Something More Than Night by Ian Tregillis Read Free Book Online Page B

started using again? He’d never get help on his own.
    Unless …
    What had Bayliss said? Something about angels shaping reality.
    Was she really an angel? She didn’t feel angelic. But what if—
    Behind her, a door opened. A trio of penitentes emerged, their wounds steaming in the chilly night. They were too busy jabbering to each other—was that Latin ?—to see her crouched on the landing.
    “Hey! Watch it!” said Molly.
    She scrambled aside before one of the sweaty, bloody, half-naked freaks tumbled atop her. But they kept coming like she wasn’t there. Molly raised her arms to shield herself. The guy in front lost his footing. Molly flinched—
    —and landed on the floor of the Minneapolis apartment.
    She lay there a moment, panting and stroking the floor. The floorboards slid like silk beneath her fingers. Ria had done such a fantastic job. They were straight and smooth and perfect but for the one blemish where the cherry of Bayliss’s cigarette had damaged the varnish. He deserved a punch in the nose for that. The butt had landed there, tip down, then rolled a few inches away, leaving a curlicue of ash in its wake. A faint trace of smoke, a phantom scent, haunted the bedroom like a revenant spirit. Molly cracked a window open; a frigid February night leaked inside. The moon, nearly full, cast blue shadows from the sash. Waxing or waning? She couldn’t tell.
    Molly took the butt to the bathroom and flushed it. Bayliss had, of course, left the lid up. The shower curtain still lay in the tub, half torn from the rings by his retreat. She returned the baseball bat to its spot under the bed. Then she ran a spare washcloth under the faucet and scrubbed away the ash. The cloth went in the trash rather than the laundry hamper. She was too disgusted to ever use it again, no matter how fiercely it was washed.
    Then she stopped.
    Laundry hamper?
    What if I really am dead?
    If I’m dead, she thought, really, truly dead, why am I still thinking about laundry? What does it matter? What does anything matter?
    This building had burned to the ground long ago. It didn’t exist, except in photographs and memories. It was gone. Like Dad and Mom. And yet here she was: cleaning the floors and worrying about laundry. Pointless.
    Bayliss’s place—what did he call it? His Pleroma? Magisterium?—was filled with people. Granted, they were straight from central casting for an old-time movie, but at least that crapsack diner wasn’t empty. Wasn’t “sterile,” as Bayliss had put it. All Molly wanted was to hear the rhythm of Ria’s breath while she slept, to feel the warmth of her body on the sheets. But she knew, deeper than her marrow, she hadn’t the strength to sew disparate memories into a companion. A woman was more than the sum of her parts. More than a chicken pox scar on the tip of her nose, and radical politics, and a hatred of raisins. Molly secured it all, and more, in the lockbox of her heart. For later. Not much later. Just not tonight. It was all too big for tonight.
    Much smaller was the damaged spot on the floor.
    She sat at the edge of the bed, imagining how things had been before the fire. Imagining the lustrous sheen of varnish. The gentle, unbroken whorls of grain in the oak. The paper-thin seam where the boards joined.
    The spot shrunk. Her heat beat faster.
    The edges of the burn lightened. Gentle ripples lapped at its coarse perimeter, eroding the blemish one hair’s breadth at a time. The pattern of the wood grain grew like time-lapsed ivy.
    Sweat trickled down Molly’s forehead and between her breasts. She gulped down cold air. It numbed her throat, but made her sinuses ache. She tasted turpentine and sawdust and cigarette smoke.
    The alterations slowed, then stopped. The center of the damaged spot wouldn’t budge. It resisted her. The very fact of its presence asserted a contradictory reality. The memory of the unblemished floor slipped away like water through her fingertips.
    Molly pushed.