Murder of Angels by Caitlin R. Kiernan Page A

silver thread, and she took out five dollars and told the driver to keep the thirty cents she had coming in change.
    “Hell’s bells. Guess I’ll be able to retire a lot sooner than I thought,” he said, pulled a pencil stub from behind his left ear, licked the tip and jotted something down on a clipboard. His two-way radio crackled to life, momentarily drowning the jazz station in a sudden burst of static and angry, unintelligible voices speaking in Spanish.
    “Thanks for the ride,” Niki said, climbing out of the backseat, and “Hey, wait a sec,” the driver called out to her over the sputtering racket from the radio. But the door of the cab was already swinging shut and, besides, she wasn’t in the mood for any more witty conversation. She crossed the street to Cafe Alhazred and went inside.

     

    The interior of the coffee shop was a fanciful, mismatched fusion of Middle Eastern kitsch, someone trying hard to invoke the markets of Cairo or Baghdad and getting I Dream of Jeannie instead; sand brown plaster walls decorated with an incongruous assortment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Arabic graffiti, lancet archways and beaded curtains, a few dusty hookahs scattered about here and there like a lazy afterthought, framed and faded photographs of desert places. A pretend Casablanca for the punks and hippies, the goths and less classifiable misfits that had long ago claimed Cafe Alhazred as their own.
    Niki ordered a tall double latte, paid at the register, and took an empty table near the front of the cafe, sipped at the scalding mix of steamed milk and espresso and inspected the people filing hurriedly past the windows. Men and women on their way to work or somewhere else, two purposeful and intertwining trails like strange insects caught in a forced march, northeast or southwest, and she closed her eyes for a moment. Nothing but the warm coffee smells, the commingled conversations of other customers, and an old Brian Eno song playing softly in the background.
    I really got away, she thought again, oddly satisfied by the simple fact of it, but not quite believing it was true, either, and not quite sure why. Marvin had never actually stopped her from going out without him, but since he’d come to live with them, to watch over her, she’d never tried to venture farther than Alamo Square park alone.
    But I did it, didn’t I? I got away from him and that house. Now I can go anywhere. Anywhere at all.
    Niki opened her eyes, half expecting to be back in her bedroom, but nothing had changed, and she was still sitting there in the wobbly wooden chair at the little table, the Friday morning stream of pedestrians marching past. Only now there was someone standing out there looking in, an ashen-skinned child no more than five or six, seven at the most, gazing straight at her. The girl’s long hair was black, and she stood with her face pressed against the window, her breath fogging up a small patch of the plate glass. Her blue eyes so pale they made Niki think of ice, and the child wasn’t wearing a coat, not even long sleeves, just a T-shirt and grimy-looking jeans.
    Niki smiled at her, and the girl blinked her cold blue eyes and smiled back, a hesitant, uneasy smile as though she wasn’t precisely sure what smiles meant or how to make one, and then she pointed one finger towards the sky. Niki looked up and saw nothing over her head but the ceiling of Cafe Alhazred, and when she looked back down again the child was gone, just a snotty smear on the glass to prove that she’d ever been there.
    We dream of a ship that sails away, Brian Eno sang above and between the murmuring voices crowding the cafe…. a thousand miles away.
    Niki raised the big mug of coffee, both hands and the cup already halfway between the Formica tabletop and her lips when she noticed the mark the child had traced on the windowpane, the simple cruciform design, and she stopped, caught in the disorienting blur of recognition and unwanted memories, the