Kiss of the Black Angel Read online

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  It wasn't until I went down to the dealer's room that the memories of the night before caught up to me. I was taking the covering off the display when a fat guy with a green dragon perched on one shoulder ogled me with a knowing grin.

  "Looks like I'm not the only one who scored last night," he said, though he obviously hadn't scored his entire life. I recognized him as the vendor from the stall next to mine. The eyes of the latex dragon blinked, tiny red LEDs that gave me a start for the irretrievable image they stirred – a different kind of dragon and dappled ivy and images I both feared and longed for simultaneously.

  Strangely light-headed, I gaped at him.

  He just shrugged and pointed at my throat. "Looke like your girlfriend took a nice bite out of you." Snickering, he elbowed his partner. "Hey, Carl, get a load of this guy's hickey!"

  Another hollow-eyed ignoramus with a Big Mac in his hand and a Jurassic Park t-shirt stretched too tight over his belly stared at me and started to chuckle. Hercules and Indiana Jones sidled up next to them, gawking now, too. The tarot reader with the silver hair stood on her tiptoes and whispered in my ear, "Don't think of the man in your dreams as the King of Swords but call him the Magician. The path of least resistance always leads to the grave, so take the higher road if you dare."

  Under normal circumstances, with reasonably normal human beings, I wouldn't have scrambled away so abruptly; but it was at that moment the memories came flooding back as if injected deep inside my brain with a dull needle and a hard, fast push.

  In a flash, all of the night before was there—the limousine, the dragon hedge with its red eyes, Miquel and Dimitri and the things they'd done—laid out before me like a feast of rich desserts that left me nauseous until I fled the crowded room and burst through the emergency exit onto the loading dock with a breathless gasp. It stank there—rotting garbage and diesel and rat piss—but at least there was no hint of Eternity when I sucked in the foul air in an effort to clear my head.

  I had to be alone and I had to be in the real world, in a place where daylight had chased away the shadows, where traffic and airplanes and sirens created a comforting uproar of human existence. And yet, the thing that had happened the night before caused me to suddenly wonder just how real any of it really was.

  So is your entire reality only an illusion held together by the glue of society's consensual thoughts?

  Strange ponderings again, uninvited cousins from another universe.

  As I looked at the 'real world' now, it seemed an illusion, a thin shade pulled down to conceal an inconceivable reality beneath, a transparent overlay of stages and actors in one of Mr. Shakespeare's plays.

  And though I'd never noticed it before, the edges of the set were a bit rickety, the colors faded and dull; and when a security guard walked by without asking what I was doing there, I realized some of the extras had forgotten their lines. Indeed, it was as if I started to see the world for the thing it was—a two-dimensional backdrop, a cheap painting on black velvet hiding a masterpiece beneath, a Hollywood set that could fold in on itself at any moment like—

  "—a carnival!" Stephanie exclaimed, her nose pressed to the window as we sped down the freeway late at night. "Can't we stop, Daddy? Oh, please—just for a little while?"

  At the edge of Del Mar's fluorescent sea, a double ferris wheel plummeted end-over-end through whirligig darkness. A tumbledown roller coaster labored up unseen tracks to plunge over the nothing into nothing more. The Tilt-a-Whirl spun, a magically illumined eggbeater stirring up a potion in the night.

  "Maybe tomorrow, honey," I told my little girl, exhausted from the long convention weekend. Laurie would be waiting up at home, probably drinking again, and perpetually annoyed because we were late.

  Stephanie just kept looking out the window, her head turning to stay with the lights as we left the carnival behind. "It won't be there tomorrow," she said with ethereal certainty. "It's only there for now because we see it, because we're creating it. As soon as we look away, it'll be gone forever."

  She'd either be a quantum physicist or a writer. "We'll go tomorrow, punkin. I promise."

  But as I looked in the rearview mirror, the carnival had already gone dark. When we returned the next night, there was nothing to indicate it had ever been there—not a drink cup blowing along the shore, not a half eaten corn dog crawling with ants, not even a faded funhouse ticket torn in half.

  It was a thing of the night and to the night it had returned. That's what Stephanie said. I believed her just enough to begin fitfully scrawling notes for my fourth book, Tilt-A-Whirl Worlds—the diary of a mental patient who believed the key to other dimensions was a wobbly thrill ride at a phantom carnival...

  Now I wondered what Stephanie had seen that I never could.

  I would have given anything for one chance to do it over again, but there was no going back, and now I'd never know if those distant lights had been real or just a special effect, courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic. I sat down on the hotel's loading dock with my legs dangling over the edge, staring at the metropolis which had sprung up out of the earth just as that carnival had sprung up out of the ether.

  Was L.A. any more real, or if I turned my back would it disappear, too?

  Engrossed in my troubling reverie, I barely noticed the vagrant passing through the alley until his scuffling footsteps caused me to look up. Wrinkled green army fatigues folded in on his frail body as he caught my eye and shot me a mock salute accompanied by a toothless grin.

  "You'll drive yerself crazy tryin' to figger it out," he slurred in my direction, clutching a paper sack with the neck of a whiskey bottle peeking out. He took a swig of amber amnesia and wiped at his scroungy beard with a dirty hand, tottering from side to side as he stood there in a stupor and began urinating in his pants.

  The wind stopped whipping the dandelions that had fought their way up through a crack in the asphalt. The world went still. And though it had once been my nature to look the other way in circumstances such as these, I stared into the derelict's jaundiced eyes as if they held all the secrets of the universe.

  And because I was already crazy, I said to this vagabond who could as easily have been a wizard, "Was the carnival ever there that night?"

  He looked at me and chuckled. "The carnival's always there—'cept when it ain't."

  His words sent an icy rush shooting through my veins, for I knew then he was as real as I was myself—not just some organic prop going through the motions of a random life. But he was already staggering away, as if he, too, had entire worlds to build before the sun went down.

  "Wait!" I called after him, jumping to my feet. I hurried down the loading ramp, but a gust of wind burst around the corner and tossed a handful of grit in my eyes. Above the rushing howl, I could have sworn I heard the giggling of mischievous munchkins and the cackling of the wicked witch.

  By the time my vision cleared, the dust devil had swept the stage bare and the drunk was nowhere in sight.

  Trembling, lost, I clutched my arms to my chest, leaning heavily against the dirty block wall for a long time. 'For now, you must return to the dayshine world and make your peace with your mirror'.

  Miquel's warning came back to me, though I knew now he hadn't been referring to the looking glass above the sink. The world was my mirror, reflecting back at me whatever I put into it, whether carnivals from the phantasm or a hobo who was only a visiting zephyr.

  The people and the dogs and the props looked real enough, but I was starting to suspect they weren't as solid as I'd once believed, and, indeed, they were probably hustled off at dusk to an abandoned factory where they slept a dreamless sleep until some other isolated traveler thought them back into existence. For when darkness came calling again, this whole vast stage would fold in on itself to be reborn as a carnival that existed only at night, complete with its own sun in the form of neon lights and kaleidoscope vampyre eyes.

  During the course of that day, I convinced myself that t
he entire affair was nothing more than an hallucination brought on by bad hotel food, or some bizarre experiment with virtual reality for which I'd been the unwitting guinea pig. But in the end, when I felt that cold wall at my back and saw the sun crawling toward its ocean bed, a strangely euphoric calm came over me.

  The understanding came easily when I stopped chasing after it—the realization that humans have little purpose on the Earth other than learning, and what greater thing was there to learn than the way out?

  Like all men, I was afraid of death and I was most certainly afraid of change, so it stood to reason I was terrified of this thing Miquel had offered me, for it meant I would no longer have the luxury of looking at the world the same way. It meant acknowledging a fourth dimension of sorts, an underworld where vampyres walked the night and death was the blink of an eye instead of an endless black sleep.

  It meant turning my back on everything I'd ever known, and that meant dancing a dangerous tango with a designer label known as insanity. Still, I couldn't help thinking that madness, like death, was a threat thrown in by the scriptwriter to keep the stakes elevated.

  If we stripped away the social taboos and could ever confess what we truly believe, I doubt there would be more than a handful of souls who really believe in heaven, and those would be captured within the pale green walls of asylums or cloistered inside dank monasteries.

  We all pretended to believe in some nebulous afterlife, but no one really did.

  We hired gurus to search for our truths and doctors to find cures for our ailments instead of eradicating the source of the ailments themselves: the belief that we would die. We trusted priests to show us the way to eternal life because we were far too busy creating corporations and slinging hamburgers and raising our families to look for ourselves.

  Death, therefore, had become an institution, nursed at the breasts of undertakers and all complacent fools. But faith could no more save my life than wine and wafers could raise me from the dead. There was no miraculous snake oil on the 6 o'clock news which would cure me of my mortality. There was no proof of reincarnation, no hint that even Harry Houdini had survived that final disappearing trick.

  There was only Miquel and his red kiss. Take it or leave it. Live or die. Now or never.

  Eat my body, drink my blood and you will never die.

  A chill passed through my heart and caused my eyes to water. It was a sensation I'd known only rarely in the past, some eerie confirmation of a deeply hidden truth clawing its way to the surface. A niggling at first, an phantom itch, nagging.

  When the epiphany did come, it snowballed into an assault, each realization more dangerous and soul shattering than the last.

  "Oh, God," I whispered, and slid down the wall until I was sitting on the ground hugging my knees to my chest. "Oh, God!"

  Eat my body, drink my blood and you will never die.

  Had similar words once been intended literally but became warped over the centuries into mere symbolic ritual that had lost its meaning? Was this man Christ crucified in the noonday sun not because of his claims of godliness, but for deeds that could only be explained as witchcraft or vampyre magic? Was the wine really wine that night or were the disciples already Princes of the Blood—emissaries of eternal life set loose on the world to do battle with the brute with the scythe?

  Had Jesus really been the submissive child come to do his Father's will, or was he the rebel son in disguise, determined to steal the secret of immortality from Daddy's blood and give that secret back to Man?

  Eat my body, drink my blood and you will never die...

  Was our entire Western society based on vampirism?

  Jesus Christ! my mind protested, appalled and imploding as it tore loose the bonds of decent moral restraint. Jesus Holy Vampyre Christ!

  Clever boy.

  A voice in my head screamed Blasphemer! to scare my thoughts into obedient silence, but when I closed my eyes and took a peek beyond the veil, the only thing shouting in my ear was me. That was the truth which came to me while workers unloaded shredded lettuce as if it really mattered and two kids from the kitchen stood smoking a joint as if knowing none of it mattered.

  But I had to ask myself, Is it worth it, Stefan? Is it worth giving up your humanity to defeat death?

  We're expected to keep a stiff upper and pray for an afterlife for some part of us that scientists can't find and mystics can't define and surgeons can't transplant into a corpse to give it life again. The ironic thing was this: the only way I could avoid dying was to die trying and trust the bloodthirsty devil to raise me up from the dead.

  Faith.

  There was that word again, that monosyllabic abstraction which stated that humans were in control of nothing, including our fate or even our faith.

  But at least Miquel had held me in his arms and offered me immortality in a body I already knew and a location right here on Earth. God and his unmapped heaven had some catching up to do.

  The city shimmered in the distance, a mirage in the corner of my mirror.

  If this isn't your will, strike me dead now, God, I prayed in earnest, not because I expected an answer, but because I desperately needed one.

  But the lightning didn't come. The building didn't fall on me. No embolism ruptured to stop my lungs.

  I was almost disappointed.

  Blasphemer! the little voice cried again, louder and more shrill as it took up the chant of well-worn clichés. You'll burn in hell! All things die! God moves in mysterious ways! Blasphemer! Blasphemer! Blasphemer!

  "Shut up."

  Imbued with total calm, I returned to the dealer's room, packed up my dead daughter's belongings and left them in a box for the cleaning crew to find. Inside the lid, I scrawled a note for Charlie, asking her to take care of my cat and telling her I wouldn't be coming home again.

  Then, not really sure where I was going, I ambled into the lobby where the convention's din was at its loudest and the bustle of chaos swam around me. It was there I saw Dimitri coming through the revolving door just as the last dim watercolor bled from the sky. His coat fluttered in brisk wind. His hair shone, a halo of pure light. He had come for me.

  It was night and would be forevermore.