly, like a sleepwalker, and turned the knob. And the darkness behind it laughed and laughed and laughed. . . .

CHAPTER 3

I came awake all at once, with a jolt like five shots of espresso hitting my bloodstream at full speed. The pencil had snapped in my fist, and I was clutching the two broken pieces. My head felt like a bowling ball being cracked by a giant’s fingers, and I moaned and blinked. Gray light coming in through the window was empty, sterile, and infinite.

The house was a still, cold cave.

I pushed myself up, head throbbing and ribs aching. I’d fallen asleep and slid over to the side, my back against the wall and my artist’s pad digging into my stomach. I rubbed what felt like a half-ton of sand out of my eyes and listened for the heater, for the sound of breathing, for the creaks of Dad moving around.

Nothing. And my alarm clock was turned off. I vaguely remembered something noisy happening earlier and me fumbling for it, almost spearing my palm with the broken pencil.

I rolled up out of my mattresses and shuffled barefoot into the hall. The quilt wrapped around my shoulders wouldn’t keep me warm enough. I made my way down to the other bedroom at the end of the hall, the one next to the stairs.

The door was open but the blinds were down. I peered in. Dad’s cot was there, and his metal footlocker. A wooden box sat by the door, Dad’s private box; I didn’t lift the lid. The cot was neatly made, and I thought it hadn’t been slept in. You could always bounce a quarter off Dad’s cot, though, even five minutes after he got up.

No problem. He’s downstairs; he fell asleep over the table again. Or he’s in the living room with