Strange Angels

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. . . .