Den Of Dark Angels

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Book excerpt

CHAPTER ONE 

Astria Brin's greatest fear was abandonment, yet she arranged it herself.

Her favorite uncle, a fireman, had taught her never to show fear, as he had not, although the flames she set burned him black and shriveled. Even the death of her beloved maternal grandmother in the same fire, and her nanny (dear Nanny!) didn't deter the younger Astria from braving the whispered gossip at school and in the papers, and smiling in the face of loss. Close by the mansion whose white face was grey with soot, her wealthy parents buried the victims in haste and money exchanged hands in an effort to veil the horrendous day. They knew who could have set the fire, but like many a parent of a criminal, hid the crime and pretended all was well.

            Astria, ten years later, remained haunted, and when the rigid lions from the Centre Street Bridge followed her home and slavered greedily in the dark corners of her closet, she thought they must be remnants of revenge from the crooked charred bones of the past. Patrick helped her to rationalize those grave monsters, and she thought he was well deserved as a lover and confidante in their mutual complicity to commit forgetfulness. She was stuck in the possibility of major guilt and a future crawling with regret, and he – he was a nihilistic presence.

            So Astria sat up now and faced the danger. Next to her in the bed made of wooden slats, the smooth white sheets over his chest, her partner Patrick Ferguson snored softly; the blond tendrils of his beard rose and fell with each breath. Astria knew that Patrick would be as little physical help to her in the bowels of night as he was during the day, though his body under the sores was lean and strong, and his sexual prowess admirable. She shuddered and glanced at the glowing numerals 3:42 on her bedside clock, the polished floor gleaming blue beneath it. The young woman braced herself on both hands. A muffled roar snaked from across the room. The blue light illuminated her face – slim, tense, watchful. Their closet door creaked open, revealing broad yellow orbs which glowed and blinked out. Astria's bare feet struck the tiled floor and she closed the door.

"You know," Patrick said the next morning on their walk to the C-train, "some hallucinogens might put lions in anyone's closet. It could explain the nightmares."

            "They're not nightmares and I don't take hallucinogens. I see their eyes. I hear them roar. It's like Stephen King designed our bedroom closets," Astria said.

            A match flared in his cupped hands. Patrick inhaled, cloying sweet smoke. "I never noticed them."

            They passed beneath the concrete lions guarding Centre Street Bridge. They would tread below the lions again coming back. Astria pulled on her bulky anorak and shivered. "People don't look up. Even when they're walking. The lions have been here since before Moses came down from the mountain. Nobody sees them, and they follow us home."

             Patrick took Astria's hand and swung it, running his free hand over his long blond hair and dirty beard. "You've been reading too much Edgar Allan Poe, Ass-girl. Poe took opium or something. You my woman, girl. You don't take no drugs, hear me? I'm the only pothead here and even so, we can't afford weed half the time – we're poor students, and if you're going to be a lawyer someday like your daddy, you sure don't want to get busted."

            The sidewalk curved upward toward the C-train station. A fine fog covered the pillars of the bridge, silvering the granite and reflecting the sheets of pink and grey in the east, and a sun which struggled to rise.

            "I love Edgar Poe," Astria said. "Heck, my nanny taught me to read and I bet my first word was ‘nevermore’."

            "Only rich kids have nannies. Great, we're over the bridge."

             Mist dripped from Patrick's long nose, past his wide expressive mouth to his beard. Astria strode along beside him.

            "I never asked to be born rich," she said.

            Patrick grinned. "I never asked to be born."

            "We sure don't live rich." Astria shrugged. He pulled at his beard and made a face, the money a barrier yet a bond between them.

            "Thanks to your parents who hate me. They think I'm a bum living on their money, some kind of boozing professional student who'll never finish anything – and they're right." He laughed.

            "You can prove them wrong," she said.

            The river hissed. They caught the C-train to the campus where they were students. Whistling, Patrick departed for his economics class.

 As well as enjoying evening classes in photography, her true avocation, Astria's pre-law studies were not difficult for her, and she spent her spares researching old cases in the library in preparation for next year. Her friend Ingrid studied in the cubicle next to her, untidy texts strewn on the floor and beneath her chair, laptop open, fingers flying over the keys in search of German historical research. Ingrid was a sturdy Valkyrie, afraid of nothing, and would face down the hounds of hell by herself if needed. She was a good friend to have, Astria thought, and the blonde Viking's dog, as well. Nothing like Patrick and their dachshund Goliath, no one at home to protect Astria, although, of course. She. Was. Not. Afraid.

            Past the balustrades encircling the library to the dripping quad and the bulwarked city to the river, the stone lions crouched on the plinths of the bridge, hidden behind a curtain of rain and sleet and… waited.

CHAPTER TWO

Ingrid rose early one morning and pulled on warm clothes to walk Fergie, her golden retriever, along the little park near her house. They paused at the bottom of a hill while the dog peed on a white shrouded shrub, then they continued to the banks of the Elbow River while Fergie rooted with its nose through the frozen vegetation at the side of the path. Ingrid gazed at the grey mist that swirled close to the bosom of the river. Unusual, the fog seemed alive. It crept closer. She remained rooted to the frozen earth while the dog snuffled in the ground and seemed oblivious to the mist.

There was something behind the swirling fantastic grey pattern, though it was almost opaque. It seemed stopped by the snowbound banks and then pushed upward, closer to Ingrid and the dog. She stood, motionless.

A voice boomed from the fog. "Ay, mate. Ahoy, you little wench." Then a long hollow bellow of mirth.

Nobody talked like that anymore. "Who are you?" Ingrid called. The fog swirled closer, up the edges of the river, over the frozen white shrubbery, pressing the blood from Ingrid's extremities, from her vital organs, icy tentacles touching her brain, stomach a block of frozen stone.

"It's Valdemar of Harlaem come back to find my Madeline."

Ingrid recognized the familiar names from literature. "Madeline of the House of Usher?"

"Ay, mate, one and the same. Come back to find her there in the House of Usher."

"It's fallen."

Ingrid was wrapped now in the ice crystals of the dense fog, shivering, unable to find her dog, unable to see her frozen fingertips in front of her staring eyeballs. The fog enveloped everything that stretched from there to the riverbank, and she couldn't fathom her way through it. She remembered that Valdemar of Harlaem had decomposed months after his death. She was talking to a dead man from one of Edgar Allen Poe's macabre stories.

"What of Roderick?" Ingrid asked. She was part of the Poe Society at the campus, with Astria, Patrick and a couple other close friends, and they all knew the stories well, including this one – the man Valdemar of Harlaem who had remained dead but hypnotized so he was unable to free his spirit until released, many months later. A dreadful story and Ingrid shivered as though the morning were colder now, and damper.

The voice was hollow and close now. "All dead, dead, dead and decomposed like the mesmerizer did to me, only kept me alive in a trance for those months after I had died, I was dead as road kill. Kept alive in a terrible hypnotic trance although my heart and brain had stopped months before. Decomposed immediately, like road kill, madam."

"How – how do you know about road kill?" Ingrid shivered and wished herself anywhere but here; yes, home in her warm bed, where she may wake at any moment from this horrible dream.

"This is the twenty-first century, Madam, it be centuries and many thousands of miles from my grave."

"Are you Poe?" Ingrid grew braver, remembering her Viking ancestry and the strong sense of curiosity she carried with her almost everywhere. The fog swirled and thickened. A long low wail arose from the river's entrails.

"N-n-no, you wretch, but Poe created us and left us here in the madhouse of the river's memory."

Ingrid looked around for help but none appeared except a glimpse of her dog behind the hoary bushes. "Why here, in Calgary?"

"He became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity." There were shapes in the icy fog, moving closer and a man appeared, of dreadful visage, leered into Ingrid's face and then he spat into the frozen air. The globules turned to ice crystals and dropped to the path below.

"You're not real," Ingrid said. She called to her dog and Fergie answered from a place not far away, galloped to Ingrid’s side through the curdled air and whimpered as Ingrid huddled for warmth in her parka and scarf. Ingrid held tight to the dog's collar.

"Let's go, Fergie," she said, and the dog responded by barking at the apparition, lunging at the end of the leash, and tearing it from Ingrid's hand.

"G-g-good dog," the horrible man blithered and changed shape on the path in front of them.

"The name the author gave me is Pluto," he said. "I have nine lives. I'll butcher you." He lunged at the dog.

"No!" Ingrid was released from her spell of ennui, unusual for her, the strong sturdy guardian of control. "Don't you touch her, you – you – wraith. You can't hurt us. You're just a book. You're a story. And this fog, it's just a dream and you're less than a dream."

The retriever howled and gnawed at the ghost's femur, shook its sleek yellow head and threw Valdemar of Harlaem to the ground. The dog cut to the quick of Poe's heart; the ghost was an entity in the thick fog and thus could be taken. To Ingrid's imagination, the ghost controlled the present hour which wriggled by like blood dripping, and her own blood ran thicker and colder at the haunt's voice. She would have fled if the dog, with its basic animal nature, had not recognized the truth and snatched at the decomposing bones from the river's cloud.

'Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary…' In the fog, Valdemar writhed like worms. The dog tore at the haunt's entrails, snarling while foam dribbled from her jaws and blood, black as Dutch licorice, smeared the ground.

"Come on, Fergie. Enough."

Ingrid took courage at the thought that this was only a dream. She wanted to run but a coldness in her bones froze her feet to the soil. The massive bank of fog began to back up to the river's edge, became translucent, then swirled as though it went down a drain to the middle of the Elbow River and disappeared, taking the ghost with it. There were other shapes in the grey, thick powder of shapes left behind, but they, too, swirled down the drain to the bottom of the river, which erupted into ice and fire for a brief time, then smoothed over. The surface was white again and the morning deathly quiet.

Ingrid would have thought it indeed a dream but for the black, putrid blood around Fergie's mouth and the fire-scorched vegetation at the side of the path. Later, at their weekly meeting of the Poe Society, Astria agreed this could have been real, and Poe's creatures really existed in this present life, as did the other Edgar, somewhere like the lions on the bridge, waiting to murder them all.